John L Jerz Website II Copyright (c) 2017

Scientific Progress (Rescher, 1978)

Home
Current Interest
Page Title

A philosophical essay on the economics of research in natural science

Nicholas Rescher

p.42 The crucial fact is that scientific progress hinges not just on the structure of nature but also on the structure of our information about it.

p.48-50 Today's major discoveries represent an overthrow of yesterday's... Science in the main develops not by way of cumulation but by way of substitution and replacement. And its progress lies not in a monotonic accretion of more information, but in superior performance in point of prediction and control over nature... Theoretical innovation makes our entire earlier picture of natural phenomena look naive - a matter of rough approximation or imperfect understanding... Scientific progress, then, is not - or need not be - a matter of increased detail regarding certain fixed parameters, but occurs at the much more fundamental level of conceptual novelty and innovation. Its key is the deployment of creative imagination on the theoretical plane in devising new explanatory models to accommodate the data that come to hand.

p.165 Our "laws of nature" are in fact the product of mind-nature interaction, and their modes of formation and conceptualization are certainly man-made. The discoveries or findings of science are thus in significant park makings - a matter of conceptual inventiveness within a contrived framework of explanatory idealizations. Nothing in the exploratory model should be construed as negating the fact that scientific discovery is a profound adventure of the creative spirit working with its characteristic conceptualizing inventiveness.

p.244 Ignorance (i.e., the lack of knowledge) will accordingly be of two very different types. It prevails at a surface level when we can grasp a question but lack - under the circumstances - any means of giving an answer to it... Ignorance prevails at a deeper level when we could not even pose the question - and indeed could not even understand the answer should one be vouchsafed us by a benevolent oracle.

p.245 All that is needed for unending progressiveness is the very real phenomenon that in the course of answering old questions we constantly come to pose new ones... We propose to call this phenomenon of the ever-continuing "birth" of new questions the "Kant Proliferation Effect," after Immanuel Kant

p.246 [Immanuel Kant]

every answer given on principles of experience begets a fresh question, which likewise requires its answer