 |
| By Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science - Professor Imre Lakatos, c1960sUploaded by Fæ, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15336126 |
From the Logical Positivists to Kuhn
What differentiates science from pseudoscience? The logical positivists believe that scientific theories need to be objectively grounded in facts based on abstract reasoning or experimental confirmation. Popper argues against this notion of confirmation: since there can always be future instances which disconfirms a theory, the criterion of confirmation can never be fully satisfied. In addition, he thinks that confirmations only count if they are the “results of risky predictions,”[2] where, if not for the theory, events incompatible with the theory would have been expected. Instead, the theory makes a bold prediction of events previously “undreamt of.”[3]
He proposes a better criterion of demarcation: what makes a theory scientific is its falsifiability, where one specifies in advance a “crucial experiment (or observation) which can falsify it.”[4] However, Lakatos observes that falsification is not what scientists do. When scientists encounter observations that cannot be explained by their theories, they do not discard them. Instead, they attempt to explain the anomalies or ignore them, considering them aberrations and not refutations.
Kuhn holds neither view. For him, science operates within paradigms. A paradigm is characterised by a set of fundamental theoretical assumptions which go unquestioned by the scientific community, leading to general agreement on how research should proceed, since there is a “constellation of shared assumptions, beliefs, and values” [5] which unites them. Kuhn terms such research “normal science,” where scientists work within the prevailing paradigm. When anomalies occur, scientists operating in “normal science” are likely to believe they have made an error rather than question the veracity of the paradigm. However, over time, anomalies accumulate, leading to a growing “sense of crisis”[6] in the paradigm, finally culminating in a breakdown in confidence. This marks the start of a period of “revolutionary science” where alternative theories are proposed with the best one leading to a radical new paradigm. While Kuhn thinks revolution happens suddenly, he acknowledges that the switchover by all to the new paradigm is not instantaneous. It might take a generation, when the scientists sticking to the older paradigm die out or convert, allowing those who adhere to the new paradigm to become dominant.
Lakatos’s Rationalisation of Kuhn
Kuhn’s account of scientific development requires “an irrational change in commitment,”[7] which is puzzling to many who view science as a rational enterprise. To remedy this, Lakatos presents his “methodology of scientific RPs.”[8] A RP consists of a hard core of laws protected by a more flexible belt of auxiliary hypotheses. All RP have unsolved problems and anomalies, even from the start. Hence, the Popperian falsifiability distinction is not what makes a theory scientific, since all theories will then be “born refuted.”[9] Lakatos does however sympathise with Popper’s idea of risky predictions. He writes: “In a progressive RP, theory leads to the discovery of hitherto unknown novel facts. In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts.”[10] Like Kuhn, Lakatos thinks that scientific revolution accounts for how science develops. However, the details differ. For Lakatos, given two rival RPs in which one is degenerating while the other is progressing, scientists will tend towards the progressive one. Contrary to Kuhn, Lakatos observes from history that scientific revolutions are neither sudden nor irrational. Instead they are gradual with progressive RP replacing degenerating ones, an example being Lavoisier’s theory of combustion replacing phlogiston theory. According to Ladyman, phlogiston theorists did not simply die out but “converted almost unanimously.”[11]
Lakatos’s theory rationalises Kuhn’s. According to Okasha, Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolution has two supporting arguments: incommensurability and theory-ladenness. Competing paradigms might be so different from one another that there is no “common language into which both can be translated,”[12] making them incommensurable. Hence, there is no way to determine which is better since scientists working in different paradigms have no common language to even make the comparison. Related to this incommensurability is theory-ladenness. Experimental data depends on the theory it arises from; there is no theory-neutral data. This is because perception is conditioned by background beliefs such as the theory, with observations described in the language of the theory.[13] An example is the valency of elements. Based on the ‘planetary model of atoms’ paradigm, a scientist will observe that elements combine in chemical reactions based on their respective valencies. However, scientists using the quantum mechanics paradigm will explain it in a completely different way, using the vocabulary of quanta and energy levels. Both describe the same phenomena in different theoretical languages, with each description depending on the respective theory. Since competing paradigms are incommensurable with their data dependent on their respective paradigms, the only way one can switch between competing paradigms is by a revolutionary shift akin to a “religious conversion.”[14]
These two characteristics of incommensurability and theory-ladenness are powerful supports for Kuhn’s account of why science develops through scientific revolution. Lakatos’s methodology retains these two characteristics since he abides by Kuhn’s notion of scientific revolution, but yet do not require a sudden irrational leap of faith to transition between paradigms or RPs. Instead, this transition is a more rational, albeit gradual, switching to the ‘winning team’ of the more progressive RP, and a gradual hollowing out and ultimate abandonment of the degenerating RP.
Conclusion
Contrary to the common intuition that the scientific enterprise is rational, Kuhn’s account requires an irrational leap of faith. Lakatos rationalises Kuhn’s idea with his methodology of RP, which explains the transition between competing paradigms from a degenerative to a progressive RP. In that way, Lakatos improves on Kuhn’s concept of scientific revolution, while retaining the emphasis Kuhn places on the history of science and sociological factors in determining how science develops.
Bibliography
Ladyman, James. “Structural Realism Versus Standard Scientific Realism: The Case of Phlogiston and Dephlogisticated Air.” Synthese 180, no. 2 (2011): 87–101.
Lakatos, Imre. “Science and Pseudoscience.” In Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Okasha, Samir. Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge, 1963.
[1] Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 74.
[2] Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge, 1963), 266.
[3] Imre Lakatos, “Science and Pseudoscience,” in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 24.
[4] Ibid., 22–23.
[5] Okasha, Short Intro., 75.
[6] Ibid., 76.
[7] Lakatos, “Science and Pseudoscience,” 23.
[8] Ibid., 23.
[9] Ibid., 24.
[10] Ibid., 25.
[11] James Ladyman, “Structural Realism Versus Standard Scientific Realism: The Case of Phlogiston and Dephlogisticated Air,” Synthese 180, no. 2 (2011): 91–92.
[12] Okasha, Short Intro., 79.
[13] Ibid., 82.
[14] Lakatos, “Science and Pseudoscience,” 23.
No comments:
Post a Comment