The Underdetermination Debate: How Lack of History Leads to Bad Philosophy

Abstract

Over the course of a century, the debate on underdetermination has produced an abundance of versions of the thesis that evidence does not uniquely determine scientific theories. Almost everybody agrees that some weak transitory underdetermination is a historical reality while several strong renderings are clearly implausible. Thus, the real challenge of the debate consists in formulating the underdetermination thesis in a way that strikes the right balance between the extremes. Such a formulation reaches beyond the trivial observation that theories are underdetermined if relevant evidence is missing. It should be methodologically useful both for the working scientist and for the historian of science while evading the common objections.