Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos, c. 1960s
Born	November 9, 1922 Debrecen, Hungary
Died	February 2, 1974 (aged 51) London, England
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Eleatic fallibilism, critic of Logical Positivism, Formalism (philosophy), Falsificationism
Main interests	Philosophy of mathematics, Philosophy of science, Epistemology, Politics,
Notable ideas	Method of Proofs & Refutations, Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Methodology of Historiographical Research Programmes
Influenced by Paul Feyerabend, Hegel, Lenin, George Lukacs, Karl Marx, George Polya, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Árpád Szabó
Influenced Paul Feyerabend, Nancey Murphy, Jean-Claude Milner

Imre Lakatos (November 9, 1922 – February 2, 1974) was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his methodology of scientific research programmes.

Life[link]

Lakatos was born Imre (Avrum) Lipschitz to a Jewish family in Debrecen, Hungary in 1922. He received a degree in mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the University of Debrecen in 1944. He avoided Nazi persecution of Jews by changing his name to Imre Molnár. His mother and grandmother died in Auschwitz. He became an active communist during the Second World War. He changed his last name once again to Lakatos (Locksmith) in honor of Géza Lakatos.

After the war, from 1947 he worked as a senior official in the Hungarian ministry of education. He also continued his education with a PhD at Debrecen University awarded in 1948, and also attended György Lukács's weekly Wednesday afternoon private seminars. He also studied at the Moscow State University under the supervision of Sofya Yanovskaya in 1949. When he returned, however, he found himself on the losing side of internal arguments within the Hungarian communist party and was imprisoned on charges of revisionism from 1950 to 1953. More of Lakatos' activities in Hungary after World War II have recently become known.

After his release, Lakatos returned to academic life, doing mathematical research and translating George Pólya's How to Solve It into Hungarian. Still nominally a communist, his political views had shifted markedly and he was involved with at least one dissident student group in the lead-up to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

After the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in November 1956, Lakatos fled to Vienna, and later reached England. He received a doctorate in philosophy in 1961 from the University of Cambridge. The book Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, published after his death, is based on this work.

Lakatos never obtained British Citizenship. In 1960 he was appointed to a position in the London School of Economics, where he wrote on the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science. The LSE philosophy of science department at that time included Karl Popper, Joseph Agassi and John Watkins. It was Agassi who first introduced Lakatos to Popper under the rubric of his applying a fallibilist methodology of conjectures and refutations to mathematics in his Cambridge PhD thesis.

With co-editor Alan Musgrave, he edited the highly-cited Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, the Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965. Published in 1970, the 1965 Colloquium included well-known speakers delivering papers in response to Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".

Lakatos remained at the London School of Economics until his sudden death in 1974 of a brain haemorrhage, aged just 51. The Lakatos Award was set up by the school in his memory.

In January 1971 he became editor of the internationally prestigious British Journal for the Philosophy of Science until his death in 1974,^[1] after which it was then edited jointly for many years by his LSE colleagues John W. N. Watkins and John Worrall, Lakatos's ex-research assistant.

His last LSE lectures in scientific method in Lent Term 1973 along with parts of his correspondence with his friend and critic Paul Feyerabend have been published in For and Against Method (ISBN 0-226-46774-0).

Lakatos and his colleague Spiro Latsis organised an international conference devoted entirely to historical case studies in Lakatos's methodology of research programmes in physical sciences and economics, to be held in Greece in 1974, and which still went ahead following Lakatos's death in February 1974. These case studies in such as Einstein's relativity programme, Fresnel's wave theory of light and neoclassical economics, were published by Cambridge University Press in two separate volumes in 1976, one devoted to physical sciences and Lakatos's general programme for rewriting the history of science, with a concluding critique by his great friend Paul Feyerabend, and the other devoted to economics.^[2]

Proofs and refutations, mathematics[link]

Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics was inspired by both Hegel's and Marx' dialectic, by Karl Popper's theory of knowledge, and by the work of mathematician George Polya.

The 1976 book Proofs and Refutations is based on the first three chapters of his four chapter 1961 doctoral thesis Essays in the logic of mathematical discovery. But its first chapter is Lakatos’s own revision of its chapter 1 that was first published as Proofs and Refutations in four parts in 1963-4 in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. It is largely taken up by a fictional dialogue set in a mathematics class. The students are attempting to prove the formula for the Euler characteristic in algebraic topology, which is a theorem about the properties of polyhedra, namely that for all polyhedra the number of their (V)ertices minus the number of their (E)dges plus the number of their (F)aces is 2:  (V – E + F = 2). The dialogue is meant to represent the actual series of attempted proofs which mathematicians historically offered for the conjecture, only to be repeatedly refuted by counterexamples. Often the students paraphrase famous mathematicians such as Cauchy, as noted in Lakatos's extensive footnotes.

