Scientific Progress

This Element describes the ultimate standards for evaluating scientific progress and where they stem from.

Darrell P. Rowbottom (Author)

9781108714433, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 October 2023

76 pages
23 x 15.3 x 0.5 cm, 0.127 kg

What constitutes cognitive scientific progress? This Element begins with an extensive survey of the contemporary debate on how to answer this question. It provides a blow-by-blow critical summary of the key literature on the issue over the past fifteen years, covering the central positions and arguments therein. It also draws upon older literature, where appropriate, to inform the treatment. The Element then enters novel territory by considering meta-normative issues concerning scientific progress. It focuses on how the standards involved in assessing progress arise. Does science have aims, which determine what counts as progress, as many authors assume? If so, what is it to be an aim of science? And how does one identify such things? If not, how do normative standards arise? After arguing that science does not have overarching aims, the Element proposes that the standards are ultimately subjective.

1. The contemporary debate on scientific progress: what constitutes cognitive progress?
2. On second order cognitive goodness makers: the aim(s) of science
3. Inventing cognitive progress: a subjectivist, quasi-error theoretic, view
References.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of science [PDA]