Scientific Progress

What constitutes a scientific discovery? What role do discoveries play in science, its dynamics and social practices? Must every discovery be attributed to an individual discoverer (or a small number of discoverers)? The paper explores these questions by first critically examining extant philosophical explications of scientific discovery—the models of scientific discovery, propounded by Kuhn, McArthur, Hudson, and Schindler. As a simple, natural and powerful alternative, we proffer the “change-driver model”: in a nutshell, it takes discoveries to be cognitive scientific results (...) that have epistemically advanced science. The model overcomes the shortcomings of its precursors, whilst preserving their insights. We demonstrate its intensional and extensional superiority, especially with respect to the link between scientific discoveries and the dynamics of science, as well as the award system of science. Both as an illustration, and as an application to a recent scientific and political controversy, we apply the considered models of discovery to one of the most momentous discoveries of science: the expansion of the universe. We oppose the 2018 proposal of the International Astronomers’ Union as too simplistic vis-`a-vis the historical complexity of the episode. The change- driver model yields a more nuanced and circumspect verdict: (i) The redshift-distance relation shouldn’t be named the “Hubble-Lemaître Law”, but “Slipher-Lundmark-Hubble-Humason Law”; (ii) Its interpretation in terms of an expanding universe, however, Lemaître ought to be given credit for; but (iii) The establishment of the expansion of the universe, as an evidentially sufficiently warranted result, is a communal achievement, emerging in the 1950s or 1960s. (shrink)

I have conceived, or realized or shall propose, a distinction between promotional and progressive secondary literature. Is it new to you? "The terms are unfamiliar but all your realizations are probably built-in to us through upbringing, or the best responses are"? Secondary literature develops around certain thinkers, such as Wittgenstein, Pierre Bourdieu, John Rawls, and David Lewis. But some of the literature may be merely promotional. More and more of this literature causes one to pay attention to the thinker, but (...) there is little evidence of “academic” improvement: epistemic improvement. Leave aside the natural scientist's war cry that no debates here are resolved. There is little improvement in definitions, quality of formulation, and discussion of objections. Other literature is progressive: there is significant improvement in one or more of these areas. To illustrate, let us focus on John Rawls. I taught Rawls for seven years at the University of Manchester, or even more - I have not checked my CV. In various years, students raise this objection: I cannot do his thought experiment the original position. In the original position, we imagine rational actors choosing societal principles but we imagine them lacking (or their lacking!) biasing knowledge, including knowledge of their social class, sex, wealth, talents, and goals. The objection is also suggested or made by Michael Sandel and made by Susan Moller Okin. Samuel Freeman has a discussion of this objection in his Routledge guide to John Rawls. But I cannot see significant improvement over teaching class discussions almost annually. I wrote one of my papers "Doing history in the original position" partly as a mockery of him, by the way. (“You let me know this now, you brat!”?) One further note: you might regard the idea of promotional and progressive literatures as about types, ideal types one might misleadingly say, to which actual cases are mostly approximations. Well, this is just some chat from your perspective. Over to you! (shrink)

This paper proposes The theory of the Pivot of the Dao (Daoshulun,DSL), aiming to investigate certain issues through the lens of recursivity and non-recursivity. The paper is divided into two main sections: -/- The first section systematically expounds the theoretical foundation of the D-P framework, defining the dialectical relationship between recursivity (P) and non-recursivity (D). Through five core propositions, DSL asserts that the essence of hierarchical evolution lies in the eternal game of recursive chains. -/- The second section explores DSL’s (...) division of rationality, the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) under DSL, and an interpretation of the latent laws governing scientific development. -/- The D-P framework offers a unified explanation for the hierarchical interactions, limitations, and evolutionary patterns of complex systems. Its methodological discussions encompass AI ethics, philosophy of science, and social governance. -/- © 蒋柯帆 2025. This is a preprint version licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). This version supersedes all previous versions uploaded prior to March 13, 2025, which did not carry an explicit license. You are free to share and adapt this material for non-commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to the author. For commercial use, please contact the author. If you need to make any adjustments to the existing categories, please notify me by email in advance so we can coordinate accordingly. (shrink)

