The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes

by Imre Lakatos

Book Overview

Imre Lakatos' philosophical and scientific papers are published here in two volumes. Volume I brings together his very influential but scattered papers on the philosophy of the physical sciences, and includes one important unpublished essay on the effect of Newton's scientific achievement. Volume II presents his work on the philosophy of mathematics (much of it unpublished), together with some critical essays on contemporary philosophers of science...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521280311
• ISBN13: 9780521280310
• Release Date: November 1980
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Popper redux, and then some

"Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes." "A series of theories is theoretically progressive ... if each new theory has some excess empirical content over its predecessor, that is, if it predicts some novel, hitherto unexpected fact. ... [It] is also empirically progressive ... if some of this excess empirical content is also corroborated, that is, if each new theory leads to the discovery of some new fact. Finally, let us call a problemshift progressive if it is both theoretically and empirically progressive, and degenerating if it is not." (pp. 33-34). "Justificationists valued 'confirming' instances of a theory; naive falsificationists stressed the 'refuting' instances; for the methodological falsificationist [i.e. Lakatos] it is the---rather rare---corroborating instances of the excess information which are the crucial ones ... We are no longer interested in the thousands of trivial verifying instances nor in the hundreds of readily available anomalies." (p. 36). One implication is that it may be perfectly rational to work on a theory even if it rests on false assumptions. "Indeed, some of the most important research programmes in the history of science were grafted on to older programmes with which they were blatantly inconsistent." (p. 56). In quantum mechanics, for example, "the decision to go ahead with temporarily inconsistent foundations was taken by Einstein in 1905, but even he wavered in 1913, when Bohr forged forward again" (p. 59). Similarly, "Cartesian push-mechanics" was "inconsistent with Newton's theory of gravitation," but "Newton worked both on his positive heuristic (successfully) and on a reductionist programme (unsuccessfully), and disapproved both of Cartesians who, like Huyghens, thought that it was not worth wasting time on an 'unintelligible' programme and of some of his rash disciples who, like Cotes, thought that the inconsistency presented no problem" (p. 59). Another consequence is that "The history of science has been and should be a history of competing research programmes ..., but it has not been and must not become a succession of periods of normal science: the sooner competition starts, the better for progress. 'Theoretical pluralism' is better than 'theoretical monism'" (p. 69). I think Lakatos makes too much of the Popper/Kuhn dichotomy. Lakatos points out again and again that he "followed, and tried to improve, Popperian tradition" (p. 95), and has copious quotations and precise footnotes pointing to Popper. By contrast, Kuhn's theory is brusquely misrepresented without proper referencing; e.g. "there is no particular rational cause for the appearance of a Kuhnian 'crisis' ... 'Crisis' is a psychological concept; it is a contagious panic" (p. 90), for which there is no reference other than an inconspicuous "Kuhn [1970]" elsewhere on the page. This is all the more unfortunate since "Popper never abandoned his earlier (naive) falsification rules. He has demanded, until this day,