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Local Underdetermination in Historical Science*

David Lewis (1979) defends the thesis of the asymmetry of overdetermination: later affairs are seldom overdetermined by earlier affairs, but earlier affairs are usually overdetermined by later affairs. Recently, Carol Cleland (2002) has argued that since the distinctive methodologies of historical science and experimental science exploit different aspects of this asymmetry, the methodology of historical science is just as good, epistemically speaking, as that of experimental science. This paper shows, first, that Cleland’s epistemological conclusion does not follow from the thesis of the asymmetry of overdetermination, because overdetermination (in Lewis’s sense) is compatible with epistemic underdetermination. The paper also shows, contra Cleland, that there is at least one interesting sense in which historical science is epistemically inferior to experimental science, after all, because local underdetermination problems are more widespread in historical than in experimental science.