Scientific progress in the mind of the theorist

Abstract This paper investigates the writings of Luigi Lodovico Pasinetti (1930-2023) and Geoffrey Colin Harcourt (1931-2021) with the purpose of trying to understand how theorists conceptualise scientific progress and the impact this has on how they do their work. Most of the literature on the progress of science focuses on the process that explains scientific progress in general, as a community phenomenon, and the methodological and ontological underpinnings of this process. In this paper, we focus on a different question: how does the perception of the progress of science influence the way a theorist does their work? We investigate the link between Pasinetti and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions (Pasinetti, 1981, 2007) and contrast it with Harcourt’s (1999) ‘Horses for Courses’ approach that, we contend has similarities with Larry Laudan’s ‘research traditions’ conception. We argue that differences in the conception of the nature of the field and of progress in the discipline lead theorists to start from different ontological frameworks and, essentially, do theory building with different strengths and limitations.