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Kuhn, Progress, and Knowing-How: An Epistemological-Functional Account of Scientific Progress
Abstract
Kuhn famously rejects that science progresses towards a uniquely true account of the mind-independent world. Yet he states that science progresses. Progress comes down to improved problem-solving. It is important to realize that Kuhn talks about the progress of scientific knowledge. This raises the question of in what sense exactly problem-solving is knowledge. This chapter then has two main goals. The first is to explain Kuhn’s account of problem-solving as growth in knowledge by redefining knowledge as knowledge-how instead of knowledge-that. By linking the discourse of scientific progress to recent epistemological debates, I argue that knowledge-how ought to be understood as an ability, and therefore, scientific progress as an improved ability to solve problems and accomplish other tasks of scientific practice. The second goal of this chapter is to assess this notion of progress in relation to the recent debate on the nature of scientific progress, which has been reinvigorated by Bird’s (2007) paper. It will be shown that the epistemological and functional accounts of progress are, in fact, compatible if only the classical definition of knowledge is replaced by its understanding as knowledge-how. This results in a new, epistemological-functional conception of scientific progress.
This article criticizes the pragmatist theory of progress developed by Rahel Jaeggi and argues for a psychologist alternative. In her theory, Jaeggi rejects both moralist and historicist understandings of progress, arguing that progress should be regarded as a non-teleological process of experience enrichment. However, by identifying progress with problem-solving activities, Jaeggi explicitly makes a parallelist argument between social-moral and scientific progress, which is highly questionable. In this analysis, I argue that Jaeggi's analogy fails. And by referring to Kuhn's notion of incommensurability, I demonstrate a more radical, psychologist approach, which departs from any idea of experience enrichment in history. The lack of a sufficient account of progress is not the failure of Kuhn. In contrast, it is his very own insight.
Shan, Yafeng. in press. “The Functional Approach: Scientific Progress as Increased Usefulness.” In New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress, edited by Yafeng Shan, 46-61. New York: Routledge.
This article develops and defends a new functional approach to scientific progress. I begin with a review of the problems of the traditional functional approach. Then I propose a new functional account of scientific progress, in which scientific progress is defined in terms of usefulness of problem defining and problem solving. I illustrate and defend my account by applying it to the history of genetics. Finally, I highlight the advantages of my new functional approach over the epistemic and semantic approaches and dismiss some potential objections to my approach.
Roughly, instrumentalism is the view that science is primarily, and should primarily be, an instrument for furthering our practical ends. It has fallen out of favour because historically influential variants of the view, such as logical positivism, suffered from serious defects.
In this book, however, Darrell P. Rowbottom develops a new form of instrumentalism, which is more sophisticated and resilient than its predecessors. This position—‘cognitive instrumentalism’—involves three core theses. First, science makes theoretical progress primarily when it furnishes us with more predictive power or understanding concerning observable things. Second, scientific discourse concerning unobservable things should only be taken literally in so far as it involves observable properties or analogies with observable things. Third, scientific claims about unobservable things are probably neither approximately true nor liable to change in such a way as to increase in truthlikeness.
There are examples from science throughout the book, and Rowbottom demonstrates at length how cognitive instrumentalism fits with the development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chemistry and physics, and especially atomic theory. Drawing upon this history, Rowbottom also argues that there is a kind of understanding, empirical understanding, which we can achieve without having true, or even approximately true, representations of unobservable things. In closing the book, he sets forth his view on how the distinction between the observable and unobservable may be drawn, and compares cognitive instrumentalism with key contemporary alternatives such as structural realism, constructive empiricism, and semirealism.
Overall, this book offers a strong defence of instrumentalism that will be of interest to scholars and students working on the debate about realism in philosophy of science.
This chapter is an examination of Thomas S. Kuhn’s Foerster Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. At that moment, Kuhn was beginning to reexamine some of his main theses in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A special emphasis was made on the relationship between his account of scientific revolutions and the nature of knowledge. As he was a critic of traditional foundationalism, he opted for a different point of view, more sympathetic to his renewing perspective. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and John L. Austin’s writings inspired in him a new account of the grounds for knowledge-claims, as opposed to those for belief-claims. In that lecture, Kuhn related this new account to his explanation of scientific change and drew some conclusions on the question concerning the ‘growth’ of knowledge.
