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Empirical Equivalence, Underdetermination, and Systems of the World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Carl Hoefer  and
Alexander Rosenberg
Carl Hoefer
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside
Alexander Rosenberg*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside
*
‡Send reprint requests to the authors, Department of Philosophy, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521, USA.
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Abstract

The underdetermination of theory by evidence must be distinguished from holism. The latter is a doctrine about the testing of scientific hypotheses; the former is a thesis about empirically adequate logically incompatible global theories or “systems of the world”. The distinction is crucial for an adequate assessment of the underdetermination thesis. The paper shows how some treatments of underdetermination are vitiated by failure to observe this distinction, and identifies some necessary conditions for the existence of multiple empirically equivalent global theories. We consider how empiricists should respond to the possibility of such systems of the world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 61 , Issue 4 , December 1994 , pp. 592 - 607
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1994

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Footnotes

†

We would like to thank the participants of the 1993 UNC Greensboro conference on Underdetermination, and Jarrett Leplin in particular, for very helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper. Thanks also to John Earman for helpful comments and criticism.

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