Progress and Its Problems
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 AI Story
The book was written against the backdrop of a philosophical crisis. Kuhn's 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions had undermined the positivist account of science without providing an adequate successor. Feyerabend had pushed Kuhn's argument toward explicit epistemological anarchism. The philosophy of science seemed to face a choice between defending a fixed standard that the history of science did not support and abandoning standards altogether. Laudan's intervention carved a third path.
The problem-solving model offered a way to evaluate competing traditions without requiring access to a neutral standard outside them. Traditions could be compared by the number and importance of the problems they solved, the number and severity of the anomalies they generated, and the trajectory of their development — whether they were expanding to address new problems or contracting to exclude them. The evaluation was comparative, empirical, and never final, but it was not arbitrary.
The book's most consequential move was the distinction between empirical problems (questions about the world that theories try to explain) and conceptual problems (tensions within theoretical frameworks that cannot be resolved by additional data). This distinction enabled Laudan to evaluate traditions on dimensions that purely empirical approaches missed. A tradition could be empirically successful and conceptually incoherent, and when it was, the incoherence would eventually produce empirical failures the tradition could not accommodate.
The framework has since been applied in contexts Laudan did not anticipate. Philosophers of technology have used it to evaluate competing design traditions. Policy analysts have used it to evaluate competing regulatory approaches. And this volume applies it to the most contested intellectual transition of the present moment — the competition between frameworks for understanding what AI is doing to human work, meaning, and capability.
Origin
The book emerged from a decade of Laudan's work on scientific change, building on his earlier papers at the University of Pittsburgh. Its arguments were refined through seminars with historians of science and sharpened by engagement with Kuhn, Feyerabend, Popper, and Lakatos. The 1977 publication established the research program Laudan would extend in Science and Values (1984) and Beyond Positivism and Relativism (1996).
Key Ideas
The problem is the unit. The solved problem, not the confirmed theory, is the basic unit of scientific progress.
Conceptual problems matter. Internal coherence is not a luxury. A conceptually incoherent tradition generates empirical failures eventually.
Progress is comparative. No absolute measure exists. Traditions are evaluated against their competitors.
Anomalies are diagnostic. The anomalies a tradition generates reveal more about its long-term viability than the successes it celebrates.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth (University of California Press, 1977).
- Larry Laudan, Beyond Positivism and Relativism (Westview, 1996).
- Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science (Oxford, 1993).
- Larry Laudan, Science and Values (University of California Press, 1984).