Discovery, Rationality, and Progress in Science: A Perspective in the Philosophy of Science

Abstract

If we examine some relatively sophisticated area of science at a particular stage of its development, we find that a certain body of information is, at that stage, taken to be an object for investigation. On a general level, we need only think of the subject-matters called ‘electricity’, ‘magnetism’, ‘light’, or ‘chemistry’; but both within and outside such standard fields, there are more specific examples — such as, for instance, what are taken to be subfields of the preceding subjects. Further, those general subjects themselves are, in many cases, considered to be related in certain ways. (For example, in the nineteenth century, reasons accumulated for believing that electricity, magnetism, chemistry, and light were related, and in such a manner that it was reasonable to search for a common account of all these subjects.) I will refer to such bodies of related items as domains, though we will find that, in the sense in which this concept will prove helpful in understanding the enterprise of science, more is involved than the mere relatedness of items.

This paper was originally presented in a symposium at the Second Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, East Lansing, Michigan, on October 29, 1972, with Stephen Toulmin as co-symposiast and Imre Lakatos as commentator. Written under a grant from the National Science Foundation, the paper surveys certain central aspects of some of my recent work, chiefly that in the following articles: ‘Notes Toward a Post-Positivistic Interpretation of Science’, in P. Achinstein and S. Barker (eds.), The Legacy of Logical Positivism, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1969, pp. 115–160; ‘Scientific Theories and Their Domains’, to appear in F. Suppes (ed.), The Structure of Scientific Theories; University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1973; and ‘On the Relations Between Compositional and Evolutionary Theories’, to appear in a volume of proceedings of the Serbelloni Conference on Reduction in the Biological Sciences, Macmillan, London, 1973, edited by T. Dobzhansky and F. Ayala.