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Scope of Scientonomy - Explicit and Implicit (view source)
Revision as of 22:42, 11 March 2018
, 22:42, 11 March 2018no edit summary
[[Thomas Kuhn]] was more ambiguous on the issue. He rejected the existence of a universal method and believed that different paradigms employed different methods.[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962a)]] However, his view can be read as change in methodology as well. After a paradigm shift occurs, scientists change their explicitly stated methodology in the new textbooks. Thus, it is not clear what his view is on this issue.
[[Paul Feyerabend]] was skeptical about the existence of a universal method. His argument was that every normative philosophical theories we possess contradict the actual practice of scientists.[[CiteRef::Feyerabend (1975a)]] Put in different terms, his view is that there is a sharp distinction between the methodologies which scientists prescribe and the methods which they actually employ during various episodes of scientific change. As a result, he believed that there were many methods scientists actually employed during their practices and there was no universally employed method.[[CiteRef::Feyerabend (1975a)]] He gave the example of Galileo who, along with his supporters, was concerned with experimental confirmations while his community required a new theory to be intuitively true or follow from the first principles.[[CiteRef::Feyerabend (1975a)]] The example shows that normative methodologies philosophers come up with are unable to capture the practices of at least one important group. Therefore, Feyerabend, believed that philosophers should give greater weight to the implicit methods scientists employed rather the explicit methodologies.[[CiteRef::Feyerabend (1975a)]]
[[Larry Laudan]] believed that there was a disconnection between what scientists believed they were doing and what they were actually doing.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1984a)]] The former refers to the explicit statements of scientists on how their science should be conducted. These requirements were different in various periods. Laudan gives the example of the transition from the inductivist methodology to the hypothetico-deductive methodology.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1984a)]] Inductivism forbids positing the existence of unobservable entities. However, scientists in the 19th Century were positing the existence of many unobservable entities including atoms and the force of gravity. Laudan subsequently argues that we should focus on the actual expectations of the scientific community rather than the explicit expectations scientists say they possess.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1984a)]]
