Scientific progress is the idea that scientific knowledge accumulates and refines through either the application of a scientific method, or some more haphazard heuristic.

Origins of the concept

Early pre-scientific technological and religious traditions did not concern themselves with gaining knowledge in any systematic way, and thus the concept of scientific progress would have been largely alien to them. Such traditions in general having enough on their hands just passing already gained thoughts and practises faithfully along to the next generation.

Even if some esoteric traditions may have involved themselves with a rudimentary experimental method as the nucleus of their initiation, they did not overtly separate exploration from instruction.

Some classical Greeks like Hippocrates did systematically (although privately) gather evidence, but as a concept incremental increase of knowledge is first formulated in connexion with the science of warfare.

General problem of definition

The problem of defining what scientific progress is, and where it stems from consists in the paradox that any such evaluation will have the current scientific knowledge as a given reference point, and thus anything which can be shown to have led to it, even if circuitously, will be deemed "progress".

Attitudes towards scientific progress