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The contemporary scientific progress debate in philosophy of science and empirical evidence on Knowledge That versus Knowledge How in scientific practice

Mizrahi, Moti (2025) The contemporary scientific progress debate in philosophy of science and empirical evidence on Knowledge That versus Knowledge How in scientific practice. [Preprint]

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Abstract

In his comprehensive survey of the contemporary debate over scientific progress in philosophy of science, Rowbottom observes that philosophers of science have mostly relied on interpretations of historical cases from the history of science and intuitions elicited by hypothetical cases as evidence for or against philosophical accounts of scientific progress. Only a few have tried to introduce empirical evidence into this debate, whereas most others have resisted the introduction of empirical evidence by claiming that doing so would reduce the debate to empirical studies of science. In this paper, I set out to show how empirical evidence can be introduced into the scientific progress debate. I conduct a corpus-based, quantitative study whose results suggest that there is a positive linear relationship between knowledge that talk and knowledge how talk in scientific articles. These results are contrary to Niiniluoto’s view according to which there is a clear distinction between scientific progress and technological progress such that knowledge that belongs to the former, whereas knowledge how belongs to the latter.


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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Mizrahi, Motimotimizra@gmail.com
Keywords: Darrell Rowbottom; Empirical evidence; Know how; Knowledge that; Metaphilosophy of science; Scientific progress
Subjects: General Issues > Data
General Issues > Evidence
General Issues > History of Science Case Studies
General Issues > Philosophers of Science
General Issues > Theory Change
General Issues > Thought Experiments
Depositing User: Dr. Moti Mizrahi
Date Deposited: 15 Jun 2025 13:23
Last Modified: 15 Jun 2025 13:23
Item ID: 25701
Official URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44204-0...
DOI or Unique Handle: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-025-00294-8
Subjects: General Issues > Data
General Issues > Evidence
General Issues > History of Science Case Studies
General Issues > Philosophers of Science
General Issues > Theory Change
General Issues > Thought Experiments
Date: 11 June 2025
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/25701

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