Scientific Progress

Edited by Yafeng Shan (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
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  1. Die These der semantischen Inkommensurabilität.Johannes Heinle - manuscript
    Was kann und sollte der wissenschaftliche Realist auf die These(n) der semantischen Inkommensurabilität entgegnen?
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  2. Nudging Scientific Advancement through Reviews.Venkata Rayudu Posina, Hippu Salk K. Nathan & Anshuman Behera - manuscript
    We call for a change-of-attitude towards reviews of scientific literature. We begin with an acknowledgement of reviews as pathways for the advancement of our scientific understanding of reality. The significance of the scientific struggle propelling the putting together of pieces of knowledge into parts of a cohesive body of understanding is recognized, and yet undervalued, especially in empirical sciences. Here we propose a nudge, which is prefacing the insights gained in reviewing the literature with: 'Our review reveals' (or an equivalent (...)
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  3. What is the Point of Persistent Disputes? The meta-analytic answer.Alexandre Billon & Philippe Vellozzo - forthcoming - Dialectica.
    Many philosophers regard the persistence of philosophical disputes as symptomatic of overly ambitious, ill-founded intellectual projects. There are indeed strong reasons to believe that persistent disputes in philosophy (and more generally in the discourse at large) are pointless. We call this the pessimistic view of the nature of philosophical disputes. In order to respond to the pessimistic view, we articulate the supporting reasons and provide a precise formulation in terms of the idea that the best explanation of persistent disputes entails (...)
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  4. Scientific Progress Without Justification.Finnur Dellsén - forthcoming - In Kareem Khalifa, Insa Lawler & Elay Shech (eds.), Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. Routledge.
    According to some prominent accounts of scientific progress, e.g. Bird’s epistemic account, accepting new theories is progressive only if the theories are justified in the sense required for knowledge. This paper argues that epistemic justification requirements of this sort should be rejected because they misclassify many paradigmatic instances of scientific progress as non-progressive. In particular, scientific progress would be implausibly rare in cases where (a) scientists are aware that most or all previous theories in some domain have turned out to (...)
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  5. Scientific Progress without Problems: A Reply to McCoy.Finnur Dellsén - forthcoming - In Insa Lawler, Kareem Khalifa & Elay Shech (eds.), Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. Routledge.
    In the course of developing an account of scientific progress, C. D. McCoy (2022) appeals centrally to understanding as well as to problem-solving. On the face of it, McCoy’s account could thus be described as a kind of hybrid of the understanding-based account that I favor (Dellsén 2016, 2021) and the functional (a.k.a. problem-solving) account developed most prominently by Laudan (1977; see also Kuhn 1970; Shan 2019). In this commentary, I offer two possible interpretations of McCoy’s account and explain why (...)
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  6. Reply to Sprenger’s “A Novel Solution to the Problem of Old Evidence”. [REVIEW]Fabian Pregel - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science:1-10.
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  7. Justifying Scientific Progress.Jacob Stegenga - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    I defend a novel account of scientific progress centred around justification. Science progresses, on this account, where there is a change in justification. I consider three options for explicating this notion of change in justification. This account of scientific progress dispels with a condition for scientific progress that requires accumulation of truth or truthlikeness, and it emphasises the social nature of scientific justification.
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  8. How pluralistic is pluralism really? A case study of Sandra Mitchell’s Integrative Pluralism.Ragnar van der Merwe - forthcoming - Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science:DOI: 10.1387/theoria.23838.
    Epistemic pluralists often argue that different epistemic perspectives in science are equally warranted given different contexts. Sandra Mitchell—with her Integrative Pluralism (IP) —has notably advocated for this kind of epistemic pluralism. A problem arises for Mitchell because she also wants to be an epistemological pluralist. She claims that, not only are different epistemic perspectives in science equally warranted, but different understandings of these epistemic perspectives in science are also equally warranted. The problem is that Mitchell presents her understanding of epistemic (...)
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  9. Would Disagreement Undermine Progress?Finnur Dellsén, Insa Lawler & James Norton - 2023 - Journal of Philosophy 120 (3):139-172.
