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Larry Laudan Birth 1941
Born October 16th 1941 in Austin Texas -
Larry Laudan Progress and its Problems
Laudan's most influential book was released in 1977, "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." -
Larry Laudan Pessimistic Induction
Laudan is well known for his pessimistic induction argument against the claim that the cumulative success of science shows that science must truly describe reality. In his 1981 article A Confutation of Convergent Realism he argued that the history of science furnishes vast evidence of empirically successful theories that were later rejected; from subsequent perspectives, their unobservable terms were judged not to refer and thus, they cannot be regarded as true or even approximately true. -
Larry Laudan Beyond Positivism and Relativism
The ai of science is to secure theories with a high problem-solving effectiveness and that scientific progress is possible when empirical data is diminished. Indeed, on this model, it is possible that a change from an empirically well-supported theory to a less well-supported one could be progressive, provided that the latter resolved significant conceptual difficulties confronting the former. The better theory solves more conceptual problems while minimizing empirical anomalies. -
Larry Laudan Death 2022
Died August 23rd 2022, aged 80