Larry Laudan 16 Oct 1941

  • Contribution

    Laudan's most influential book is Progress and its Problems (1977), in which he charges philosophers of science with paying lip service to the view that "science is fundamentally a problem-solving activity" without taking seriously the view's implications for the history of science and its philosophy, and without questioning certain issues in the historiography and methodology of science. Against empiricism, which is represented by Karl Popper, and "revolutionism," represented by Thomas Kuhn,
  • Known.

    Laudan is particularly well known for his pessimistic induction argument against the claim that the cumulative success of science shows that science must really describe how the world really is. Laudan famously argued in his 1981 article "A Confutation of Convergent Realism"
    https://courses.cs.sfu.ca/2015fa-phil-880-g1/pages/laudan/view