"The preceding pages have carried my schematic description of scientific development as far as it can go in this essay. Nevertheless, they cannot quite provide a conclusion. If this description has at all caught the essential structure of a science's continuing evolution, it will simultaneously have posed a special problem: Why should the enterprise sketched above move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not? Why is progress a perquisite reserved almost exclusively for activities we call science? The most usual answers to that question have been denied in the body of this essay. We must conclude it by asking what substitutes can be found."
Page 162:
"Viewed from within any single community, however, whether of scientists or of non-scientists, the result of successful creative work is progress."
163:
"These doubts about progress arise, however, in the sciences too. Throughout the pre-paradigm period when there is a multiplicity of competing schools, evidence of progress, except within schools, is very hard to find."
"part of the answer to the problem of progress lies simply in the eye of the beholder."
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He also manages to compare scientists to characters form 1984, and claim that we choose which fields to call science based on which ones appear to make progress, so science seems to achieve progress in part through a selection effect.
So, he takes it for granted that we don't make progress in a variety of fields. He attacks scientific progress as subjective -- a matter of biased points of view. He has doubts about progress in general which extend to science. Part of the answer, he says, is that science doesn't actually make progress. And, he says, the last 12 chapters denied the common sense views on why and how science makes progress, and he hopes to come up with a substitute, but he isn't even trying very hard (because he doesn't really believe in progress very much, in general).
OK, I read some Kuhn for you. shudder. Someone go read Fabric of Reality now :) It is full of good explanations.
Thanks a lot for the citation tracking. From the passages you quote, maybe he does deny progress in some sense, so you were right... Still, his position seems at least defensible, and anyway, that topic wasn't central to the theme of the book.
I thought that the book was very interesting for the perspective it cast on discoveries in the physical sciences. The description of the state of confusion preceding paradigms, the establishment of paradigm, and so forth, that was a nice way of looking at it.
And here's Kuhn denying there is such thing as progress short of finding an ultimate, final, perfect truth:
There is another step, or kind of step, which many philosophers of science wish to take and which I refuse. They wish, that is, to compare theories as representations of nature, as statements about 'what is really out there'. Granting that neither theory of a historical pair is true, they nonetheless seek a sense in which the latter is a better approximation to the truth. I believe nothing of that sort can be found. On the other hand, I no longer feel that anything is lost, least of all the ability to explain scientific progress, by taking this position.
How is the book mistaken? Did you read it? Can you condense what you think is wrong?
I don't think he denies scientific progress. He addressed that point in the post-scriptum, if I remember correctly.