The notion of scientific procedure in Pierre Duhem’s work

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the main points in the philosophy of science of Pierre Duhem, one of the leading exponents and pioneers of French Historical Epistemology. We aim to introduce what the author exposes as his general notion of science that opposes to empiricism, focusing on his notion of scientific object, how it is constructed through abstract properties, experimental laws and hypothesis, as well as his notions of scientific explanation and representation. This allows us to comprehend his general thesis in philosophy of science as a whole. For that, we will start from the most general positions of the author, regarding the theoreticity of the scientific object, including propositional and experimental holism, to subsequently analyze how said object is constructed, until finally returning to the general functions of a scientific theory, notably to explain versus to represent. Thereby, we present that for the Parisian science makes artificial classifications that tend to seem natural classifications, and we achieve to relate his philosophy to his history of science, through the historicity of the construction of ideal properties and hypothesis, and through representation continuism and explanation discontinuism.