Introduction: Philosophical Analyses of Scientific Progress

In New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress. New York: Routledge. pp. 1-9 (2022)
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Abstract

Scientific progress is a hot topic in the philosophy of science. However, as yet we lack a comprehensive philosophical examination of scientific progress. First, the recent debate pays too much attention to the epistemic approach and the semantic approach. Shan’s new functional approach and Dellsén’s noetic approach are still insufficiently assessed. Second, there is little in-depth analysis of the progress in the history of the sciences. Third, many related philosophical issues are still to be explored. For example, what are the implications of scientific progress for the scientific realism/antirealism debate? Is the incommensurability thesis a challenge to scientific progress? What role does aesthetic values play in scientific progress? Does idealisation impede scientific progress? This book fills this gap. It offers a new assessment of the four main approaches to scientific progress (Part I). It also features eight historical case studies to investigate the notion of progress in different disciplines: physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, seismology, psychology, sociology, economics, and medicine respectively (Part II). It discusses some issues related to scientific progress: scientific realism, incommensurability, values in science, idealisation, scientific speculation, interdisciplinarity, and scientific perspectivalism (Part III).

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A New Functional Approach to Scientific Progress.Yafeng Shan - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (4):739-758.

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Yafeng Shan
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas Samuel Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Otto Neurath.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
The idea of history.Robin George Collingwood - 1993 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by der Dussen & J. W..

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