Structural Deficiencies in Current Accounts of Scientific Development

Contemporary philosophy of science provides influential accounts of falsifiability, paradigm change, research programmes, and probabilistic confirmation. However, these frameworks do not supply a unified quantitative representation of structural completeness, nor a general dynamical principle governing theory refinement. Empirical adequacy, explanatory scope, regime coverage, symmetry realization, and multiscale coherence are typically treated as distinct virtues rather than formally integrated dimensions. In addition, ontological modelling and epistemic evaluation are rarely represented within a single structured framework. This paper identifies structural gaps in existing approaches and argues that a general account of scientific development requires (i) a bounded completeness functional defined on structured theory-space, and (ii) a dynamical descent principle governing refinement. We articulate minimal formal requirements for such a representation without presupposing specific physical content, thereby motivating the construction of a quantitative theory of scientific structure.