Summary
The historical studies which have been carried out and are being carried out with the help of the methodology of research programmes define two types of relation between research programmes and the evidence. Let me call these types type A and type L respectively. They examine episodes where one research programme R″ replaces another research programme, R′ (or fails to be replaced by it), i.e. R′ is made the basis of research, argument, metaphysical speculation by the great majority of competent scientists. The authors find that the relation of R″ to the evidence is usually of type L while that of R′ to the evidence is of type A (other circumstances being present when this is not the case). Assuming their historical analysis to be correct this is an interesting sociological law. The authors do not present their results in such terms, however. Making A and L part of a normative methodology they claims to have shown that the acceptance of R″ was rational while the continued defence of R′ would have been irrational, and they express this belief of theirs by calling research programmes exhibiting relation L to the evidence progressive while research programmes which stand in relation A to the evidence are called degenerating. They also claim that such judgements are objective, independent of the whims and subjective convictions of the thinkers who make them. Using such a normative interpretation of their sociological results they also claim to possess arguments for and against well known research programmes. For example, they would say that today most versions of environmentalism degenerate and that it is irrational to continue working on them. Fortunately this puritanical superstructure of the otherwise excellent sociological studies need not be taken seriously. The reason is that the superstructure is arbitrary, or ‘subjective’ in at least five different ways. (1) the basic philosophy behind the normative apprisals makes modern science the source of the standards without giving reasons for the choice; (2) despite all its praise for modern science the methodology of research programmes uses a streamlined version of it without (a) making the principles of streamlining explicit and without (b) arguing for them; (3) the standards that are obtained via the arbitrary steps (1) and (2) are not strong enough to praise any action as ‘rational’ or condemn it as ‘irrational’ which means that such judgements are without support from the arbitrarily selected standards; (4) in some of the studies research programmes are selected in an idiosyncratic manner, the purpose being to make the general philosophy appear true (not that such truth would be of much use — see (3)); (5) the attempt to show that competent scientists always acted ‘rationally’ is not applied to all scientists but only to those whose actions seem to fit into the general methodology (for ‘seem’ see again item (3)). The superstructure of rationality which is subjective in the five ways just enumerated is supposed to guide scientists while the case studies are to show that the guide has substance — he is not merely a philosopher indulging in abstract dreams of law and order. The alleged substantiality is moonshine and one can reject the standards just as arbitrarily as they have been introduced. In sum: in the case studies we have (a) the discussion of certain sociological regularities; (b) the proposal of arbitrary standards which have no practical force; (c) the insinuation that the regularities are not merely factual, but are features of rationality, that they lend support to the standards and are justified by them, (a) may be accepted with the caution we extend to any new ‘discovery’ in sociology, (c) must be rejected (and with it the tendentious terminology used in all the case studies), (b) may be accepted, or rejected, depending on mood, the weather etc. Environmentalists, however, may continue on their path, for no argument has been raised against their enterprise.
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Notes
Cf. Against Method, London 1975, Chapter 4 and the literature given there.
Ostrander and Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain, Prentice Hall, 1970, as well as the literature in Thelma Moss’ contribution to E. D. Mitchell (ed.), Psychic Exploration, A Challenge for Science, New York 1974.
Cf. the immense literature on traditional medicine in China as well as my brief account in Chapter 4 of Against Method, London 1975.
Cf. the reports and literature in E. D. Mitchell op. cit.
According to Nelson Goodman ‘A World of Individuals’ quoted from Benacerraf and Putnam(eds.), Philosophy of Mathematics, Prentice Hall, 1964, p. 207, the inventions of the scientists “become raw material for the philosopher whose task is to make sense of all this… in understandable terms”. Considering that logicians are only rarely capable of following scientists on their flights of fancy this would indeed seem to be ‘the task’ of ‘the philosopher’ — only Goodman is not that modest. If he does not comprehend a thing, then the thing uncomprehended is intrinsically obscure and must be ‘clarified’, i.e. it must be translated into a language which he understands (pidgin logic, in most cases). If he understands a language, then the language is intrinsically clear and must be spoken by everyone. This is also how the demand for reconstruction arises. Logicians cannot make sense of science — but they can make sense of logic and so they stipulate that science must be presented in terms of their favourite logical system. This would be excellent comedy material were it not the case that by now almost everyone has started taking the logicians seriously.