How might epistemology build upon its past and present, so_ as to be better in the future? Epistemology Futures _ takes bold steps towards answering that question. What _ methods will best serve epistemology? Which phenomena and _ concepts deserve more attention from it? Are there _ approaches and assumptions that have impeded its progress _ until now? This volume contains provocative essays by _ prominent epistemologists, presenting many new ideas for _ possible improvements in how to do epistemology. Doubt is _ cast upon the powers of conceptual analysis and of _ epistemological intuition. Surprising aspects of knowledge_ are noticed. What is it? What is it not? Scepticism's limits are traced. What threatens us as potential knowers? What _ does not? The nature and special significance of inquiry, of normative virtues, of understanding, and of disagreement are elucidated, all with an eye on sharpening epistemology's _ future focus. There is definite insight and potential _ foresight. How might real epistemological progress occur in the future? Epistemology Futures offers some intriguing clues.
Interpreting Kuhn provides a comprehensive, up-to-date study of Thomas Kuhn's philosophy and legacy. With twelve essays newly written by an international group of scholars, it covers a wide range of topics where Kuhn had an influence. Part I deals with foundational issues such as Kuhn's metaphysical assumptions, his relationship to Kant and Kantian philosophy, as well as contextual influences on his writing, including Cold War psychology and art. Part II tackles three Kuhnian concepts: normal science, incommensurability, and scientific revolutions. Part III deals with the Copernican Revolution in astronomy, the theory-ladenness of observation, scientific discovery, Kuhn's evolutionary analogies, and his theoretical monism. The volume is an ideal resource for advanced students seeking an overview of Kuhn's philosophy, and for specialists following the development of Kuhn scholarship.
Gilbert Ryle's distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that faces a significant challenge: accounting for the unity of knowledge. Jason Stanley, an ‘intellectualist’ opponent of Ryle's, brings out this problem by arguing that Ryleans must treat ‘know’ as an ambiguous word and must distinguish knowledge proper from knowledge-how, which is ‘knowledge’ only so-called. I develop the challenge and show that underlying Ryle's distinction is a unified vision of knowledge as ‘a capacity to get things right’, covering both knowledge-how and knowledge-that. I show how Ryle specifies the general notion into knowledge-how and knowledge-that and discuss the mutual interdependence exhibited by the two forms of knowledge. Ryle's positive view of knowledge, properly understood, emerges as an important, neglected, alternative which should be brought back into the ongoing conversation about practical and theoretical knowledge.
What is scientific progress? On Alexander Bird's epistemic account of scientific progress, an episode in science is progressive precisely when there is more scientific knowledge at the end of the episode than at the beginning. Using Bird's epistemic account as a foil, this paper develops an alternative understanding-based account on which an episode in science is progressive precisely when scientists grasp how to correctly explain or predict more aspects of the world at the end of the episode than at the beginning. This account is shown to be superior to the epistemic account by examining cases in which knowledge and understanding come apart. In these cases, it is argued that scientific progress matches increases in scientific understanding rather than accumulations of knowledge. In addition, considerations having to do with minimalist idealizations, pragmatic virtues, and epistemic value all favor this understanding-based account over its epistemic counterpart.
Pragmatists have traditionally been enemies of representationalism but friends of naturalism, when naturalism is understood to pertain to human subjects, in the sense of Hume and Nietzsche. In this volume Huw Price presents his distinctive version of this traditional combination, as delivered in his Renè Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in 2008. Price contrasts his view with other contemporary forms of philosophical naturalism, comparing it with other pragmatist and neo-pragmatist views such as those of Robert Brandom and Simon Blackburn. Linking their different ‘expressivist‘ programmes, Price argues for a radical global expressivism that combines key elements from both. With Paul Horwich and Michael Williams, Brandom and Blackburn respond to Price in new essays. Price replies in the closing essay, emphasising links between his views and those of Wilfrid Sellars. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students of philosophy of language and metaphysics.
Some key aspects of contemporary epistemology deserve to be challenged, and How to Know does just that. This book argues that several long-standing presumptions at the heart of the standard analytic conception of knowledge are false, and defends an alternative, a practicalist conception of knowledge. • Presents a philosophically original conception of knowledge, at odds with some central tenets of analytic epistemology • Offers a dissolution of epistemology's infamous Gettier problem - explaining why the supposed problem was never really a problem in the first place. • Defends an unorthodox conception of the relationship between knowledge-that and knowledge-how, understanding knowledge-that as a kind of knowledge-how.
