What is Scientific Progress?

1 C.f. the motto to Francis Bacon’s New Organon “multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia” (“many shall go about and
knowledge shall increase”) and Sir William Bragg: “If we give to the term Progress in Science the meaning which is
most simple and direct, we shall suppose it to refer to the growth of our knowledge of the world in which we live.”
(Bragg 1936; 41)
2 I do not wish to rule out the possibility that epistemic concepts might ultimately be defined in terms of semantic ones.
Nonetheless, I intend my argument to support Williamson’s view (2000) that knowledge is the central epistemic
concept and does not have an analysis.
3 Niiniluoto briefly discusses the cumulative truth view (Niiniluoto 1984,76-7). He says the view is “nowadays widely
regarded as giving a naïve and oversimplified picture of the development of science.” He rejects the view because,
among other reasons, it cannot, he says, accommodate strictly false theories that are nonetheless idealizations that are
close to the truth. I reject this reason below.
4 Laudan (1977, 147) notes that several philosophers have promoted cumulative accounts of progress, including
Whewell, Peirce, Duhem, Collingwood, Popper, Reichenbach, Lakatos, and Stegmüller. That an account of progress is
cumulative is consistent with its conforming to any of the epistemic, semantic, or functional-internal. conceptions What
will vary among the cumulative versions of such views will be what is accumulated (knowledge, truth, or problem-
solutions). But since knowledge is harder to come by and more difficult to shift once acquired, the problem of a
corresponding loss will be rarer for the epistemic conception than for the other conceptions.
5 Others have chosen verisimilitude for different sceptical reasons. Popper of course did not accept the pessimistic
induction. But his inductive scepticism and his conviction that theories have a zero probability of truth mean that he
cannot think of progress either as accumulating knowledge or as accumulating truth.
6 ‘Approximately p’ may be read as ‘it is approximately true that p’.
7 C.f. footnote 6 above.
8 As Bragg (1936, 41) states “The first purpose of scientific enquiry is to add to the extent and accuracy of our
knowledge.” (My emphasis; c.f. footnote 1)
9 So the proposition represented ‘c= Val(c+δ)’ where c=2.99793x10 8 ms −1 and δ=0.00002x10 8 ms −1 is to be read as
‘c=2.99795x10 8 ms −1 ’.
10 The realist might in any case be able to accommodate a small number of peripheral and unusual counter-examples.
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