2. The Concept of Progress
2.1 Aspects of Scientific Progress
Science is a multi-layered complex system involving a community of scientists engaged inresearch using scientific methods in order to produce new knowledge. Thus, the notion of science may refer to a social institution, the researchers, the research process, the method of inquiry, and scientific knowledge. The concept of progress can be defined relative to each of these aspects of science. Hence, different types of progress can be distinguished relative toscience:
economical
(the increased funding of scientific research),
professional
(the rising statusof the scientists and their academic institutions in the society),
educational
(the increased skilland expertise of the scientists),
methodical
(the invention of new methods of research, therefinement of scientific instruments), and
cognitive
(increase or advancement of scientificknowledge). These types of progress have to be conceptually distinguished from advances inother human activities, even though it may turn out that scientific progress has at least somefactual connections with
technological
progress (increased effectiveness of tools and techniques)and
social
progress (economic prosperity, quality of life, justice in society).All of these aspects of scientific progress may involve different considerations, so that there is nosingle concept that would cover all of them. For our purposes, it is appropriate here toconcentrate only on cognitive progress, i.e., to give an account of advances of science in terms of its success in knowledge-seeking.
2.2 Progress vs. Development
“Progress” is an axiological or a normative concept, which should be distinguished from suchneutral descriptive terms as “change” and “development” (Niiniluoto 1995a). In general, to saythat a step from stage
A
to stage
B
constitutes progress means that
B
is an
improvement
over
A
insome respect, i.e.,
B
is
better
than
A
relative to some standards or criteria. In science, it is anormative demand that all contributions to research should yield some cognitive profit, and their success in this respect can be assessed before publication by referees (peer review) and after publication by colleagues. Hence, the theory of scientific progress is not merely a descriptiveaccount of the patterns of developments that science has in fact followed. Rather, it should give aspecification of the
values
or
aims
that can be used as the constitutive criteria for “good science.”The “naturalist” program in science studies suggests that normative questions in the philosophyof science can be reduced to historical and sociological investigations of the actual practice of science. In this spirit, Laudan has defended the project of testing philosophical models of scientific change by the history of science: such models, which are “often couched in normativelanguage,” can be recast “into declarative statements about how science does behave” (Laudan etal. 1986; Donovan et al. 1988). It may be the case that most scientific work, at least the bestscience of each age, is also good science. But it is also evident that scientists often have differentopinions about the criteria of good science, and rival researchers and schools make differentchoices in their preference of theories and research programs. Therefore, it can be argued againstthe naturalists that progress should not be
defined
by the actual developments of science: thedefinition of progress should give us a normative standard for appraising the choices that thescientific communities have made, could have made, are just now making, and will make in thefuture. The task of finding and defending such standards is a genuinely philosophical one whichcan be enlightened by history and sociology but which cannot be reduced to empirical studies of science.
2.3 Progress, Quality, Impact
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