This is a philosophical and historical investigation of the role of inconsistent representations of the same scientific phenomenon. The logical difficulties associated with the simultaneous application of inconsistent models are discussed. Internally inconsistent scientific proposals are characterized as structures whose application is necessarily tied to the confirming evidence that each of its components enjoys and to a vision of the general form of the theory that will resolve the inconsistency. Einstein's derivation of the black body radiation law is used as (...) an example application of such a strategy and is contrasted with planck's derivation. (shrink)

Inconsistent representations of the world have in fact played and should play a role in scientific inquiry. However, it would seem that logical analysis of such representations is blocked by the explosive nature of deductive inference from inconsistent premisses. "Paraconsistent logics" have been suggested as the proper way to remove this impediment and to make explication of the logic of inconsistent scientific theories possible. I argue that installing paraconsistent logic as the underlying logic for scientific inquiry is neither a necessary (...) nor a sufficient condition for giving a philosophical alternative, I suggest that identification of heuristic strategies, based on the network of confirming evidence for inconsistent proposals for reasoning from such proposals to their consistent replacements is the proper way to explicate their function in science. (shrink)

Logical analyses of scientific representations of the world have usually focused on axiomatized or axiomatizable theories. As practiced, science seldom employs such theories. Rather, we find aggregations of claims, the logical relations of which are not as neat as philosophers of science might like them to be. Indeed, a common feature of such aggregations is the presence of certain “theoretical anomalies,” statements that are in some way incompatible with the remainder of the corpus. Huygens’ description of light as exhibiting an (...) asymmetry with respect to its direction of propagation in polarization phenomena was such an anomaly because of its inconsistency with his account of light as longitudinal waves in a medium. (See Sabra 1981, pp. 226-227.) Although the occurrence of these anomalies is indicative of a problem that must be dealt with, inconsistent representations of the world are not without significant heuristic value. (shrink)