The Nature of Scientific Progress
Physicist and Nobel laureate W.L. Bragg once compared science to a coral reef, pointing out how the living organisms at the surface produce the growth of the reef on top of tens of hundreds of feet of skeletons of organisms that have long since died. The life of the reef is only at its surface; the life of science is only at its frontier. The main idea of this analogy is that present science is not created out of thin air, but rather, was a product of many years of research and development. This idea in itself implies that there is progress in science. Scientific methodologies as well as science as an institution have been developed in such a way to allow for growth and improvement. Like the growth of the reef, is a process of building upon the foundation created by our ancestors.It is a common misconception that science progresses when a correct theory replaces a wrong one. The process is better described as the replacement of a wrong theory with a less wrong theory. However, before even beginning to understand how this can happen, one must examine the criterion that is used to judge a correct theory from an incorrect one. Determining whether a theory is "true" or "false" is a never-ending process; that is, a theory can ne
If there is no way to prove the absolute validity or falsity of a theory, how has science been able to progress? In the past many philosophers have attempted define progress as something other then simply moving closer to the truth. Two theories that perhaps provide us with the greatest understanding of progress in terms of science and culture are T.H. Kuhn's model of paradigms and revolutions, and Larry Laudan's model of research traditions. If science is viewed in a naive sense, where every theory is just a logical continuation of the previous one and the nature of change is frequent and gradual, then progress is easy to see because each new theory is simply better then its forerunner. While this may hold true in some cases where only small changes in theory are occurring, most of the progress in science does not occur this way. The models proposed by both Kuhn and Laudan attempt to provide a more realistic view of science and its progress. They define progress then as the cumulative growth of a system of knowledge over time, in which useful features are retained and non-useful features are abandoned, based on the rejection or confirmation of testable knowledge. Laudan goes further and divides the empirical problems into three categories; solved, unsolved, and anomalous. The differences between solved and unsolved problems are self-explanatory, the more important distinction lies between the unsolved and the anomalous. An unsolved problem becomes anomalous when a new competing theory provides an explanation. It is at this point that the new theory becomes "more correct", as it is able to better explain or predict the circumstances of the phenomena that has been shown by experimental tests. The new theory is then able to use facts to back up its ideas and essentially make the transition from an anomalous problem to a solved one. This transformation from unsolved to anomalous and then to solved is a trademark of scientific progress. In science, useful features are retained and non-useful features are abandoned through the confirmation or rejection of testable knowledge. The scientific method, in this way, is constructed to be progressive. Though is seen as progressive, it is not possible to know if the knowledge uncovered by the scientific method is positive or negative. We have no reference points by which to judge the truth. We can only see that science has progressed because our present day theories are better at solving problems than their predecessors. Because we cannot reach the absolute truth, no matter how far science progresses there will always be room for infinite improvement. In the words of Albert Einstein, "one thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike--and yet it is the most precious thing we have." At some point, science is always faced with conceptual or empirical problems. Laudan explains that these problems are naturally given different levels of importance. It is on this scale of importance that scientists are guided when making decisions between rival theories or schools of thought. The importa
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Approximate Word count = 2103
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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