The Popperian Conception of Scientific Progress

Abstract

In Chapter 3 the basis of Popper’s philosophy of science, including his notions of basic statement, background knowledge, and corroboration, were shown to rest on the Deductive Model, in which scientific laws are conceived to be universal statements of the form: (x) (Fx→Gx). And in Chapter 4 an Empiricist conception of progress was presented, also in terms of the model. In the present chapter it will be shown that Popper’s attempts to provide a conception of progress likewise rely on the Deductive Model, the basic difference between his view and that of the Empiricists being that, where the latter see succeeding theories as logically entailing their predecessors, Popper sees such theories as contradicting one another. Thus, for example, Popper claims that:

[F]rom a logical point of view, Newton’s theory, strictly speaking, contradicts both Galileo’s and Kepler’s.... For this reason it is impossible to derive Newton’s theory from either Galileo’s or Kepler’s or both, whether by deduction or induction. For neither a deductive nor an inductive inference can ever proceed from consistent premises to a conclusion that formally contradicts the premises from which we started.¹