A programme of some ninety papers accumulates conclusions faster than it states them, and it has never set its own framework out in one place. This article does three things. First, §2 catalogues the whole apparatus — every theory, theorem and coined term, with the paper in which each was established and the warrant it carries. Second, it sets out plainly what the Philosophy of Virtues has concluded: what is established, what is conditional, what is registered and untested, and what (...) is not assessable. That part concedes its method and its findings to the programme’s own warrant audit and adds nothing to them. Third, and this is the article’s contribution, it derives eleven conclusions that follow from results the programme already holds and that no paper states. They are obtained by reading the corpus across its own boundaries: the forgery cluster against the ethics layer, the measurement layer against the classification layer, the crypto-religion results against the political ones. Four are worth the reader’s time before the rest. The maintenance cost of a counterfeit is what makes duration the only reliable test of virtue, which unites the Thermodynamics of Inversion, the re-tribalisation result, and Aristotle’s hexis under one mechanism, and yields a prediction that costs a few hundred euros to test (N1). The Internalisation Theorem is absorption in a single person, and the Absorption Theorem supplies the condition it has always lacked: internalisation completes when the external reference that could correct the agent is severed (N2). Moral formation is a verification problem, and the reputational layer is the only one at which virtue can be verified without being captured, which derives the programme’s practical prohibitions rather than asserting them (N3). And the three-channel measurement failure is a corollary of forgeability, not an independent finding: what the measurement papers discovered empirically is what the Duality Theorem predicts (N4). Two further conclusions are uncomfortable and are stated anyway. The programme’s own vocabulary is a transmissible form and therefore a forgeable one: it supplies an instrument for counterfeiting principled speech (N9). And the possibility of vice is not a defect of the moral order but the price of virtue being teachable (N5), a claim that must be kept clear of the two fallacies waiting on either side of it. Keywords: Philosophy of Virtues; inventory; warrant; Inversion Theorem; Capture Law; forgery; internalisation; moral formation; measurement; research programme -/- Highlights • What is established in the programme is narrow, recent, and mostly not what the programme is known for. • A counterfeit costs more to maintain than the genuine act, so time is the only verifier that cannot be forged (N1). • The Internalisation Theorem gets its missing condition from the Absorption Theorem: severance of external reference (N2). • Virtue can be verified at the reputational layer and nowhere above it. The scoring prohibition follows rather than being assumed (N3). • The measurement layer’s three-channel failure is what forgeability predicts (N4). • Vice is not necessary to virtue; the possibility of vice is, because a teachable form is a copyable one (N5). • The programme’s own formalism is forgeable, and says so (N9). -/- Relevance A reader approaching ninety papers needs to know two things that no single paper tells him: what the programme has actually concluded, and what those conclusions together imply. The first is a matter of record and is summarised here. The second is not on the record at all, because the conclusions in question live in different papers and different domains, and were never put side by side. Several of them are more testable than the results they follow from, and two identify the cheapest empirical work now available to the programme. (shrink)

“Five wins, eleven places, four scratched. It’s not bad at all. The horse that runs in twenty races and claims twenty has told you nothing about any of them.” Highlights The forgery core is strongest where it generalises: one operation — form conserved, origin substituted, substitution undetectable in the mode of presentation — covering a painting, a metric, a coerced virtue and a mimic’s signal, with consequences that differ by case and are derived rather than described. It weakens wherever a (...) mature field already has the special case with better instruments, or a formal literature has modelled the same cell under another name. That pattern is the result, and the eleven domains where the priority is shared are not a defeat but the shape of a real advantage. The Verdict at a Glance Twenty domains, each assessed against a named rival on criteria fixed before any comparison was run. The full map is §2. Tier Verdict Domains A Advantage strongly defensible What a forgery is · Why fidelity aggravates · How forgeries end · The measurement of character · Channel selection under capture B Genuine contribution, close antecedent, priority shared Where counterfeits are built · Signalling and the price of heredity · Mimicry, divergence and convergence · Internalisation and the counterfeit self · Self-deception · Character and situationism · Credentials and testing · Crypto-religion and absorption · Molecular domestication · The verification spiral · Legitimacy by duration C Claim not sustainable as an advantage Stemmatics and provenance reconstruction · Cryptographic authentication · Fraud, reliance and the law · Connoisseurship and technical authentication Abstract The programme’s forgery cluster — nine articles from Authorship and Its Forgery (#108) to Virtue after Forgery (#118) — claims to have found one structure behind a painted Vermeer, a gamed metric, a coerced apology, a cuckoo’s egg and a domesticated transposon. This paper asks the only question that makes such a claim assessable: in which domain, against which named rival, for which specific reason is it better — and where is it not? Ten criteria are fixed in advance, three of them chosen because the cluster fails them. Twenty domains are assessed. The verdict is a distribution. In five domains the advantage is strongly defensible. The field of art forgery has a special case where the cluster has a general structure with a tense rule that says which endings are open (Goodman, Lessing, Dutton). The aesthetics of forgery predicts that skill mitigates; the Competence Theorem predicts that damage rises with fidelity, and says why. No literature has a general account of how forgeries end; the Exit Theorem supplies four exits and a rule fixing which are open. The psychometric and situationist traditions argue about instruments; the three-channel measurement failure derives why any instrument reading a form must fail. And where Goodhart has one channel, the Capture Law has three, selected conditionally. In eleven domains the contribution is genuine and the priority is not. This paper establishes one concession the corpus has not made: Meyer and Rowan (1977) described ceremonial conformity, and the decoupling of formal structure from actual activity, forty-nine years before the programme’s Ceremony channel. They, and not Goodhart, are the rival that channel had to beat, and the corpus never named them. What survives as the programme’s own is the conditional selection rule, not the phenomenon. Three further antecedents are conceded here. Holmström (1979) modelled the cell the Decoy Placement Rule names — a principal who contracts on an observed signal while the action behind it stays unobservable — which moves that domain out of Tier A; what remains is the three destinations, the withdrawal channel above all, and the transfer to substrates with no principal and no contract. Anderson (2001) is conceded for the verification spiral, and Spence (1973) with Collins (1979) for the credential case. In four domains the claim is withdrawn as an advantage. Textual criticism reconstructed descent from shared errors a century before the Error-Provenance Lemma; cryptography solved origin-verification with mechanisms the theory can redescribe but not improve; the law of fraud has centred reliance since long before T5; and technical authentication already works by inspecting the axes the forger did not. The pattern. The core wins where a field has a case and it has a structure, or where a field has a description and it has a conditional prediction. It loses where a field has an instrument, or a model of the same cell. Not one of the six separating observations in §2.1 has been made. Keywords: forgery; authorship; authenticity; institutional capture; signalling; mimicry; research programme appraisal; priority; virtue theory; Nelson Goodman; Charles Goodhart; Bengt Holmström; Richard Dawkins; John Meyer and Brian Rowan; Michael Spence; Amotz Zahavi; Ross Anderson; Imre Lakatos . (shrink)

