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Progress and Its Problems
Laudan's 1977 landmark that replaced the search for a fixed standard of scientific truth with the operational question of problem-solving effectiveness — the foundational text of the framework this volume applies to AI.
Progress and Its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth was published by the University of California Press in 1977 and established Laudan's reputation as one of the most rigorous philosophers of science of his generation. The book rejected both the positivist picture of cumulative truth-approximation and Kuhn's quasi-sociological account of paradigm shifts, proposing in their place an operational alternative: theories and traditions should be evaluated by their capacity to solve empirical and conceptual problems while minimizing anomalies. The book introduced the concept of research traditions, the distinction between kinds of problems, and the criterion of progress as comparative problem-solving effectiveness. Its framework has been applied across the philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, and — in this volume — the philosophy of the AI transition.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book was written against the backdrop of a philosophical crisis. Kuhn's 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions had undermined the positivist account of