Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) was by any standard an important scientific figure. Trained as a mathematician and physicist, he made important contributions to hydrodynamics, elasticity, thermodynamics, and physical chemistry. As a historian of science, he is generally credited with the discovery of medieval science. As a philosopher of science, he is famous for his opposition to classical mechanics as it was practiced in the late 19th century, for his anti-atomism, for the theses that no experiment can decisively refute a theory and that theory selection is not dictated by rules, and for the claim that physics and metaphysics are legitimate but separate methods of inquiry. However, his philosophical position is not very well understood: a random walk through the literature shows that interpretations of his philosophical work range across the spectrum. This is unfortunate because his views about physics and metaphysics are complex, often puzzling, and contain many insights about how theories of physics are constructed and how, in his view, they should be constructed.
Intellectual Merit. One of the most interesting things about Duhem is that, as he tells us explicitly, his view of physics developed in response to his reflections on what he was doing as a researcher in physics and on how to teach physics to his students. Yet this connection between the background context of 19th century physics and his philosophy has been largely neglected. To date there is no systematic critical study of Duhem's philosophy of science that gives due attention to its motivation in his physics. The primary goal of the research proposed here is to fill this gap by developing a series of papers on Duhem's philosophy of science showing how his interesting and sometimes peculiar views about metaphysics, physics, and common sense developed from his attempts to make sense of 19th century physics.
Broader Impact. As a systematic study of Duhem's philosophy the papers should appeal to people working in the history and philosophy of science. But the project should also have a broader appeal. The past thirty-five years have witnessed ongoing debates in the philosophical literature about the thesis of scientific realism -- the extent to which we are entitled to hope, believe, or accept that science will tell us what the world is really like. Realists tend to be optimistic; antirealists do not. The debate is largely deadlocked, and many philosophers argue that nothing of interest depends on its outcome. But the original problem was not confined to academic philosophy. Duhem wondered about these issues and cared about them because he felt that the way in which physics was practiced and taught depended on how they are decided. Philosophically-minded physicists and ordinary folk also wonder about them. And in the past decade the science education literature has been increasingly occupied with the scientific realism debate and its implications for the question of how to think properly about science in a way that students will learn it. Since Duhem's views developed in response to such problems and he has interesting things to say about nearly every topic debated today, the project promises to increase the understanding of us all -- philosophically-minded physicists, interested lay persons, and science educators as well as specialists in history and philosophy of science.
