-> A discussion of other types of philosophical accounts of science developed in interaction with, or in response to Kuhn
Research program: similar to a paradigm in Kuhn’s borad sense, with a key difference: there can be more than one research program in a scientific field at any given time.
Large-scale processes of scientific change should be understood as a competition between research programs.
-> Larry Laudan worked out a superior version of Lakatos’s idea.
-> Paul Feyerabend argued for epistemological anarchism in which rules of method and normal scientific behavior should be replaced by an ‘anything goes’ attitude.
-> Lakatos aligned his views with Popper’s, and hated Kuhn’s. His aim was to ‘rescue the rationality of science from Kuhn’s damage.’
He viewed Kuhn as destructive of reason and dangerous to society because Kuhn presented scientific change as a fundamentally disordered, irrational and chaotic process determined by ‘mob mentality’.
Historical case studies should be used to assess philosophical views of science
We should write ‘rational reconstructions’ of those historical episodes to make scientists’ decisions look as rational as possible
We should then separately (a.k.a. in footnotes) point out places where rational reconstruction has misrepresented what happened in the past
WTF is wrong with Lakatos?! You can’t try to reconstruct history to make it perfectly rational while misrepresenting it e_e
-> Difference between research program vs paradigm: there’s usually more than one research program per scientific field at a given time.
Research program: A historical entity that evolves over time, which contains a sequence of related theories.
Competition between research programs is essential to rationality and progress
They should persist for awhile despite empirical anomalies
So a complete theory of scientific change in Lakatos’s view must consider 2 types of change:
Change within individual research programs
Change at the level of the collection of research programs within a scientific field
Hard Core
A set of basic ideas that are essential to the research program
Protective Belt
A set of less fundamental ideas that are used to apply the hard core to actual phenomena.
Example 1: Newtonian Research Program of 1700’s
Hard Core
Three laws of motion + gravitational law
Protective Belt
Contains detailed ideas about matter, a view about the structure of the universe, and mathematical tools to link hard core to real phenomena
Example 2: Darwinian Research Program of 1800’s
Hard Core
Different biological species are linked by descent and form a family tree
Protective Belt
Detailed ideas about which species are closely related to which
Ideas about inheritance, variation, competition, and natural selection
Ideas about distribution of organisms around the earth
-> He saw the sequence of theories within a research program as being linked by logic, with each successive theory having a broader application than its predecessor.
Both Lakatos and Kuhn agreed that all research programs/paradigms are faced with anomalies a.k.a. unsolved empirical problems, at any time.
Changes should only be made to the protective belt
Changes to that belt should be progressive
Progressive Program: Constantly expanding its application to a larger and larger set of cases, or striving for more precise treatment of the cases it presently covers. It’s succeeding in increasing its predictive power.
Degenerative Program: Changes made only serve to cover existing problems and don’t extend the research program to new cases. It’s falling behind or only barely keeping up in attempting to deal with anomalies.
So a progressive research program fends of refutation and extends to cover new phenomena. So in Lakatos’s view, you can measure how quickly a research program is progressing.
Each field will have a collection of research programs asynchronously progressing rapidly, progressing slowly, and/or degenerating.
It’s acceptable to protect a research program for awhile during a period of degeneration because it might recover, even if another program has overtaken it. Lakatos called this ‘high risk.’
Lakatos undermined himself here because he didn’t develop any way/rule to handle decisions for when a rational scientist should give up on one research program and switch to another.
Kuhn: Trusts science left in the hands of implicit shared values a.k.a. the shared standards implicit in paradigms and ability of science to find a way after crises
Lakatos: Wants to have the whole enterprise guided by methodological rules.
-> Example of a research program: Evolutionary psychology, neutral theory of molecular evolution (random processes instead of natural selection)
-> Example of a paradigm: Synthetic theory in biology
Popper conceded that theories shouldn’t be discarded at first rebuttal, but should be shielded to see if they can overcome their problems at first. He said that Kuhnian normal science sometimes occurs, but it’s uncommon, and a bad thing worth discouragement.
-> Research traditions instead of research programs
Theories grouped within research traditions are more loosely related than in research programs.
Ideas can move more freely in and out of the hard core.
It’s okay of successive theories don’t cover broader ground, or retreat
Theories can break away from one research tradition and join another
Eg. Sadi Carnot’s theory of thermodynamics developed in a research tradition that saw heat as a fluid (caloric), but transitioned into a research tradition that views heat as the motion of matter
Two attitudes to research traditions and theories, opposing just ‘belief’:
Acceptance
Close to belief – to accept something is to treat it as true
Pursuit
Deciding to work with and explore an idea for a reason other than having confidence in its truth
You can pursue a theory that you don’t accept.
* It’s rational to pursue the research tradition with the highest rate of progress in problem-solving power. But this doesn’t necessitate acceptance of the basic ideas of that research tradition
* Acceptability of theories and ideas should be measured by their current overall level of problem-solving power, not by their rate of change.
You can approach it by looking at individual choices, which is selfish
You can approach it by asking which distribution of people across rival research programs is best for science?
