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 anythin...
