What constitutes cognitive scientific progress? This Element begins with an extensive survey of the contemporary debate on how to answer this question. It provides a blow-by-blow critical summary of the key literature on the issue over the past fifteen years, covering the central positions and arguments therein. It also draws upon older literature, where appropriate, to inform the treatment. The Element then enters novel territory by considering meta-normative issues concerning scientific progress. It focuses on how the standards involved in assessing progress arise. Does science have aims, which determine what counts as progress, as many authors assume? If so, what is it to be an aim of science? And how does one identify such things? If not, how do normative standards arise? After arguing that science does not have overarching aims, the Element proposes that the standards are ultimately subjective.
Author(s): Darrell P. Rowbottom
Series: Elements in the Philosophy of Science
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
City: Cambridge
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Scientific Progress
Contents
1 The Contemporary Debate on Scientific Progress: What Constitutes Cognitive Progress?
1.1 Survey Scope
1.1.1 Key Preparatory Distinctions
1.2 Bird’s Epistemic Account: Progress As Increasing Knowledge
1.2.1 Bird on the Epistemic View versus the Semantic View
1.2.2 Bird on the Epistemic View versus the Functionalist-Internalist View
1.2.3 Bird on Knowledge of False Theories, Promoting Progress viaKnowledge, and Understanding
1.3 Arguments for the Semantic View versus the Epistemic View
1.4 Folk Intuitions on the Semantic and Epistemic Views
1.5 An Argument for Extending the Epistemic View: A Rolefor Know-How?
1.6 Arguments for an Understanding-Based(and Prediction-Based) View
1.6.1 Understanding as Progressive from a Pluralistic Perspective
1.6.2 Understanding As Progressive from a Monistic Perspective
1.6.2.1 Progressive Understanding without Knowledge
1.6.2.2 Knowledge without Progressive Understanding
1.6.2.3 Public Understanding
1.7 Functionalist Responses to Bird’s Arguments
1.8 A Sprawling Interminable Debate
1.9 Conclusion: The Relevance of Meta-Normative Concerns
2 On Second-Order Cognitive Goodness Makers: The Aim(s) of Science
2.1 Aims of Science: A Vague Dogma
2.2 Existing Accounts of ‘The Aim(s) of Science’
2.2.1 Aims As Shared Goals
2.2.2 Aims As Corporate Goals
2.2.3 Aims As Normative Ideals
2.2.4 Aims As Characteristics (Or As Constitutive)
2.2.5 Collective Intentionality and Goals
2.2.6 More on Functions: Against Bird’s New Approach
2.2.7 Hybrid Accounts of Aims, Appeals to Origins, and an Intermediate
Conclusion
2.3 Necessary Conditions for a Satisfactory Account of ‘the Aims
of Science’
2.3.1 Rational Aims As Characteristics
2.3.2 Potential Refinements
2.4 Hypothetically Rational Aims and Goodness Makers:
Explaining the Link
3 Inventing Cognitive Progress: A Subjectivist, Quasi-error Theoretic View
3.1 What I Do Not Deny: Local Cognitive Aims and Progress
3.2 On the Non-existence of Objective Standards [Thesis 1]
3.3 On the Falsity of Discourse Presuming the Existence
of Objective Standards or Privileged Intersubjective Standards [Thesis 3]
3.4 On Reactions to the Non-existence of Objective Standards
[and Thesis 5]
3.5 On the Non-existence of Epistemically Privileged
Intersubjective Standards [Thesis 2]
3.6 On True Claims about Cognitive Scientific Progress [Thesis 4]
3.7 On Investigative Methods
3.7.1 Thought Experiments
3.7.2 History of Science
3.7.3 Social Scientific Studies of Science
3.8 On Philosophical Progress
3.9 A Challenging Conclusion
References
Acknowledgements
