Background
Laudan, Laurens L. was born on October 16, 1941 in Austin, Texas, United States.
Laudan, Laurens L. was born on October 16, 1941 in Austin, Texas, United States.
BA, University of Kansas, 1962. Manuscripts and Archives, University of Princeton, 1964, PhD 1965. University of Cambridge, Fellow 1964-1965.
University College, London, 1965 -9. University of Pittsburgh, 1969-1983. Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 1983-1986.
University of Hawaii at Manoa, from 1986.
After earlier scholarly work on the history of theories of scientific method Laudan’s later work, as he himself acknowledges, has been a response to the crisis in the philosophy of science created by the work of T. S. Kuhn, which he took to be the problem of giving a rational account of both scientific change and scientific consensus. His Progress audits Problems (1977) gives a pragmatic turn to the type of solution proposed earlier by Lakatos. He later sponsored a series of scholarly case studies of the historical role of methodological issues in scientific change, while moving to a type of methodological naturalism in which theories, methodologies and values are considered to be mutually underdetermined, and adjusted separately in a pragmatic way by scientists in the course of their work. This analysis is used to ground critiques of relativism and scientific realism.