Epistemology: An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge

12. Scientific Progress

209 Chapter 12 Scientific Progress SYNOPSIS • The development of inquiry in natural science is best understood on the analogy of exploration—to be sure, not in the geographical mode but rather exploration in nature’s parametric space of such physical quantities as temperature , pressure, and field strength. • The technology-mediated exploration that comes into play here involves interactions between man and nature that become increasingly difficult (and expensive) as we move ever farther away from the home base of the accustomed environment of our evolutionary heritage. • The course of scientific progress accordingly involves a technological escalation —an ascent to successively higher levels of technological sophistication that is unavoidably required for the production of duly informative observational data. • Scientific inquiry seeks to develop a harmoniously systematized coordination of theorizing conjecture with the determinable data. However, this attempt at data/theory equilibriation repeatedly sustains the destabilizing shocks of ongoingly enlarged experience. Our technologically mediated entry into new regions of parameter space confronts us with this task in ever-renewed forms. • In theory, the prospect of such ongoing “scientific revolutions” is potentially unending. And there is certainly no warrant for a theory of convergence that sees the innovations of theorizing science as being of constantly diminishing scope; with discoveries in natural science, later does not mean lesser. However, the increasing cost of further progress is a portentous consideration . • We may indeed stand at the center of our cognitive realm but we do not stand at the center of the cognitive world. • For the advancement of cognitive progress means that we must see the science of the future as being not just different but better. THE EXPLORATION MODEL OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY A theoretical prospect of unending scientific progress lies before us. But its practical realization is something else again. One of the most striking and important facts about scientific research is that the ongoing resolution of significant new questions faces increasingly high demands for the generation and cognitive exploitation of data. And in developing natural science, we humans began by exploring the world in our own locality, and not just our spatial neighborhood but—more far-reachingly—our parametric neighborhood in the space of physical variable such as temperature, pressure, and electric charge. Near the “home base” of the state of things in our accustomed natural environment, we can operate with relative ease and freedom—thanks to the evolutionary attunement of our sensory and cognitive apparatus—in scanning nature with the unassisted senses for data regarding its modes of operation. But in due course we accomplish everything that can be managed by these straightforward means. To do more, we have to extend our probes into nature more deeply, deploying increasing technical sophistication to achieve more and more demanding levels of interactive capability. We have to move ever further away from our evolutionary home base in nature toward increasingly remote observational frontiers. From the egocentric standpoint of our local region of parameter space, we journey ever more distantly outward to explore nature’s various parametric dimensions in the search for cognitively significant phenomena. The appropriate picture is not, of course, one of geographical exploration but rather of the physical exploration—and subsequent theoretical systematization— of phenomena distributed over the parametric space of the physical quantities spreading out all about us.This approach in terms of exploration provides a conception of scientific research as a prospecting search for the new phenomena demanded by significant new scientific findings. As the range of telescopes, the energy of particle accelerators, the effectiveness of low-temperature instrumentation , the potency of pressurization equipment, the power of vacuum-creating contrivances, and the accuracy of measurement apparatus increases—that is, as our capacity to move about in the parametric space of the physical world is enhanced —new phenomena come into view. After the major findings accessible via the data of a given level of technological sophistication have been achieved, further major findings become realizable only when one ascends to the next level of sophistication in data-relevant technology. Thus the key to the great progress of 210 Cognitive Progress contemporary physics lies in the enormous strides which an ever more sophisticated scientific technology has made possible through enlarging the observational and experimental basis of our theoretical knowledge of natural processes.1 In cultivating scientific inquiry, we scan nature for interesting phenomena and grope about for the explanatorily useful regularities they may suggest. As a fundamentally inductive process, scientific theorizing calls for...