Varieties of Progress: Commercial, Moral and Otherwise

Abstract

With characteristic incautious panache, the late Karl Popper claimed that, of all human practices, science stands alone regarding progress:

...in the field of science, we have something like a criterion for judging the quality of a theory as compared with its predecessor, and therefore a criterion of progress. And so it means that progress in science can be judged rationally. This possibility explains why, in science, only progressive theories are regarded as interesting; and science is, by and large, a history of progress. (Science seems to be the only field of humanendeavour of which this can be said.) (1981, 94–5)¹

Popper’s claim notwithstanding, progress has surely been made in technology. Further, although scientific progress has undoubtedly made progressive technological change possible, science has notably been heavily dependent upon technology, given the incessant call in the sciences for measuring devices of increasingly greater accuracy. Further, however much scientific and technological progress are interdependent and mutually enhance each other, the web of interchange does not end there. For some time now, technology cannot have been developed, nor can it have exerted its full influence without substantial help from the commercial sphere. How else these days can any technology be planned, produced, marketed and distributed outside the ambit of business and commerce? This suggests that technological progress itself both rests upon and contributes to progress in business and commerce. So, despite Popper’s grand, rational, lone-gun scientism, the facts are these: if the process of judging comparatively the quality of a theory is a “criterion of progress”; if that judgment relies upon careful testing; if careful testing demands superior instruments and facilities; if such instruments and facilities arise through superior technologies; and, finally, if such worthy technologies emerge only through the best productive capacities available at a time, the history of scientific progress cannot have emerged as a self-sufficient and self-sustaining phenomenon. The fates of science, technology and commercial enterprise have been inextricably interwoven for many decades now. Thus, if progress attaches to the development of science, so it must attach to the development of business and commerce.