    In recent years, several philosophers have argued that their discipline makes no progress (or not enough in comparison to the “hard sciences”). A key argument for this pessimistic position appeals to the purported fact that philosophers widely and systematically disagree on most major philosophical issues. In this paper, we take a step back from the debate about progress in philosophy specifically and consider the general question: How (if at all) would disagreement within a discipline undermine that discipline’s progress? We reject (...)
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  10. Understanding the Progress of Science.C. D. McCoy - 2023 - In Kareem Khalifa, Insa Lawler & Elay Shech (eds.), Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. Routledge. pp. 353-369.
    Philosophical debates on how to account for the progress of science have traditionally divided along the realism-anti-realism axis. Relatively recent developments in epistemology, however, have opened up a new knowledge-understanding axis to the debate. This chapter presents a novel understanding-based account of scientific progress that takes its motivation from problem-solving practices in science. Problem-solving is characterized as a means of measuring degree of understanding, which is argued to be the principal epistemic (or cognitive) aim of science, over and against knowledge. (...)
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  11. Why philosophy needs a concept of progress.James Norton - 2023 - Metaphilosophy 54 (1):3-16.
    This paper defends the usefulness of the concept of philosophical progress and the common assumption that philosophy and science aim to make the same, or a comparable, kind of progress. It does so by responding to Yafeng Shan's (2022) arguments that the wealth of research on scientific progress is not applicable or useful to philosophy, and that philosophy doesn't need a concept of progress at all. It is ultimately argued that while Shan's arguments are not successful, they reveal the way (...)
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  12. Science is more than knowing.Yafeng Shan - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1):1-6.
    Bird’s new book, Knowing Science, provides an exemplar of how to do epistemology and philosophy of science together. While I wholeheartedly appreciate his attempt to bridge the gap between epistemology and philosophy of science and find his project promising, I am not convinced by the central thesis of the book that knowledge plays a central role in science. In this article, I focus on Bird’s epistemic account of scientific progress, which is the view that the nature of scientific progress is (...)
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  13. A Pragmatist Reboot of William Whewell’s Theory of Scientific Progress.Ragnar van der Merwe - 2023 - Contemporary Pragmatism 20 (3):218-245.
    William Whewell’s philosophy of science is often overlooked as a relic of 19th century Whiggism. I argue however that his view – suitably modified – can contribute to contemporary philosophy of science, particularly to debates around scientific progress. The reason Whewell’s view needs modification is that he makes the following problematic claim: as science progresses, it reveals necessarily truths and thereby grants a glimpse of the mind of God. Modifying Whewell’s view will involve reinventing his notion of necessary truth as (...)
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  14. Scientific Progress: By-Whom or For-Whom?Finnur Dellsén - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 97 (C):20-28.
    When science makes cognitive progress, who or what is it that improves in the requisite way? According to a widespread and unchallenged assumption, it is the cognitive attitudes of scientists themselves, i.e. the agents by whom scientific progress is made, that improve during progressive episodes. This paper argues against this assumption and explores a different approach. Scientific progress should be defined in terms of potential improvements to the cognitive attitudes of those for whom progress is made, i.e. the receivers rather (...)
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  15. The Noetic Approach: Scientific Progress as Enabling Understanding.Finnur Dellsén - 2022 - In Yafeng Shan (ed.), New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress. Routledge. pp. 62-81.
    Roughly, the noetic account characterizes scientific progress in terms of increased understanding. This chapter outlines a version of the noetic account according to which scientific progress on some phenomenon consists in making scientific information publicly available so as to enable relevant members of society to increase their understanding of that phenomenon. This version of the noetic account is briefly compared with four rival accounts of scientific progress, viz. the truthlikeness account, the problem-solving account, the new functional account, and the epistemic (...)
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  16. Understanding and scientific progress: lessons from epistemology.Nicholas Emmerson - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-18.
    Contemporary debate surrounding the nature of scientific progress has focused upon the precise role played by justification, with two realist accounts having dominated proceedings. Recently, however, a third realist account has been put forward, one which offers no role for justification at all. According to Finnur Dellsén’s (Stud Hist Philos Sci Part A 56:72–83, 2016) noetic account, science progresses when understanding increases, that is, when scientists grasp how to correctly explain or predict more aspects of the world that they could (...)