How is progress in the academic discipline of ethics related to improvements in people's ethical thoughts and behaviours? We propose that there is disciplinary ethical progress on some phenomenon to the extent that the discipline puts people in a position to increase their understanding of that phenomenon. Even though progress, thus construed, does not guarantee improved thoughts and behaviours, progressive ethical theorising nonetheless enables these improvements. Our account thus has the resources with which to substantiate and shed light on concerns (...) that academic work in ethics is too isolated, obtuse, or trivial. (shrink)

We call for a change-of-attitude towards reviews of scientific literature. We begin with an acknowledgement of reviews as pathways for the advancement of our scientific understanding of reality. The significance of the scientific struggle propelling the putting together of pieces of knowledge into parts of a cohesive body of understanding is recognized, and yet undervalued, especially in empirical sciences. Here we propose a nudge, which is prefacing the insights gained in reviewing the literature with: 'Our review reveals' (or an equivalent (...) phrase), that can bring about the desired cultural shift in the practice of science. The resulting elevation of the status of reviews to that of original findings would also bring about the desirable smoothening of the undesirable schism between theorists and experimentalists. (shrink)

I argue that the key to understand many fundamental issues in philosophy of science lies in understanding the subtle relation between the non-empirical cognitive values used in science and the constraints imposed by measurability. In fact, although we are not able to fix the interpretation of a scientific theory through its formulation, I show that measurability puts constraints that can at least exclude some implausible interpretations. This turns out to be enough to define at least one cognitive value that is (...) able to penalize, without damages, precisely those bad features that deceive purely empirical assessments. This leads to the formulation of a simple model of scientific progress, that is based only on empirical accuracy and conciseness. The model is confronted here with many possible objections and with challenging cases of real progress. Although I cannot exclude that the model might be incomplete, it includes all the cases of genuine progress examined here, and no spurious one. In this model, I stress the role of the state of the art, which is the collection of all the theories that are the only legitimate source of scientific predictions. Progress is a global upgrade of the state of the art. (shrink)

Just as skepticism about our knowledge of the external world is thought to engender a kind of despair, skepticism about our philosophical knowledge, if true, engenders a despair of a similar kind. We remain optimistic. Despair, we urge, needn’t get the best of us. Philosophical knowledge is attainable. Progress is possible. But we aren’t overly optimistic either. Philosophical skepticism has its place. In this chapter, we show how philosophical knowledge and philosophical progress is possible in light of widespread disagreement in (...) philosophy. (shrink)

In an important new Article, titled A Matter of Facts: The Evolution of the Copyright Fact-Exclusion and Its Implications for Disinformation and Democracy, Professor Jessica Silbey argues provocatively that we “‘only” know that facts are excluded from copyright protection because Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service “says so.” She argues that both the nature and importance of facts has been underdefined and is in flux, nonetheless tracing it to the foundational cases of United States (U.S.) copyright law, and argues for (...) a stronger exclusion of facts, which are publici juris, and belong in the public domain. This central thesis is most agreeable, as is her analysis of doctrine and legislative history. The Article’s rich study of American pragmatism, legal realism, the Cambridge school of analytic philosophy, and the “new social scientists,” which Professor Silbey uses to support a strong fact-exclusion, is a tour de force. The Article ends with a list of proposals for a strong Feist application to evaluations, catalogs, manuals, and legal documents. It also includes a call not to allow for industrial dilution of copyright’s framework, including the facts and ideas exclusion. Both are laudable and timely in the era of generative artificial intelligence (AI), where proposals to protect non-authorial quasi-expression or to prevent copying of non-expressive subject matter abound. While I agree with a call for a robust public domain and strong fact-exclusion, and devote Part II of this Response to explore further doctrinal grounds for them, in Part III I explore Silbey’s argument that “pragmatist philosophy’s challenge to universal truths combined with legal realist challenges to formalist jurisprudence eventually shape what is (or should be) copyright law’s broad public domain in ‘facts.’” It is not immediately clear if pragmatism and realism are a solid ground for justifying strong legal principles and axioms. Engaging with this provocative argument allows us to uncover what realism means to Professor Silbey and the much more radical consequences of her arguments. Part IV concludes. (shrink)

Machine Learning (ML) models nowadays solve prediction problems that had been unsolved for decades. Yet, why do real-world systems behave as predicted? How can we manipulate them to behave otherwise? The ability to answer such questions reflects understanding, which several philosophers take to be the measure of scientific progress. But ML models typically do not deliver answers. Can ML really foster scientific progress? On knowledge-, truth-, or justification-based approaches to progress, ML might advance science in different ways: On knowledge-based approaches, (...) it may lead to progress through the discovery of novel phenomena; on truth-based ones, through the discovery of novel hypotheses; on justification-based ones, by delivering a new basis for justification. This Element enters new territory by investigating these ways in which ML may lead to scientific progress. It also constitutes an opinionated snapshot of the fast-growing philosophical literature on ML in science. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the nature of conceptual progress in science. Analyzing five historical episodes of conceptual progress in science, I will show that none of the existing philosophical theories of conceptual progress can make sense of all these cases. I will argue that this is because these theories try to capture conceptual progress as a single type of improvement. Instead, building upon recent cognitive science, I will propose a novel cognitive-pragmatic theory of conceptual progress that understands this phenomenon as (...) involving two evaluative dimensions: cognitive enhancement and pragmatic optimization. While the former dimension assesses concepts in terms of their general cognitive utility, the latter assesses their optimization to the specific goals of the relevant scientific community. We will see that, thanks to these two dimensions, this theory is able to adequately characterize the diversity of conceptual progress exhibited by these historical episodes. (shrink)

