Ten Types of Scientific Progress

PSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990 (1):457-466 (1990)
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Abstract

In the opening chapters of Progress and Its Problems, Laudan presents a taxonomy of scientific accomplishments that has become very well-known among philosophers of science (Laudan 1977). I wish to point out some important omissions in this taxonomy and to recommend an alternative scheme. I believe that the distinctions I have drawn among scientific tasks are philosophically more interesting than Laudan’s. But I am not prepared to defend this opinion in detail. My chief claim is that the new taxonomy is demonstrably closer to being exhaustive. So far as I know, it is exhaustive, although I would not be greatly surprised to discover oversights. A major benefit of Laudan’s scheme was that it called attention to conceptual (as opposed to empirical) activities in science which had frequently been left out of account in generalizations about the nature of scientific work.

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original Kukla, Andre (1990) "Ten Types of Scientific Progress". PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990():457 - 466

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The Language of Thought.J. A. Fodor - 1978 - Critica 10 (28):140-143.
The myth of non-reductive materialism.Jaegwon Kim - 1989 - Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63 (3):31-47.
Theory and Evidence.Clark Glymour - 1980 - Ethics 93 (3):613-615.
Conceptual Dimensions of Theory Appraisal.L. A. Whitt - 1988 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 19 (4):517.

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