Miguel Agustín Aguilar Sandoval

Feyerabend is known for emphasizing the need to proliferate incompatible theories as a means of scientific progress. However, he also strongly criticized the idea of “free theory creation” in the course of the debate over the interpretation of Ernst Mach’s philosophical work and its influence on Albert Einstein’s discovery of relativity. This criticism implies that Feyerabend conceived restrictions on theory creation. The purpose of this text is to identify what these restrictions were and whether they imply an internal tension in Feyerabend’s philosophy.

This paper analyzes Pierre Duhem’s position on the role of simple induction in scientific research. Duhem has been understood as a critic of induction in science but that is not entirely accurate. Duhem holds a position similar to one that might be recognized in traditional philosophy of science (according to which, although theories are not the result of inductions, some physical laws can be understood as inductive generalizations). Nonetheless, Duhem differs from that position in ways that have not been clearly recognized in secondary literature. The most important difference is that Duhem’s distinction between inductive laws and theoretical hypotheses is not based on the kind of concepts we use but supported by a (mostly implicit) conception of scientific discovery. The idea is that there are two different processes of discovery distinguished by the use of different types of inference, of which induction is only one. Clarifying these distinctions can contribute to recent debates on the interpretation of Duhem’s philosophical work in recent literature.

A inicios del siglo XX, Albert Einstein y Hendrik Lorentz produjeron explicaciones diferentes acerca de los mismos fenómenos. Sin embargo, rápidamente se produjo un consenso, en favor de Einstein, que ha sido difícil de comprender para historiadores y filósofos de la ciencia. La literatura reciente explica ese éxito señalando conflictos entre algunas ideas de Lorentz y la temprana física cuántica. Sin negar que esos factores pudieron contribuir en la aceptación de la relatividad especial, propongo una explicación complementaria en la que atribuyo el éxito de Einstein al uso de la estabilidad de la medición de la velocidad de la luz.