What role does artificial intelligence (AI), and large language models (LLMs) in particular, play in the progress of science? How might such AI systems help speed up scientific progress, and even make progress possible on topics that would otherwise be beyond our grasp? Conversely, how might they undermine scientific progress, e.g. because of the opacity of LLMs and the hallucinations they regularly produce? Are these technologies best understood as tools for accelerating the scientific progress made by human researchers, or might (...) autonomous AI agents be capable of making scientific progress in their own right? Focusing primarily on LLM-based systems, this Element explores the relationship between AI and scientific progress. Throughout, we consider both how the use of AI in science aligns with or challenges existing accounts of progress, and how the philosophical debate about these accounts sheds light on the promise and pitfalls of AI in science. (shrink)

Stegenga (forthcoming) formulates and defends a novel account of scientific progress, according to which science makes progress just in case there is a change in scientific justification. Here we present several problems for Stegenga’s account, concerning respectively (i) obtaining misleading evidence, (ii) losses or destruction of evidence, (iii) oscillations in scientific justification, and (iv) the possibility of scientific regress. We conclude by sketching a substantially different justification-based account of scientific progress that avoids these problems.

In this paper, I argue that the fact that a discipline is rarely able to secure knowledge is entirely compatible with the idea that acquiring knowledge is aim of that discipline. What’s more, I maintain that progress towards this aim can be made, and measured, even if a discipline has failed to produce any such knowledge. In motivating this controversial view, I appeal to a field which has been almost entirely ignored by the scientific progress literature: astrobiology.

The cognitive sciences are facing questions of how to select from competing theories or develop those that suit their current needs. However, traditional accounts of theoretical virtues have not yet proven informative to theory development in these fields. We advance a pragmatic account by which theoretical virtues are heuristics we use to estimate a theory’s contribution to a field’s body of knowledge and the degree to which it increases that knowledge’s ability to solve problems in the field’s domain or problem (...) space. From this perspective, properties that are traditionally considered epistemic virtues, such as a theory’s fit to data or internal coherence, can be couched in terms of problem space coverage, and additional virtues come to light that reflect a theory’s alignment with problem-having agents and the context in a societally embedded scientific system. This approach helps us understand why the needs of different fields result in different kinds of theories and allows us to formulate the challenges facing cognitive science in terms that we hope will facilitate their resolution through further theoretical development. (shrink)

Some philosophers are optimistic about progress in philosophy (e.g., Stoljar 2017), whereas other philosophers have more pessimistic views about philosophical progress in comparison to scientific progress (e.g., Chalmers 2015). As far as scientific progress is concerned, there is no question among philosophers of science that science does make progress. Instead, the question philosophers of science are primarily concerned with is this: what is the basic unit of scientific progress? Does science make progress by approximating truth, accumulating knowledge, increasing understanding, or (...) solving problems? Mizrahi (2021; 2022) attempts to approach this question about scientific progress empirically. Using computational, corpus-based methods, Mizrahi (2021; 2022) analyzes a large corpus of scientific publications to find out whether practicing scientists talk about the aim(s) or goal(s) of scientific research in terms of truth, knowledge, understanding, or solutions in their academic publications. In this chapter, we attempt to do the same with respect to philosophical progress. That is, using computational, quantitative, and corpus-based methods, we address the following question empirically. When they talk about the aim(s) or goal(s) of academic philosophy in their academic publications, which of the following terms do academic philosophers use more frequently: ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘understanding’, or ‘solution’? Overall, the results of this quantitative, corpus-based study suggest that there is significantly more truth talk than knowledge talk, more knowledge talk than understanding talk, and more understanding talk than solution talk around progress terms in academic articles published in philosophy journals. (shrink)

Successful replication is a hallmark of scientific truth. Discordant evidence refers to the situation where findings from different studies of the same phenomenon do not agree. Although evidential discordance can spur scientific discovery, it also gives scientists a reason to rationally disagree and thereby compromises the formation of scientific consensus. Discordance indicates that facts about the phenomenon of interest remain unsettled and that a finding may not be reliably replicable. We single out persistent evidential discordance as a particularly difficult problem (...) for the epistemology of science, and distinguish between different causes of evidential discordance – non-systematic error, noise, and bias. Unlike discordance brought about by non-systematic error or noise, persistent discordance often cannot be rationally resolved by temporarily suspending judgment and collecting more data within existing lines of inquiry. We suggest that the analysis of enriched lines of evidence (Boyd 2018) provides a useful approach to diagnosing and evaluating episodes of persistent evidential discordance. Attention to the line of evidence, which extends from raw data to an evidential claim supporting or disconfirming a hypothesis, can help researchers to locate the source of discordance between inconsistent findings. We argue that reference to metadata, information about how the data were generated and processed, can be a key step in the process of resolving normative questions of correctness, i.e., whether a line of evidence provides a legitimate answer to a particular research question. We illustrate our argument with two cases: the alleged discovery of gravitational waves in the late 1960s, and the social priming controversy in experimental psychology. (shrink)

The fact that philosophy has not made much progress in finding answers to its big questions is often demonstrated with a comparison to natural sciences. Some have recently argued that the state of progress in philosophy is not so different than the sciences: there are many unresolved big questions in the sciences too, and philosophy has made progress on its smaller questions just like the sciences. I argue that this comparison is misleading: the situation in the two fields looks similar (...) only if we focus on unresolved scientific questions that have philosophical import. The sciences have made progress on many questions that are significant but that are not ‘big’ in a philosophical sense, while philosophy has made less progress on its own significant questions. Moreover, ‘smaller’ questions in the sciences are significant in themselves, while smaller questions in philosophy do not have much significance beyond their contribution to the bigger debates. I conclude with brief remarks about what underlies the disparity between the two fields: to understand the slow pace of progress in philosophy we should pay attention to factors that are at the intersection of the nature of philosophical questions, current philosophical methodology and the sociology of academic philosophy. (shrink)