The thesis of this book is that knowing how to do something amounts to knowing facts. The facts are those that answer a question about how one could do it. Elaborating the conception of knowledge how involves presenting more generally an account of what it is to know the answer to a question. The account of knowing an answer to a question, or knowledge-wh, leads to a novel defense of a Fregean view of propositions, according to which they contain ways of thinking (or modes of presentations) of objects. In explaining and defending the account of knowing how, the book lays out a conception of knowledge of facts where possession of such knowledge is not merely passive in guiding behavior. The ultimate moral of the book is that it is our ability to acquire knowledge of facts that explains our capacity for skilled engagement with the world.
Imre Lakatos' philosophical and scientific papers are published here in two volumes. Volume I brings together his very influential but scattered papers on the philosophy of the physical sciences, and includes one important unpublished essay on the effect of Newton's scientific achievement. Volume II presents his work on the philosophy of mathematics (much of it unpublished), together with some critical essays on contemporary philosophers of science and some famous polemical writings on political and educational issues. Imre Lakatos had an influence out of all proportion to the length of his philosophical career. This collection exhibits and confirms the originality, range and the essential unity of his work. It demonstrates too the force and spirit he brought to every issue with which he engaged, from his most abstract mathematical work to his passionate 'Letter to the director of the LSE'. Lakatos' ideas are now the focus of widespread and increasing interest, and these volumes should make possible for the first time their study as a whole and their proper assessment.
Alexander Bird argues for an epistemic account of scientific progress, whereas Darrell Rowbottom argues for a semantic account. Both appeal to intuitions about hypothetical cases in support of their accounts. Since the methodological significance of such appeals to intuition is unclear, I think that a new approach might be fruitful at this stage in the debate. So I propose to abandon appeals to intuition and look at scientific practice instead. I discuss two cases that illustrate the way in which scientists make judgments about progress. As far as scientists are concerned, progress is made when scientific discoveries contribute to the increase of scientific knowledge of the following sorts: empirical, theoretical, practical, and methodological. I then propose to articulate an account of progress that does justice to this broad conception of progress employed by scientists. I discuss one way of doing so, namely, by expanding our notion of scientific knowledge to include both know-that and know-how.
Summary The present paper argues that there is an affinity between Kuhn'sThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Wittgenstein's philosophy. It is maintained, in particular, that Kuhn's notion of paradigm draws on such Wittgensteinian concepts as language games, family resemblance, rules, forms of life. It is also claimed that Kuhn's incommensurability thesis is a sequel of the theory of meaning supplied by Wittgenstein's later philosophy. As such its assessment is not fallacious, since it is not an empirical hypothesis and it does not have the relativistic implications Kuhn's critics repeatedly indicated. Although concepts are indeed relative to a language game or paradigm, interparadigmatic intelligibility is preserved through the standard techniques of translation or praxis. The impossibility of radical translation which is captured by the claim of incommensurability lies with that which cannot be said but only shown.
Two books have been particularly influential in contemporary philosophy of science: Karl R. Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, and Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Both agree upon the importance of revolutions in science, but differ about the role of criticism in science's revolutionary growth. This volume arose out of a symposium on Kuhn's work, with Popper in the chair, at an international colloquium held in London in 1965. The book begins with Kuhn's statement of his position followed by seven essays offering criticism and analysis, and finally by Kuhn's reply. The book will interest senior undergraduates and graduate students of the philosophy and history of science, as well as professional philosophers, philosophically inclined scientists, and some psychologists and sociologists.
Kuhn argued against both the correspondence theory of truth and convergent realism. Although he likely misunderstood the nature of the correspondence theory, which it seems he wrongly believed to be an epistemic theory, Kuhn had an important epistemic point to make. He maintained that any assessment of correspondence between beliefs and reality is not possible, and therefore, the acceptance of beliefs and the presumption of their truthfulness has to be decided on the basis of other criteria. I will show that via Kuhn’s suggested epistemic values, specifically via problem-solving, his philosophy can be incorporated into a coherentist epistemology. Further, coherentism is, in principle, compatible with convergent realism. However, an argument for increasing likeness to truth requires appropriate historical continuity. Kuhn maintained that the history of science is full of discontinuity, and therefore, the historical condition of convergent realism is not satisfied.
The Logical Status of Knowing That
- John Hartland-Swann
- J Hartland-Swann
The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought
- Thomas Kuhn
- T Kuhn
A Critical Introduction to Knowledge-how
- Poston Carter
- Carter and Poston
Knowledge How. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Carlotta Pavese
Knowledge How. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Jeremy Fantl
Knowledge as an Ability
- John Hyman
- J Hyman
Thomas Kuhn’s Revolutions: A Historical and an Evolutionary Philosophy of Science
- James Marcum