Yafeng Shan - New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress

I would like to express my gratitude to all my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy and Centre for Reasoning, University of Kent. In particular, I wish to thank Jon Williamson for his support and advice. I am indebted to all the authors and referees for their hard work on this volume and to Andrew Weckenmann and Allie Simmons at Routledge for their help and expertise. I would also like to thank the support of the British Academy (SRG1920\101076) and the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2019059). In addition, I wish to thank Xianzhao He for his moral support. Finally, my thanks go to Zifei Li for her boundless support over the past few years, especially during the pandemic.

Alexander Bird

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165859-3

One compelling approach to the nature of scientific progress focuses on truth. The semantic approach says that scientific progress is the accumulation of scientific truth or that it is the increasing proximity of scientific theory to the truth. Alternative accounts of progress can depart from this semantic approach in a number of ways. An anti-realist who nonetheless wants to be able to say that science does make progress will be less demanding than the semantic approach as regards truth. Science can progress without acquiring truth or getting closer to it. Without any truth-related requirement, an antirealist view will have to be more demanding than the semantic approach in some other respect. Typically, such a view will focus on some key feature of scientific practice that one might regard as the aim or function of science this is the functional approach. This might be the development and solving of scientific problems. Science progresses when more problems are proposed and solved. This view is more demanding than the semantic approach in that the semantic approach does not require that contributions to scientific progress address scientific problems. The functional approach can be adopted without anti-realist intent. It remains the case that it is more demanding than the semantic approach in this respect.

Other approaches to scientific progress are also more demanding than the semantic approach, but in different respects. The epistemic and noetic approaches both say that scientific progress requires a cognitively more demanding state than belief that is true or truthlike. The epistemic view says that scientific progress requires an increase in scientific knowledge. It therefore requires that developments that contribute to progress have the epistemic justification characteristic of knowledge. The noetic approach says that scientific progress requires an increase in scientific understanding. Quite how the epistemic and noetic approaches relate to one another depends on how one sees the relationship between knowledge and understanding. If, as I do ( one takes understanding to be a different sort of cognitive state, one that does not entail knowledge, then the noetic approach will be more demanding than the semantic approach, but not necessarily more demanding than the epistemic approach.

In my opinion, the fact that the epistemic approach is more demanding than the semantic approach by requiring progressive developments to be justified is an advantage, since adding a true proposition believed for bad reasons to the stock of science is not genuine progress. However, I think that the additional demands placed on progress by the functional and noetic approaches are misplaced. If you think that knowing is a simple, basic mental state () then the epistemic view is the simplest of the views on offer. In this chapter I argue that the additional complexity demanded by the functional and noetic approaches is mistaken, since discoveries, simply by coming to be known, can add to progress.

What I have called the noetic and the functional approaches are general approaches that encompass more specific accounts that characterise scientific progress in terms of understanding and in terms of the problem-solving function of science, respectively. I now turn to the leading specific accounts within each approach, the noetic account of and this volume). These are articulated in detail elsewhere in this volume, and so I adumbrate their accounts as follows:

Dellsns noetic account

Science progresses when there is an increase in scientific understanding. A scientist understands X if and only if they grasp a sufficiently accurate and comprehensive dependency model of X; their degree of understanding of X is proportional to the accuracy and comprehensiveness of their dependency model of X.

Shans functional account

Science progresses when science proposes more useful exemplary practices. An exemplary practice is useful when it provides a way of defining and solving research problems that is repeatable, provides a reliable framework for looking for solutions to unsolved problems and generates more testable research problems across a wider range of fields.

(For simplicity, in this chapter, I will call these the noetic account and the functional account, while recognising that there are other accounts possible within the general approaches they exemplify.)

Without doubt the most important contributions to the progress of science conform to both of these accounts. The chemical revolution of the late eighteenth century led to a new and accurate understanding of the nature of matter and laid down the framework for setting and solving problems that dominated nineteenth century chemistry. Before Lavoisier, the theory of matter was comprised of the vestiges of the ancient four element theory, supplemented by the hypothesis of various principles, such as phlogiston, the principle of combustion. Lavoisiers contemporaries were debating, for example, whether water could be transmuted into earth, as suggested by the fact that water distilled several times would still leave a solid residue when evaporated. Most famously Lavoisier disproved the hypothesis that combustion is a matter of a substance losing phlogiston. The new theory that combustion is a matter of a substance combining with a hitherto unknown substance, oxygen, led to a broader theory of matter: matter is composed of combinations of elements (or of an element in its pure form), where the number of such elements is not small. Clearly this constituted a new understanding of matter and of chemical reactions, and that understanding can be represented as grasping one or more dependency models. At the same time, the chemical revolution established a number of new and useful exemplary practices, most obviously the identification of new elements and showing of which elements particular substances are composed. When supplemented by the law of definite proportion, chemistry became centred on stoichiometry, the science of determining the proportions of reactants in a chemical reaction (and the laws of such reactions), and the related idea that a substance may be represented by a chemical formula.

The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 gave scientists not only an understanding of that structure but also a deeper understanding of how it was possible for genetic information to be duplicated in the process of mitosis and to be transferred from one generation to another. The discovery also opened a whole host of research questions in molecular biology, regarding, for example, the details of transcription and the relationship between RNA triples and amino acids, the nature of mutation, and the mechanisms for gene expression, among many others. Two decades after the discovery of DNA began the science and technology of genomics, with the first sequencing of a gene and then a whole organism, MS2, an RNA virus. This in particular initiated a range of exemplary practices in science for identifying and sequencing genes and then for modifying and synthesising genetic material.