What Lakatos tried to establish was that no theorem of informal mathematics is final or perfect. This means that we should not think that a theorem is ultimately true, only that no counterexample has yet been found. Once a counterexample, i.e. an entity contradicting/not explained by the theorem is found, we adjust the theorem, possibly extending the domain of its validity. This is a continuous way our knowledge accumulates, through the logic and process of proofs and refutations. (If axioms are given for a branch of mathematics, however, Lakatos claimed that proofs from those axioms were tautological, i.e. logically true.)^{[citation needed]}

Lakatos proposed an account of mathematical knowledge based on the idea of heuristics. In Proofs and Refutations the concept of 'heuristic' was not well developed, although Lakatos gave several basic rules for finding proofs and counterexamples to conjectures. He thought that mathematical 'thought experiments' are a valid way to discover mathematical conjectures and proofs, and sometimes called his philosophy 'quasi-empiricism'.

However, he also conceived of the mathematical community as carrying on a kind of dialectic to decide which mathematical proofs are valid and which are not. Therefore he fundamentally disagreed with the 'formalist' conception of proof which prevailed in Frege's and Russell's logicism, which defines proof simply in terms of formal validity.

On its first publication as a paper in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 1963-4, Proofs and Refutations became highly influential on new work in the philosophy of mathematics, although few agreed with Lakatos' strong disapproval of formal proof. Before his death he had been planning to return to the philosophy of mathematics and apply his theory of research programmes to it. Lakatos, Worrall and Zahar use Poincaré (1893)^[3] to answer one of the major problems perceived by critics, namely that the pattern of mathematical research depicted in Proofs and Refutations does not faithfully represent most of the actual activity of contemporary mathematicians.^[4]

Cauchy and uniform convergence[link]

In a 1966 text published as (Lakatos 1978), Lakatos re-examines the history of the calculus, with special regard to Augustin-Louis Cauchy and the concept of uniform convergence, in the light of non-standard analysis. Lakatos is concerned that historians of mathematics should not judge the evolution of mathematics in terms of currently fashionable theories. As an illustration, he examines Cauchy's proof that the sum of a series of continuous functions is itself continuous. Lakatos is critical of those who would see Cauchy's proof, with its failure to make explicit a suitable convergence hypothesis, merely as an inadequate approach to Weierstrassian analysis. Lakatos sees in such an approach a failure to realize that Cauchy's concept of the continuum differed from currently dominant views.

Research programmes[link]

Lakatos' contribution to the philosophy of science was an attempt to resolve the perceived conflict between Popper's falsificationism and the revolutionary structure of science described by Kuhn. Popper's theory as often (inaccurately) reported implied that scientists should give up a theory as soon as they encounter any falsifying evidence, immediately replacing it with increasingly 'bold and powerful' new hypotheses. However, Kuhn described science as consisting of periods of normal science in which scientists continue to hold their theories in the face of anomalies, interspersed with periods of great conceptual change. Popper acknowledged that excellent new theories may be inconsistent with apparently empirically well supported older theories. For example, he pointed out in Objective Knowledge^[5] (at page 200) that "in Newton's theory Kepler's laws are only approximately valid – that is, strictly invalid – if we take into account the mutual attraction between the planets", so that (in precise terms) Newton's theories were inconsistent with Kepler's third law. However, whereas Kuhn implied that good scientists ignored or discounted evidence against their theories Popper regarded counter evidence as something to be dealt with, either by explaining it, or eventually modifying the theory. Popper was not describing actual behaviour of scientists, but what a scientist should do. Kuhn was mostly describing actual behaviour.

Lakatos sought a methodology that would harmonize these apparently contradictory points of view, a methodology that could provide a rational account of scientific progress, consistent with the historical record.

For Lakatos, what we think of as a 'theory' may actually be a succession of slightly different theories and experimental techniques developed over time, that share some common idea, or what Lakatos called their ‘hard core’. Lakatos called such changing collections 'Research Programmes'. The scientists involved in a programme will attempt to shield the theoretical core from falsification attempts behind a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses. Whereas Popper was generally regarded as disparaging such measures as 'ad hoc', Lakatos wanted to show that adjusting and developing a protective belt is not necessarily a bad thing for a research programme. Instead of asking whether a hypothesis is true or false, Lakatos wanted us to ask whether one research programme is better than another, so that there is a rational basis for preferring it. He showed that in some cases one research programme can be described as progressive while its rivals are degenerating. A progressive research programme is marked by its growth, along with the discovery of stunning novel facts, development of new experimental techniques, more precise predictions, etc. A degenerating research program is marked by lack of growth, or growth of the protective belt that does not lead to novel facts.

Lakatos claimed that he was extending Popper's ideas, which had themselves developed over time. He contrasted Popper, the crude falsificationist, who existed only in the minds of critics and followers who had not understood Popper's writings, Popper1, the author of what Popper actually wrote, and Popper2, who was supposed to be Popper as reinterpreted by his pupil Lakatos, though many commentators believe that Popper2 just is Lakatos. The idea that it is often not possible to show decisively which of two theories or research programmes is better at a particular point in time whereas subsequent developments may show that one is 'progressive' while the other is 'degenerating', and therefore less acceptable, was a major contribution both to philosophy of science and to history of science. Whether it was Popper's idea or Lakatos' idea, or, most likely, a combination, is of less importance.

