In this essay, I will argue that science does make progress on three conceptions: social, methodological, and cognitive (specifically, epistemic). I define the concept of progress and distinguish between possible end goals, before arguing that a knowledge conception of progress better characterizes scientific progress than a truth conception.
I will discuss science as a discipline, including both physics and the special sciences. I distinguish science from other disciplines such as philosophy, art, and literature. Similarly, scientific progress is widely thought to differ from the progress seen in these other disciplines in several ways. First, there is a widespread belief that science does make progress, but perhaps not that art or literature does. Second, science itself seems to lay down some kind of measure of progress – even if there is no unified conception of scientific progress across all scientists, I think that each scientist has some idea of how science progresses. Disciplines such as art don’t share this in-built concept of progress – it’s not obvious that each artist thinks about how their art contributes to the discipline’s overall progress, or even that artists believe that art can make significant progress at all.
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I will define the concept of progress first in broader terms, and then specifically in terms of scientific progress. Progress can be defined as the process of moving forward toward some external end goal. Intuitively, a goal must be external, not internal. If I solve an astrology problem in my head using astrological methods, I am not making scientific progress, regardless of how much I feel I have progressed. It’s also not the case that any change can constitute progress – improvement, or getting better, is necessary. To know whether an improvement is being made, we must have an end goal in mind, which comprises some criteria against which any scientific change can be measured. I distinguish between types of progress-enabling goals: those which are inaccessible and those which are accessible. The distinction I have drawn here is similar to Laura Valentini’s distinction between ‘end-state’ and ‘transitional’ political theories. ‘End-state’ theories are those that focus on what a perfect (often inaccessible) society would look like, while ‘transitional’ theories offer accessible steps to improve society. Similarly, we might have an inaccessible goal that we can take steps towards but never reach, or an accessible goal that need not be considered perfection. I argue that scientific progress is defined by an inaccessible goal – it’s difficult to imagine what a perfect science would look like, which it seems we would be able to do if scientific progress had an accessible goal. Of course, it could also be argued that scientific progress is defined by an inaccessible goal that science cannot get nearer to.
I argue that science need not have only one particular goal – there may be multiple goals, and as such moving towards each would constitute scientific progress. I will focus on three such goals: social goals, cognitive goals, and methodological goals. It seems that science has clearly made progress toward social goals. Medicine driven by scientific research has improved life expectancy, engineering, and technology have increased jobs and quality of life globally, and science has proved a liberating discipline, providing jobs and education to underprivileged groups.
Furthermore, science has made significant improvements in its methodology. Scientific instruments can give more precise measurements, and in some cases can observe things that were previously unobservable. For example, the invention of the microscope allows us to see microscopic organisms, and the telescope allows for astronomy – fields which would not be possible without such inventions. Indeed, I argue that the introduction of new disciplines is a key part of scientific progress. With the legitimization and introduction of scientific methods in fields such as psychology, the discoveries science can make have increased. It could be argued that rather than the introduction of new fields progressing, the unity of science is a marker of scientific progress. It does seem that a unified science would support other intuitive markers of scientific progress, such as simplicity. Unification might also make science easier to use and more accessible, thereby increasing the ease of discovery and social progress as well. However, I argue that a reductive conception of unity does not work toward scientific progress. For example, Oppenheim and Putnam’s ‘micro-reduction’ reduces branches of science to each other (psychology might be reduced to neuroscience). However, not only is Oppenheim and Putnam’s unity not conceived of as a goal (but as a working empirical hypothesis), I argue that such a reduction loses some of the value of science. The various branches of science allow scientists to ask different questions, and so to gain different knowledge about the world. For example, psychology might ask about depression as a set of feelings and experiences, with social causes and consequences, but neuroscience might not be able to encompass such social aspects effectively, cutting off some areas of scientific investigation. Carnap’s reductive unity of science (which is designed as a goal) is susceptible to the same objection. Instead, I argue with Dupré that branches of science are unified by a shared scientific method and set of non-epistemic and epistemic virtues.
However, I argue that Dupré’s application of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance to science does not allow for the third goal of science addressed in this essay: cognitive goals. If branches of science bear a family resemblance to each other, they share no essential feature. I argue that all branches of science must share a cognitive goal – science aims at knowledge. As such, I would characterize scientific progress as gathering as much knowledge as possible (alongside the social and methodological conceptions of progress discussed above). I define knowledge as true justified belief – any difficulties around what a justification condition entails are not within the scope of this essay.
There is a widespread belief that science has indeed made progress. This progress is thought to be a slow and steady one over time, with the introduction of new instruments, branches, and methods such as peer review. It could be argued that such progress is a result of science aiming at truth. I argue that while aiming at truth is a necessary condition for scientific progress, it’s not sufficient. Merely aiming at truth (or true beliefs) does not account for steady scientific progress. For example, I might study astrology and so conclude that my brother is feeling sad because of his star sign. At the time, I (and indeed every scientist) might believe that astrology is a suitable scientific method and that it meets science’s epistemic standards. However, later we learn that astrology is not a suitable method of science– instead, another scientist uses psychology and neuroscience to determine that my brother is sad because he is depressed. I drew a true belief from my astrology, but this belief was not justified because my method did not meet the epistemic standards it must be considered science. Under the truth conception of progress, I made progress when I used astrology to form the initial judgment, and then no progress was made after – I have always held a true belief. Such examples of a failed methodology producing true results are prevalent in the history of science, and it’s assumed that the alteration of such methods constitutes progress. This is not so under the truth conception. However, the knowledge conception of progress does characterize this as progress: I did not know about astrology but I do now know psychology and neuroscience.
It could be argued that accepting, such a true belief, would have been science. In a few cases accepting an unjustified true belief might not have a hugely negative impact. For example, it seems that we can survive just as well on true beliefs as we can on knowledge. I argue that science is not just about providing means for survival or fulfilling social progress, but that epistemic standards must be maintained. Indeed, such standards prevent the risk of accepting false beliefs. We accept unjustified true beliefs because we have some evidence for them and little against them. But without requiring justification, we might enable false beliefs based on these unjustified true beliefs – for example, the belief that the movement of the stars affects our emotions. This would set back scientific progress on both the truth and the knowledge conception.
In conclusion, I have argued that science does make social, methodological, and most importantly epistemic progress. I have argued that a goal of knowledge better characterizes scientific progress than the goal of truth. It should be acknowledged that the notion of progress towards a goal may be problematic for science’s objectivity – surely, any goals are imposed upon science by humans, even epistemic goals. However, while the definition of social progress might change over time, the core notion that science strives for knowledge remains constant and so does not seem to pose a problem to science’s objectivity – indeed, objectivity is important because it enables truth, and thus knowledge.
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