Underdetermination, Prove it!

Positivist scientific philosophy, ala Popper, argues that scientific theories/statements can be judged through empirical experimentation and testing. If a theory/statement passes this test, usually by repeatedly and correctly predicting the outcome of a defined procedure, then scientists say that such a theory is factual. Or if they are very responsible, they say that it is provisionally true.

However, Post-positivists, as John Zammito calls them in his engaging history of SSK (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge) and STS (Science and Technology Studies) thought, have mounted several objections to this integral component of what is normally termed the Scientific Method.

What we can term the "underdetermination argument," is that recourse to experimentation to test scientific theories is simply insufficient to establish (or determine, hence the name) the level of credibility that is normally accorded to what we regard as scientific facts. It is always possible, and historically has usually been the case, that two (or more) theories which are logically incompatible, both adequately, at least at a certain point in history, explain a given set of empirical observations. In other words there is more going on, what Thomas Kuhn calls "historical accidents," when scientists determine "facts" than just some idealized Scientific Methodology.

Zammito acknowledges this point but only what he calls its "weak" form. Taken to its extreme the underdetermination argument could, and has by some authors, been used to relativise and thereby weaken Science's claim to be able to produce uniquely credible knowledge.

I tend to agree with Zammito on a pragmatic level, though I am not entirely convinced by the arguments he employs to avoid the slippery slope into relativism provided by the underdetermination thesis.

Underdetermination, Prove it!