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Theory flexibility and inconsistency in science

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Abstract

For several decades now philosophers have discussed apparent examples of internally inconsistent scientific theories. However, there is still much controversy over how exactly we should conceive of scientific theories in the first place. Here I argue for a new approach, whereby all of the truly important questions about inconsistency in science can be asked and answered without disagreements about theories and theory-content getting in the way. Three examples commonly described as ‘internally inconsistent theories’ are analysed in the light of this approach. In the process, the question ‘Is the theory inconsistent or not?’ is identified as a bad, or at least unimportant, question.

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Notes

  1. For example, does the Dirac equation entail the existence of positrons or not? Does Newtonian cosmology entail an indeterminate gravitational force on the earth or not (Vickers 2009)? And beyond such ‘material’ conundrums of entailment, there are even disagreements as to which logical inferences should be permitted.

  2. This assumes that we have settled on a definition of ‘inconsistent’, of course. See Vickers (2013), Chapter 2, for discussion.

  3. Of course, some might claim that the question is not independent of the syntactic and semantic approaches, since the content of a theory does not ‘exist’ until it is reconstructed by somebody, be that a scientist, historian, or philosopher. This issue won’t affect the point I will be making in this paper.

  4. Cf. Piccinini and Scott (2006).

  5. I’ll talk about propositions in this paper, since these are the most obvious focus for inconsistency. One can substitute talk of equations, or models, or whatever one prefers.

  6. See Vickers (2014).

  7. In Vickers (2013), Chapter 3, I conduct a much more thorough investigation of this case study.

  8. See Muller (2007) for details.

  9. For a more detailed analysis of this case study, see Vickers (2013), Chapter 4.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Juha Saatsi for introducing me to Kirchhoff’s theory of diffraction, and thanks in particular to Jody Azzouni for helpful suggestions on an earlier draft.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, Durham, UK

    Peter Vickers

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  1. Peter Vickers
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Vickers, P. Theory flexibility and inconsistency in science. Synthese 191, 2891–2906 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0464-8

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