There is no hint of the contemporary use of the political in our use of this term. Nor do we refer to progress. There may be some marginal elements of these concepts in the mix, but we refer rather to the process, that is the method by which we progress.
We progress when we build on that which has gone before. The method or methods by which we do this well, we can call progressive, as in: > We can describe something as progressive when it is in the aid of progress, or movement towards a goal.
Metamagical Themas and other nomic quests.
The goal itself may not be required, though it often helps. Pure experimentation, or play, without an explicit or concrete purpose, can certainly be progressive as evidenced in retrospect.
Our progressive method is at it's core life-like. As such it embodies an evolutionary practice recursively to its core.
As such we can view a diverse competing set of methods each seeking to be as progressive as possible, where nothing whether it be the assessment of success, or any of the rules of the game are fixed. This game of life after all is surely nomic.
# In retrospect
We may have failed, or we may have succeeded. In either case our method may have been progressive. So while me may iterate, and judge the success of our iterative methodologies recursively, no individual occurrence should give us pause.
# See also - Progressive Software - http://progressive.earth