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Can We Use the History of Science to Decide between Competing Methodologies?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2022
Extract
How are we to decide between the different methodologies that have been proposed for science? In particular, how are we to decide between inductivism, conventionalism, falsificationism, and research programism? Lakatos says that we should use history of science to help us decide. He proposes, or at any rate seems to propose, the following criterion: Given competing methodologies we should prefer that methodology according to which more of the actual history of science is internal and rational, and more of scientists’ own judgments about science are correct. This criterion presupposes the following proposition, which Lakatos also asserts: The different methodologies lead to determinable and different dividing lines between internal (rational) history of science and external (empirical) history of science.
- Type
- Symposium: History of Science and Its Rational Reconstruction
- Information
- PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1970 , 1970 , pp. 151 - 159
- Copyright
- Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1970
References
Notes
1 I also have doubts about the tenability of the distinction between internal and external history of science. But for the purposes of this paper, I shall simply accept that purported distinction.
2 Page numbers in parentheses refer to Lakatos’ article in this volume.
3 See, for example, Carnap, R., “The Aim of Inductive Logic’, in Logic Methodology and Philosophy of Science (ed. by Nagel, E., Suppes, P. and Tarski, A.), Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 1962Google Scholar.
4 Hempel, C. G., Aspects of Scientific Explanation, The Free Press, New York, 1965, pp. 466-7Google Scholar.
5 Hempel, C. G., ‘Recent Problems of Induction’, in Mind and Cosmos (ed. by Colodny, Robert G.), University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1966, p. 131Google Scholar.
6 It may be that on no methodology can we construe all the basic value judgments of scientists as correct because these judgments may be inconsistent among themselves. But in such a case why should we automatically prefer the methodology that agrees with the most of these judgments? It is probably true that in the case of Lysenko,. the majority of the scientists stayed (scientifically) rational but it could have been the other way around, as Lakatos admits in his astronomy-to-astrology example (p. 120).
7 Goodman, N., Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., Indianapolis 1965, pp. 63–64Google Scholar.