Abstract
Philosophers frequently link their discussions of progress in science and mathematics to the issues of scientific and mathematical realism. I don’t dispute that these connections can be made, but I think that questions of progress in mathematics and science are more complicated than this, and that perhaps the more important measures of progress are independent of questions of realism. So I want to begin by distinguishing several senses in which we might measure progress in mathematics. My investigation on this front ends on a pessimistic note: perhaps we can establish that mathematics as a whole makes progress, but it is unlikely that we can measure progress in one branch of mathematics or in one historical period against that in another.
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Resnik, M.D. (2000). Some Remarks on Mathematical Progress from a Structuralist’s Perspective. In: Grosholz, E., Breger, H. (eds) The Growth of Mathematical Knowledge. Synthese Library, vol 289. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9558-2_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9558-2_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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