What Scientific Progress Is Not: Against Bird’s Epistemic View

Abstract

This article challenges Bird’s view that scientific progress should be understood in terms of knowledge, by arguing that unjustified scientific beliefs (and/or changes in belief) may nevertheless be progressive. It also argues that false beliefs may promote progress.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for comments from audience members when I presented this paper at Swarthmore College, notably Alan Baker, Audre Brokes, Mark Goodwin, Joel Pust, and Gerald Vision. I am also grateful to Peter Baumann, Susan Castro, James McAllister, Tim Williamson, and two anonymous referees for their comments on drafts.

Notes

[1] There are other understandings of knowledge. The ‘objective knowledge’ of Popper (1972) may be false as well as unjustified, and doesn’t directly concern beliefs either. Alternatively, one might follow Sartwell (1992) in thinking that knowledge is just true belief.

[2] Thanks to Tim Williamson for drawing this to my attention.

[3] The demand for non‐subjective confirmation is reasonable, I take it, in so far as two individuals may differ radically on the prior probabilities that they assign to hypotheses on a purely subjective view of confirmation. See Ramsey ([1926] 1964) and De Finetti ([1937] 1964). I do not wish to revisit this ground here; suffice it to say that whether one is justified in believing some theory (h) given some evidence (e) should not simply be a matter of the value that one arbitrarily assigns to P(h, e) (even if values of zero or unity are ruled out in the absence of entailment or contradiction). See also Rowbottom (2010b).

[4] Needless to say, there are also other strong challenges to the view that scientific theories can be confirmed, stemming, for instance, from Duhem’s thesis; see Strevens (2001) and Rowbottom (forthcoming‐a). But I take it that one good argument is enough for present purposes.

[5] I could strengthen my case, however, by noting that one need not consider only theory change. Perhaps scientific progress is sometimes possible to achieve merely by the development of new models, which provide new predictive resources.

[6] On a related note, Leplin (1981, 282) writes of ‘a form of progress which consists in extension of the scope of observation’. So one might add that unjustified theory change may result in new potential for observation.

[7] In Bird’s words: ‘The semantic approach takes truth (or verisimilitude) to be the central concept in defining progress’ (Bird 2007, 64).

[8] I presume that Bird (2007, 87) would not take this line, given his suggestion that it is not an advantage of Laudan’s (1984) account that progress ‘can be assessed internally’. But other advocates of the epistemic view of progress might disagree.

[9] In this context, ‘our cognitive ability’ may perhaps be better understood instead as our competence as puzzle‐solvers in the sense suggested by Kuhn (1996).

[10] Socrates notes that ‘true opinion is in no way a worse guide to correct action than knowledge’ but that true opinions are not liable to linger unless one ‘ties them down by an account of the reason why’ (97a–d). In short, he appears to claim that one can only cement a true belief in mind by providing an explanation; or perhaps, in modern terms, by having a justification. More recent discussions of the value of knowledge include Jones (1997), David (2001, 2005), and Kvanvig (2005).

[11] This view has been recently challenged, however, in line with my view—expressed in Rowbottom (2008)—that false beliefs may be responsible for progress (even when this is construed as an increase in knowledge). See Klein (2008) and the conclusion.

[12] I take the observation to be scientific, in line with my earlier discussion, in so far as it was not made with the naked eye but instead with a scientific instrument, namely the telescope, and therefore in a way that was scientifically theory‐laden.