Do We Need a Scientific Revolution?

Many see modern science as having serious defects, intellectual, social, moral. Few see this as having anything to do with the philosophy of science. I argue that many diverse ills of modern science are a consequence of the fact that the scientific community has long accepted, and sought to implement, a bad philosophy of science, which I call standard empiricism. This holds that the basic intellectual aim is truth, the basic method being impartial assessment of claims to knowledge with respect to evidence. Standard empiricism is, however, untenable. Furthermore, the attempt to put it into scientific practice has many damaging consequences for science. The scientific community urgently needs to bring about a revolution in both the conception of science, and science itself. It needs to be acknowledged that the actual aims of science make metaphysical, value and political assumptions and are, as a result, deeply problematic. Science needs to try to improve its aims and methods as it proceeds. Standard empiricism needs to be rejected, and the more rigorous philosophy of science of aim-oriented empiricism needs to be adopted and explicitly implemented in scientific practice instead. The outcome would be the emergence of a new kind of science, of greater value in both intellectual and humanitarian terms.

💡 Research Summary

In this paper Nicholas Maxwell argues that the contemporary practice of science is fundamentally compromised by its adherence to what he calls “standard empiricism” (SE). SE holds that the sole intellectual aim of science is the acquisition of truth and that the only legitimate methodological principle is the impartial assessment of claims against evidence. Maxwell shows that, despite this professed neutrality, physics (and by extension other sciences) implicitly assumes that the universe is fundamentally unified. Scientists routinely reject empirically more successful but “disunified” rival theories—so‑called patchwork or ad‑hoc constructions—because they violate a hidden metaphysical thesis that all disunified theories are false. This hidden assumption directly contradicts SE’s claim that no permanent thesis about the world may be accepted independent of evidence, rendering SE logically untenable.

To make the problem explicit, Maxwell offers a precise definition of theoretical unity: a theory is unified when the same dynamical laws apply uniformly across all possible phenomena to which the theory is meant to refer. A theory that posits different laws for different domains (different ranges of space‑time, mass, velocity, etc.) is disunified, and the degree of disunity can be quantified (N = 1 for full unity, N > 1 for increasing fragmentation). He further distinguishes several kinds of disunity, showing that the mere reformulation of a theory does not affect its unity status.

Recognizing that the implicit unity assumption is both substantial and problematic, Maxwell proposes a new philosophical framework: Aim‑Oriented Empiricism (AOE). AOE replaces the single, fixed aim of SE with a hierarchy of aims and associated methodological rules. At the top of the hierarchy sits a nearly certain thesis: the universe is such that some knowledge of our local circumstances is possible. Descending the hierarchy, assumptions become increasingly specific and thus increasingly likely to be false: (5) the universe is comprehensible in some way; (4) it is physically comprehensible, i.e., a true “theory of everything” would be unified; (3) it is physically comprehensible in a particular form (e.g., corpuscular, field, string); (2) the current best fundamental theories (the Standard Model and General Relativity); (1) the body of empirical data. Each level is linked to a methodological rule that requires acceptance of the lower‑level thesis insofar as it is compatible with the higher‑level one and best promotes empirically successful theories at level 2.

AOE thus makes explicit the “positive feedback” loop that Maxwell believes is a hallmark of genuine scientific progress: as knowledge grows, the methods for acquiring knowledge are themselves refined. Under SE, methods are fixed; under AOE, methods evolve in tandem with theory because the hierarchy of assumptions is continuously critiqued and revised. This self‑corrective capacity, Maxwell argues, solves three classic problems in the philosophy of science that SE cannot: (1) the problem of defining theoretical unity; (2) the problem of verisimilitude—how to say science progresses from one false theory to another; and (3) the problem of induction.

Beyond methodological rigor, Maxwell contends that SE’s denial of any role for values, politics, or humanitarian aims in science is both false and damaging. In practice, research priorities, funding decisions, publication criteria, education, and public engagement are all value‑laden. By making the metaphysical and value assumptions explicit, AOE allows the scientific community to assess and improve them, thereby aligning scientific practice more closely with broader human welfare.

In sum, Maxwell calls for a scientific revolution: the abandonment of standard empiricism and the adoption of aim‑oriented empiricism, with its hierarchical structure of aims and methods. Such a shift would render science more rigorous, self‑critical, and socially responsible, fostering a new kind of science that delivers greater intellectual and humanitarian value.