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Scientific Realism and the Divide et Impera Strategy: The Ether Saga Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Alberto Cordero
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Abstract

Using the optical ether as a case study, this article advances four lines of consideration to show why synchronic versions of the divide et impera strategy of scientific realism are unlikely to work. The considerations draw from (a) the nineteenth-century theories of light, (b) the rise of surprising implication as an epistemic value from the time of Fresnel on, (c) assessments of the ether in end-of-century reports around 1900, and (d) the roots of ether theorizing in now superseded metaphysical assumptions. The typicality of the case and its impact on diachronic versions of the strategy are briefly discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 78 , Issue 5 , December 2011 , pp. 1120 - 1130
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I wish to thank Roman Frigg, the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at LSE-London, and the audience at the December 2009 meeting of the Sigma Club for comments on an ancestor to this article.

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