Change and Progress in Modern Science

Reflections on Change.- I. Historical Dimensions.- The Mechanical Philosophy and Its Problems: Mechanical Explanations, Impenetrability, and Perpetual Motion.- Ghosts in the World Machine: A Taxonomy of Leibnizian Forces.- The Notion of Experimental Physics in Early Eighteenth-Century France.- Some Pragmatic Aspects of the Methodology of Johann Heinrich Lambert.- Classical Wage Theory and the Causal Complications of Explaining Distribution.- Genetic Epistemology in the Context of Evolutionary Epistemology.- II. Conceptual Considerations.- Truthlikeness, Realism, and Progressive Theory-Change.- In Praise of Cumulative Progress.- Kuhn’s Critique of Methodology.- Scientific Discovery and Theory-Confirmation.- Meaning, Acceptance, and Dialectics.- Extraterrestrial Science.