Abstract

GUILLAUMIN, Godfrey. Progreso científico mediante convergencia cognitiva. Socavando la inferencia pesimista. Valenciana [online]. 2010, vol.3, n.5, pp.89-116. ISSN 2007-2538.  https://doi.org/10.15174/rv.v0i5.237.

Some authors have recently examined the idea of scientific progress as Philip Kitcher (2001), Hasok Chang (2004) and Alexander Bird (2007). Their fundamental reactions were against traditional points of view about this issue from authors as Thomas Kuhn (1962), Larry Laudan (1977), Irme Lakatos (1970) y Ilkka Niiniluoto (1984). Four main theses supported these traditional views about the idea of scientific progress, namely, a) the idea of progress is internal to scientific disciplines; b) problem solving is an adequate measurement of scientific progress; c) scientific knowledge is mainly articulated by theories and d) there is a distinction between empirical progress and theoretical progress. In this paper I appraise and criticize these theses in order to elaborate a satisfactory notion of scientific progress which overcomes the epistemic challenges of the so called pessimistic inference.

Keywords : scientific progress; pessimistic inference; cognitive evolution; growth of information; feedback.

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