This classic work in the philosophy of physical science is an incisive and readable account of the scientific method. Pierre Duhem was one of the great figures in French science, a devoted teacher, and a distinguished scholar of the history and philosophy of science. This book represents his most mature thought on a wide range of topics.
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From the Back Cover
"The central proposition of this famous book is that physical theories are conventions serving to economize scientific thought rather than descriptions or explanations of the way the world is made. The work remains intensely alive in a climate of opinion in which strong skepticism about scientific realism is motivated by social and political considerations that could scarcely be more at variance with Duhem's ultra-Catholic conservatism. The introduction by Jules Vuillemin, at once expository and critical, is the clearest commentary on Duhem's philosophy of science that I have had the pleasure of reading. Duhem's phenomenalism, Vuillemin points out, distinguishes between humanity and nature and opposes the naturalism that would make reason merely an aspect of the natural processes it studies."--Charles C. Gillispie, Da}ton-Stockton Professor of History of Science Emeritus, Princeton University,
About the Author
Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) is best known in science for his work in thermodynamics and in history of science for his treatment of the Middle Ages. He was Professor of Physics at the University of Bordeaux
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compulsory reading for philosophers of science,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton Science Library) (Paperback)
"The Aim and Structure" is a very influential book in the history of philosophy of science. Duhem rejects the methodology of crucial experiment and inductivism. He emphasizes that scientific experiments are not observations of raw empirical data, but they are highly dependent on theory (theory-ladenness of observation). But the most famous thesis of this book is epistemological holism; according to W.V.O. Quine it is a "milestone of empiricism". I consider "The Aim and Structure" an excellent introduction to some philosophical problems of science, a compulsory reading for a philosopher of science.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What exactly is the role of metaphysics in physical theory?,
This review is from: The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton Science Library) (Paperback)
Duhem's views on metaphysics' relation to modern physics are contradictory to me. First he says in this book that physical theory is not subordinate to metaphysics nor can metaphysics edify it, then later he says that although physical hypotheses develop within a physicist, metaphysics offers a guide to what he should consider fundamental elements of it, as though modern physics is indeed subordinate to metaphysics. The whole criticism of Duhem rests on his "fideist" separation of physical theory from metaphysics, as this excellent biography of Duhem attests (esp. pgs. 203-206, which are free to view on Google Books).
Besides this criticism, Duhem gives a very insightful summary of how modern physics operates. It has reaffirmed my view, molded by doing physics myself, of how physics should work and what its aims are. Every physicist and philosopher interested in reconciling true philosophy with modern physics should read this book. It really opened me up to what "saving the phenomena" means and to what modern physics' strengths and weaknesses are. Also, his somewhat lengthly discussion of the historical development of the formulation of the 1/r^2 law of gravitation was enlightening. It proved the necessity of teaching physics with the so-called historical method, as Duhem writes: "The legitimate, sure and fruitful method of preparing a student to receive a physical hypothesis is the historical method. To retrace the transformations through which the empirical matter accrued while the theoretical form was first sketched; to describe the long collaboration by means of which common sense and deductive logic analyzed this matter and modeled that form until one was exactly adapted to the other: that is the best way, surely even the only way, to give to those studying physics a correct and clear view of the very complex and living organization of this science." In summary, as interesting as that book is--and he does an excellent job explaining how physics operates through his historical examples--I still think he has an unclear (at least it seems unclear to me) notion of what exactly the role of metaphysics is in relation to modern physics. At the beginning of the book he seems to think metaphysics plays no role (he gives the historical example of Fresnel on how optics effectively "transcended" the metaphysics that inspired the theories); then he says maybe certain metaphysics can play a role; then toward the end he says metaphysics plays the role in determining what elements of physical theories one should consider fundamental. {Perhaps he is merely distinguishing the "via inventionis" ("way of discovery") from the "via resolutionis" ("way of resolution"); in the former metaphysics plays no role but in the latter it does, or vice versa?} Still, it is a very fascinating book; his attempt to show the relation between modern physics and metaphysics is noble; but his philosophy of physics (that physical theories are just equations and that all modern physics does is classify) completely discounts physics' explanatory power. Duhem has been infected with a small dose of skepticism. This quote well-summarizes his position on metaphysics as it relates to physics: "Now these two questions -- Does there exist a material reality distinct from sensible appearances? and What is the nature of reality? -- do not have their source in experimental method, which is acquainted only with sensible appearances and can discover nothing beyond them. The resolution of these questions transcends the methods used by physics; it is the object of metaphysics. Therefore, if the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics." He argues it is autonomous, though. His engineer friend Eugène Vicaire justly criticized Duhem's postivistic conception of the relation of physics to metaphysics as "the poison of skepticism." Vicaire wrote: "It is not true that when constructing its theories, positive science has as its object simply to classify experimental laws; its proper object is the discovery of causes. To deny this is to maintain a suspect doctrine of positivism, and one capable of leading to skepticism. That doctrine, condemned by the whole tradition of great physicists, is dangerous, for it destroys scientific activity." Pages 207-209 of William A. Wallace's excellent The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis contain a good critique of Duhem's philosophy of science.
