Changes

===Paul Feyerabend 'On Method' 1975===

===Irme Lakatos 'Methodology of Scientific Research Programs' 1970===

Philosopher [[Imre_Lakatos|Irme Lakatos]], a proponent of the rationality of science and of a fixed scientific method launched a new account of scientific change with his 'Methodology of Scientific Research Programs' in 1970.[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1970)]] Lakatos sought to challenge both Kuhn and Feyerabend. He saw interrelated scientific theories as constituting ''research programs''. Unlike Kuhn, he believed that scientific fields typically host multiple competing research programs and rejected the idea of coherent unitary paradigms. Not all theoretical constituents of a research program were assigned equal importance. The ''hard core'' of a research program consisted of those theoretical claims that were indispensable to it. Adherents to a research program attempt to explain an increasingly wide range of natural phenomena in terms of the core claims. This is the ''positive heuristic'' of the research program. The ''protective belt'' consists of those theoretical assumptions that allowed the application of the hard core to an increasing range of cases. Scientists used their ingenuity to protect the hard core by making alterations to the protective belt so as to protect the core from falsification. The protection of the hard core is a research program's ''negative heuristic''. A ''progressive'' research program is one that makes successful novel predictions. A ''degenerating'' research program is one whose predictions repeatedly fail, and whose protective belt must be altered in an arbitrary, ad hoc fashion to protect the hard core from falsification. Lakatos rejected Kuhn’s distinction between normal and revolutionary science, and supposed that a revolution occurs when scientists simply switch allegiance from a degenerating research program to a progressive one.