Quine’s Underdetermination Thesis

Artificial cells as reified quines

Cellular automata were initially conceived as a formal model to study self-replicating systems. Although reproduction by biological cells is characterized by exponential population increase, no population of self-replicating machines modeled as a cellular automaton has ever exhibited such rapid growth. We believe this is due to the inability of cellular automata to model bonded complexes of rei...

Logical underdetermination in physics

This paper discusses physical implications of a result concerning underdetermination of truth in mathematics. If the time development of a complex physical system on the macro level for logical reasons may be underdetermined by the physical laws which determine its behavior on the micro level, then there arises a free maneuvering space concerning that physical system, giving room for a form of ...

Is structural underdetermination possible?

Structural realism is sometimes said to undermine the theory underdetermination (TUD) argument against realism, since, in usual TUD scenarios, the supposed underdetermination concerns the object-like theoretical content but not the structural content. The paper explores the possibility of structural TUD by considering some special cases from modern physics, but also questions the validity of th...

Underdetermination and Evidence

The Intelligibility Objection against Underdetermination

One of the objections against the thesis of underdetermination of theories by observations is that it is unintelligible. Any two empirically equivalent theories — so the argument goes — are in principle intertranslatable, hence cannot count as rivals in any non-trivial sense. Against that objection, this paper shows that empirically equivalent theories may contain theoretical sentences that are...