Does scientific progress need aims?

Abstract While it is uncontroversial that science has been making steady progress, it is controversial what constitutes such progress, among other things, because it is controversial what science’s aims are and what it means for science to have aims in the first place. In this paper, I scrutinize the widespread assumption that scientific progress must be defined in terms of aims. I argue that the notion of progress is not inherently a goal-relative concept. We can define what constitutes progress in science without determining its aims.