What is Scientific Progress?

theories in providing puzzle-solutions). In so doing Kuhn seeks to avoid Whiggery by eschewing
use of the notion of truth altogether.
This may be a methodologically wise move as regards the history of science. But Kuhn does avoid
the charge that this makes science an intellectual game whose relationship to reality is tenuous. His
account of progress is central to an intended minimal concession to realism. Kuhn does think that
science progresses in a non-trivial way, even through revolutions. The key factor in choosing a new
paradigm will be it ability to preserve as far as possible the puzzle-solving power of its predecessor
while permitting the solution or dissolution of as many outstanding anomalies as possible (Kuhn
1970, 169).
We have already seen that such a conception clashes with the intuitive notion of progress, since a
badly false theory might permit the apparent solution of merely apparent puzzles, a development
that would be progressive in Kuhn’s sense but not in the intuitive sense. That just serves to remind
us that the intuitive sense does appeal at least to the notion of truth (and I think to knowledge also).
Non-Whiggish methodology might reasonably eschew the use of the intuitive notion of progress.
But that is no reason to substitute an alternative. What Kuhn should have said is the following:
historians of science should eschew the notion of truth (as applied to theories, hypotheses, etc.) in
explaining how science develops; historians should also therefore eschew the notion of progress;
theirs is the history of the development of science, not of the progress of science. That
methodological advice to historians does not prevent our being able so say truly (in some other
capacity) “Priestley was wrong to think that combustion is to be explained by the release of
phlogiston and Lavoisier was correct in believing oxygen to be the component of air responsible for
burning.” Such statements made with the benefit of hindsight may be of no use to the
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