"A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.” Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth’ for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (1996), Postscript—1969.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ontology
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Ontology
50 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Ontology →
Related Quotes
"It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether …"
"One is what one is, partly at least."
"On bourgeois ground... change is impossible anyway even if it were desired. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to…"
"The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism—there is only one world, the natural world, exhi…"
"Why do I think that Turing's paper "On computable numbers" is so important? Well, in my opinion it's a paper on epist…"
"A sample of the modern debate, which neatly summarizes the anti-reductionist position is provided by Grene (1974). Sh…"
"Systems is an epistemology (making a statement of the kind: 'A certain type of knowledge may be expressed in systems …"
"Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radic…"
"[Women's Liberation] ... is an ontological, spiritual revolution, pointing beyond the idolatries of sexist society an…"
"Antoine Meillet also noted that imperatives in European languages are typically the morphological root of the verb, a…"