AI methods are being touted as a powerful new source of scientific progress. Are they? If so, what kind of progress do they facilitate? To find out, we employed qualitative research methods to explore how space scientists conceive of AI. We show that space scientists are mainly concerned with whether AI can help them solve specific problems, and more generally, to extend their abilities in useful ways. Inspired by our qualitative data, we propose a new account according to which (at (...) least one type of) scientific progress is improving scientific abilities. We differentiate this view from others, address some objections, and show how it flexibly integrates insights from existing work. (shrink)

We report new findings from an empirical study of scientists from seven disciplines and scholars working in history and philosophy of science (HPS) regarding their views about scientific realism. We found that researchers’ general disposition to endorse or reject realism was better predicted by their views regarding scientific progress than their views about the mindindependence of scientific phenomena or other common theses in the realism debate. Age and gender also significantly predicted endorsement of scientific realism. Implications of these findings for (...) philosophical debates about scientific realism and scientific progress are considered. (shrink)

Many instances of scientific progress feature the development of theories that are not fully true, but merely approximately true to various extents. Since only fully true propositions can be known, this seems to rule out the view that scientific progress consists in the accumulation of knowledge. According to Bird's Cumulative Knowledge Account of progress, however, what becomes known in such instances is a (fully true) proposition expressing that the theory in question is approximately true to some extent. We present a (...) general challenge for this idea -- the Epistemic Mismatch Problem -- and consider various strategies by which proponents of the Cumulative Knowledge Account might respond to it. We suggest, however, that the only plausible such strategies involve giving up on aspects of the Cumulative Knowledge Account that are central to why it has seemed plausible to begin with. (shrink)

The Hallmarks of Aging framework has become a widely accepted schema within geroscience, organizing diverse mechanisms of cellular and molecular decline. This article examines whether the Hallmarks function as a scientific paradigm and, beyond that, whether they have enabled genuine scientific progress—an angle largely absents from current literature. Drawing on models from the philosophy of science, the article evaluates the framework’s status and impact from multiple perspectives. From Kuhn, the Hallmarks act as exemplars within the damage paradigm, guiding “normal science” (...) without instigating revolutionary change. From Lakatos, they form part of a protective belt that stabilizes a research programme rather than producing theoretical innovation. From Laudan, they help solve empirical problems but leave conceptual issues unresolved. From Kitcher, their success lies in rhetorical and institutional unification more than inferential structure. From Galison, they are best understood as an instrumental “trading zone” that enables cross-disciplinary coordination. In sum, while the Hallmarks have brought coherence and methodological infrastructure to aging research, they may also constrain conceptual imagination—raising critical questions about the field’s long-term epistemic vitality. (shrink)

Artikel zur Wissenschafts- und Sozialphilosophie von Auguste Comte.

Kuhn was unable to fully develop a comprehensive theory of truth and scientific progress, which continue to be unresolved topics in his philosophy. This chapter discusses the reasons these issues were significant for Kuhn’s work and expands on his observations concerning both of them. Although he did not support traditional theories of truth, Kuhn also chose not to eliminate the idea entirely. Some of his later writings provide arguments for interpreting him as aligned with coherentism; however, it remains uncertain how (...) he might have formulated his own theory of truth. In addressing the concept of progress, I challenge two prevalent assumptions: first, that Kuhn espoused a purely instrumentalist view of progress; and second, that he believed postulating a general aim for science is unnecessary. Drawing on my interpretation of Kuhn’s dynamic perspective, I describe his conception of scientific progress as an epistemic theory. Furthermore, I elucidate how this framework posits a constitutive, albeit not ultimate, aim for science. (shrink)

Now that the Kuhnian scholarship has clarified that Kuhn’s philosophy does not support externalist, constructionist, or even irrationalist images of science, a new worry is starting to loom large. Some argue, in fact, that Kuhn may be read as a supporter, or even a promoter, of the so-called Value-Free Ideal (VFI), which many contemporary philosophers of science find untenable. Other philosophers, however, interpret Kuhn in the opposite direction, that is as a supporting the idea that non-epistemic values are necessary to (...) science. This chapter aims at clarifying the place of Kuhn’s philosophy within the contemporary debate about values in science.After defining VFI, I will discuss the ‘Value-Free Kuhn’ interpretations which, as I will argue, are based on some misunderstandings about some fundamental elements of Kuhn’s philosophy. Furthermore, I will argue that the issue of values in science must be disentangled from the issue of the political autonomy of science, and that Kuhn’s approach shows how this is so. Finally, I suggest how Kuhn’s philosophy may help us reconsider some aspects of the debate on values in science, as well as some issues concerning the science/society relationship. (shrink)

A collective approach to science must define and describe the collective agent of science, namely the scientific community. In SSR, the concepts of scientific community and paradigm are co-defined: a paradigm defines the scientific community that holds it. This circularity may pose some problems. However, Kuhn maintained that it is possible to isolate a scientific community without prior recourse to its paradigm. If that is the case, then the philosopher describing a scientific community can ‘discover’ its paradigm. The concept of (...) paradigm faced several criticisms, and, for this reason, in some post-SSR works Kuhn attempted to refine it. This chapter analyses how Kuhn went from a ‘wide’ to a ‘narrow’ conception of paradigm, by introducing the distinction between exemplars and disciplinary matrix. While exemplars have been recently rehabilitated by some philosophers, it is questionable whether they can be isolated from disciplinary matrices, the concept of which deserves deeper analysis. (shrink)

