Conceptions of scientific progress in scientific practice: an empirical study
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Conceptions of scientific progress in scientific practice: an empirical study Moti Mizrahi1 Received: 13 August 2020 / Accepted: 18 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
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. Keywords Aim of science · Corpus linguistics · Empirical philosophy of science · Goal of science · Knowledge · Scientific progress · Truth · Understanding
1 Introduction According to Chang (2007, p. 1), “Scientific progress remains one of the most significant issues in the philosophy of science today.” Following the publication of Bird’s (2007) seminal paper on scientific progress, an exchange ensued between Bird (2008),
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Moti Mizrahi [email protected] School of Arts and Communication, Florida Institute of Technology, 150 W. University Blvd., Melbourne, FL 32901, USA
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Rowbottom (2008, 2015), and Niiniluoto (2014) on the merits of various philosophical accounts of scientific progress. Bird (2007) defends an epistemic account of scientific progress, according to which scientific progress consists in the accumulation of knowledge. Bird (2008) characterizes the epistemic account as follows: (E) An episode constitutes scientific progress precisely when it shows the accumulation of scientific knowledge (Bird 2008, p. 279). Against (E), Rowbottom (2008) defends a semantic account, according to which scientific progress should be understood in terms of truth, not knowledge. Bird (2008) characterizes the semantic account as follows: (S) An episode constitutes scientific progress precisely when it either (a) shows the accumulation of true scientific belief, or (b) shows increasing approximation to true scientific belief (Bird 2008, p. 279). In another paper on scientific progress, Rowbottom (2010, p. 245) endorses
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