Epistemologically progressivist and traditionalist analyses of scientific error in Rescher’s Allchin’s and Feyerabend’s philosophies

Abstract

In the modern period, Bacon and Descartes dedicated some time to talk about errors. However, by the end of the last century, and the beginning of the 21st century, the topic did not receive enough attention. Thus, we debate three different authors on error, representing two epistemic views that we are calling progressivist and traditionalist. The first author is Rescher (2007), who we take as a supporter of a more traditionalist approach, with a great contribution to the researches on the topic. The second author, a progressivist, is Allchin. He stresses the need to build a catalog of errors, so we can gradually avoid them. Our third author, Feyerabend, sees errors from this categories: small and comprehensive. Different from Allchin, Feyerabend puts more weight on issues like pluralism and the relation between error and all the theoretical structures of which it is part. Our aim, beyond exploring the views of these authors, is to see how in the 21st century they present different but contributive research on errors, although we hope to convince the reader that some of these views, as how Feyerabend contributes to this subject matter, seems to be in better harmony with science as we see nowadays