Abstract
In this paper a constructive empiricist account of scientific change is put forward. Based on da Costa's and French's partial structures approach, two notions of empirical adequacy are initially advanced (with particular emphasis on the introduction of degrees of empirical adequacy). Using these notions, it is shown how both the informativeness and the empirical adequacy requirements of an empiricist theory of scientific change can then be met. Finally, some philosophical consequences with regard to the role of structures in this context are drawn.
Now, we daily see what science is doing for us. This could not be unless it taught us something about reality; the aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relations between things; outside those relations there is no reality knowable.
Henri Poincaré (1905), p. xxi
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Bueno, O. What is Structural Empiricism? Scientific Change in an Empiricist Setting. Erkenntnis 50, 55–81 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005434915055
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005434915055