Scientific Progress

Featuring the Gestalt Model and the Perspectivist conception of science, this book is unusual in its non-relativistic development of the idea that successive scientific theories are logically incommensurable. This edition includes four new appendices in which the central ideas of the book are applied to subatomic physics, the distinction between laws and theories, the relation between absolute and relative conceptions of space, and the environmental issue of sustainable development. This book gives a complete overview of how the different views of scientific progress have developed since the time of the Vienna Circle. It is an introduction to a complex period in contemporary theory of knowledge. In later chapters the author presents his own standpoint, so that the work can also be used as a source of new impulses in this direction. He works out how from his point of view it is possible to explain the conflict beteen two theories as an incompatibility of perspectives, and at the same time avoid sliding into relativism by giving criteria for scientific progress.