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  17. Scientific progress and idealisation.Insa Lawler - 2022 - In Yafeng Shan (ed.), New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress. Routledge.
    Intuitively, science progresses from truth to truth. A glance at history quickly reveals that this idea is mistaken. We often learn from scientific theories that turned out to be false. This chapter focuses on a different challenge: Idealisations are deliberately and ubiquitously used in science. Scientists thus work with assumptions that are known to be false. Any account of scientific progress needs to account for this widely accepted scientific practice. It is examined how the four dominant accounts—the problem-solving account, the (...)
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  18. The Challenges of Identifying Significant Epistemic Failure in Science.Tobias Lehmann, Michael Borggräfe & Jochen Gläser - 2022 - In Michael Jungert & Sebastian Schuol (eds.), Scheitern in den Wissenschaften: Perspektiven der Wissenschaftsforschung. Anna Braungart, Tübingen: Brill Deutschland GmbH. pp. 237-267.
    If one follows the accounts by philosophers of science and the discussions in scientific communities, there can be little doubt that failure is an essential part of scientific practice. It is essential both in the sense of being integral to scientific practice and of being necessary for its overall success. Researchers who create new scientific knowledge face uncertainties about the nature of the problem they are trying to solve, the existence of a solution to that problem, the way in which (...)
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  19. The scientific method from a philosophical perspective.David Merritt - 2022 - ESO on-Line Conference: The Present and Future of Astronomy.
    A methodology of science must satisfy two requirements: (i) It must be ampliative: the theories which it generates must make statements that go far beyond any data or observations that may have motivated those theories in the first place. (ii) It must be epistemically probative: it must somehow provide a warrant for believing that the theories so produced are correct, or at least partially correct, even if they can never be fully confirmed. These two requirements pull in opposite directions, and (...)
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  20. Critique Without Normative Foundations: Response to Vogelmann and Prusik.Iaan Reynolds - 2022 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 11 (8):8-17.
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  21. Evaluation of Some Recent Debates on Scientific Progress.Funda Neslioglu Serin - 2022 - KİLİKYA JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 1 (1):97-109.
    At first glance, what scientific progress means seems to be a quickly answered question. It is not easy to think of the sciences without progress; sciences and the notion of progress seem identical in general. Describing the nature of scientific progress is an important task that will have practical and theoretical consequences. The approach, which argues that the background on which sciences are based does not have a historical or cultural character following the positivist interpretation, accepts sciences as testing the (...)
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  22. The Functional Approach: Scientific Progress as Increased Usefulness.Yafeng Shan - 2022 - In New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress. New York: Routledge. pp. 46-61.
    The functional approach to scientific progress has been mainly developed by Kuhn, Lakatos, Popper, Laudan, and more recently by Shan. The basic idea is that science progresses if key functions of science are fulfilled in a better way. This chapter defends the function approach. It begins with an overview of the two old versions of the functional approach by examining the work of Kuhn, Laudan, Popper, and Lakatos. It then argues for Shan’s new functional approach, in which scientific progress is (...)
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  23. Introduction: Philosophical Analyses of Scientific Progress.Yafeng Shan - 2022 - In New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress. New York: Routledge. pp. 1-9.
    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 (...)
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  24. Philosophy and Common Sense 3: Philosophy as a Science.Sebastian Sunday-Grève & Timothy Williamson - 2022 - The Philosophers' Magazine 97:30-35.
    Timothy Williamson and Sebastian Sunday-Grève discuss the question of where philosophy starts, and the idea of philosophy as a non-natural science.
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  25. Reinterpreting Science as a Vocation.Tong Zhang - 2022 - Max Weber Studies 22 (1):55-73.
    Weber's 'science as a vocation' has often been viewed as a therapeutic concept with no functional significance in the fully bureaucratized and professionalized modern science. However, development in the philosophy of science in the last century, especially the Kuhn thesis of the discontinuity of scientific progress and the Duhem-Quine thesis of underdetermination, shows that Weber's distinction between science as a vocation and science as a profession (career) can potentially answer one of the oldest questions in science studies: What makes scientific (...)
