Bird’s Knowing Science: on cases of scientific progress

Abstract

In his recent book Knowing Science, Alexander Bird argues that scientific progress is to be understood in terms of the accumulation of knowledge (CK). To this end, he employs the method of conceptual analysis; i.e., he considers several (actual or hypothetical) cases and argues that CK does the best job in capturing our intuitions concerning the applicability of the concept ‘scientific progress’. In this review, I argue that the cases which Bird considers are not fully adequate for the sake at hand, because they describe progress towards science rather than progress within science (which I take the concept of scientific progress to be all about).