-> Paul Feyerabend argued for epistemological anarchism
opposed all systems of rules and constraints in science
opportunism and creativity
Like Kuhn, he thought rival scientific theories are linguistically incommensurable.
Observations in science are tainted by theoretical assumptions, so they can’t be neutral
Feyerabend was a troll in the sense that he disclaimed his views by saying he was essentially playing devil’s advocate – not abiding by what he wrote. He used reason to destabilize it.
-> Science is an aspect of human creativity & imagination.
He was similar in this respect to Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic assessment of ideas – as long as they’re beautiful, they’re worthwhile, regardless of immorality or blasphemy or any other societal judgements.
While others found too much disorder and chaos in Kuhn’s propositions, Feyerabend found too much of an emphasis on order – too much incitement towards order-taking within normal science.
~Why did Feyerabend think this? He thought Kuhn’s view was a deliberate rhetorical device which encouraged appreciation for:~
Professionalization
Narrow-mindedness
Exclusion of unorthodox ideas
Why did Feyerabend care that Kuhn’s mindset encouraged a lack of concern for moral consequences if he’s advocating for ‘anything goes’ similar to Oscar Wilde?
Feyerabend was ultimately against the modern scientific establishment because it turned a field of formerly creative investigators into a field of order-taking investigators.
-> Because a principle or rule may go wrong, we should ignore it, if Galileo is anything to go by, because traditional philosophy would have never gotten us to Galilean conclusions.
If empiricism in philosophy ‘has any teeth’, then it entails people in the 1600’s had good reason to resist Galileo and believe the earth isn’t moving.
Galileo thought Copernicus and others like him had, “through sheer force of intellect done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience plainly showed them to be the contrary.”
Galileo had to create a different kind of observational description of the world. Science had to break through the constraints of an outdated worldview that had permeated even the most basic observational description.
To Feyerabend, science is a matter of challenging rather than following the lessons of observation.
The basic empiricist principle that ‘science is great because it’s responsive to observational data’ would have pointed people in the 1600’s away from the scientific theory we now know to be true -> a.k.a in the wrong direction.
“Hence it is advisable to let one’s inclinations go against reason in any circumstances, for science may profit from it.”
Paul Feyerabend
The mere possibility that a rule may fail proves little.
Out of all the aforementioned views on scientific change, Laudan’s comes closest to still holding against Feyerabend’s argument about the history of philosophy.
Principle of Tenacity
We should give attractive theories a chance to develop their potential, even if they have problems at first.
Principle of Proliferation
We should make new theories and propose new ideas.
Kuhn thought a proliferation of ideas should only occur during a crisis
Feyerabend said he was following in the steps of John Stuart Mill:
Mill argued that society benefits from a diversity of ideas and ways of life, which collectively create a ‘marketplace of ideas’.
Unusual sources of ideas from ‘the ramblings of madmen’ served as inputs into this marketplace
He argued that we can only see the limitations of our perspective when we step outside it.
Progress begins when we adopt an external perspective on ideas we usually assume uncritically.
This is why alternative theories, even if they have massive problems, are valuable – because they provide an external vantage point.
-> A rule or mechanism for rejecting or eliminating ideas
If science is supposed to guide us in solving practical problems, then Feyerabend’s doctrine falls apart because it lacks a mechanism of selection in science, and a mechanism for the rejection of some ideas.
Proliferation is part of science, but so is selection among alternatives.
-> Should we see scientific change as involving two levels in science, with different types of change occurring at each?
Changes made within the boundaries provided by a general framework
Changes at the level of the frameworks themselves?
^ Kuhn, Carnap, Lakatos, Laudan, and Friedman
The alternative is to give a unified account w/ no qualitative distinction made between two levels, layers, or kinds of change.
^ Quine, Feyerabend, Popper (though technically, he rejected the idea of frameworks as constraining thought and knowledge)
Kuhn’s argument that there are two processes of change deals with the history of specific episodes in science – it’s backed up by them.
Quine argued that al changes made to a belief system regardless of size involve the same kind of holistic change within the web of belief. So we accommodate experience by making as few changes as possible and keeping our worldview as simple as possible.
Quine’s most powerful argument that we can’t mark a distinction between changes within and changes between frameworks in a way that’s scientific and doesn’t beg the question doesn’t actually deal with the history of specific episodes in science.
Immanuel Kant was the first to develop a detailed view in which an abstract conceptual framework acts to guide empirical investigation.
The basic framework (‘conceptual scheme’) that we apply to the world is fixed, universal, and inescapable across all normal humans.
-> Popper called it the ‘myth of the framework’.
-> Feyerabend insisted that imaginative people can resist and overcome the bounds of a framework.
-> Fundamental change in experimental traditions occurs non-simultaneously (asynchronously?) with fundamental change in theory.
This is because experimental traditions, theoretical traditions, and instrumental traditions within a given scientific field are aspects of large-scale science that are somewhat autonomous.
Different kinds of frameworks have different roles – a.k.a. Kant’s universal conceptual framework ≠ Laudan’s research traditions.
Is there a difference between two-process views that see people as modifying frameworks and those that see people as jumping between them?