editor, Administrators
2,020
edits
Changes
no edit summary
|Brief=a Hungarian-born philosopher of science who greatly contributed to the problem of demarcation and theory choice in science
|Summary=A protege of [[Karl Popper]], Lakatos attempted to respond to problems posed by the work of Popper and [[Thomas Kuhn|Kuhn]].[[CiteRef::Musgrave and Pigden (2016)]][[CiteRef::Chalmers (2013)]] His [[Lakatos (1970)|''Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes'']] (MSRP) offers a holistic approach to theory choice which extends beyond Popper's falsificationism. It assesses a particular research program as progressive or degenerative, depending on its overall record of predictive and explanatory successes and failures. Lakatos later entered into a correspondence with [[Paul Feyerabend]], with the goal of addressing Feyerabend’s objections to the MSRP. He met an untimely death due to a heart attack at the age of 51. Some of Feyerabend’s objections remain challenging to this day.
|Historical Context=Much of Lakatos's work was a response to the problems of [[Karl Popper]]’s '''falsificationism''', and was expressed in a series of publications between 1935 and the early 1970's. Lakatos rejected the idea that a false prediction was alone grounds for rejecting a theory. Most theories, he pointed out, are born in an “ocean of anomalies” and are therefore falsified from the moment of their inception. For example, Copernican heliocentric astronomy predicts that the stars should change in apparent position as the Earth revolves around the sun, but for three centuries after Copernicus proposed his theory, all attempts to detect this stellar parallax failed. Astronomers nevertheless accepted the theory on other grounds. The failure of Newtonian mechanics to account for the motions of the planet Mercury was known for many decades, during which the theory also wasn't rejected.[[CiteRef::Musgrave and Pigden (2016)]] A well known criticism of falsificationism, the [[Pierre Duhem|Duhem]]-Quine thesis,[[CiteRef::Stanford (2016)]][[CiteRef::Duhem (1962)]][[CiteRef::Quine (1951)]] which Lakatos championed, was that the failure of a prediction could be due to a problem anywhere in the network of theories and auxiliary assumptions responsible for that prediction. Lakatos thus argued that Popper's theory was overly restrictive and inconsistent with much of scientific practice. In scientific practice, Lakatos observed that if a theory is the best available of its kind, it is typically allowed to undergo modifications to account for all data and not rejected.
Lakatos also responded to Thomas Kuhn’s ''Structure of Scientific Revolutions'', published in 1962.[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962a)]] He was troubled by Kuhn's '''incommensurability thesis''', which asserts that theories with different taxonomies cannot be rationally compared. Lakatos accused Kuhn of depicting the process of scientific change as completely irrational. If there truly existed a problem of incommensurability in science, then there would be no method to demarcate between science and pseudoscience, and no way of measuring scientific progress.[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1978a)]] At the same time, Lakatos and Kuhn's views of science have important points in common. Both rejected the positivist, inductivist accounts of science popular in the early twentieth century, and both emphasized the importance of theory over observation. Both agreed that any theory of how science works must make sense of the actual history of science.[[CiteRef::Chalmers (2013)|pp. 103-114]]
|Major Contributions==== Lakatos on Theory Choice ===
Following the Duhem-Quine thesis, Lakatos recognized that scientific theories could not be appraised individually. Rather, all of the theoretical assumptions bearing on an experimental finding had to be assessed holistically, as parts of what he called a '''research program'''.[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1970)|pp. 31-55]] While Kuhn supposed that, in a mature scientific discipline, only one paradigm generally existed at a time, Lakatos argued that it was generally the case that more than one research program existed in a field at any given time, and that large-scale processes of scientific change should be understood as competition between research programs.[[CiteRef::Godfrey-Smith (2003)|pp. 102-121]] Within a research program, not all theoretical assumptions are treated equally. The indispensable central theoretical assumptions of a research program are its '''hard core'''. Any modification of the hard core constitutes the abandonment of the research program and the creation of a new one. [[CiteRef::Chalmers (2013)|pp. 103-114]][[CiteRef::Lakatos (1970)|pp. 31-55]]