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Role of Methodology in Scientific Change (view source)
Revision as of 23:29, 11 March 2018
, 23:29, 11 March 2018no edit summary
|Question=What role do '''methodologies''' play in scientific change? Are methodologies capable of affecting employed methods?
|Topic Type=Descriptive
|Description=TODO: DescriptionThe explicitly prescribed requirements for theory acceptance are often different than the implicit requirements of theory acceptance within any given scientific community. It is currently accepted that the implicit expectations can change the explicit requirements. However, the question of whether methodologies can affect the implicit methods employed by a given scientific community is unsettled. [[Methodology Can Shape Method theorem (Barseghyan-2015)]] states that a methodology can influence employed methods, if its requirements implement abstract requirements of some other employed method. This raises the questions what is the role of methodologies in facilitating scientific change and can methodologies affect employed methods?
|Parent Topic=Mechanism of Scientific Change
|Authors List=Hakob Barseghyan,
|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.
