Abstract
Alexander Bird argues for an epistemic account of scientific progress, whereas Darrell Rowbottom argues for a semantic account. Both appeal to intuitions about hypothetical cases in support of their accounts. Since the methodological significance of such appeals to intuition is unclear, I think that a new approach might be fruitful at this stage in the debate. So I propose to abandon appeals to intuition and look at scientific practice instead. I discuss two cases that illustrate the way in which scientists make judgments about progress. As far as scientists are concerned, progress is made when scientific discoveries contribute to the increase of scientific knowledge of the following sorts: empirical, theoretical, practical, and methodological. I then propose to articulate an account of progress that does justice to this broad conception of progress employed by scientists. I discuss one way of doing so, namely, by expanding our notion of scientific knowledge to include both know-that and know-how.
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Notes
The idea of the growth of knowledge looms large in the history of science, at least from the early modern period. It may be traced back to Francis Bacon, whose Instauratio magna (1620) frontispiece declares: “Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia.” Sarton (1927, I, 3–4) expressed a similar idea as follows: “The acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge is the only human activity which is truly cumulative and progressive.”
It is worth noting that, according to Bird (2007, 84) contributions to scientific knowledge can be more or less significant. Bird supplements (E) with the notion of significance because of cases of pointless investigation, such as investigating grains of sand. See also Kitcher (1993, 117) on significant truths.
Proponents of (S) include Popper (1979) and Niiniluoto (1987). As is well known, explicating the notion of approximate truth is notoriously difficult. Popper’s (1972) attempt to formalize the notion of verisimilitude was shown to be problematic (see Miller 1974 and Tichý 1974). Other formal approaches, such as the similarity approach (see, e.g., Niiniluoto 1984, 1987) and the type hierarchy approach (see, e.g., Aronson et al. 1994), also suffer from technical problems (see, e.g., Aronson 1990 and Psillos 1999). For these reasons, realists have tried to explicate approximate truth in non-formal, qualitative terms (see, e.g., Leplin 1997, Boyd 1990, Weston 1992, and Smith 1998). For example, it has been suggested that T 2 is more approximately true than its predecessor T 1 if T 1 can be described as a “limiting case” of T 2 (see, e.g., Post 1971; French and Kamminga 1993). But there are problems with these informal approaches as well (Chakravartty 2010).
It is important to note that Bird does not take knowledge to be justified true belief. Rather, he thinks that his arguments support Williamson’s (1997, 2000) view that knowledge is a foundational concept in epistemology and that it does not have an analysis. Henceforth, I will take knowledge to be an unanalyzable primitive in the same way that Williamson and Bird do.
Both Bird and Rowbottom basically argue as follows: “Upon considering hypothetical case C, it seems to me that p; therefore, p.” However, the problem is that, while it seems to Bird that p, it seems to Rowbottom that not-p. That is why the methodological significance of such appeals to intuition is unclear (see Mizrahi 2012, 2013).
See, e.g., the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Laveran “in recognition of his work on the role played by protozoa in causing diseases” (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1907/laveran.html), the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Mechnikov and Ehrlich “in recognition of their work on immunity” (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1908/), and the 1953 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Krebs “for his discovery of the citric acid cycle” (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1953/#). See also Zuckerman (1996).
Admittedly, I am painting EK with a rather broad brush. Finer distinctions can be made, for example, between “raw data,” i.e., the sort of data we get from immediate observation, and “models of data” (Suppes 1962, 252–261). Other distinctions can be drawn between types of data processing, such as data assessment and data reduction (Hacking 1992, 29–64). For present purposes, however, the important point is that advancements in terms of EK count as scientific progress.
Cf. Feyerabend (1987). As an anonymous referee pointed out, historians of science are becoming increasingly hostile to the “Great Men” style of historiography. This increasing hostility is partly due to the recognition that these “Great Men” stood on the shoulders of others, including lab technicians and assistants, data collectors, experimenters, inventors, and the like. See also Fissell and Cooter (2003, 156).
By necessary and sufficient conditions here, I do not mean “individually necessary and jointly sufficient” as in conceptual analysis, but rather collectively sufficient for scientific progress, or better yet, constitutive criteria for progress.
Baird and Faust suggest that philosophers of science talk about knowledge, but when they do, it is theoretical knowledge exclusively. On the other hand, Kitcher (2002, 385) says that, within the philosophy of science, “there is little explicit discussion of scientific knowledge.”
As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, one reason why philosophers of science focus on theories (the end result of science) rather than practices might be that most of them are not practicing scientists (although there are exceptions, such as Michael Weisberg). In that respect, it is also important to mention the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) whose “aim [is] to change [the fact that concern with practice has always been somewhat outside the mainstream of English-language philosophy of science] through a conscious and organized programme of detailed and systematic study of scientific practice that does not dispense with concerns about truth and rationality” (http://www.philosophy-science-practice.org/en/mission-statement/).
As an anonymous referee pointed out, in order to understand scientific progress, we might need to expand our notion of scientific knowledge even further—beyond know-that and know-how—to include something like Baird’s (2004) notion of “thing knowledge.” Roughly speaking, Baird’s idea is that things, e.g., scientific instruments, bear knowledge. Doing justice to Baird’s material epistemology is beyond the scope of this paper.
As an anonymous referee pointed out, we might add to this list the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to E. O. Lawrence “for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it” (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1939/), apropos Baird and Faust’s discussion of the cyclotron quoted in Sect. 5.
Available at http://ppc08.astro.spbu.ru/index.html.
For more on the philosophy of space exploration, see Munevar (unpublished manuscript). Available at http://philosophyofspaceexploration.blogspot.com/.
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Acknowledgments
A version of this paper was presented at the Third Biennial Conference of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice in the University of Exeter, UK in June 2011. I would like to thank the audience and members of the organization committee for their helpful feedback. Special thanks are due to Marcel Boumans. I am grateful to the PSC-CUNY for the generous financial aid and travel funds. I am also indebted to Alberto Cordero, Catherine Wilson, and Joseph Dauben for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Mizrahi, M. What is Scientific Progress? Lessons from Scientific Practice. J Gen Philos Sci 44, 375–390 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-013-9229-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-013-9229-1