Lakatos was a student of popper-1934-logic-of-scientific-discovery and accused Kuhn-1962-structure-of-scientific-revolutions reducing science to mob psychology where the loudest, most energetic, and most numerous voices would prevail, since Kuhn-on-normal-science is based on consensus and had heavy subjective elements.
Lakatos response to Kuhn is to go back to Popper, and bring back the empiricist values and that more rules are needed.
Lakatos also had some interesting views on the Role-of-history-in-Kuhn-account-of-science. Lakatos agreed that historical case studies should be used to assess philosophical views of science, but he also said that we should write “rational reconstructions” of the historical episodes.
Lakatos’ account of science = methodology of scientific research programs
- A healthy scientific field contains several competing research programs
- Scientists in each program defend their views against falsification
- There are good and bad ways to do this
- Programs that always do it badly are eventually abandoned
Lakatos’s idea of “research program” is analogous to Kuhn-on-paradigms with the key difference being that we expect to find more than one research program in a scientific field at any given time, so that the large-scale processes of scientific change should be understood as competition between research programs.
For Lakatos, falsification is still the primary basis like popper-1934-logic-of-scientific-discovery but the focus is falsifying other research programs in order to support your research program. Workers within a research program typically have some commitment to their program; they try to modify their theories to deal with the problem but research programs can still be abandoned like Kuhn.
Features of a research program
- Hard core = set of basic ideas that are essential to the research program
- protective belt = set of less fundamental ideas that are used to apply the hard core to actual phenomena
The detailed, specific version of a scientific theory that can actually be tested will contain ideas from the hard core combined with the ideas from the protective belt.
change within research programs
There is also an evolution basis in Lakatos account. As scientists choose their preferred research program and one research programs become more popular, unpopular research programs die out.
- A ‘progressive’ research program responds to falsification by amending the theory in a way that leads to new discoveries (‘progressive problem-shift’)
- a progressive research program is one that is succeeding in increasing its predictive power
- A ‘degenerating’ research program defends itself in a way that leads to no new discoveries (‘degenerative problem-shift’)
- a degenerating research program is one that does not successfully extend the research program to new cases
- it is falling behind, or only barely keeping up, in its attempt to deal with anomalies
- this is similar to ad hoc hypotheses that Popper was against
For Lakatos,
- changes should only be made to the protective belt, never to the hard core
- changes to the protective belt should be progressive
changes within a scientific field
Each field will have a collection of research programs at any given time, some of which are progressing rapidly, others progressing slowly, and others degenerating.
Lakatos does not choose the most progressive research program, instead for Lakatos, it is acceptable to protect a research program for a while, during when it is degenerating for it might recover. He does say that this decision to stay with a degenerating research program is a high-risk one.
Evaluating Lakatos’ account
| strength | weakness |
|---|---|
| Lakatos believes that there can be more research programs in a field in a given time which is a good shift away from Kuhn-1962-structure-of-scientific-revolutions because it has a wider applicability | Lakatos does not put a proper rule on when should scientists abandon a degenerate research program. Some believe that this makes Lakatos account irrational, but it could also be seen as making science less efficient if scientists choose to stick with degenerating research program, but not irrational |
| Lakatos offers a more competitive account of Kuhn-1962-structure-of-scientific-revolutions i.e. it introduces competition as fuel to science. | Lakatos does not acknowledge that Research programs can progress or degenerate for reasons other than response to falsification (funding, political climate, societal values) |