2. Progress in science
• The term ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do
progress in obvious ways. Progress is a perquisite
reserved almost exclusively for science activities.
• Debate: Whether one or another of the
contemporary social sciences is really a science.
• Does a field make progress because it is a
science, or is it a science because it makes
progress?
3. Is progress only reserved for normal
science?
• Normal science progresses because the enterprise
shares certain salient characteristics.
1. Members of a mature scientific community work from
a single paradigm or from a closely related set.
2. Very rarely do different scientific communities
investigate the same problems.
• The result of successful creative work is progress.
1. Progress is an attribution to many fields (technology -
now, painting - during the Renaissance)
2. Even if we argue that a field does not make
progress, that does not mean that an individual
school/discipline within that field does not.
4. • Progress seems both obvious and assured in normal science.
In part, this progress is in the eye of the beholder.
• Unlike in other disciplines, the scientist need not select problems
because they urgently need solution and without regard for the
tools available to solve them.
• There are no other professional communities in which individual
creative work is so exclusively addressed to and evaluated by other
members of the profession.
-> This insulation of the scientist from society permits the individual
scientist to concentrate attention on problems that she has a good
reason to believe she will be able to solve.
-> We would expect science to solve problems at a more rapid rate
5. Science’s insulation from society
• +Music, arts, literature: Practitioner gains
education by exposure to works of other artists.
• +History, philosophy and social science: Textbook
has greater significant. A problem has a number
of competing and incommensurable solutions.
• +Contemporary natural sciences: Rely mainly on
textbooks until 3rd,4th year of graduate work, until
beginning research. Not recommended: Reading
works not written specifically for students.
Scientists don’t want to change it because it has
been immensely effective.
6. Progress toward no goal
• Darwin example: When published theory of natural
selection, the greatest difficulty that Darwin encountered
was not the novelty of idea and resistance.
• The evidence pointing to evolution, including the evolution
of man, had been suggested and widely disseminated
before.
• The greatest difficulty stemmed from an idea that was
more nearly Darwin’s own. Pre-Darwinian evolutionary
theories (Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, German
Naturphilosophen) had taken evolution to be a goal-
directed process. However, “The origin of Species”
recognized no goal set either by God or nature. Natural
selection is responsible for the changes of species.
7. Kuhn’s question
• “We may have to relinquish the notion, explicit
or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry
scientists and those who learn from them
closer and closer to the truth” (P170)
• What must nature, including man, be like in
order that science be possible at all?
