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|Summary=Pierre Duhem was a French boor born philosopher and physicists who worked in the field of thermodynamics and worked clear up the relationship between evidence and theory.
In his most notable work, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, he explained many of his theories on the topics of instrumentalism, how evidence does not certainly reject a theory (Duhem - Quine thesis) and the holistic view of science. He also opposed Newton's statement that gravity was deduced from phenomena and the entire structure of induction.
His main works in science and the work he is best known for is the work he did on thermodynamics. His work spans from his failed dissertation in 1885 to 1911. He believed that generalized thermodynamics could provide the foundation of all physics and chemistry.
In philosophy of science, he worked on the theory surrounding the relationship between a theory and experiment. He rejected both Newton's theory and atomism accepting his own idea of thermodynamics. Although Duhem's rejection of atomism was a belief in instrumentalism, he did believe that there was an ultimate truth. Certain groups of physics such as thermodynamics was a way to each reach it.
|Major Contributions=1. Duhem on both the inductive method and hypothetico-deductive method