It is surprising to realise how difficult it is to see science in perspective. Carl Sagan, surely one of the most imaginative scientists alive warns us not to unduly restrict the possibilities of life, and he mentions various types of ‘chauvinism’ (oxygen-chauvinism: if a planet has no oxygen, then it is uninhabitable; temperature chauvinism: low temperatures such as those on Jupiter and high temperatures such as those on Venus make life impossible; carbon chauvinism: all biological systems are constructed of carbon compounds) which he regards as unwarranted (The Cosmic Connection, New York 1975, Ch. 6). He writes (page 179): “It is not a question of whether we are emotionally prepared in the long run to confront a message from the stars. It is whether we can develop a sense that beings with quite different evolutionary histories, beings who may look far different from us, even ‘monstrous’ may, nevertheless, be worthy of friendship and reverence, brotherhood and trust”. Still, in discussing the question whether the message on the plaque of Pioneer 10 will be comprehensible to extraterrestrial beings he says that “it is written in the only language we share with the recipients: science” (18; cf. p. 217: messages to extraterrestrial beings “will be based upon commonalities between the transmitting and the receiving civilization. Those commonalities are, of course, not any spoken or written language or any common, instinctual encoding in our genetic materials, but rather what we truly share in common — the universe around us, science and mathematics.”) In times of stress this belief in science and its temporary results may become a veritable maniac-making people disregard their lives for what they think to be the truth. Cf. Medvedev’s account of the Lysenko case.
Workshop No. 1 — Position Paper. Criteria of Scientific Progress, A Critical Rationalist View, pp. 2/21f.
Critical Rationalists take great care to show that prima facie disreputable procedures in science, when looked at in detail, turn out to be quite acceptable (cf. Zahar on the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction, or Worrall on the fate of Young’s version of the wave theory). They also know that there are good scientists and bad scientists and that the procedures of the former are not discredited by the errors of the latter: no one would abandon science because it contains complementarity. The attitude towards Marxism, or astrology, or other traditional heresies is very different. Here the most superficial examination and the most shoddy arguments are deemed sufficient. Worral uses some Marxist interpretations of events in Hungary to discredit the whole approach but without saying what the interpretations are, who has put them forth, and where they can be found. Popper (Open Societys, Vol. ii, 187ff) mentions the hypothesis of colonial exploitation as a perfect example of an ad hoc hypothesis although it is accompanied by a wealth of novel predictions (the arrival and structure of monopolies being one of them). And whoever has read Rosa Luxemburg’s reply to Bernstein’s criticism of Marx or Trotsky’s account of why the Russian Revolution took place in a backward county (cf. also Lenin ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’, Collected Works, Vol. 19, pp. 99ff) will see that Marxists are pretty close to what Lakatos would like any upstanding rationalist to do, though there is absolutely no need for them to accept his rules. After all, all he can say in favour of these rules is that the elite of some enterprise he loves sometimes sticks to the rules (see below).
‘History of Science and its Rational Reconstruction’, p. 111.
ibid., p. 117.
p. 117.
p. 111.
p. 117f.
p. 112.
Leon Rosenfeld in Observation and Interpretation, London 1957, p. 44.
“Is it not… hybris to try to impose some a priori philosophy of science on the most advanced sciences?… I think it is.” p. 121.
p. 121.
p. 121.
p. 121.
p. 122.
p. 111.
p. 122.
p. 121.
p. 111.
p. 1/3.
Lakatos, p. 111.
This possibility of choosing a methodology on the basis of cosmological considerations shows that there can be different types of science: given fairly clear species with not too many disturbances we may decide to remain naive falsificationists and absorb the exceptions by methods such as monster barring, or various means of adaptation, but we may also decide to use basic laws for the explanation of all events and so becomes research programmists. Aristotle made the first decision, Galileo as seen by some thinkers made the second. Cf. Kurt Lewin’s most interesting essay ‘Aristotelische und Galileische Betrachtungsweise in Biologie und Physik’, Erkenntnis, vol. ii. Thus the idea that there can be only one science — one physics, one biology, one chemistry — which is found even among socalled dialectical materialists (Cf. Zhores A. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, New York and London 1969, pp. 133, 247) is again but a result of insufficient analysis.
Lakatos, p. 121.
p. 121.
p. 100.
p. 105; cf. also ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’ in Lakatos and Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge 1970, pp. 116ff.
p. 104.
‘Falsification’, p. 164.
