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Conceptions of scientific progress in scientific practice: an empirical study

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Abstract

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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Fig. 1

Source: JSTOR data for research

Fig. 2

Source: JSTOR data for research

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Notes

  1. More recently, however, Rowbottom (2019, p. 19) has argued that scientific progress should not be defined solely in terms of increasing verisimilitude, but rather that “scientific progress more centrally involves increasing our resources for predicting and understanding how phenomena interrelate” (emphasis in original). In that respect, Rowbottom (2019, p. 22) agrees with Mizrahi (2013a) that increasing know how “is another significant means by which science can progress.” For another argument against the semantic account of scientific progress, see Mizrahi (2017).

  2. Another philosophical account that should be mentioned here is the “functional-internalist” account of scientific progress, according to which “An episode shows scientific progress precisely when it achieves a specific goal of science, where that goal is such that its achievement can be determined by scientists at that time (e.g., solving scientific puzzles)” (Bird 2008, p. 279). Kuhn’s account of scientific progress is a functional-internalist account of scientific progress, where “the solved problem is the basic unit of scientific progress” and “the aim of science is to maximize the scope of solved empirical problems” (Laudan 1977, p. 66). However, the current debate over scientific progress in contemporary philosophy of science has been focused on the semantic, epistemic, and noetic accounts. Although see Shan (2019) for a recent defense of a functional account of scientific progress.

  3. Cf. Cevolani and Tambolo (2013) whose intuitions seem to differ from Bird’s.

  4. Cf. Mizrahi (2013a), where two case studies (namely, Landsteiner’s discovery of blood groups and Pavlov’s work on the physiology of digestion) are taken as providing support for an epistemic account of scientific progress.

  5. On the methodological problems associated with using case studies from the history of science as evidence in philosophy of science, see Sauer and Scholl (2016, pp. 1–10), Bolinska and Martin (2020), and Mizrahi (2020).

  6. On the application of the methods of data science and corpus linguistics, such as data mining and corpus analysis, to philosophy of science, see Mizrahi (2013b) and Mizrahi (2016). For an example of an application of survey and other methodologies from the social sciences to the question of scientific progress in philosophy of science, see Mizrahi and Buckwalter (2014). See also Beebe and Dellsén (2020).

  7. Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point.

  8. In that respect, the default setting for proximity searches in databases like JSTOR and ProQuest’s Literature Online (LION) is ten words.

  9. According to Machery (2016, p. 480), “Rational reconstructions reconstruct the way scientists use particular concepts,” such as scientific progress.

  10. Although, according to Lakatos (1971, p. 91), “any rational reconstruction of history needs to be supplemented by an empirical (socio-psychological) ‘external history’.”

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to two anonymous reviewers of Synthese for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. School of Arts and Communication, Florida Institute of Technology, 150 W. University Blvd., Melbourne, FL, 32901, USA

    Moti Mizrahi

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Mizrahi, M. Conceptions of scientific progress in scientific practice: an empirical study. Synthese 199, 2375–2394 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02889-5

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