Laudan's pessimistic meta-induction shows that historically successful scientific strategies are routinely abandoned as frameworks change, undermining confidence in their continuation.

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Frameworks (in science)(why successful strategies get abandoned when frameworks change): The basic set of ideas, methods, and assumptions that scientists use in a particular era—like how scientists in the 1600s used completely different frameworks than scientists today.
Laudan(the main subject being discussed in this statement): Larry Laudan is a philosopher of science who argued that just because a scientific theory works well doesn't necessarily mean it's true—a controversial claim that challenges how we think about the relationship between success and truth.
Meta-induction(The logical structure of Laudan's argument): A type of reasoning where you look at a pattern in past examples and use it to predict the future—in this case, looking at the history of failed scientific theories to predict that current theories will also fail.
epistemology(Contrasted with purely descriptive scientific inquiry): A normative enterprise that tells us how we ought to reason from evidence and how we ought to justify our beliefs, as distinct from merely describing how we do reason or justify beliefs
pessimistic meta-induction(philosophy of science, debate over scientific realism): An argument against scientific realism that inductively infers from the historical record of past successful-but-false theories that current successful theories are also likely false

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