Kuhn’s mature writings contain some interesting but rather underdeveloped insights about the process of specialisation, which is the topic of this chapter. I begin by discussing the formation of what Kuhn calls ‘scientific specialties’, the kind of incommensurability that drives such a phenomenon, and the relation between specialisation and scientific revolutions. My take on these topics draws from Kuhn’s philosophy but leads to conclusions that Kuhn himself could not see or failed to appreciate. I also I discuss interdisciplinarity, a phenomenon (...) that Kuhn did not address, even though it threatens his ideas about the existence of an incommensurable divide among scientific specialties. Finally, I consider how the theory of specialisation enriches our understanding of Kuhn’s views on scientific change and of his remarks about the ‘plurality of worlds’. (shrink)

In this introductory chapter, I argue for a revised interpretation on Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy. I will begin with a general analysis of the contemporary debates around Kuhn, which reveals the existence of two different and non-communicating parties: the ‘Kuhnians’ and the ‘post-Kuhnians’. Both parties share what I call a ‘Structure-centred’ interpretation. Paying attention to Kuhn’s extensive oeuvre, however, makes it possible to develop a ‘Structure-decentred’ interpretation of his philosophy. Since it is virtually impossible to discuss Kuhn’s philosophy without referring to (...) his most famous book, I will then provide a concise overview of the central concepts of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which will be presupposed in the remainder of the book. Finally, I will present my interpretation, which will be elaborated upon in subsequent chapters. (shrink)

Commonly held interpretations suggest that Kuhn’s primary aim was to reject the image of science advanced by logical empiricism. This chapter challenges that assumption. I argue that Kuhn’s target was in fact broader—what he later described as the ‘static perspective’ on science. This is not to say that he lacked specific criticisms of logical empiricism, which are already evident in some of his earliest writings. I also examine the differences between Kuhn’s, Carnap’s, and Quine’s conceptions of the role of philosophy. (...) This will help clarifying the distinctive features of Kuhn’s philosophical project. (shrink)

Rather than with an analysis of some of the most talked about concepts of SSR, such as incommensurability or scientific revolutions, in this book I began with an analysis of Kuhn’s general philosophical perspective, which he developed as a remedy to some of the difficulties of the static perspective. From the rejection of the unwarranted presupposition concerning the accessibility of an absolute and neutral basis for scientific evaluation, the dynamic perspective unfolds through ‘Socratic juxtaposition’ to the static perspective. Kuhn did (...) not draw his dynamic perspective from the study of the history of science. Rather, he studied the history of science because of his philosophical perspective on science. Based on the history of science, he then developed a descriptive-normative account of the progress of science through periods of normal science and revolutions. Such an account can be adjusted, challenged, or even rejected by new or better historical evidence. The dynamic perspective per se, however, cannot can be challenged only by philosophical arguments. It may however bring more clarity on the often-discussed history-based model of science, that Kuhn sketched in QPT, developed in SSR and then adjusted in many post-SSR writings. (shrink)

This book examines the philosophical perspective of Thomas Kuhn, developed through dialectical opposition to the traditional 'static view' of science. Kuhn’s 'dynamic perspective' led him to turn to the history of science, formulate a history-based model of scientific progress, and adopt a collectivist, community-oriented, and practice-based conception of scientific rationality. The book reconstructs Kuhn’s philosophy by drawing on both his pre- and post-Structure writings, while also comparing his ideas with those of other major thinkers such as Rudolf Carnap and W.V.O. (...) Quine. It further addresses meta-philosophical issues concerning the study of collective scientific practice and the relationship between the philosophy of science and qualitative, social, or ethnographic approaches to scientific communities. Not only does the author reassess Kuhn’s philosophical framework, but he also extends it to contemporary issues such as scientific specialization, interdisciplinarity, and the role of values in science—making this volume valuable both for Kuhn scholars and for readers new to his work. (shrink)

In his last writings, Kuhn discussed not only strict taxonomic kinds but also ‘kinds of materials’ and ‘singletons’. This suggests that, for Kuhn, scientific lexicons are richer and more complex than simple conceptual taxonomies. At the same time, the distinctions among various components of lexicons may obscure the primary objective of their study: to elucidate the belief system of a scientific community through linguistic analysis. This original purpose can be restored by setting aside concerns related to meaning acquisition and by (...) viewing a scientific lexicon as a representation of the inferential patterns employed by members of a scientific/linguistic community. As I will show, Kuhn appears to take this approach in some of his mature writings. Finally, given how his philosophy connects scientific language to the activities of scientific communities, I will dispute claims that Kuhn underwent a ‘linguistic turn’. (shrink)

One of the implications of the dynamic perspective is the shift from the traditional individualistic and ‘algorithmic’ theory of scientific rationality to a theory of collective rationality. Such a theory needs to specify who, exactly, is the rational agent of science. From SSR on, Kuhn stresses the importance of the scientific community and, by doing so, he can be credited with the development of an earlier form of social epistemology. At the same time, it is important to point out that (...) he contemplated the existence of scientific communities of different levels of generality. This, in turn, may shed some new light on his history-based model of science. I conclude this chapter by discussing the relation between the history-oriented philosophy of science and the sociological approach to the study of scientific groups. (shrink)

