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Role of Methodology in Scientific Change (view source)
Revision as of 22:56, 11 March 2018
, 22:56, 11 March 2018no edit summary
|Prehistory=Traditionally, philosophers of science have conflated the roles of methods and methodologies. This conflation can be traced back to [[William Whewell]]’s [[Whewell (1840)|''The Philosophy of Inductive Sciences'']], in which it is proposed that philosophy of science both describes the essence of knowledge and advocates its best methods.[[CiteRef::Whewell (1840)]] [[Thomas Kuhn]]’s conceptions of paradigms and scientific revolutions also possessed both descriptive and normative connotations.[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962a)]] Similarly, [[Imre Lakatos]]’ methodology of scientific research programmes is constructed simultaneously as descriptions of methods of science and methodologies regulating what scientists ought to do.[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1970)]] Many contemporary authors working in the field inherited this view from Kuhn, Lakatos and other classics of the genre.
[[Paul Feyerabend]] for instance gives many examples of how the practice of famous scientists were often at odds with the prescriptions of scientific methodologies that philosophers of science have produced over time. [[CiteRef::Feyerabend (1975a)]] Individual famous scientists were often used in the examples due to the assumption that their practices exemplified the expectations of the actual community.[[CiteRef::Feyerabend (1975a)]] He gives the example of Galileo
[[Larry Laudan]], following Whewell and Herschell before him, clearly distinguishes the explicit prescriptions from the actual expectations scientists have.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1984a)]] According to Laudan, the rhetoric of scientists occasionally diverges from the realities of the empirical sciences.
