I. The demarcation problem again

Recall from our discussion of Popper that the demarcation problem is the problem of distinguishing between what counts as science and what doesn’t. Sometimes people frame that problem as distinguishing between science and pseudo-science, as Lakatos does here, but not everything that is not science is pseudo-science.

Lakatos says that the demarcation problem is not just a problem for armchair philosophy, it is of vital social and political relevance.

II. Criticism of Popper’s approach

Recall Popper’s solution to the demarcation problem. According to Popper, a theory is scientific if it is falsifiable. Take any theory and deduce an observational prediction from it. We can check to see if the prediction comes out as the theory predicts. If it doesn’t the theory is refuted. If it does, Popper thinks this doesn’t tell us anything. The theory is not confirmed, nor more likely than before. The best we can hope for according to Popper’s falsification is that a theory has not been falsified (yet)!

Lakatos has two objections to Popper’s approach. First, it is strange to assert that something will qualify as science if its proponents are willing to come up with falsifying conditions and not science if not. So, for example, if a Marxist is willing to identify a state of affairs that would falsify Marxism, then Marxism is thereby scientific.

Lakatos’s more serious objection is that Popper greatly underestimates how willing scientists are to persist with a theory even in the face of conflicting observations. He thinks that scientists don’t reject a theory just because the facts contradict it. Lakatos gives two features of science that conflict with Popper’s view:

1.   Lakatos thinks that scientists don’t generally discard a theory in the face of conflicting evidence. While Popper thinks that once a theory has been falsified, scientists abandon it, Lakatos thinks that scientists generally respond to anomalies in one or more of the following ways:

•   Invent a rescue hypothesis to explain the anomaly.

•   Ignore it and direct their attention to other things.

2.   Lakatos thinks that scientists would often be at a loss if asked to give falsification conditions for their theories. According to Popper’s picture, science is identified as the enquiry where falsification criteria are available. However, Lakatos says that if we had ever asked a Newtonian scientist under what experimental conditions they would abandon

Newtonian theory, they would be as nonplussed as a Marxist would.

III. Criticism of Kuhn’s approach

We saw in the last lecture that Lakatos was critical of Kuhn’s approach. Lakatos describes Kuhn’s characterization of scientific revolution as ‘just an irrational change in commitment’ akin to a religious conversion (p.23). Lakatos argues that Kuhn’s theory can’t distinguish between scientific progress and intellectual degeneration.

Remember from last time that Lakatos is right that Kuhn doesn’t think that scientific revolutions involve progress because he doesn’t think it’s possible to adjudicate between two theories from a paradigm-neutral stand point.

IV. Research programs

Lakatos’s answer to the demarcation problem relies on the notion of a research program. According to Lakatos, a research program is a lot like a paradigm, but there are a few key differences. First, there are usually more than one research program in a scientific field at any given time. Kuhn thought that there could only ever be one paradigm in a given field at a time, since part of its definition is that it is universally endorsed by the scientific community. Lakatos conceives of research programs as competing together within a field.