Quotes About Underdetermination

there is a radical underdetermination of what is said by the literal meaning of the sentence. There is nothing in the literal meaning of the sentence "She gave him her key and he opened the door" to block the interpretation, He opened the door with her key by bashing the door down with the key; the key weighed two hundred pounds and was in the shape of an axe. Or, He swallowed both the door and the key and he inserted the key in the lock by the peristaltic contraction of his gut.

In recent years the tension between realism and empiricism has often been debated under the topic of the underdetermination of theory by evidence. Empiricists argue that there will always be a range of alternative theories compatible with all our actual evidence, and maybe a range of alternative theories compatible with all our possible evidence. So we never have good empirical grounds for choosing one of these theories over others and regarding it as representing how the world really is.