John Worrall writes (p. 2/29, footnote 3 of the position paper already mentioned): “A scientist would be pronounced ‘irrational’ (or rather mistaken) by the methodology of research programmes if he stuck to the old programme denying that the new programme had any merits not shared by the old one and thus denying that his own programme needed improvement in order to catch up with the new one. It is in such circumstances that we shall begin to suspect the operation of extra-rational motives”. The arguments in the last section, in the text above, and in note 38 show that it is rather this judgement of Worrall’s which makes us “suspect the operation of extra-rational motives” where by “extrarational” we mean motives either not in accordance with the standards, or not dictated by them. Assume, I have a research programme which degenerates and I am told so by a research programmist. My reply might well be that I am interested in certainty and not in novelty and that I prefer a programme that can incorporate newly found facts without revision to a programme that constantly upsets basic convictions. When being told that this means I am not being “scientific” I can reply that the excellence of science is still a matter of debate, that it is assumed by my opponent (though discarded by him when it goes counter to his own pet ideology — see above) that it is not supported by argument (nor is there any argument to show that non-scientific ideologies are worse than science in addition to being different from it; of course, there is a general belief that this is so, and this belief may even be quite reasonable but what I am now talking about is the ability of the methodology of research programmes to give a reason for the belief). Adopting the point of view of science I can add that degeneration when taken seriously may be followed by bigger progress than progress and that progress may lead away from the truth. Or is a scientist supposed to be satisfied with temporary spectacles only? Is it enough for him to impress everyone by first predicting, and then discovering, a new planet (Neptune, e.g.) without any implications for the quality of future research? And, finally, one might comment on the futility of a point of view where a thief can steal as much as he wants, is praised as an honest man by the police and by the common folk alike provided he tells everyone that he is a thief. If that is the sense in which the methodology of research programmes differs from anarchism (Worrall, p. 2/30, footnote 1 of the position paper), then I am ready to become a research programmist. For who does not prefer being praised to being criticised if all he has to do is to describe his actions in the lingo of a particular school?
‘Method or Madness? — Can The Methodology of research programmes be rescued from epistemological anarchism?’ this volume.
Lakatos, p. 105.
Using the psychological hold which the baptismal confession had over the members of the early Christian Church and taking the non-Gnostic interpretation “as its selfevident content” (A. Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. ii, New York 1961, p. 26) Irenaeus succeeded in defeating the Gnostic heresy. Using the psychological hold which common sense has over philosophers of science and taking the conservative interpretation of his standards as its self evident content, Lakatos has almost succeeded in convincing us of the rationality of his own law-and-order philosophy and the non-ornamental character of his standards: now as before the best propagandists are found in the Church, and in conservative politics.
Lakatos, p. 118.
p. 118.
p. 120.
‘Falsification’, p. 178 — italics in the original.
E. Zahar, ‘Why did Einstein’s Programme supersede Lorentz?’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 24 (1973), 103 writes: “My redefinition of novelty amounts to the claim that in order to assess the relation between theories and empirical data, one has to take into account the way in which a theory is built and the problems it was designed to solve. This new criterion of novelty of facts also implies that the traditional methods of historical research are even more vital for evaluating experimental support than Lakatos had already suggested. The historian has to read the private correspondence of the scientist whose ideas he is studying; his purpose will not be to delve into the psyche of the scientist, but to disentangle the heuristic reasoning which the latter used in order to arrive at the new theory”.
Environmentalists therefore need not be intimidated by Peter Urbach’s ‘Progress and Degeneration in the I.Q. Debate’ BJPS 1974 (two parts). What is shown in these papers is that the relation of environmentalism to the evidence is different from the relation of some versions of geneticism to the evidence. This is all that is shown though both terminology (‘degenerating’; ‘progressive’) and philosophical insinuations create the impression that the one type of relation is better, more ‘scientific’ than the other. My remarks in the text above make it clear that this is not so. Value judgements of this kind are completely arbitrary and subjective and nobody needs to be intimidated by them. But alas! The propagandistic genius of Lakatos has concocted a mixture of propaganda and sham argument that is only difficult to unravel and so he will have his way, because of the power of his rhetorics. One might well call this the List der Unvernunft.
Cf. The introduction to Hegel’s Geschichte der Philosophic
p. 111.
‘Why did Copernicus’ programme supersede Ptolemy’s?’ in R. S. Westman (ed.), The Copernican Achievement, p. 17.
p. 31.
p. 22, footnote 1.
p. 5.
G. E. L. Owen, ‘Tithenai ta phainomena’, Aristote et les problemes de methode, Louvain 1961.
For the role of principles in Aristotle cf. W. Wieland, Die Aristotelische Physik, Göttingen 1970. Wieland makes it clear how principles in Aristotle are designed with the explicit purpose of achieving ‘degenerating’ adaptations of facts (of course, he does not use this terminology).