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  26. JKSS and Paul Feyerabend.Luis M. Augusto - 2021 - Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 2 (1):1-2.
    In this editorial, I explain how Paul Feyerabend's Principle of Proliferation is adopted and adapted as a publication model for the Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems (JKSS). Critical views on the limitations of both non-dynamic publishing models and government- and industry-based models of research are expressed.
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  27. Understanding scientific progress: the noetic account.Finnur Dellsén - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11249-11278.
    What is scientific progress? This paper advances an interpretation of this question, and an account that serves to answer it. Roughly, the question is here understood to concern what type of cognitive change with respect to a topic X constitutes a scientific improvement with respect to X. The answer explored in the paper is that the requisite type of cognitive change occurs when scientific results are made publicly available so as to make it possible for anyone to increase their understanding (...)
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  28. Ein letzter Gigant der Wissenschaft.Schiemann Gregor - 2021 - Physik Journal 2021 (10):29-34.
    Hermann von Helmholtz hat als Naturforscher sowohl die Physik als auch die Physiologie um eine beeindruckende Anzahl grundlegender Erkenntnisse bereichert, ihr heutiges Selbstverständnis entscheidend mitgeprägt, ihre Verfahren auf neue Gegenstandsbereiche angewendet und war führend an ihrem institutionellen Ausbau zu Laborwissenschaften beteiligt.
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  29. The freedom we mean: A causal independence account of creativity and academic freedom.Maria Kronfeldner - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2):1-23.
    Academic freedom has often been defended in a progressivist manner: without academic freedom, creativity would be in peril, and with it the advancement of knowledge, i.e. the epistemic progress in science. In this paper, I want to critically discuss the limits of such a progressivist defense of academic freedom, also known under the label ‘argument from truth.’ The critique is offered, however, with a constructive goal in mind, namely to offer an alternative account that connects creativity and academic freedom in (...)
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  30. Improve Popper and procure a perfect simulacrum of verification indistinguishable from the real thing.Nicholas Maxwell - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science.
    According to Karl Popper, science cannot verify its theories empirically, but it can falsify them, and that suffices to account for scientific progress. For Popper, a law or theory remains a pure conjecture, probability equal to zero, however massively corroborated empirically it may be. But it does just seem to be the case that science does verify empirically laws and theories. We trust our lives to such verifications when we fly in aeroplanes, cross bridges and take modern medicines. We can (...)
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  31. Bias in Science: Natural and Social.Joshua May - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3345–3366.
    Moral, social, political, and other “nonepistemic” values can lead to bias in science, from prioritizing certain topics over others to the rationalization of questionable research practices. Such values might seem particularly common or powerful in the social sciences, given their subject matter. However, I argue first that the well-documented phenomenon of motivated reasoning provides a useful framework for understanding when values guide scientific inquiry (in pernicious or productive ways). Second, this analysis reveals a parity thesis: values influence the social and (...)
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  32. Conceptions of scientific progress in scientific practice: an empirical study.Moti Mizrahi - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2375-2394.
    The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate over the nature of scientific progress in philosophy of science by taking a quantitative, corpus-based approach. By employing the methods of data science and corpus linguistics, the following philosophical accounts of scientific progress are tested empirically: the semantic account of scientific progress, the epistemic account of scientific progress, and the noetic account of scientific progress. Overall, the results of this quantitative, corpus-based study lend some empirical support to the epistemic (...)
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  33. Roy Bhaskar on Scientific Progress and the Fallibility of Cognition: A Critique of Four Approaches.Maryam Poostforush - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Theological Research 23 (1):131-148.
    So far, various approaches have been proposed to explain the progress of science. These approaches, which fall under a fourfold classification, are as follows: semantic, functional, epistemic, and noetic approaches. Each of these approaches, based on the intended purpose of science, defines progress on the same basis. The semantic approach defines progress based on the approximation to the truth, the functional approach based on problem-solving, the epistemic approach based on knowledge accumulation, and the noetic approach based on increased understanding. With (...)
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  34. How Intellectual Communities Progress.Lewis D. Ross - 2021 - Episteme.
