Dana Tulodziecki, Purdue University 

September 27 at 3pm in Clark Hall 206

How do false theories enable scientific progress?

One central question in philosophy of science is how to reconcile the success of science with the fact that many past scientific theories were radically false and have long been abandoned.  In this talk, I examine the transition from miasmatic views of disease to germ views in Britain in the mid-1800s, and show that the miasma theory, even though it hardly had anything in common with the germ theory, was highly successful.  Since it is not possible to identify stable elements that were carried over from the miasma to the germ theory, we can’t account for the miasma theory’s success in terms of its being true or even approximately true.  I argue that this shows that we should expand our notion of scientific success, thereby providing us with a new way to think about scientific progress.