The History of Science as a Graveyard of Theories: A Philosophers’ Myth?

ABSTRACT

According to the antirealist argument known as the pessimistic induction, the history of science is a graveyard of dead scientific theories and abandoned theoretical posits. Support for this pessimistic picture of the history of science usually comes from a few case histories, such as the demise of the phlogiston theory and the abandonment of caloric as the substance of heat. In this article, I wish to take a new approach to examining the ‘history of science as a graveyard of theories’ picture. Using JSTOR Data for Research and Springer Exemplar, I present new lines of evidence that are at odds with this pessimistic picture of the history of science. When rigorously tested against the historical record of science, I submit, the pessimistic picture of the history of science as a graveyard of dead theories and abandoned posits may turn out to be no more than a philosophers’ myth.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers of International Studies in the Philosophy of Science for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Special thanks are due to the editor, James W. McAllister.

Notes

1 Vickers (2013) attempts to offer a new and improved list of 20 dead theories and abandoned posits. For a critical evaluation of Vickers’s argument as either a deductive or an inductive argument, see Mizrahi (2015b).

2 It should be noted that some interpret the pessimistic induction as a deductive argument, specifically a reductio of the realist view that (novel) predictive success is a mark of (approximate) truth. See, for example, Lewis (2001) and Lange (2002). Saatsi (2005) accepts the reductio formulation of the pessimistic induction, but supplements it with a statistical inference. For a critical evaluation of the pessimistic induction as either a deductive (reductio and argument from counterexamples) or an inductive argument (inductive generalisation from a sample), see Mizrahi (2013, 2015b).

3 In Mizrahi (2013), I also argue that the pessimistic induction fails as a deductive argument (either a reductio or an argument from counterexamples). For other criticisms of the pessimistic induction, see Doppelt (2007) and Park (2014).

4 Müller (2015) focuses on the pessimistic induction as a deductive argument (specifically, a reductio) rather than an inductive argument. In a note, Müller (2015, 410n8) comments on Mizrahi (2013) and says that I focus on just two premises of the reductio formulation of the pessimistic induction to the exclusion of other premises. This is a curious remark for, to show that a deductive argument is unsound, it is enough to show that one premise is false. One need not show that all the premises are false. Müller also seems to forget that Saatsi (2005, 1092), whom he quotes favourably, says that the reductio formulation of the pessimistic induction needs to be supplemented with ‘a statistical argument’. If that is correct, then Fahrbach’s, Park’s, and my criticisms against the inductive formulation of the pessimistic induction apply to the reductio formulation as well. In other words, insofar as the reductio formulation of the pessimistic induction relies on the graveyard picture, any evidence that undermines the latter undermines former as well.

5 See also Ruhmkorff (2014), who advances a ‘local’ (as opposed to ‘global’) pessimistic induction.

6 It is important to note that The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science covers ‘the period from the Renaissance to the early twenty-first century’ and that the articles in it ‘cover all disciplines, historical periods, concepts, and methodologies’ (Oxford Reference 2003). Moreover, A Dictionary of Chemistry and A Dictionary of Physics also contain entries on discarded scientific theories and abandoned theoretical posits, some of which turned up in the random sample listed in Table 1, such as caloric theory and phlogiston.

7 According to the ‘About’ page of Springer Exemplar (2017), this tool ‘searches more than 3,500 journals and close to 200,000 books from Springer’s collection to find authentic examples of how a word or phrase is used in published literature. Comprehensive coverage includes both current and archival content in all major subject areas including the life science, medicine, engineering, mathematics, computer science, business, and law, contributed by some of the world’s leading academics in these fields. Exemplar is continuously updated with new content as it is published.’ According to Springer (2017), their book archives provide ‘access to scholarly research published in books dating back to the 1840s’. This should help address any concerns about how representative the Springer database is. In that respect, it is worth noting that, even if the Springer database did not contain publications going as far back as the 1840s, it could still be considered representative of scientific literature as a whole, given that ‘half of all scientific work ever done was done in the last 15–20 years, while the other half was done in all the time before; and three quarters of all scientific work ever done was done in the last 30–40 years, while in all the time before that, only one quarter was done’ (Fahrbach 2011, 148).

8 Since this is a disconfirmation argument that proceeds from empirical evidence (whether random samples, bibliometric data, or chronological data), it should be clear that it is not meant to be a conclusive refutation of the graveyard picture. Rather, it shows that the empirical evidence does not support the graveyard picture. In other words, what we see in the historical record of science is not what we would expect to see if the graveyard picture were an accurate picture of the history of science.

9 See note 8.

10 If we look at aether as a theoretical posit, rather than the more narrow electromagnetic aether, then it has been around since Aristotle, in whose physics it is the element that pervades the spheres above the sublunary world (Varvoglis 2014).

11 See note 8.

12 On the problem with using such locutions in the context of pessimistic inductions from the history of science, see Devitt (2011), 288 and Mizrahi (2013), 3214–3215.

13 For a book devoted to this task, see Bonk (2008). See also Okasha (2002) and Ivanova (2010).

14 See Mizrahi (2015b), where I argue that the case histories that Stanford (2006) uses in support of his New Induction are indeterminate between antirealist and realist interpretations. In other words, antirealism is underdetermined by the historical evidence presented by Stanford (2006).

15 See note 8.