Lakatos’s Philosophy of Science



Lakatos’s Philosophy of Science

Lakatos vs. Kuhn:

Lakatos Kuhn

Scientific change is Scientific change is sporadic

orderly and gradual. and revolutionary.

Scientific progress is Scientific progress depends on

cumulative. revolutions in science.

Scientific change can be Scientific change must be

explained largely as a explained partly in

rational process. psychological and sociological

terms.

Theories as Structures: Clues from the History of Science—

• The history of science reveals that theories start as rather vague, imprecise, and somewhat incoherent ideas and only gradually become clear, precise, and coherent.

• Scientific concepts (e.g., force, mass, heat) acquire precise meanings only by being parts of coherently structured theories.

• Scientific theories grow and develop by being open-ended and having “research programs”—structures that contain advice and suggestions about how they should be developed and extended.

Lakatos’s Notion of a “Research Program”: Pertinent Concepts—

1. hard core—consists of very general hypotheses that give the research program its essential characteristics. (e.g., the thesis in Copernican astronomy that the planets orbit the sun)

2. protective belt—consists of auxiliary assumptions, assumptions underlying the description of the initial conditions, and observation statements that, although part of the research program, can be changed or augmented without abandoning the program itself. (e.g., assumptions about the relative accuracy of telescopic observations of the planets and naked-eye observations of the planets)

3. negative heuristic—the stipulation that the hard core of the program not be abandoned or modified.

4. positive heuristic—consists of “rough guidelines” for changing or augmenting the protective belt.” (e.g., guidelines about how to move from applying Newton’s laws of motion to idealized “point masses” to applying them to more realistic objects)

Lakatos’s Views about Scientific Method:

1. Additions and modifications to the protective belt must not be ad hoc—i.e., they must be independently testable.

2. No changes in the hard core are permitted.

3. There are no rules for choosing which additions or modifications to the protective belt to make. Ingenuity is encouraged.

Evaluating Research Programs: 2 Criteria—

1. A program should be sufficiently coherent that it maps out a definite program for future research.

2. A program should lead to the discovery of new phenomena at least occasionally.

Assessing the Relative Merits of Competing Research Programs:

• A research program is progressive to the degree to which it leads to the discovery of new phenomena.

• A research program is degenerating to the degree to which it fails to the discovery of new phenomena.

• In general, research program A is preferable to competing research program B if either A is more progressive than B or is degenerating less than B.

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