Pierre Duhem

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Pierre Duhem
Western Philosophy
19th-century philosophy
Full name Pierre Duhem
Birth 10 June 1861
Death 14 September 1916
Main interests Physics, Philosophy of Science, History of Science, Epistemology
Notable ideas Confirmation Holism, Gibbs-Duhem Equation
Influenced by
Influenced

Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (10 June 1861 – 14 September 1916) was a French physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science, best known for his writings on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria and on scientific development in the Middle Ages. Duhem also made major contributions to the science of his day, particularly in the fields of hydrodynamics, elasticity, and thermodynamics.

Contents

[edit] Philosophy

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Please improve this article if you can. (August 2006)

Duhem's views on the philosophy of science are explicated in La théorie physique: son objet et sa structure.[1] In this work he opposed Newton's statement that the Principia's law of universal mutual gravitation was deduced from 'phenomena', including Kepler's second and third laws. Newton's claims in this regard had already been attacked by critical proof-analyses of the German logician Leibniz and then most famously by Immanuel Kant, following Hume's logical critique of induction. But the novelty of Duhem's work was his proposal that Newton's theory of universal mutual gravity flatly contradicted Kepler's Laws of planetary motion because the interplanetary mutual gravitational perturbations caused deviations from Keplerian orbits. Since no proposition can be validly logically deduced from any it contradicts, according to Duhem, Newton must not have logically deduced his law of gravitation directly from Kepler's Laws.[2]

His name is given to the Quine-Duhem thesis, which holds that for any given set of observations there are an innumerably large number of explanations. Thus empirical evidence cannot force the revision of a theory. As such, the Quine-Duhem thesis is offered as an alternative to the use of Popper's criterion of falsification as a reliable means of distinguishing science from pseudoscience.

As popular as the Duhem-Quine thesis may be in the philosophy of science, in reality Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine stated very different theses. Pierre Duhem believed that experimental theory in physics is fundamentally different from fields like physiology and certain branches of chemistry. Also Duhem's conception of theoretical group has its limits, since not all concepts are connected to each other logically. He did not include at all a priori disciplines such as logic and mathematics within these theoretical groups in physics which can be tested experimentally. Quine, on the other hand, conceived this theoretical group as a unit of a whole human knowledge. To Quine, even mathematics and logic must be revised in light of recalcitrant experience, a thesis that Duhem never held.

[edit] History of Science

Nicole Oresme, a prominent medieval scholar. Duhem came to regard the medieval scholastic tradition as the origin of modern science
Nicole Oresme, a prominent medieval scholar. Duhem came to regard the medieval scholastic tradition as the origin of modern science

Duhem is well known for his work on the history of science, which resulted in the ten volume Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic.[3] Unlike many former historians (e.g. Voltaire and Condorcet), who denigrated the Middle Ages, he endeavored to show that the Roman Catholic Church had helped foster Western science in one of its most fruitful periods. His work in this field was originally prompted by his research into the origins of statics, where he encountered the works of medieval mathematicians and philosophers such as John Buridan,Nicole Oresme and Roger Bacon, whose sophistication surprised him. He consequently came to regard them as the founders of modern science, having in his view anticipated many of the discoveries of Galileo and later thinkers. Duhem concluded that "the mechanics and physics of which modern times are justifiably proud to proceed, by an uninterrupted series of scarcely perceptible improvements, from doctrines professed in the heart of the medieval schools."[4]

