Science and Scientific Change - Essay Example

of or Popper, Kuhn, & Lakatos: Science and Scientific Change It is easy todismiss something which one makes no effort to understand. Indeed, the legitimacy of science is one of those, which we often encounter yet never quite thought of questioning. The philosophy of science offers a critique of science and shows us how science might not be as superior as we’ve always thought it to be. Today, it is important that we engage ourselves in such debates, because a lot of people claim that truth is discovered not through theology, philosophy, or art, but rather, through science. Indeed, this is such an extraordinary claim that we cannot help but wonder whether this view is as legitimate as it has always claimed to be. In this paper, I shall focus on Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper’s analysis of science and scientific change. I regard Kuhn’s contribution to the field as one of the most important, not because I think he’s correct, but because it radically changed the way people think about the nature and purpose of science. Before Kuhn, philosophers generally regarded science as a rational and logical enterprise, with strict standards that guaranteed objectivity. What Kuhn shows, in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), is that science, as well as scientific change, is not as rational as we think. Scientists themselves are guided not by a set of objective principles, but by their personal interests and values as much as anything else. Many philosophers and scientists have criticized Kuhn for portraying scientific change as an irrational process, one of them being Imre Lakatos. In this paper, I shall focus on the debate between Kuhn and Popper, as emphasized by Lakatos in his Falsification and The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. I shall divide this paper into four main parts: the first part will discuss Popper’s views on science and scientific change. Part two will be devoted to Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of the irrationality of science and paradigm shifts. The third part will synthesize the Popperian and Kuhnian debate. Here I will introduce Lakatos’ critique against Kuhn. Finally, I shall end my paper with my conclusion regarding the said issue at hand. Karl Popper What is the main difference between scientific theories and non-scientific theories? This is often referred to as the demarcation problem, which asks, what criterion can we use to distinguish scientific claims from non-scientific claims? What demarcates science from non-science? This is Karl Popper’s most renowned contribution. Yet what solution did Popper offer to his said problem? Popper’s solution to the demarcation problem is really quite simple. He says that what distinguishes scientific claims from non-scientific ones is its falsifiability. Thus, a hypothesis is scientific if and only if there is some way in which it can be falsified by means of some experiment. If we cannot construct an experiment, which can potentially falsify a hypothesis, then the hypothesis, even if meaningful, is really not scientific. In line with these two theories that are foundational to Popper’s philosophy, it is clear that Popper views science as a rational enterprise, where theory-change is characterized by scientific progress. According to Popper, science changes through a two-step cycle. Stage one is conjecture, and the second stage is attempted refutation. Under the stage of conjecture, a theory is proposed as an attempt to solve the problem at hand. The theory is then put to test by attempted refutations. Attempted refutation occurs when “the hypothesis is subjected to critical testing, in an attempts to show that it is false” (Godfrey-Smith 61). Moreover, Popper notes that after the hypothesis is refuted, the process repeats again starting from a new conjecture, and so on and so forth. If the theory is corroborated, then it is temporarily accepted as un-refuted, but not justified. What is important to take note of here is that as the process goes on, the scientist tends to propose new conjectures that are related to previous conjectures. Thus, a scientific theory is merely modified and improved through this process of conjecture and refutation, i.e. falsification of the previous conjectures. Popper emphasizes that “we should not make ad hoc moves that merely patch the problems found in earlier conjectures. Instead a scientist should constantly strive to increase the breadth of application of a theory and increase the precision of its predictions” (Godfrey-Smith 61). Thus, in a general perspective, an individual is said to act scientifically, if the individual engages in the process mentioned above. This process in turn, reflects the status and pace of scientific change. So there is an underlying logic of conjecture and falsification inherent in all scientific evaluations. Such evaluations are said to be value-free, independent from the personal biases and opinions of the scientists themselves; it is through this openness that scientific progress thus takes place. This perception of science can be understood as the “accepted view” of science, for most scientists regarded it as correct at that particular period in time, without having to undergo any major refutations and conjectures. Thomas Kuhn calls this “normal science.” In this picture, the structure of science is thought to be a well-organized enterprise. Scientists often agree on which problems are important and which are not, as well as an agreement on the solution