Originally, in Aristotle and in his immediate successors the task is to give an account of phenomena in terms of basic physics which in turn must be constructed in such a way that the phenomena can be accounted for. Later on basic physics is taken for granted and phenomena must be explained in its terms. This is how the idea of saving the phenomena (rather than giving an account of them) arises. Cf. Fritz Krafft, ‘Der Mathematikos und der Physikos — Bemerkungen zu der angeblichen Platonischen Aufgabe, die Phaenomene zu retten’ in Alte Probleme — Neue Ansätze Drei Vorträge von Fritz Krafft, Wiesbaden 1965. An account of phenomena deals with the nature of things. The auxiliary assumptions that are used to save the phenomena have no such pretensions. The distinction is prepared by Physics B 2.
The attempts start with Ptolemy, Planetary Hypotheses, are continued by Arab astronomers of the 11th and 13th centuries who demand a realistic account of planetary motions and last until the 16th century when the system of Alpetragius is taken up by Purbach. Cf. Duhem, Le Systeme du Monde, vol. ii, 130ff.
Cf. De Revolutionibus i 5–8 with Birkenmaijer’s comments in footnote 82ff of G. Klaus (ed.), Copernicus über Kreisbewegung, Berlin 1959. Cf. also Zahar, Einstein, II, p. 241.
“Copernicus was not aware of his own riches” writes Kepler, Mysterioum Cosmographicum, Ch. i, fn. 4 by which he means that Copernicus was not aware (a) that he was dealing with a research programme rather than with a single theory and (b) that this research programme was capable of producing novel predictions. One novel prediction, mentioned by Kepler, is that the synodic anomaly of the planets depends on the true motion of the sun not on its mean motion as had been assumed by Ptolemy.
The Aristotelian methodology of finding a point of view that could accommodate facts by degenerating absorption was not the only alternative in existence. Neoplatonists and reformers of magic such as Agrippa von Nettesheim emphasised the hidden virtues of objects that were not accessible to normal observation and had to be brought forth by special methods. In our period they may well have been the only thinkers to come close to the methodology of scientific research programmes. Cf. E. H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elisabethan England, New York 1951.
Cf. text to notes 11 to 13.
W. Pagel, William Harvey’s Biological Ideas, New York 1967;
‘William Harvey Revisited., History of Science 8 (1969). Cf. also Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Towards a Reassessment of Renaissance Aristotelianism’, History of Science, 1974. Schmitt’s problem is: what is the reason for the “dogged persistence of the Aristotelian tradition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”? (p. 171). His answer: the ability of the systen “to adopt itself and to absorb within itself many novel elements” (p. 178). The success of such absorption in the eyes of the contemporary indicates that the methodology of research programmes was not universally taken as a basis of evaluation. In addition there were progressive developments.
loc. cit., p. 237.
The Lorentz contraction involves real forces and should therefore lead to oscillations. No oscillations are to be expected on Einstein’s account. No oscillations were found in the experiment of Wood, Tomlinson and Essen, Proc. Roy. Soc. 158 (1937), 606.
Zahar, p. 100.
p. 232.
The light principle “is thrown out with no justification whatever” (p. 232) while Lorentz “explained Michelson’s result in a non ad hoc way… and he explained the invariance of c” (P. 122). Also “there was no build up — of unsolved anomalies which Einstein’s theory dissolved better than Lorentz’ “(p. 238).
p. 237.
p. 249.
pp. 233, 235, footnote 2.
p. 233.
p. 235 footnote 2.
p. 238.
pp. 252, 224f.
E = mc2 as, well as the one-sided nature of electromagnetic emission was obtained by Poincaré in 1900 without invoking the relativistic point of view. Cf. Archives Neérland. 5 (1900), 252. Hasenöhrl arrived at a more restricted result four years later. It is quite true that Lorentz himself gives no indication “that the rest mass is a variable quantity” (Zahar, p. 249) — but we are not talking about Lorentz, we are talking about his research programme.
Cf. Einstein’s comparison between “constructive theories” such as the theory of Lorentz and “theories of principle” such as the special theory of relativity in his autobiographical notes. Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist Evanston 1951, p. 53.
Stanley Goldberg ‘In Defense of Ether’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Vol. ii, Russell Mc Cormach (ed.), Philadelphia 1970, p. 97.
Clark, p. 1.
p. 3. This definition of ‘external’ makes of course many of Einstein’s reasons external.
p. 3.
p. 4.
p. 4.
p. 5.
Cf. footnote 79.
Peter Clark no longer believes the phenomenological theory to be without any heuristic. But, he says “that heuristic was a weak one in a very specific sense, namely that it was fact dependent in much the same way that the Ptolemaic heuristic was.” (Letter of March, 26, 1975).
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Feyerabend, P.K. (1976). On the Critique of Scientific Reason. In: Cohen, R.S., Feyerabend, P.K., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1451-9_11
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