Abstract
Quine in his paper ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’1 has propounded a radical conventionalist thesis, arguing that only science as a whole, including the laws of logic, is empirically testable. Grünbaum, on the other hand, has in various places including Philosophical Problems of Space and Time 2 been critical of an even moderate Duhemian conventionalism, and in particular attempts to show that the geometry of space is testable independently of other physical theory. Between these two extremes lies the Duhemian thesis. We will attempt to describe in this physics, indicating the manner in which it is a semantical conventionalism while not being trivially so.
From Nous 1 (1976). Copyright © Wayne State University Press 1976. Reprinted by permission.
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Notes
W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View, Harper and Row, New York, 1963, pp. 20–46.
Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, p. 42.
See Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans, by Philip P. Wiener, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1954, pp. 165–79, for a discussion of the particular characteristics of the laws of physics.
Duhem, Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, p. 166.
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© 1976 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Giannoni, C. (1976). Quine, Grünbaum, and the Duhemian Thesis. In: Harding, S.G. (eds) Can Theories be Refuted?. Synthese Library, vol 81. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1863-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1863-0_11
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