Abstract
Dellsén (2016) has recently argued for an understanding-based account of scientific progress, the noetic account, according to which science (or a particular scientific discipline) makes cognitive progress precisely when it increases our understanding of some aspect of the world. I contrast this account with Bird’s (2007, 2015); epistemic account, according to which such progress is made precisely when our knowledge of the world is increased or accumulated. In a recent paper, Park (2017) criticizes various aspects of my account and his arguments in favor of the noetic account as against Bird’s epistemic account. This paper responds to Park’s objections. An important upshot of the paper is that we should distinguish between episodes that constitute and promote scientific progress, and evaluate account of scientific progress in terms of how they classify different episodes with respect to these categories.
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Notes
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to the relevance of the exchange between Bird and Rowbottom to this issue.
These are all taken from Niiniluoto (2015).
Park’s solution is also extremely ad hoc, since only a rationale for restricting the account in this way is meant to avoid the aforementioned problem.
As the parenthetical remarks here indicate, I am using ‘abandon’ and ‘adopt’ as placeholder terms for the propositional attitude that undergoes change in cognitive scientific progress. For Park and Bird, this attitude is belief (since belief is necessary for knowledge); for me, it is a form of acceptance (see Sect. 3.1 for further discussion of this difference).
Indeed, the episode would count as progressive according to Park’s account even if the funding is merely a means to acquire a little bit of knowledge (less than what was previously lost), since that would still satisfy the second disjunct of Park’s disjunctive account.
Of course, this is not the only possible way to define the terms ‘belief’ and ‘acceptance’ (see Schwitzgebel 2015 for a number of competing conceptions of the nature of belief). However, it is safe to say that belief is generally taken to be involuntary in an important way (see Williams 1973; Alston 1988 for influential discussions); furthermore, belief is not generally taken to be context-sensitive in the way acceptance is on Cohen’s definition (on this point, see Dellsén 2018, 13).
It is worth noting that if this objection of Park’s were correct, it would also serve as an objection to van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism.
Park also claims that “[w]hen scientists explain something in terms of a scientific theory, they believe that it [viz., the explanandum] is real” (Park 2017, 573). This appears to be an empirical claim about all scientists’ mental states when engaging in a specific activity, viz. explanation. If so, it is almost certainly false given the existence of openly anti-realist scientists, such as Niels Bohr, who surely engaged in the practice of explaining various phenomena even though they did not believe that the relevant theories were true (see Folse 1985; Faye 1991 for more on Bohr’s views on the truth of his theories). It would be even less plausible to claim that this is some sort of conceptual truth, since it is clearly possible to explain with a theory you merely accept in Cohen and my sense of the term (but do not also believe).
Rowbottom (2010) also argues that justification is not necessary for scientific progress, but in a different way. Whereas I appeal to cases in which scientists arguably make progress in virtue of accurately explaining and/or predicting more than they previously could, Rowbottom (2010, 245–247) appeals to cases in which scientific theories become more theoretically virtuous in Kuhn’s (1977) sense.
Mizrahi (2013) argues that scientific progress often consists in increasing know-how, and argues for ‘expanding’ the notion of scientific knowledge to include both propositional knowledge and know-how in order to accommodate this point within a broadly-speaking epistemic account.
That said, it might only count as very modest progress. Recall that progress is a matter of degree, and so the fact that such research would constitute some progress is compatible with the degree of progress being miniscule.
This idea could clearly be developed in more detail, e.g. by spelling out exactly what an issue or question is in this context and what makes it important, but I lack the space to do so here. Besides, since the response is essentially one that both noeticists and epistemicists should welcome, the issue is really quite independent of the adjudication of the noetic versus the epistemic account of progress that I am concerned with here.
I briefly presented three such considerations at the very end of my previous paper (Dellsén 2016, 81–82). Park does not discuss the third advantage, having to do with the epistemic value of understanding and knowledge.
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Dellsén, F. Scientific Progress, Understanding, and Knowledge: Reply to Park. J Gen Philos Sci 49, 451–459 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-018-9419-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-018-9419-y