Jamie Shaw
The emerging consensus in the secondary literature on Duhem is that his notion of 'good sense' is a virtue of individual scientists that guides them while choosing between rival theories (Stump 2007; Ivanova 2010; Kidd 2011; Fairweather 2012; Bhakthavatsalam 2017). More specifically, it is argued that good sense can, ceteris paribus, provide grounds for choosing one theory over empirically equivalent alternatives. In this paper, I argue that good sense is irrelevant to theory choice. Theory choice, for Duhem, is either a pseudo-problem or addressed purely by methodological desiderata depending on how theory choice is understood. I go on to provide a positive interpretation of good sense as a feature of scientific communities that undergo particular forms of education that allow scientists to abandon theory pursuit. I conclude by suggesting that this interpretations lends itself to reading Duhem as a proto-social epistemology rather than a virtue epistemology.
