Underdetermine

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    Particularly in the theory of scientific explanation, to provide too few constraints to specify a unique solution.

    "1967 A. H. Armstrong (ed) The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy He recognised that, in constructing his laws, the physicist must go beyond the ‘facts’ which inevitably underdetermine his theories. Boltzmann rightly accused both the idealists and the inductivists of having ignored this basic limitation on the certainty of all scientific hypotheses."

Example

More examples

"1967 A. H. Armstrong (ed) The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy He recognised that, in constructing his laws, the physicist must go beyond the ‘facts’ which inevitably underdetermine his theories. Boltzmann rightly accused both the idealists and the inductivists of having ignored this basic limitation on the certainty of all scientific hypotheses."

Etymology

From under- + determine.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.