| Middle of last century was the period of rapid development of science and technology, and the new scientific theory and the natural discipline emerged unceasingly, so correctly understanding the scientific development pattern became an important research topic. In the meantime, naturalism, pragmatism, logical positivism converged in the United States, the various philosophical thought about science whiles away here. Ernest ? Nagel is the philosopher of science who synthesized three thought essences, melted them into his own naturalism thought of linguistic environment, and proposed the concept of science development based on reductionism.Nagel believes that the aim of science is to use scientific theory to explain the external world systematically, explanation power and range is the first value for the advancement of science. Therefore, highly unified ultimate scientific theory which is able to explain everything is the ultimate goal of scientific research. The new theory was developed with the analogy method generally; this is using metaphor expressions, as the familiar model to explain the unfamiliar. This means that scientific theories are close relations between each other. This kind of relation may indicate through certain logical rule, and used for highly relevant theoretical incorporated into a theoretical system, this set of rules is reductive law. Only through the reduction method to make an effective combination of scientific theory, science will eventually move forward to the unity of the theory. Thus, Nagel's theory of scientific progress with a logical, linear, continuous, accumulation characteristics, reductionism is his core ideas of the theory of scientific progress.In ontology, Nagel was a materialist, he thought that nature is continuous and diverse, scientific theory as the explanation of nature should also be continuous. In epistemology, Nagel is the instrumentalism and realism well distributed, he positively emphasizes the scientific theory is practical, on the other hand, he affirmed that theory's general concept in the different domain is attributing the objective reality inevitably. In methodology, Nagel advocated the analogy method, the criticized induction method, limited deduction method, stressed that validity of logic is closely linked with the use of context. It can be said that Nagel's ontology is the premise, the epistemology is the foundation, but the methodology is the means, which are consistent with their reductionist philosophy. Science progress theory of Nagel as well as the reductionism have had the important influence in the subsequent philosophy. Firstly, he demonstrated the logic of scientific theories is successful foundational work of structural theoretical concept of Kuhn and Lakatos. Secondly, his scientific unified thought of classic reductionism has caused widespread argument in science and philosophy and is still the research hotspot in philosophy of science. Although the problem of scientific progress presented research changes in historicism of science and sociology of science in recent years, but facing the rapid development of science and technology nowadays, science progress theory of Nagel still has important theoretical and practical significance. |
