Progress
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<b>Progress</b>
. Scientific progress seems superficially to consist of the accumulation of more and more
knowledge. Attempts to abstract principles of rationality in science have often
presupposed this view: they tend to yield notions of rationality that are self-consistent
-- in which it is rational to be rational -- because rational thought and action is
supposed to move closer to the truth, or to yield better approximations to the truth, or
to yield higher probabilities of the truth, and so on. Laudan's rejection of the rational
role of truth or realism in science mentioned above was in part a reaction against the
repeated failures of models of rationality that attempt to make such claims to support
them convincingly. In addition to the multifarious logical and conceptual errors in such
models, there is the straightforward question: if scientific rationality provides such
guarantees of cumulative progress of science, then why do we find the negative historical
induction? Why has science overthrown such wildly successful and supported theories?
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A simple reaction against such major repudiations in the history of science, of course, is
to posit an irrationality of some sort in the nature of science (Feyerabend, 1975; Kuhn,
1962; Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970). An unsustainable faith in the cumulative progress of
science or a rejection of science as being fundamentally rational at all is not a
palatable choice. Critical principles provide a transcendence of this dilemma too.
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The key to this transcendence has already been introduced. Critical principle rationality
is self-consistently progressive in the sense that it tends to move away from error, not
in the sense that it provides some guarantee of (even a tendency toward) movement toward
truth. In this view, science is not necessarily
<i>cumulative</i>
in its positive knowledge, but is
<i>progressive</i>
in that the positive knowledge, even when utterly rejecting previous positive knowledge,
succeeds in avoiding more and deeper errors than previous positive knowledge. Without the
recognition of the special nature and role of negative knowledge -- critical principles --
the only possible form of progressivity seems to be cumulativity, and positive
cumulativity is contradicted by history.
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A historical progression that illustrates this point can be found in a cumulative sequence
of critical principles that have been involved in the history of physics. In Aristotle's
physics, the laws of physics varied from place to place; the laws for the heavens, for
example, were not the same as those for earth. The revolution of Copernicus, Galileo, and
Newton introduced a principle of criticism of such notions: the heavenly laws and those on
earth should be the same (Brown, 1988; Kuhn, 1957). The laws of physics should be place
invariant. The Special Theory of Relativity maintained this criterion of place invariance,
and added a criterion of velocity (first time derivative of place) invariance. The General
Theory of Relativity, in turn, maintained both of these criteria, and added a criterion of
acceleration (second time derivative) invariance (Friedman, 1983; Longair, 1984; Lucas &
Hodgson, 1990; Misner, Thorne, & Wheeler, 1973; Torretti, 1983; Wald, 1984; Weinberg,
1972).
<u>[12] <http://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/critical.html></u>
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The positive theories, and their underlying ontologies, were radically rejected in each of
these moves, but the negative knowledge, the structure of critical principles, was
strictly cumulative. It is the cumulativity of these critical principles, I suggest, that
accounts for the progressivity of the respective theories. An example mentioned earlier --
the rejection of metaphysical critical principles based on notions of God's design of the
universe -- illustrates critical principle progressivity even when there is an
infirmation, not a confirmation or cumulation, between critical principles.
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