[edit] Other works

Duhem is also known for his work in thermodynamics, being in part responsible for the development of what is known as the Gibbs-Duhem relation.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Les théories de la chaleur (1895)
  • Le mixte et la combinaison chimique. Essai sur l'évolution d'une idée (1902)
  • L'évolution de la mécanique (1902)
  • Les origines de la statique (1903)
  • La théorie physique son objet et sa structure (1906)
  • Études sur Léonard de Vinci. Paris, F. De Nobele, 1906-13; 1955. 3 v. 1. sér. I. Albert de Saxe et Léonard de Vinci. II. Léonard de Vinci et Villalpand. III. Léonard de Vinci et Bernardino Baldi. IV. Bernardino Baldi, Roberval dt Descartes. V. Thémon le fils du juif et Léonard de Vinci. VI. Léonard de Vinci, Cardan et Bernard Palissy. VII. La scientia de ponderibus et Léonard de Vinci. VIII. Albert de Saxe. 2. sér. IX. Léonard de Vinci et les deux infinis. X. Léonard de Vinci et la pluralité des mondes. XI. Nicolas de Cues et Léonard de Vinci. XII. Léonard de Vinci et les origines de la géologie. 3. sér. Les précurseurs parisiens de Galilée: XIII. Jean I. Buridan (de Béthune) et Léonard de Vinci. XIV. Le tradition de Buridan et la science italienne au XVIe siecle. XV. Dominique Soto et la scolastique parisienne.
  • Sozein ta phainomena. Essai sur la Notion de Théorie physique de Platon à Galilée (1908)
  • Traité de l'énergétique (1911)
  • Le Système du Monde. Histoire des Doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic, 10 vols., (1913—1959)

[edit] References

  1. ^ (The aim and structure of physical theory. Foreword by Prince Louis de Broglie. Translated from the French by Philip P. Wiener. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1954)
  2. ^ See pp190-195 of The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory 1914/54/62, Atheneum, New York 1962. For an account of the repeated rediscovery of Duhem's refutation of Newton's inductivism, see Imre Lakatos's 1973 LSE Scientific Method Lecture 3 in Matteo Motterlini's For and Against Method: Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, University of Chicago Press, 1999 (pp45-9). For an account of Newton's subjective concept of 'deduction' see Lakatos's paper Newton's Effect on Scientific Standards published as Chapter 5 of The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers Volume 1 Imre Lakatos (eds Worrall & Currie) Cambridge University Press, 1978, and for an account of the method of analysis-synthesis Newton was attempting, see Lakatos’s article The Method of Analysis-Synthesis, Chapter 5 of Mathematics, Science and Epistemology: Philosophical Papers Volume 2 Imre Lakatos,CUP 1978
  3. ^ (a selection was published as Medieval cosmology: theories of infinity, place, time, void, and the plurality of worlds, edited and translated by Roger Ariew. University of Chicago Press, 1985).
  4. ^ Pierre Duhem, Les origines de la statique, vol. 1, p. iv Harvard University Press. p. 38
  • Lowinger, Armand, The Methodology of Pierre Duhem Columbia University Press, 1941
  • Martin, R. N. D., Pierre Duhem: Philosophy and History in the Work of a Believing Physicist, 1991
  • Stoffel, Jean-François, Pierre Duhem et ses doctorands: bibliographie de la littérature primaire et secondaire, Turnhout: Brepols, 1996, 325 p.
  • Stoffel, Jean-François, Le phénoménalisme problématique de Pierre Duhem, Brussels, Académie royale de Belgique, 2002, 391 p.
  • Moody, E.A., Galileo and Avempace: The Dynamics of the Leaning Tower Experiment published in Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 12 1951. (A rebuttal of Koyre's thesis contra Duhem that Galileo abandoned Parisian scholastic impetus dynamics in his post-Pisan mature dynamics of his Dialogo and Discorsi)
  • Moody, E.A., Galileo and His Precursors in Golino, C. (ed.) Galileo Reappraised 1966, pp.23-43 (A rebuttal of Maier's thesis contra Duhem that bodies inherently resist motion in Parisian scholastic dynamics.)
  • Dijksterhuis, E.J., The Origins of Classical Mechanics from Aristotle to Newton M. Clagett (ed) Critical Problems in the History of Science 1959, pp163-184 University of Wisconsin Proceedings 1957 (A rebuttal of Koyre's anti-Duhemian thesis that in his Principia Newton conceived of motion as an unforced state, contra Aristotle.)

[edit] External links

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