Study On Larry Laudan’s View Of Scientific Progress

"Science is in progress". It seems to be a common sense that needs no proof. However,this apparently simple proposition has bothered several generations of philosophers of science and even become one of the most widely problems in the field of philosophy of science in the20th century. As one of the representatives of the New Historicist School, Larry Laudan, the philosopher of science, forms his own scientific progress idea after absorbing the relevant thoughts of Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and other peoples and also treating these thoughts as basis. He puts forward the scientific progress mode with solving problems as its core. He thinks that there is not much relationship between the scientific progress and its confirmatory or perjury. But it is with great relationship to the validity of theoretical solving problems. He even creatively use the view of the historical evolution for the first time in his book "progress and its problems" to describe the scientific progress view of one and only thought. This thought tries to persist the principle of the rationality, progress, comparability, and the integrity in the science and also overcome the proposition with its non-rationality, anti-progress, anti-comparability, unicity in the traditional scientific progress mode. And then, he further proposes the network mode regarding to the rationality of the scientific progress. Through the comparative study with contemporary scientific progress view we can find that laudan’s thought not only for traditional scientific progress view put forward the solutions to the road, as well as the research direction of contemporary philosophy of science has opened up a new research field.