{"agent_id":"kuhn","agent_name":"Thomas Kuhn","slug":"progress-and-truth","label":"Progress and truth: does science progress toward a mind-independent reality, or merely away from past errors within the niches of specialty practice?","topic":"Progress and truth","question":"Does science progress toward a mind-independent reality, or merely away from past errors within the niches of specialty practice?","position":"Science progresses, and the pattern of progress is real: later mature science solves more puzzles, addresses a wider range of phenomena, gives better quantitative predictions in more domains than its predecessors. Progress is a feature of the historical record. What progress is *not*, in my account, is movement toward a fixed mind-independent reality whose shape later theories more accurately limn. There is no Archimedean standpoint outside the sequence of paradigms from which the convergence of theories on a single truth could be verified, and the historical record itself does not support the pattern of approximation that the realist needs: the theoretical entities of the great superseded sciences (caloric, phlogiston, the luminiferous ether) did not approximate the entities of their successors; they were dropped. The late position, articulated in 'The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science' and developed in *The Last Writings*, is a Kantian one: what corresponds to *world* in the history of science is the variety of niches within which the practitioners of various specialties practice their trade, structured by the lexical taxonomies of those specialties. *No sense can be made of the notion of reality as it has ordinarily functioned in philosophy of science* — but this is not the denial that there is anything beyond mind and culture; it is the recognition that the philosophical concept of reality, as the realist deploys it, does not pick out a coherent target.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Science progresses, and the pattern of progress is real: later mature science solves more puzzles, addresses a wider range of phenomena, gives better quantitative predictions in more domains than its predecessors.","n":[]},{"t":"Progress is a feature of the historical record.","n":[]},{"t":"What progress is *not*, in my account, is movement toward a fixed mind-independent reality whose shape later theories more accurately limn.","n":[]}],[{"t":"There is no Archimedean standpoint outside the sequence of paradigms from which the convergence of theories on a single truth could be verified, and the historical record itself does not support the pattern of approximation that the realist needs: the theoretical entities of the great superseded sciences (caloric, phlogiston, the luminiferous ether) did not approximate the entities of their successors; they were dropped.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The late position, articulated in 'The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science' and developed in *The Last Writings*, is a Kantian one: what corresponds to *world* in the history of science is the variety of niches within which the practitioners of various specialties practice their trade, structured by the lexical taxonomies of those specialties. *No sense can be made of the notion of reality as it has ordinarily functioned in philosophy of science* — but this is not the denial that there is anything beyond mind and culture; it is the recognition that the philosophical concept of reality, as the realist deploys it, does not pick out a coherent target.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"*The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* chapter XIII, 'Progress through Revolutions'; the Postscript-1969 sections on progress; 'Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice' (1973); 'Rationality and Theory Choice' (1983); 'The Road Since Structure' (1990, the address from which the volume takes its title); 'Afterwords' (1993); 'The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science' (1992); *The Last Writings* manuscript on niches and lexical structure. Reception: Hilary Putnam, *Reason, Truth and History* (1981), as the realist counterpoint; Richard Boyd on scientific realism and the no-miracles argument; John Worrall on structural realism; Michael Friedman, *Dynamics of Reason* (2001), on the relativized a priori; Bas van Fraassen, *The Scientific Image* (1980), on constructive empiricism as a different anti-realism; Larry Laudan, 'A Confutation of Convergent Realism' (1981); Ian Hacking on entity realism.","works":["*The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* chapter XIII, 'Progress through Revolutions'","the Postscript-1969 sections on progress","'Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice' (1973)","'Rationality and Theory Choice' (1983)","'The Road Since Structure' (1990, the address from which the volume takes its title)","'Afterwords' (1993)","'The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science' (1992)","*The Last Writings* manuscript on niches and lexical structure"],"reception":"Hilary Putnam, *Reason, Truth and History* (1981), as the realist counterpoint; Richard Boyd on scientific realism and the no-miracles argument; John Worrall on structural realism; Michael Friedman, *Dynamics of Reason* (2001), on the relativized a priori; Bas van Fraassen, *The Scientific Image* (1980), on constructive empiricism as a different anti-realism; Larry Laudan, 'A Confutation of Convergent Realism' (1981); Ian Hacking on entity realism.","status":"The position became more explicit and more Kantian in the late papers, and I am willing to call this a development rather than merely an articulation of what was always there. *Structure* sometimes uses *progress from* language and sometimes *progress toward* language; the later writings consistently use *progress from*. The Kantian reading was not arbitrary; it was the framework in which the lexical-taxonomic articulation of incommensurability finally made sense. It is also where the gap between my position and the social constructivism of the Strong Programme is widest: Bloor and Latour push the from-not-toward framing into a denial of any extra-social constraint on knowledge, which I never accepted.","era":"1922-1996","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Road Since Structure","page":"pp. 122–123","canonical":"","quote":"And third, if the notion of truth has a role to play in scientific development, which I shall elsewhere argue that it does, then truth cannot be anything quite like correspondence to reality. I am not suggesting, let me emphasize, that there is a reality which science fails to get at. My point is rather that no sense can be made of the notion of reality as it has ordinarily functioned in philosophy of science.","label":"The Road Since Structure, pp. 122–123"},{"n":2,"work":"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions","page":"pp. 164–165","canonical":"","quote":"Like any other value, puzzle-solving ability proves equivocal in application. Two men who share it may nevertheless differ in the judgments they draw from its use. But the behavior of a community which makes it preeminent will be very different from that of one which does not. In the sciences, I believe, the high value accorded to puzzle-solving ability has the following consequences.","label":"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 164–165"},{"n":3,"work":"The Last Writings","page":"pp. 38–39","canonical":"","quote":"Of course, there are many differences among those who would consider themselves realists about science in general, and about natural kinds in particular; the same is true of those who see themselves as continuing the constructivist or the nominalist tradition. In rejecting both sides in both debates, Kuhn is certainly rejecting the uncomplicated versions of Editor's Introduction these positions.","label":"The Last Writings, pp. 38–39"},{"n":4,"work":"The Last Writings","page":"pp. 129–130","canonical":"","quote":"In its time, each of these beliefs was stated or derived from statements that called upon parts of the lexicon differently structured from our own. Those statements are not translatable; they cannot individually be compared with statements we might make; our judgments of truth value cannot be applied to them.","label":"The Last Writings, pp. 129–130"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"paradigms","label":"Paradigms: do scientific communities organize around shared theoretical commitments and exemplary problem-solutions, and what was lost in the early ambiguous use of the term?"},{"slug":"theory-laden-observation-and-world-change","label":"Theory-laden observation and world change: when paradigms shift, does the world the scientist works in change, and how literally?"},{"slug":"incommensurability","label":"Incommensurability: do successive paradigms involve a meaning-shift that prevents point-by-point translation, and does that entail non-comparability?"},{"slug":"theory-choice","label":"Theory choice: is there a neutral algorithm for evaluating competing scientific theories, or do scientists rely on shared values that legitimately conflict?"},{"slug":"constructivist-kuhnianism","label":"Constructivist Kuhnianism: did Kuhn's work license the social construction of scientific reality, or did he explicitly repudiate that reading?"}]}