 The thesis that science is progressive is an overall claim about scientific activities. It does not imply that each particular step in science has in fact been progressive: individual scientists make mistakes, and even the scientific community is fallible in its collective judgments. For this reason, we should not propose such a definition that the thesis about the progressive nature of science becomes a tautology or an analytic truth. This undesirable consequence follows if we define truth as the limit of scientific inquiry (this is sometimes called the consensus theory of truth), as then it is a mere tautology that the limit of scientific research is the truth (Laudan 1984a). But this “trivialization of the self-corrective thesis” cannot be attributed to Peirce who realized that truth and the limit of inquiry coincide at best with probability one (Niiniluoto 1980). The notion of truthlikeness allows us to make sense of the claim that science converges towards the truth. But the characterization of progress as increasing truthlikeness, given in Section 3.5, does not presuppose “teleological metaphysics” (Stegmüller 1976), “convergent realism” (Laudan 1984), or “scientific eschatology” (Moulines 2000), as it does not rely on any assumption about the future behavior of science.