that ought to be implemented. However, Kuhn also emphasizes that when a new and bigger conjecture occurs, along with more dramatic refutations, a scientific revolution occurs. In the next section, I shall show Kuhn’s analysis of the irrationality of science and scientific change. Thomas Kuhn In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR), Kuhn tells us that the history of science is a history of changes in paradigms. Kuhn doesn’t define the word “paradigm” in a very clear way, but briefly put, a paradigm is a set of beliefs, definitions, and metaphysical assumptions that work together to help us derive meaning out of certain elements in the world. It is a kind of “lens” that we wear that makes us see things in a particular way. Each paradigm has its own set of rules and standards. When paradigms change, the rules and standards also change. Kuhn shows, by means of several examples through his SSR, that science proceeds normally until a crisis occurs. This crisis occurs when certain features of the world can no longer be explained by the current theory. What happens next is that another paradigm emerges which can explain things a little better, and so this new paradigm replaces the old. Kuhn calls this change of paradigm a revolution, and distinguishes it from normal science. Normal science consists in working our the details of the new paradigm, making modifications here and there, and solving problems that can be dealt with by the new paradigm. Kuhn’s description of revolutionary science as a paradigm shift is important because he uses it as a starting point for criticizing the main tenets of the “received view” of science. In order to understand Kuhn’s contention of the irrationality of science and scientific change, I shall use a comparative analysis of the features of science that occurred before Kuhn to that of the features based on Kuhn’s analysis. First, science was thought to be cumulative. What could be more obvious than the notion that the scientific enterprise consists in the accumulation of facts, or that science has made progress over the centuries? The fact is that – at least in the popular view- we know more today than a hundred years ago than two hundred years ago. Kuhn refers to this notion as incrementalism. According to this view, the latter science is a more correct version of the earlier science. Here, once it has been corrected, science remains correct, i.e. it does not operate backwards. Kuhn makes the claim in his SSR, however, that revolutions in science have been discontinuous. Whenever a new paradigm replaces an old one, the new paradigm carries with it a whole new way of looking at the world. The old paradigm is therefore simply abandoned rather than improved. What results when a new paradigm emerges in the sciences can be compared to a gestalt shift. With gestalt shifts, a whole new way of looking at a phenomenon emerges which ahs little to do with the old way of looking at it. When a new way of looking at things emerges, the words with which phenomenon is described or labeled change their meanings from one paradigm to another. This has also led Kuhn to regard scientific theories from different paradigms as incommensurable. To quote Kuhn, “the normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before” (“The Structure” 103). That is, there is no way by which the terms of one paradigm can be rationally translated to another. There is also no theory-neutral language that can be used to compare theories from different paradigms. To regard the replacement of one paradigm with another as an “improvement” would therefore be misleading. We can strictly speak only of replacement, not improvement. When Kuhn observed the historical development of science carefully, without the biases scientists often have, he came to realize, correctly that one paradigm is chosen over another not on purely rational grounds. Thus, when change occurs, he characterizes it as irrational. We often think, for example, that the choice to adopt Copernicus’ view of the cosmos over the Ptolemaic view represents the triumph of rational consistency over irrationality. However, it seems that it was merely a choice of simplicity over consistency (Kuhn, “Objectivity” 104-105). What was once “scientific” is regarded as a myth when it is replaced by a new paradigm, and a new paradigm adopted by scientists ceases to be regarded as scientific when it is replaced once again by another. For this reason, “If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced be the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge” (Kuhn, “The Structure” 2). This being the case, the notion of a sharp distinction between scientific theories and other kind of beliefs break down. Furthermore, Kuhn also saw that scientific evaluation is not as objective as it seems to be. Kuhn states that “the choices scientists make between competing theories depend not only on shared criteria – those my critics call objective – but also on idiosyncratic factors dependent on individual biography” (“Objectivity” 110). This being the case, we can no longer say that science is value-free and that there is an underlying logic of conjecture and falsification implicit in all scientific theories. As Kuhn puts it, “an apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time” (“The Structure” 4). Kuhn believes, furthermore, that the values scientists uphold, help them to determine which theory is most justified by the evidence. This can be regarded as a rejection of the typical idea of a unified science, since scientists working in