Is science progressive?

When something is meant to be progressive, it means that it happens gradually or in

stages (step by step). In overall, science is progressive, as different
technological advances through time have brought new discoveries for the
scientific world. Something to keep in mind about this claim is that this is an
overall claim about scientific activities. It does not, whatsoever, imply that
each step in science has been progressive, since individual scientists make
mistakes and the scientific community is fallible in its collective and union judgments.

What also prevents this statement of being 100 percent true has to do with Popper’s falsifiability.

Falsifiability has to do with the inherent possibility of proving something
false. Popper imposes this idea that what is unfalsifiable is unscientific, and
what is falsifiable is scientific. He believed that the practice of declaring this
unfalsifiabilty to be true. A scientist might prove something to be false
without doing certain experiments, thus, making the claim that science is
progressive false.

However, just like Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolution did, Kuhn challenged the
prevailing view of progress in “normal science”. He believes that the normal
scientific progress is developed through the accumulation of facts and
theories. These discoveries made during revolutions leads to new a paradigm,
which then asks new questions of the old data, coming then to a conclusion. If
you think about it, Kuhn contradicted himself, since these discoveries were
made in a progressive manner. First, through accumulation, scientists find new
discoveries out, then forcing them to ask questions and qualify their data. In other
words, these discoveries do go through a progressive manner, where there are
lots of steps to prove claims.

The book claims that some discoveries were made “unpurposely”, meaning that these were

brought up unintentionally. To some extent, this is true, as we can see in the
solid models in Physics. It created a structure that, in som way, provided a
clear diagram of how electrons moved in a solid. However, it did not prove the
total point. It was only used to make the understanding more clear. Even though
it was made unintentionally, it did occur progressively. Scientists had to
gather enough information in a progressive manner to create this model. If it
was not done progressively, then this structure would not be credible as it now
is.

A classical example that also proves this claim is that natural science has been used to

describe the natural world through the use of scientific methods. Previously,
scientists did not have the adequate technology to prove all claims regarding
natural science. However, they did manage to use their available technology at
that time, and were, limitlessly, able to prove their point. In nowadays,
Physics, Biology, and Chemistry manage to find new scientific scientists, and
these scientists are now able to develop scientific experiments each and every
year to prove their points. In early, years, these same scientists were not
able to perform experiments to totally prove their points.

The final example that proves this claim has to do with a modern controversial issue:
global warming. There has been a discussion whether global warming actually
exists. However, this is not important for the claim. What really matters about
this controversial issue is that the information has been gathered from past
years. With new information being brought up, new discoveries and claims were
made. Thus, showing a progressive manner. In previous years, the claim that
global warming exists was not backed up sufficiently. However, as we can see in
the present moment, there is a lot to prove that global warming actually
exists. Even though it is controversial with huge debates going on, there is
nothing to against that this issue has been growing progressively, and in the
next few years, we can’t predict what types of claims will be made.

In other words, even though the normal scientific progress is viewed by Kuhn to be

non-progressive, it is true that scientific progress is progressive. In the
next few years, we cannot predict what technological advances will be made, and
this is part of the valid statement above.