Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, editor, Interface administrators, Administrators (Semantic MediaWiki), Curators (Semantic MediaWiki), Suppressors, Administrators, Widget editors
11,019
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
|Authors List=Hakob Barseghyan,
|Formulated Year=2015
|Prehistory=Although almost all of the great philosophers of science of the 20th century have described the history of science in terms of a changing, systematic collection of beliefs, there has never been a real consensus in the language used to describe such a collection. [[Thomas Kuhn]] used the word ''paradigm'' to talk of integrated collections of theories, methods, and values that were replaced during episodes of revolutionary scientific change.[[CiteRef::Bird (2011)]][[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962)]][[Imre Lakatos]] described a set of propositions as fitting into a scientific “research programme”;[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1978a)]]; [[Larry Laudan]] used the concept of ''research tradition''.[[CiteRef::Matheson and Dallmann (2015)]][[CiteRef::Laudan (1984)]] Richard DeWitt talks of “worldviews” to describe the beliefs held by a scientific community at any given time.[[CiteRef::DeWitt (2010)|p. 7]]
Although these terms are used to describe collections of scientific beliefs at some particular point in history, it would be wrong to assume that they are interchangeable. There has been much debate within the philosophy of science over what constitutes the exact contents of a given community’s system of beliefs. While for [[Karl Popper]] and [[Imre Lakatos]] a belief system would only include descriptive propositions, for the later Larry Laudan, methods and values should be included along with theories as part of the fabric of a community’s belief system.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1984)|p. 26]] According to Kuhn, all theories within a given paradigm use a certain “taxonomy” unique to that paradigm. Thus, beliefs held by a community holding paradigm A can never be fully understood by the community believing paradigm B, because both paradigms operate under at least partially untranslatable languages.[[CiteRef::Bird (2011)]]
