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Mechanism of Theory Acceptance (view source)
Revision as of 05:37, 2 March 2017
, 05:37, 2 March 2017no edit summary
|Prehistory=This question has been one of the central questions of the classic philosophy of science. It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that no philosopher of science could bypass this issue.
Initially, philosophy held a static conception of science. [[Immanuel Kant]] [[Kant_(1781)#_SCITEa80372857ad2020366e6129a3f86ebdc|believed]] that the axioms of Newtonian Mechanics were a priori synthetic propositions. Philosophy believed in a static conception of science because no scientific revolution had been experienced since the advent of modern science. While Scientonomy recognizes the transition from the Aristotilian-Medieval method to the Newtonian world view as a scientific revolution, this was not the case historically. [[CiteRef::Kant (1781)]]
The scientific revolutions in the early twentieth century caused philosophers of science to being asking the question of how science accepts its theories. The first answer was given by [[Karl Popper]] in his [[Popper_(1959)#_SCITEac2da6e3e07142716bdf470b23e6d6b0|''Logic of Scientific Discovery'']]. Popper believed old theories replaced by new theories when an old theory is falsified and a new theory is accepted in its place. This occurs in a crucial experiment that successfully tests a bold conjecture made by the new theory.
The importance of novel predictions in theory acceptance was also stressed by [[Imre Lakatos]]. However, he believed that theories are not necessarily falsified by bad predictions. Rather, a theory's fate depends on its place in the research program. The more central a theory is to its research program, the more it can be saved by modifying auxiliary hypotheses.