    Recent work takes both philosophical and scientific progress to consist in acquiring factive epistemic states such as knowledge. However, much of this work leaves unclear what entity is the subject of these epistemic states. Furthermore, by focusing only on states like knowledge, we overlook progress in intermediate cases between ignorance and knowledge—for example, many now celebrated theories were initially so controversial that they were not known. -/- This paper develops an improved framework for thinking about intellectual progress. Firstly, I argue (...)
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  35. EL OFICIO DEL INVESTIGADOR NOVEL.Manuel Ángel González Berruga - 2020 - Revista Científica de la Facultad de Filosofía - UNA 11 (2):92 - 114.
    El propósito del ensayo es ofrecer una reflexión sobre la profesión del investigador novel desde la experiencia del autor a la luz de las ideas y reflexiones ofrecidas por Pierre Bourdieu en su obra “El oficio de científico” con cuestiones actuales y retos a los que se enfrentan la comunidad científica en el ámbito de las ciencias de la educación. El texto se articula con relación a los temas que surgen de la lectura del libro de Bourdieu que se irán (...)
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  36. Aristotle's Revenge: the metaphysical foundations of physical and biological science, by Edward Feser. [REVIEW]Monte Johnson - 2020 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2020 (01.02).
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  37. The Pursuit of Knowledge and the Problem of the Unconceived Alternatives.Fabio Sterpetti & Marta Bertolaso - 2020 - Topoi 39 (4):881-892.
    In the process of scientific discovery, knowledge ampliation is pursued by means of non-deductive inferences. When ampliative reasoning is performed, probabilities cannot be assigned objectively. One of the reasons is that we face the problem of the unconceived alternatives: we are unable to explore the space of all the possible alternatives to a given hypothesis, because we do not know how this space is shaped. So, if we want to adequately account for the process of knowledge ampliation, we need to (...)
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  38. Epistemic Diversity and Editor Decisions: A Statistical Matthew Effect.Remco Heesen & Jan-Willem Romeijn - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    This paper offers a new angle on the common idea that the process of science does not support epistemic diversity. Under minimal assumptions on the nature of journal editing, we prove that editorial procedures, even when impartial in themselves, disadvantage less prominent research programs. This purely statistical bias in article selection further skews existing differences in the success rate and hence attractiveness of research programs, and exacerbates the reputation difference between the programs. After a discussion of the modeling assumptions, the (...)
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  39. Über Tatsachen. An die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern.Geert Keil - 2019 - Forschung and Lehre:894-897.
    * Einige Gemeinplätze über Tatsachen und Wissenschaft * Postfaktische Kommunikation und »alternative Fakten« * Ist nur Unumstößliches Tatsache? * Woran starb Ramses II.? * Ist der naive Realismus nicht seit Kant überwunden?
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  40. A New Task for Philosophy of Science.Nicholas Maxwell - 2019 - Metaphilosophy 50 (3):316-338.
    This paper argues that philosophers of science have before them an important new task that they urgently need to take up. It is to convince the scientific community to adopt and implement a new philosophy of science that does better justice to the deeply problematic basic intellectual aims of science than that which we have at present. Problematic aims evolve with evolving knowledge, that part of philosophy of science concerned with aims and methods thus becoming an integral part of science (...)
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  41. Epistemic Justification and Methodological Luck in Inflationary Cosmology.C. D. McCoy - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (4):1003-1028.
    I present a recent historical case from cosmology—the story of inflationary cosmology—and on its basis argue that solving explanatory problems is a reliable method for making progress in science. In particular, I claim that the success of inflationary theory at solving its predecessor’s explanatory problems justified the theory epistemically, even in advance of the development of novel predictions from the theory and the later confirmation of those predictions.
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  42. In Defense of Realism and Selectivism from Lyons’s Objections.Seungbae Park - 2019 - Foundations of Science 24 (4):605-615.
    Lyons (2016, 2017, 2018) formulates Laudan’s (1981) historical objection to scientific realism as a modus tollens. I present a better formulation of Laudan’s objection, and then argue that Lyons’s formulation is supererogatory. Lyons rejects scientific realism (Putnam, 1975) on the grounds that some successful past theories were (completely) false. I reply that scientific realism is not the categorical hypothesis that all successful scientific theories are (approximately) true, but rather the statistical hypothesis that most successful scientific theories are (approximately) true. Lyons (...)
