Science, labor and scientific progress

My dissertation introduces a new materialist theory of scientific progress built on a novel characterization of scientific work and an analysis of progress appropriate to it. Two questions, crucial for understanding scientific progress, are answered: a. Why is it possible for scientists at a given time to have more epistemic abilities than scientists at an earlier time? b. How can knowledge acquired in the past be used in on-going or future research? I argue that these questions are best answered by analyzing science as a form of labor. The elements of the labor process, involving both intellectual and material means, provide a starting-point for the systematic study of how scientific abilities evolve. As a unit of analysis, the labor process exposes features of the dynamics of knowledge accumulation that traditional analyses do not. I analyze historical cases from chemistry and the Scientific Revolution, attending carefully to how scientific work is conducted and conceived. First, I argue that scientific progress consists not just in the growth of theoretical or empirical knowledge, as in traditional philosophy of science, but also in the growth of know-how. The tools of science play a crucial role in determining the abilities scientists can and must have to do science. Tools also determine how scientists’ abilities change over time, by enabling, but also constraining, the incorporation of knowledge into the labor process. I argue that an extremely important mechanism of progress in science consists of a feedback loop between the production of new knowledge and instrument construction. This process requires the integration, and transformation into material form, of different kinds of knowledge. As the process is repeated over the long term, scientific work is transformed because it becomes less dependent on native human epistemic abilities. Second, the evolution of scientific abilities depends on ambient ideological conditions: Social attitudes towards different kinds of work are critical, as are notions about the proper object of science. What results is a picture of scientific change involving the interactions of different kinds of knowledge and in which internal and external factors, as well as instrumental rationality, play a significant role.