Pierre Duhem - The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory

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If the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics.

Pierre Duhem
The history of science alone can keep the physicist from the mad ambitions of dogmatism as well as the despair of Pyrrhonian scepticism.

Pierre Duhem
The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses.

Pierre Duhem
The sole purpose of physical theory is to provide a representation and classification of experimental laws; the only test permitting us to judge a physical theory and pronounce it good or bad is the comparison between the consequences of this theory and the experimental laws it has to represent and classify.

Pierre Duhem
The development of physics incites a continual struggle between "nature that does not tire of providing" and reason that does not wish "to tire of conceiving."

Pierre Duhem
The laws of physics are therefore provisional in that the symbols they relate too simple to represent reality completely.

Pierre Duhem
Physics makes progress because experiment constantly causes new disagreements to break out between laws and facts, and because physicists constantly touch up and modify laws in order that they may more faithfully represent the facts.

Pierre Duhem
But, once again, what the physical states as the result of an experiment is not the recital of observed facts, but the interpretation and the transposing of these facts into the ideal, abstract, symbolic world created by the theories he regards as established.

Pierre Duhem
Whoever sees in physical experiments only the observation of facts would not understand the role played by corrections in these experiments; he would not understand, furthermore, what is meant in speaking of 'systematic errors' that an experiment may involve.

Pierre Duhem
A physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of principles, which aim... to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a group of experimental laws.

Pierre Duhem
A "Crucial Experiment" is Impossible in Physics.

Pierre Duhem