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Role of Methodology in Scientific Change (view source)
Revision as of 20:54, 11 March 2018
, 20:54, 11 March 2018no edit summary
Most philosophers of science have conflated the role of method, which is the actual expectations of the scientific community, with the role of explicit methodology which are the explicitly stated prescriptions.
[[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. Individual famous scientists were often used in the examples due to the assumption that their practices exemplified the expectations of the actual community.
[[Larry Laudan]], following Whewell and Herschell before him, clearly distinguishes the explicit prescriptions from the actual expectations scientists have. According to Laudan, the rhetoric of scientists occasionally diverges from the realities of the empirical sciences.
Furthermore, Laudan argues that his reticulated model is able to account for scientific change due to its piecemeal approach. According to this reticulated model, scientific changes can occur in theoretical level, methodological level and the axiological level with the latter being concerned with changes in the goal of the science. When there is a dispute, scientists use the other levels for resolution. Laudan believes that when scientists realize that their explicit requirements are in tension with the actual practices, scientists will change their explicit requirements. He gives the example of the transition from the empirical-inductivist methodology to the hypothetico-deductive model. Empirical-inductivist method was incompatible with the existence of unobservable entities. However, physicists in the 19th century has accepted the existence of numerous unobservable entities such as natural selection and gravitational force. As a result, the community changed their explicit methodology. Therefore, Laudan believes that while differences between the implicit requirements and explicitly prescribed requirements are possible but given time, the latter will harmonize with the former.
