Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ttngx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-03T14:54:39.570Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ten Types of Scientific Progress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Andre Kukla
Andre Kukla*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the opening chapters of Progress and Its Problems, Laudan presents a taxonomy of scientific accomplishments that has become very well-known among philosophers of science (Laudan 1977). I wish to point out some important omissions in this taxonomy and to recommend an alternative scheme. I believe that the distinctions I have drawn among scientific tasks are philosophically more interesting than Laudan’s. But I am not prepared to defend this opinion in detail. My chief claim is that the new taxonomy is demonstrably closer to being exhaustive. So far as I know, it is exhaustive, although I would not be greatly surprised to discover oversights. A major benefit of Laudan’s scheme was that it called attention to conceptual (as opposed to empirical) activities in science which had frequently been left out of account in generalizations about the nature of scientific work.

Type
Part VIII. Theory and Hypothesis
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 457 - 466
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

Preparation of this article was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Committee of the University of Toronto.

References

Fodor, J.A. (1975), The Language of Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Glymour, C. (1980), Theory and Evidence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kim, J. (1989), “The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63: 31–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kintsch, W., & Judd, C.M. (1989), “Editorial”, Psychological Review 96: 3–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kukla, A. (1990), “Evolving Probability”, Philosophical Studies 59: 45–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laudan, L. (1977), Progress and Its Problems. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Laudan, L. (1988), “Conceptual Problems Re-Visited”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 19: 531–534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smedslund, J. (1984), “What Is Necessarily True in Psychology?”, in Annals of Theoretical Psychology (Vol. 2), Royce, J. R. & Mos, L. P. (eds.). New York: Plenum Press, pp. 241–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Fraassen, B. (1983), “Glymour on Evidence and Explanation”, in Testing Scientific Theories (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 10, Earman, J. (ed.). University of Minnesota Press, Pp. 165-176.Google Scholar
Whitt, L.A. (1988), “Conceptual Dimensions of Theory Appraisal”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 19: 517–529.CrossRefGoogle Scholar