Long time no read, eh? It’s 2011 and I managed to not post at all for years. Oh well.
This post shall be about my current night time endeavour: doing a short course in the Philosophy of Science.
I love philosophy and especially the science part, because I have the vision of one day helping scientists bridge between their professional aspiration for accuracy and the layman’s need to understand what the point of science is. There are plenty of popular science books out there but most are written by scientists with a limit knowledge of philosophy (which tends to be the reason why they use the word “truth” and “fact” so unquestioning).
My course is introductory, so I simply get a broad overview of the great contributors to the Philosophy of Science and their views on scientific revolutions, the scientific method and science in general and in particular.
The biggest names so far, were Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend. All four approach science and its issues in, at times, vastly different ways and to anticipate the outcome for you: I do not agree with any of them. Therefore, my personal goal is to review each and make up a better (i.e. better for me) theory up as I progress in my understanding. Maybe I tell you a little bit about the Big 4 mentioned.
Karl Popper or Mr Wrong
Popper, like all of the philosophers of science, was greatly concerned with the so-called demarcation problem. The demarcation problem is the peculiar issue that it’s bloody hard to distinguish between science and everything else that has theories but probably isn’t science (you know religion, pseudoscience, somewhat-but-not-really science and ultimately, philosophy). Popper’s idea was that a single theory could be judge by its ability to be false. If a scientist goes and tests a theory, he shall do so to refute it. If at any one time the respective theory has a flaw, it must be abandoned.
In simple terms, if we have the assumption that all tomatoes are red, we must go out and try to find a not-red tomato. If we come across a yellow tomato, we must abandon the assumption that all tomatoes are red. We have refuted our theory and the theory that all tomatoes are red is now non-science.
Thomas Kuhn or Co-exist not, my good ‘ol paradigm!
Thomas Kuhn decided to go a bit beyond Popper. While Popper had sought to distinguish only between theories, Kuhn wanted to distinguish between entire schools circling around a theory. When Kuhn encountered a theory, which had laws and a core idea, he would look if that theory also came with a how-to description on how it could solve existing problems and new technological advancements. If a theory had all that, he called it a paradigm. If a paradigm starts to be disturbed by anomalies and they pile up, the whole thing gets into a crisis. Scientists look for new ideas and if those are tried and enough scientists persuaded (that can happen simply through enough of the old people dying); we have experienced a paradigm shift.
Simple: Dude has an idea, persuades enough people, people work on it until something seems fishy, big fight, new dude, new idea, new people persuaded – repeat ad nauseam!
Imre Lakatos or Now children, let’s not fight!
Lakatos was influenced by both, Popper and Kuhn. He agreed with some stuff from either party but was determined to solve the problems their theories proposed. To do so, he introduced his idea of scientific research programmes (SRP). A SRP had three characteristic: a hard core, the key idea that needed protection from falsification, a protective belt with auxiliary hypotheses, body guards to the hard core and positive heuristics, a funny word describing the ability of a SRP to deal with anomalies. Lakatos thought that the scientist had to decide if a theory is better than another rather than if it were true.
Simpleville: A theory has new interesting ideas, so me, Dr Blogreader, goes after this one, instead of the old one that just became too weird or boring.
Paul Feyerabend or Anarchy with a PhD!
Feyerabend is a controversial philosopher with the sharp idea that there is no scientific method at all and that’s how it should be. He thought that methodological rules would limit scientific progress and de-humanize scientists
That’s pretty much the essence that is important to know about Feyerabend.
And that is what I think about lately, how to distinguish science from non-science. Cheers!