This chapter is about the dynamic perspective on science, which Kuhn developed in opposition to the static perspective. First, I will spell out how Kuhn built his new perspective by drawing the logical and philosophical implications of the rejection of foundationalism. Then, I will explain why the dynamic perspective is different and more fundamental than the model of science of SSR. The analysis of the relationship between his philosophical perspective, his work on the history of science, and his history-based model (...) of science will make it clearer which parts of Kuhn’s thought are more susceptible to empirical testing than others. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Kuhn’s (unexpected) defence of so-called Whig history of science in some of his last writings. (shrink)

In his more mature years, Kuhn became increasingly interested in the conceptual structure of conceptual taxonomies and in the meaning of kind terms. Contrary to those who claim that such an interest is evidence of a ‘linguistic turn’ he underwent to be accepted by the philosophy community of his time, in this chapter I examine the philosophical reasons that drove Kuhn to the problem of meaning, and how he attempted to solve such problems by focussing on taxonomies. Then, I analyse (...) Kuhn’s crucial shift from the ‘principle of similarities’ to the ‘principle of differentiae’, and how the latter sheds a new light on other parts of his philosophy. Finally, I discuss the problems that Kuhn’s concept of taxonomy faces. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Kerry McKenzie identifies theory change in science as a source for doubts about the value of engaging in metaphysics of science before a final theory is at hand. According to McKenzie, the basic problem is that naturalistically-inclined metaphysics lacks a concept of progress. More specifically, naturalistically-inclined metaphysics lacks a concept of progress as approximation that can easily be taken to correspond to the scientific sources of metaphysical inquiry. In this paper we criticise progress as approximation as (...) too narrow a concept, notably, even in science. Instead, we propose an alternative notion of scientific progress that metaphysical investigations can and do latch on to, namely progress understood as exploring and constraining theory space. This understanding of progress draws on common practice in particle physics, translates nicely to metaphysics, and leads to a convincing reply to McKenzie’s argument, as we shall argue. Furthermore, our proposal speaks in favour of a more lenient version of naturalistically-inclined metaphysics, namely inductive metaphysics. (shrink)

This article offers a novel take on what philosophers have called problems of “practical underdetermination” in order to identify a form of creative epistemic agency operative in the means by which researchers cope with such problems. In developing my analysis, I contrast my “experimental dead-space” (EDS) formulation of practical underdetermination with the more standard “epistemic gap” formulation. Drawing on prior work, I embed the idea of an EDS within a broader unit of analysis—a “research platform”—and identify an experimental dead-space with (...) what I call, borrowing terms from Stuart Kauffman, an “epistemic adjacent possible.” This enables me to characterize the form of creativity I have in mind. Finally, I revisit the case study for which I originally formulated the idea of an EDS in order to show how my expanded analysis enables us to appreciate how research platforms in experimental science can creatively develop in genuinely novel, “unprestatable” ways. (shrink)

Does science have any aim(s)? If not, does it follow that the debate about scientific progress is somehow misguided or problematically non-objective? These are two of the central questions posed in Rowbottom’s Scientific Progress. In this paper, I argue that we should answer both questions in the negative. Science probably has no aims, certainly not a single aim; but it does not follow from this that the debate about scientific progress is somehow misguided or problematically non-objective.

In the philosophical debate about scientific progress, several authors appeal to a distinction between what constitutes scientific progress and what promotes it (e.g., Bird, 2008; Rowbottom, 2008; Dellsén, 2016). However, the extant literature is almost completely silent on what exactly it is for scientific progress to be promoted. Here I provide a precise account of progress promotion on which it consists, roughly, in increasing expected progress. This account may be combined with any of the major theories of what constitutes scientific (...) progress, such as the truthlikeness, problem-solving, epistemic, and noetic accounts. However, I will also suggest that once we have this account of progress promotion up and running, some accounts of what constitutes progress become harder to motivate by the sorts of considerations often adduced in their favor, while others turn out to be easier to defend against common objections. (shrink)

The paper examines the nature of scientific progress through the lens of the history of modern cosmology (i.e. from Einstein’s, 1917 static universe to the present-day Standard (ΛCDM) model of cosmology). We distil three novel lessons, germane to the debate between the two main accounts of scientific progress (the noetic and the epistemic one, respectively). First, it’s difficult to sharply locate—to precisely pinpoint the locus of—the epistemic content of scientific knowledge. Cosmology displays stark epistemic holism: epistemic content and evidence are (...) typically inextricably distributed over a wider “web of beliefs”. Secondly, cosmologists employ a variety of justificatory practices and modes of reasoning. More often than not, they fall short of the fastidious standards of traditional epistemology. Thirdly, cosmological claims typically defy easy and unambiguous characterisation in terms of truth. These three lessons are shown to pose grave challenges to the epistemic account of scientific progress (on which progress consists in the accumulation of knowledge). By contrast, the rivalling noetic account (which characterises progress in terms of improved understanding) can naturally accommodate those lessons. (shrink)

