Theoretical progress means gaining new expressive capacities, not approaching truth

Evidence

HALL: I think your criticism is quite right; it does have a sort of narrative of progress smuggled into it. I don’t think I meant theoretical gains in that way but it may be that I did, and that it was part of the unconsciousness of what I was saying, that I meant more than I said, or said more than I meant. What I meant by theoretical gains was that the next kind of work that you feel able to do is done in a profoundly different way because you’ve had to wrestle with a new set of what I call conundra. You move within a different set of positions and with a set of conceptual insights which have emerged through what I metaphorically called struggling with the angels. I don’t know if that new work has any built-in guarantee that it’s better than the work you did before, quite often it’s not. I’m trying to represent the movement of theory, not from theorist to theorist or problematic to problematic, but from problem to … I don’t want to say solution because as soon as you get something which resolves a particular theoretical problem, you have instantly to recognize what it doesn’t do. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 268

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘theoretical gains’ as acquiring new expressive capacity rather than advancing toward superior truth.
• DEEPTHINKING: A mature account of intellectual change that resists both whig narratives of progress and pure relativism — theory as movement from problem to unresolved problem.