Larry Laudan

Larry Laudan (1941–2022) was an American philosopher of science best known for formulating the pessimistic meta-induction — the argument that the history of abandoned successful theories undermines the inference from predictive success to approximate truth. His challenge forced realists like Philip Kitcher to develop the working/idle posit distinction and remains the central obstacle to naive scientific realism. Laudan also argued for normative naturalism, the view that methodological rules should be justified by their historical track record rather than by a priori principle.

Laudan's meta-induction is not a skeptic's victory. It is a structural map of the gap between 'this worked' and 'this is true' — a gap that no realist has yet closed with anything better than hindsight.