Einstein and Duhem

Pierre Duhem's often unrecognized influence on twentieth-century philosophy of science is illustrated by an analysis of his significant if also largely unrecognized influence on Albert Einstein. Einstein's first acquaintance with Duhem's La Théorie physique, son objet et sa structure around 1909 is strongly suggested by his close personal and professional relationship with Duhem's German translator, Friedrich Adler. The central role of a Duhemian holistic, underdeterminationist variety of conventionalism in Einstein's thought is examined at length, with special emphasis on Einstein's deployment of Duhemian arguments in his debates with neo-Kantian interpreters of relativity and in his critique of the empiricist doctrines of theory testing advanced by Schlick, Reichenbach, and Carnap. Most striking is Einstein's 1949 criticism of the verificationist conception of meaning from a holistic point of view, anticipating by two years the rather similar, but more famous criticism advanced independently by Quine in Two Dogmas of Empiricism.I wish to thank the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which holds the copyright, for permission to quote from the unpublished letters of Einstein. Items in the Einstein Archive are cited by giving their number in the control index after the following format: EA nn-nnn. Similar formats are employed for citing other archival material. Thus AA refers to material in the Adler Archive at the Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, Vienna; and RC refers to material in the Rudolf Carnap collection at the Archive for Scientific Philosophy, Department of Special Collections, Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh. The research for this paper was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation, No. SES-8420140, as well as by grants from the Deutscher akademischer Austauschdienst, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Kentucky Research Foundation.