History of Science As A Model of Scientific Progress
Another model of Scientific Progress, as put forward by Richard Boyd, and others, is History of Science as a model of scientific progress. In short, methods in science are produced which are used to produce scientific theories, which then are used to produce more methods, which are then used to produce more theories and so on.
Note that this does not conflict with a continuous or discontinuous model of scientific progress. This model supports realism in that scientists are always working within the same universe; their theories must be referring to real objects, because they create theories that refer to actual objects that are used later in methods to produce new theories.
A good example supporting realism is the case of the electron. It is hard to prove the existence of an electron because it is so small. However, any microscopist will tell you that he knows an electron exists, because he uses it in his electron microscope.
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Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, science, model, scientific and/or progress:
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)