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Born October 16th 1941 in Austin Texas
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Laudan's most influential book was released in 1977, "He charges philosophers of science with paying lip service to the view that science is fundamentally a problem-solving activity without taking seriously the view's implications for the history of science and its philosophy, and without questioning certain issues in the historiography and methodology of science."
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Laudan is well known for his pessimistic induction argument against the claim that the cumulative success of science shows that science must truly describe reality. In his 1981 article A Confutation of Convergent Realism he argued that the history of science furnishes vast evidence of empirically successful theories that were later rejected; from subsequent perspectives, their unobservable terms were judged not to refer and thus, they cannot be regarded as true or even approximately true.
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The ai of science is to secure theories with a high problem-solving effectiveness and that scientific progress is possible when empirical data is diminished. Indeed, on this model, it is possible that a change from an empirically well-supported theory to a less well-supported one could be progressive, provided that the latter resolved significant conceptual difficulties confronting the former. The better theory solves more conceptual problems while minimizing empirical anomalies.
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Died August 23rd 2022, aged 80