WORK
Science and Values
Laudan's 1984 book developing the reticulated model of scientific rationality and demonstrating that aims, methods, and theories evolve together — one of the most influential books in the post-Kuhnian philosophy of science.
Science and Values: The Aims of Science and Their Role in Scientific Debate was published by the University of California Press in 1984. The book extended the framework of Progress and Its Problems by addressing a question the earlier work had left open: how do the aims of inquiry themselves evolve? Positivists had assumed aims were fixed; Kuhnians had suggested that aims changed with paradigms in ways that made inter-paradigmatic evaluation impossible. Laudan proposed a third option: aims, methods, and theories form a reticulated web in which each level constrains the others and each can be modified through coordinated revision of the whole. The book established the philosophical framework within which Laudan's subsequent work operated, and provided the resources this volume extends into the AI discourse.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book responded to critics who had argued that Progress and Its Problems assumed but did not defend the criteria by which problem-solving effectiveness itself was judged.