different fields develop different sorts of criteria for the judgment of the strength of evidence in support of a theory. Finally, when a paradigm shift occurs, the meanings of the terms used begin to change. This being the case, we cannot accept the notion that scientific terms have objective and precise meanings. We can now see how Kuhn’s exploration of paradigm shifts in his analysis of scientific change, demolished the typical received view of science. This demolishing created a “crisis” in the philosophy of science and motivated others to respond critically to Kuhn. In the next section, I shall focus on the dichotomy between Popper and Kuhn’s philosophy, in the light of Lakatos’ critique. The former maintains that scientific change is a rational process while the latter claims otherwise, that it is irrational. What does Lakatos have to say? Lakatos: Kuhn vs. Popper on Scientific Change Is scientific change irrational, as Kuhn would claim? In this section, I shall give my verdict regarding the debate between Kuhn and Popper on scientific change. But first, given the aforementioned analysis on Popper and Kuhn’s philosophy of science, in what ways are they different when dealing with scientific change? In a paper entitled, Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs, Lakatos explains: For Popper scientific change is rational or at least rationally reconstructible and falls in the realm of the logic of discovery. For Kuhn scientific change – from one paradigm to another – is a mystical conversion which is not and cannot be governed by rules of reason and which falls totally within the realm of the (social) psychology of discovery. Scientific change is a kind of religious change (Lakatos 93). According to Lakatos, scientific change, in Kuhn’s “crisis” is a “psychological concept; it is a contagious panic” (Lakatos 178). Indeed, Lakatos saw Kuhn’s analysis as a threat to the rationality of scientific knowledge. Lakatos claims that Kuhn conceives scientific change as “a matter for mob psychology” (178). He saw the destruction that Kuhn caused, and so he thought to reconstruct scientific change or progress as a “proliferation of rival research programmes and degenerative problem shifts” (Lakatos 179). Herein, where Popper’s conception of scientific change – process of conjecture and refutation – aims at a description of objective scientific progress, Kuhn claims that theory-change in science is fundamentally irrational. Herein, Lakatos attempts to provide a kind of synthesis between Popper and Kuhn by claiming that progress in science occurs when a progressive research programme supersedes another degenerating one. A research programme has two main components: a hardcore and a protective belt. The former is a set of essential and fundamental ideas; the latter is a set of less fundamental ideas, which is responsible for applying the ideas in the hardcore to the physical world. Scientific change within individual research programmes should be progressive and should manifest only within the protective belt. Here, we can see that Lakatos adopts a Popperian perspective when he claims that research programmes ought to be progressive. A progressive research programme is one that succeeds in increasing its predictive power, just as a hypothesis is subject to refutation and new conjectures in Popper’s philosophy. On the other hand, like Kuhn, all research programmes are said to be subject to anomalies. These anomalies, if unresolved, lead to the degeneration of research programmes. However, unlike Kuhn, degenerating research programmes may be recovered in time. Lakatos disagrees with Kuhn’s irrational conception of scientific change. “For many, justificationism represented the only possible form of rationality: the end of justificationism meant the end of rationality” (Lakatos 178). It is in this light that Lakatos attempted to show that Kuhn was wrong in saying that science and theory-change in science is irrational. Conclusion Given the aforementioned analysis, I would say that Kuhn’s analysis is the closest to describing what really is going on in science. I am not prescribing that Kuhn is correct in claiming that scientific change is irrational, but I do believe that where Popper left of, Lakatos only tried to strengthen. Lakatos was afraid of what may happen, given that Kuhn was right in discovering the irrationality going on in science. “For centuries knowledge meant proven knowledge” (Lakatos 91). If our basis for proven knowledge turns out to be unfounded, then the entire scientific tradition breaks down. Therefore, our foregoing discussions have shown that science may not be what we think it is. We need to be willing to subject it to critique just like everything else because it wields so much power. Perhaps our views of science need to be reevaluated. And the best way, I believe, is to think about what Kuhn had to say about it, and to ask whether his views on science and scientific change make sense. Works Cited Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Theory and Reality: An Introduction to The Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Print. Kuhn, Thomas S. "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice." The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. 320-339. Print. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Print. Lakatos, Imre. "Falsification and The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.” Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Eds. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. 91-196. Print. Read More