Abstract

This paper consists of two parts which are linked by Mary Hesse’s notion of negative analogy. In the first part I will characterise the context into which this notion was introduced, i.e. the discourse on models and analogies which Hesse reacts to and her own work from some papers in the 1950ies to her book on Models and Analogies (Hesse, 1966). One important distinction she draws in this book is between positive, neutral and negative analogies. In the second part of the paper, I will start with an observation by Hesse on negative analogies and will argue this has far reaching consequences for the metaphysics of science. It allows us to see how we can have empirical access to natural modalities.