Abstract

Historically, those who defend the idea that there is a progress in science have been the ones who defend the view that science is a rational and objective activity. For those who do not think that science is an objective activity it is not meaningful to talk about theoretical and conceptual progress in science. What is meant by a “theoretical and conceptual progress”? If the succeeding theory performs better than the previous theory in explanations and predictions, then we can say that the succeeding theory has made a conceptual progress over the previous theory. In this paper, I argue that to show that science is a rational and objective activity we have to show that theory choice in science is an objective and rational activity. However, showing that theory choice is rational and objective forces us to relativize theory choice to a certain time. This puts scientific progress in front of us as a problem to be explained