Scientific Progress, Understanding, and Knowledge: Reply to Park

Dellsén, Finnur

doi:10.1007/s10838-018-9419-y

Cited by 16 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Moreover, Park (2017) criticizes the noetic account and argues in favor of an epistemic or knowledge-based account, along the lines of (E). Dellsén (2018a) responds to Park (2017), Park (2019) responds to Dellsén, and the debate rages on.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptions of scientific progress in scientific practice: an empirical study

Mizrahi

2020

Synthese

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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 (i.e., scientific progress in terms of truth), the epistemic account of scientific progress (i.e., scientific progress in terms of knowledge), and the noetic account of scientific progress (i.e., scientific progress in terms of understanding). Overall, the results of this quantitative, corpus-based study lend some empirical support to the epistemic and the noetic accounts over the semantic account of scientific progress, for they suggest that practicing scientists use the terms 'knowledge' and 'understanding' significantly more often than the term 'truth' when they talk about the aims or goals of scientific research in their published works. But the results do not favor the epistemic account over the noetic account, or vice versa, for they reveal no significant differences between the frequency with which practicing scientists use the terms 'knowledge' and 'understanding' when they talk about the aims or goals of scientific research in their published works.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptions of scientific progress in scientific practice: an empirical study

Mizrahi

2020

Synthese

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“…in adding to the stock of scientific knowledge (Bird 2007(Bird , 2016. Finally, the noetic account holds that scientific progress consists in increasing understanding of natural phenomena (Dellsén 2016(Dellsén , 2018c. For each of these accounts, there is an achievement that lies at its heart (respectively: truthlikeness, problem-solving, knowledge, understanding).…”

Section: Scientific Progress and Epistemic Justificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scientific Progress without Justification

Dellsén¹

2022

Scientific Understanding and Representation

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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 be false, or (b) the new theory was a result of subsuming and/or logically strengthening previous theories, or (c) scientists are aware of significant peer disagreement about which theory is correct.A second clarification concerns the term 'constitutes'. It is a truism that there are many ways for science to progress -even cognitively, i.e. with respect to its theories (representations). For example, there is surely a sense in which scientists make progress as they collect more evidence or develop new formalisms. These are all forms of progress… in a sense. But I say that we should distinguish these from the type of progress that occurred, for example, when J.J. Thomson's plum pudding model of the atom was replaced with Ernest Rutherford's nuclear model. The difference is that the former type of progress (e.g. collecting evidence) is progress because and in so far as it helps to achieve the latter type (e.g. improving atomic models).By contrast, the latter type of progress counts as progress regardless of whether it leads to some other instances of progress. To mark this distinction, I say (following Bird 2008, 280) that some improvements promote progress, whereas others constitute progress. It is the latter that accounts of scientific progress are accounts of.A final clarification. In the question above, I use the term 'improvement' instead of 'progress' to emphasize two related points about our topic. The first is that accounts of scientific progress are not attempts to analyze the term 'scientific progress' as it is used either in common parlance or scientific practice. Even if there was no such

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“…A fourth and final account of scientific progress is the noetic account developed by Dellsén (2016, 2018a, forthcoming; 2015; Goebel, 2019; Potochnik, 2017). According to this account, making scientific progress with regard to some phenomenon amounts to gaining or improving our abilities to correctly explain or predict it.…”

Section: From Scientific Progress To Philosophical Progressmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Third, another useful distinction that has been made in recent discussions is that between constituting and promoting progress (Bird, 2008, 280; Dellsén, 2018a, 73). The four accounts reviewed in §3.2 are clearly intended as accounts of what constitutes progress.…”

Section: From Scientific Progress To Philosophical Progressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking about Progress: From Science to Philosophy

Dellsén

Lawler

Norton

2021

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Is there progress in philosophy? If so, how much? Philosophers have recently argued for a wide range of answers to these questions, from the view that there is no progress whatsoever to the view that philosophy has provided answers to all the big philosophical questions.However, these views are difficult to compare and evaluate, because they rest on very different assumptions about the conditions under which philosophy would make progress. This paper looks to the comparatively mature debate about scientific progress for inspiration on how to formulate four distinct accounts of philosophical progress, in terms of truthlikeness, problemsolving, knowledge, and understanding. Equally importantly, the paper outlines a common framework for how to understand and evaluate these accounts. We distill a series of lessons from this exercise, to help pave the way for a more fruitful discussion about philosophical progress in the future.

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Scientific Progress, Understanding, and Knowledge: Reply to Park

Cited by 16 publications

References 20 publications

Conceptions of scientific progress in scientific practice: an empirical study

Conceptions of scientific progress in scientific practice: an empirical study

Scientific Progress without Justification

Thinking about Progress: From Science to Philosophy

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