Larry Laudan

American philosopher of science (University of Pittsburgh at the time of writing; later Texas, UNAM) best known for "A Confutation of Convergent Realism" (Philosophy of Science, 1981), a sustained attack on the "no miracles" argument for scientific realism built around a list of once successful theories later judged false or non-referring. Matters to this vault as the author of the most influential partial attempt at the "denominator" the realism debate keeps needing and never gets: a catalog of historically successful-but-false theories, read directly at primary for the first time in this vault on 2026-11-03 and found to be twelve items long, not the five-item compression commonly reproduced downstream.

References

• claim-laudan-1981-list-challenged-as-unrepresentative-since-the-1980s — the list, its load-bearing sentence (confirmed verbatim at primary, p. 35), and the representativeness challenge realists raised against it almost at once.
• claim-lewis-2001-no-full-denominator-survey-of-past-theories-ever-attempted — Peter Lewis's 2001 observation that no neutral census of past theories has ever been attempted; Laudan's list is the most influential partial one, built from the failure side only.