David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Ezio Di Nucci
Jack Alan Reynolds
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B 26 (1):87-105 (1995)
Within the philosophy of science there has been a great deal of rather vague talk about the 'heuristic fruitfulness' (or what Peirce called the 'esperable uberty') of theories. It is my aim in the present paper to add some precision to these discussions by linking this 'fruitfulness' to the satisfaction of certain heuristic criteria. In this manner the demarcation between 'discovery' and 'pursuit' becomes blurred. As a case study, I present the competition between the paraparticle and colour models of quarks in the late 1960s. I argue that the eventual appraisal of the latter as the more fruitful of the two was based on the incorporation of a particular symmetry principle, regarded as a heuristic guideline, rather than on non-epistemic factors concerning 'cognitive resources' and the like.
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References found in this work BETA
Bas C. Van Fraassen (1989). Laws and Symmetry. Oxford University Press.
Andrew Pickering (1984). Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics. University of Chicago Press.
P. A. M. Dirac (1930). The Principles of Quantum Mechanics. Oxford, the Clarendon Press.
Ian Hacking (1992). The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences. In Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture. University of Chicago Press 29--64.
Citations of this work BETA
Steven French (2012). Unitary Inequivalence as a Problem for Structural Realism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 43 (2):121-136.
S. French & J. Ladyman (1997). Superconductivity and Structures: Revisiting the London Account. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B 28 (3):363-393.
David John Baker, Hans Halvorson & Noel Swanson (2014). The Conventionality of Parastatistics. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (4):axu018.
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