PERSON
Larry Laudan
The philosopher of science who replaced the search for a fixed standard of scientific truth with the operational question of which framework actually solves more problems—and whose tools for evaluating competing research traditions are the most rigorous instruments available for assessing the AI transition.
Larry Laudan (1941–2022) spent his career dismantling the two most comfortable responses to the problem of scientific rationality. The comfortable assumption—that there exists a fixed, paradigm-independent standard for evaluating scientific theories—was untenable; Thomas Kuhn had shown that convincingly. But Kuhn’s alternative—that paradigm shifts are fundamentally arational, driven by generational change and social pressure rather than evidence—was equally untenable, because it could not explain why science so manifestly works. Bridges stay up. Vaccines prevent disease. Rockets reach the moon. Laudan’s solution was characteristically operational: abandon the search for a fixed standard, abandon the conclusion that no standard exists, and instead evaluate competing frameworks by what they actually do—solve problems. His 1977
Progress and Its Problems replaced “true” with “progressive”, replacing the question “Which theory is correct?” with “Which tradition solves more of the problems we actually face while generating fewer anomalies?” The evaluation is comparative, empirical, auditable, and revisable—and it applies with unsettling precision