Changes

Laudan’s early views are best seen through his [[Laudan (1977a)|''Progress and its Problems (1977)'']] where he essentially attempted to explicate the one universal and unchangeable method of science, akin to the previous attempts by Popper, Lakatos, and others. The central tenet of the early-Laudan is the pragmatist idea that scientists prefer theories that solve more problems - empirical or conceptual. Similar to Lakatos, he accepts that scientific theories live and die in an ocean of anomaliesand that there is no such thing as a decisive refutation of a theory by a counterexample. However, he disagrees with Popper and Lakatos on the question of novel predictions. While both Popper and Lakatos argued that a new theory is better than the old theory only if it has confirmed novel predictions (the so-called "excess corroborated empirical content"), Laudan holds that novel predictions are not given any epistemic advantage in the process of theory choice. It According to Laudan, it is not a theory's ability to predict novel phenomena ''per se'' that gets the theory accepted, but its ability to solve more empirical or conceptual problems(one of which can be its ability to predict novel phenomena).[[CiteRef::Laudan (1977a)]]