Scientists often disagree on the best theory to describe a scientific event. While such debates are a natural part of healthy scientific discourse, the timeframe for scientists to converge on an ideal method may not always align with real-life knowledge dynamics. In this article, I use an event from the history of chemistry as inspiration to develop Agent-Based Models of epistemic networks, exploring method selection within a scientific community. These models reveal several situations where incorrect, simpler methods can persist, even (...) when substantial evidence supports a more complex method. This becomes particularly evident when different evidence-sharing timeframes are analyzed. The network structure connecting the scientists plays a crucial role in determining how and when convergence on the correct method is achieved, guided by real-world evidence. This framework provides a foundation for further exploration of scientists’ behavior in past and future discoveries, as well as how agents internalize scientific information. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the extent to which prominent debates about the future of AI are best understood as subjective, philosophical disagreements over the history and future of technological change rather than as objective, material disagreements over the technologies themselves. It focuses on the deep disagreements over whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) will prove transformative for human society—a question that is analytically prior to that of whether this transformative effect will help or harm humanity. The article begins by distinguishing two fundamental (...) camps in this debate. The first of these can be identified as “transformationalists,” who argue that continued AI development will inevitably have a profound effect on society. Opposed to them are “skeptics,” a more eclectic group united by their disbelief that AI can or will live up to such high expectations. Each camp admits further “strong” and “weak” variants depending on their tolerance for epistemic risk. These stylized contrasts help identify a set of fundamental questions that shape the camps’ respective interpretations of the future of AI. Three questions in particular are focused on: the possibility of nonbiological intelligence, the appropriate time frame of technological predictions, and the assumed trajectory of technological development. In highlighting these specific points of nontechnical disagreement, this article demonstrates the wide range of different arguments used to justify either the transformationalist or skeptical position. At the same time, it highlights the strong argumentative burden of the transformationalist position, the way that belief in this position creates competitive pressures to achieve first-mover advantage, and the need to widen the concept of “expertise” in debates surrounding the future development of AI. (shrink)

This dissertation analyses the philosophical concept of pursuitworthiness through a historical investigation of drug design and regulation. By focusing on low-level regularities and the value of economic efficiency within the practices of drug design and regulation, I illuminate various aspects of pursuitworthiness. In doing so, I present accounts of pursuitworthiness that centre on what happens during pursuit practices rather than the potential for theoretical development. I employ the concept of pursuitworthiness as a philosophical tool to narrate the interplay between intellectual (...) development and social settings within drug design and regulation, with a particular focus on the Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) research community. Additionally, I delve into several aspects of pursuitworthiness, grounded in the historical episodes of the QSAR community. First, I analyse what renders data-driven models lacking the potential for theoretical growth pursuitworthy, drawing insights from the early pioneers’ pursuit of QSAR models. Second, emphasising the importance of persuasion at the organisational level of pursuit, I develop an activity-centric approach to persuasion. Third, through an examination of the regulatory use of QSAR models, I analyse the influence of regulatory institutions on the shaping of pursuitworthiness assessments and argue that the models come to represent experiments rather than phenomena as they are integrated into the regulatory system. (shrink)

Scientists and philosophers of science often draw methodological lessons from successful theories to justify methods of theory construction and to guide research programs. This paper proposes an epistemic framework for this practice, articulated in terms of the notion of meta-induction. By analogy to Goodman's `New Riddle of Induction', it introduces the concept of projectability of meta-inductive arguments, and demonstrates its significance in any account of meta-inductive reasoning. Likewise to scientific induction, meta-induction is shown to be constrained by naturalist epistemology in (...) determining which classifications of theoretical methods are `projectable'. Projectability judgments in meta-inductive arguments help ensure that when taking lessons from past theorizing (either as a part of scientific discussions or in a philosophical reflections about science), they would be based on the way evidence was exploited in theory construction or on theoretically plausible hypothesis about the natural world, rather than on human-made concepts. This framework emphasizes the primacy of empirically guided patterns of conjecture over purely formal considerations, enabling epistemic evaluation of research projects, even when theorizing is primarily grounded on abstract theoretical methods and at stages when direct evidence is unavailable. The paper discusses possible implications on philosophical debates concerning theory assessment in fundamental physics, particularly regarding meta-empirical justification, as well as discussions on model transfer in the special sciences. (shrink)

In his comprehensive survey of the contemporary debate over scientific progress in philosophy of science, Rowbottom observes that philosophers of science have mostly relied on interpretations of historical cases from the history of science and intuitions elicited by hypothetical cases as evidence for or against philosophical accounts of scientific progress. Only a few have tried to introduce empirical evidence into this debate, whereas most others have resisted the introduction of empirical evidence by claiming that doing so would reduce the debate (...) to empirical studies of science. In this paper, I set out to show how empirical evidence can be introduced into the scientific progress debate. I conduct a corpus-based, quantitative study whose results suggest that there is a positive linear relationship between _knowledge that_ talk and _knowledge how_ talk in scientific articles. These results are contrary to Niiniluoto’s view according to which there is a clear distinction between scientific progress and technological progress such that _knowledge that_ belongs to the former, whereas _knowledge how_ belongs to the latter. (shrink)

One justification for preregistering research hypotheses, methods, and analyses is that it improves the transparent evaluation of the severity of hypothesis tests. In this article, I consider two cases in which preregistration does not improve this evaluation. First, I argue that, although preregistration may facilitate the transparent evaluation of severity in Mayo’s error statistical philosophy of science, it does not facilitate this evaluation in Popper’s theory-centric approach. To illustrate, I show that associated concerns about Type I error rate inflation are (...) only relevant in the error statistical approach and not in a theory-centric approach. Second, I argue that a test procedure that is preregistered but that also allows deviations in its implementation (i.e., “a plan, not a prison”) does not provide a more transparent evaluation of Mayoian severity than a non-preregistered procedure. In particular, I argue that sample-based validity-enhancing deviations cause an unknown inflation of the test procedure’s Type I error rate and, consequently, an unknown reduction in its capability to license inferences severely. I conclude that preregistration does not improve the transparent evaluation of severity (a) in Popper’s philosophy of science or (b) in Mayo’s approach when deviations are allowed. (shrink)