1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Philosophy of science with a cheap history-facade,
This review is from: The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton Science Library) (Paperback)
"A physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of principles, which aim to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a set of experimental laws." (p. 19). "[W]e recognize in a theory a natural classification, if we feel that its principles express profound and real relations among things," and thus "we shall not be surprised to see its consequences anticipating experience and stimulating the discovery of new laws." (p. 28).
"It is not to [the] explanatory part that a theory owes its power and fertility; far from it. Everything good in the theory, by virtue of which it appears as a natural classification and confers on it the power to anticipate experience, is found in the representative part; all of that was discovered by the physicist while he forgot about the search for explanation. On the other hand, whatever is false in the theory and contradicted by facts is found above all in the explanatory part; the physicist has brought error into it, led by his desire to take hold of realities." (p. 32). An illustrative example is Descartes' work on optics. The "representative" part is quite flawless, while the explanatory part contains many silly things, e.g.: "Light is only an appearance; the reality is a pressure engendered by the rapid motions of incandescent bodies within a 'subtle matter' penetrating all bodies. This subtle matter is incompressible, so that the pressure which constitutes light is transmitted in it instantaneously to any distance" (p. 33). Indeed, Descartes was "the one who contributed most to break down the barrier between physical method and metaphysical method, and to confound their domains, so clearly distinguished in Aristotelian philosophy" (p. 43). He used the same principle in his physics, where he tried to prove that "all natural phenomena may be derived completely from this single proposition: 'The essence of matter is extension' ... He investigated the question of constructing the world with shape and motion by starting with this definition. And when he reached the end of his work, he stopped to contemplate it, and declared that nothing was missing in it: 'That there is no phenomenon in nature not included in what has been explained in this treatise'---so runs the title of one of the last paragraphs of the Principia Philosophiae." (p. 44). Newton used the right scientific approach (pp. 47-48), but his work was rejected by the Cartesians because of their garbling of science and metaphysics (pp. 15-16, 46-49). Newton won but "toward the end of the nineteenth century, hypothetical theories which were offered as more or less probable explanations of phenomena were extraordinarily multiplied. The noise of their battles and the fracas of their collapse have wearied physicists and led them gradually back to the sound doctrines Newton had expressed do forcefully." (p. 53). Theory-ladenness of experiment. "An experiment in physics is the precise observation of phenomena accompanied by an interpretation of these phenomena; this interpretation substitutes for the concrete data really gathered by observation abstract and symbolic representations which correspond to them by virtue of the theories admitted by the observer." (p. 147). This implies, for example, that no one hypothesis can be tested in isolation (p. 187). Duhem attributes great philosophical importance to the theory-ladenness of experiment, speculating about incommensurability issues, etc. But this is pure philosophical speculation with no historical examples to back it up. In fact, the only historical examples Duhem does mention in these sections are examples showing that, on the contrary, "theory-ladenness" can often be quite easily disentangled from experiments, allowing reinterpretation in a new theory (p. 160). Against models. "Physical theory ... is not to be resolved into a mass of disparate and incompatible models" (p. 220), says Duhem, mocking "the English," who do things like try to explain atomic phenomena in terms of springs and jelly and whatnot (p. 82). Again Duhem has no historical evidence that models are bad. On the contrary, one must "admit frankly that the use of mechanical models has been able to guide certain physicists on the road to discovery" (p. 99). Even so Duhem simply proclaims with no evidence that "the share of booty it has poured into the bulk of our knowledge seems quite meager when we compare it with the opulent conquests of abstract theories." (p. 99). Duhem is also upset that the method of models in many cases "appears as the instrument of discovery whereas it has only been a means of exposition" (p. 94). But why "only"? Did not Duhem himself just argue that science is "only" representation, i.e. exposition? Similarly, Duhem dislikes, on philosophical grounds, the idea that physical hypotheses should be drawn from experiment, without being able to offer any historical examples of this method being counterproductive, and while recognising the fruits of this method in the works of, e.g., Newton and Ampère (pp. 219, 190-200). Duhem compensates for being unable to offer historical support for his main theses by throwing in a trivially true decoy thesis---"hypotheses are not the product of sudden creation, but the result of progressive evolution" (p. 220)---which he then goes on to support by giving a ridiculously elaborate 30-page account of the prehistory of the law of gravitation. Finally, a great Napoleon quotation: "I take greater pleasure in reading this material than a girl does in reading a novel." (p. 59)
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