Pierre Duhem

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Pierre Duhem, philosopher and physicist

Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem [1861-1916] was a French physicist, philosopher of science, and historian of science. His most influential work in the philosophy of science came in his classic text The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory where he defended several theses, such as a moderate but powerful form of instrumentalism, the underdetermination of theories by evidence (now known as the Quine-Duhem thesis), and confirmation holism.

Biography

At the young age of eleven, Duhem entered the Collège Stanislas. By 1882, he had finished his studies with honors in Latin, Greek, science, and mathematics. After Stanislas, Duhem’s father wanted him to study applied science at École Polytechnique so that he can become an engineer. However, his mother, who was a devout Catholic, wanted him to study Latin and Greek at the École Normale Supérieure in fear that a scientific track would lead him away from religion. In 1884, Duhem disappointed both of his parents and enrolled in the École Normale Supérieure to study pure science.

Duhem excelled at the École Normale and succeeded in publishing his first paper in 1884 on electrochemical cells. In fact, Duhem excelled so much that in the same year, he submitted his doctoral thesis, which was on thermodynamic potentials in physics and chemistry. Unfortunately, in the thesis, Duhem argues that Marcellin Berthelot’s criterion for measuring the spontaneity of chemical reactions is incorrect, and that free energy should be used instead. Unfortunately, Berthelot was very influential in France and saw that Duhem’s thesis was rejected. Duhem eventually graduated from the École Normale in 1888 by writing a less controversial thesis in mathematical physics.

Duhem went on to teach at Lille Catholic University until 1893. In fact, Duhem was already teaching there when he earned his doctoral degree; he began in 1887. At Lille, Duhem lectured on hydrodynamics, elastics, and acoustics. He even published three of his lectures in 1891. But in 1893, Duhem had a dispute with the dean and moved to the University of Rennes, which he stayed for only one year due to research equipment limitations. So in 1894, Duhem moved to the University of Bordeaux to become a professor in theoretical physics. Duhem requested a move from Bordeaux to a university in Paris more than once, however, each request was rejected since Berthelot had been the French minister of education since 1886 and Berthelot still had deep disagreements about thermodynamics with Duhem.

Nevertheless, Duhem kept publishing in physics, developing such innovations as the Gibbs-Duhem Equation in thermodynamics. Three major works of Duhem at Bordeaux were Thermodynamique et chimie (1902), Recherches sur l'hydrodynamique(1903; 1904), and Recherches sur l'élasticité (1906). In 1900, Duhem’s brilliant research paid off and he was accepted into the world-renowned Academy of Sciences.

Duhem’s fervor for science blossomed into an interest in philosophy of science, which itself fueled an interest in history of science. In fact, many philosophers of science today consider Duhem to be the first philosopher of science to pay careful attention to the history of science. In fact, many philosophers of science after Duhem, such as Karl Popper [1902-1994], ignored the history of science until Thomas Kuhn [1922-1996] and Imre Lakatos [1922-1974] revived the importance of the history of science in the philosophy of science in the mid-1900s.

A few of Duhem’s major works in the philosophy and history of science were L'évolution de la mécanique (1902), Les origines de la statique (1903), and La Théorie physique: son objet et sa structure (1906). However, Duhem’s publications were vast and his drive to publish was astonishing. In fact, due to his prowess in the history and philosophy of science, Duhem was eventually offered a professorship in Paris as a historian of science. However, he rejected the position because it was not in physics. Duhem later died in 1916.

Duhem’s Philosophy of Science

Duhem had at least three books in philosophy of science, but his most prominent one was The Aim and Structure of PhysicalTheory, which was published in 1906 and translated into English in 1954 with a notable foreword by the Nobel laureate Louis de Broglie [1892-1987]. In this book, Duhem posited three major theses: instrumentalism, the underdetermination of theories by evidence, and confirmation holism.

Duhem’s instrumentalism

Duhem’s philosophy of science rests on a firm distinction between physics and metaphysics. Duhem believed that contrary to many physicists before him, physics was not subordinate to metaphysics. But rather, physics could be conducted entirely independently of one’s metaphysical beliefs, and, moreover, we should conduct physics in this way because the worth of a physical theory lies in its non-metaphysical features.

Duhem proposed that a physical theory should consist of an abstract list of axioms, whose deductions predict the phenomenological l laws in a particular domain of physics with as much completeness, precision, and simplicity as possible. In Duhem’s words:

“A physical theory is not an explanation; it is a system of mathematical propositions whose aim is to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a whole group of experimental laws” (Duhem 1954, 19).

Duhem’s picture is that physicists should observe physical phenomena, synthesize laws for those phenomena, and then propose more general mathematical laws that imply the phenomenological laws. This method had been known as the hypothetico-deductive method since Christiaan Huygens [1629-1695], but Duhem’s innovation was suggesting that the method did not require any metaphysical commitments.

For example, Isaac Newton [1642-1727] had a difficult time promoting his gravitational theory to his contemporaries because it posited an action-at-a-distant force, which conflicted with the popular seventeenth century view that all physical causes operate through contact. Nevertheless, Duhem would say that the value of Newton’s gravitational theory lies in its ability to predict Kepler’s laws of planetary motion from the law of gravity.

http://www.bartleby.com/65/du/Duhem-Pi.html http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Duhem.html