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  43. A New Functional Approach to Scientific Progress.Yafeng Shan - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (4):739-758.
    This article develops and defends a new functional approach to scientific progress. I begin with a review of the problems of the traditional functional approach. Then I propose a new functional account of scientific progress, in which scientific progress is defined in terms of usefulness of problem defining and problem solving. I illustrate and defend my account by applying it to the history of genetics. Finally, I highlight the advantages of my new functional approach over the epistemic and semantic approaches (...)
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  44. The Decline of Western Science: Defending Spengler’s Account of the End of Science - Within Reason.Gregory Morgan Swer - 2019 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (4):545-560.
    Haack classifies Spengler’s views on the end of science as what she terms annihilationist in that he forecasts the absolute termination of scientific activity as opposed to its completion or culmination. She also argues that in addition to his externalist argument that Western science, as cultural product, cannot survive the demise of Western Culture, Spengler also puts forward an internalist argument that science, regardless of the imminent demise of Western Culture, is in terminal decline as evidenced by its diminishing returns. (...)
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  45. Scientific Progress, Understanding, and Knowledge: Reply to Park.Finnur Dellsén - 2018 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 49 (3):451-459.
    Dellsén (2017) has recently argued for an understanding-based account of scientific progress, the noetic account, according to which science (or a particular scientific discipline) makes cognitive progress precisely when it increases our understanding of some aspect of the world. Dellsén contrasts this account with Bird’s (2007, 2015) epistemic account, according to which such progress is made precisely when our knowledge of the world is increased or accumulated. In a recent paper, Park (2017) criticizes various aspects of Dellsén’s account and his (...)
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  46. Scientific progress: Four accounts.Finnur Dellsén - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (11):e12525.
    Scientists are constantly making observations, carrying out experiments, and analyzing empirical data. Meanwhile, scientific theories are routinely being adopted, revised, discarded, and replaced. But when are such changes to the content of science improvements on what came before? This is the question of scientific progress. One answer is that progress occurs when scientific theories ‘get closer to the truth’, i.e. increase their degree of truthlikeness. A second answer is that progress consists in increasing theories’ effectiveness for solving scientific problems. A (...)
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  47. The technological fix as social cure-all: origins and implications.Sean F. Johnston - 2018 - IEEE Technology and Society 37 (1):47-54.
    On the historical origins of technological fixes and their wider social and political implications.
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  48. We need progress in ideas about how to achieve progress.Nicholas Maxwell - 2018 - Metascience 27 (2).
    Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment NOW is in many ways a terrific book, from which I have learnt much. But it is also deeply flawed. Science and reason are at the heart of the book, but the conceptions that Steven Pinker defends are damagingly irrational. And these defective conceptions of science and reason, as a result of being associated with the Enlightenment Programme for the past two or three centuries, have been responsible, in part, for the genesis of the global problems (...)
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  49. Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment: An Idea to Help Save the World.Nicholas Maxwell - 2018 - Ethical Record 123 (1):27-30.
    Natural science, properly understood, provides us with the methodological key to the salvation of humanity. First, we need to acknowledge that the actual aims of science are profoundly problematic, in that they make problematic assumptions about metaphysics, values and the social use of science. Then we need to represent these aims in the form of a hierarchy of aims, which become increasingly unproblematic as one goes up the hierarchy; as result we create a framework of relatively unproblematic aims and methods, (...)
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  50. The Grand Pessimistic Induction.Seungbae Park - 2018 - Review of Contemporary Philosophy 17:7-19.
    After decades of intense debate over the old pessimistic induction (Laudan, 1977; Putnam, 1978), it has now become clear that it has at least the following four problems. First, it overlooks the fact that present theories are more successful than past theories. Second, it commits the fallacy of biased statistics. Third, it erroneously groups together past theories from different fields of science. Four, it misses the fact that some theoretical components of past theories were preserved. I argue that these four (...)
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