Lakatos was following Pierre Duhem's idea that one can always protect a cherished theory (or part of one) from hostile evidence by redirecting the criticism toward other theories or parts thereof. (See Confirmation holism and Duhem-Quine thesis). This difficulty with falsificationism had been acknowledged by Popper.

Falsificationism, (Popper's theory), proposed that scientists put forward theories and that nature 'shouts NO' in the form of an inconsistent observation. According to Popper, it is irrational for scientists to maintain their theories in the face of Nature's rejection, yet this is what Kuhn had described them as doing. But for Lakatos, "It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO rather we propose a maze of theories and nature may shout INCONSISTENT".^[6] This inconsistency can be resolved without abandoning our Research Programme by leaving the hard core alone and altering the auxiliary hypotheses. One example given is Newton's three laws of motion. Within the Newtonian system (research programme) these are not open to falsification as they form the programme's hard core. This research programme provides a framework within which research can be undertaken with constant reference to presumed first principles which are shared by those involved in the research programme, and without continually defending these first principles. In this regard it is similar to Kuhn's notion of a paradigm.

Lakatos also took the view that a research programme contained 'methodological rules', some that instruct on what paths of research to avoid (he called this the 'negative heuristic') and some that instruct on what paths to pursue (he called this the 'positive heuristic').

Lakatos claimed that not all changes of the auxiliary hypotheses within research programmes (Lakatos calls them 'problem shifts') are equally as acceptable. He took the view that these 'problem shifts' can be evaluated both by their ability to explain apparent refutations and by their ability to produce new facts. If it can do this then Lakatos claims they are progressive.^[7] However if they do not, if they are just 'ad-hoc' changes that do not lead to the prediction of new facts, then he labels them as degenerate.

Lakatos took the view that if a research programme is progressive, then it is rational for scientists to keep changing the auxiliary hypotheses in order to hold on to it in the face of anomalies. However, if a research programme is degenerate, then it faces danger from its competitors: it can be 'falsified' by being superseded by a better (i.e. more progressive) research programme. This is what he says is happening in the historical periods Kuhn describes as revolutions and what makes them rational as opposed to mere leaps of faith (as he considered that Kuhn took them to be).

Pseudoscience[link]

According to the demarcation criterion of pseudoscience originally proposed by Lakatos, a theory is pseudoscientific if it fails to make any novel predictions of previously unknown phenomena, in contrast with scientific theories, which predict novel fact(s).^[8] Progressive scientific theories are those which have their novel facts confirmed and degenerate scientific theories are those whose predictions of novel facts are refuted. As he put it:

"A given fact is explained scientifically only if a new fact is predicted with it....The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one." See pages 34–5 of The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, 1978.

Lakatos's own key examples of pseudoscience were Ptolemaic astronomy, Immanuel Velikovsky's planetary cosmogony, Freudian psychoanalysis, 20th century Soviet Marxism,^[9] Lysenko's biology, Niels Bohr's Quantum Mechanics post-1924, astrology, psychiatry, sociology, neoclassical economics, and Darwin's theory.

Darwin's theory[link]

In his 1973 LSE Scientific Method Lecture 1^[10] he also claimed that "nobody to date has yet found a demarcation criterion according to which Darwin can be described as scientific".

Almost 20 years after Lakatos's 1973 'challenge' on the scientificity of Darwin, in her 1991 The Ant and the Peacock (pp31–2), LSE lecturer and ex-colleague of Lakatos, Helena Cronin, attempted to establish that Darwinian theory was empirically scientific in respect of at least being supported by evidence of likeness in the diversity of life forms in the world, allegedly explained by descent with modification. She concluded that "our usual idea of corroboration as requiring the successful prediction of novel facts...Darwinian theory was not strong on temporally novel predictions". She was equivocal about whether it did or did not make any novel predictions, only saying " For the most part this evidence was already well known, thoroughly documented by pre-Darwinian natural history.[Italics added]". Cronin did not state what other part of the evidence was not already well known, but did then assert that it was scientific on the weaker Zahar criterion^[jargon] of providing independent novel explanation of old already well known facts^{[clarification needed]}. However, she failed^{[neutrality is disputed]} to demonstrate that it provided^[vague] any confirmed nomological-deductive^[jargon] explanation of any old facts of likeness within evolutionary diversity, making an assertion that it did so^[vague], without proof.

The Milton Friedman neoclassical economics case study[link]

In August 1972, a case study of the methodology of neoclassical economics by Lakatos's London School of Economics colleague Spiro Latsis published in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science found Milton Friedman's methodology to be 'pseudo-scientific' in terms of Lakatos's evaluative philosophy of science, according to which the demarcation between scientific and pseudo-scientific theories consists of their at least predicting testable empirical novel facts or not.^[11] Latsis claimed that Friedman's instrumentalist methodology of neoclassical economics had never predicted any novel facts.^[12]

In its defense in a three-page letter to Latsis in December 1972, Friedman counter-claimed that the neoclassical monopoly competition model had in fact shown empirical progress by predicting phenomena not previously observed that were also subsequently confirmed by empirical evidence.^[13] The example he gave was a prediction of Chamberlain's monopolistic competition model that "the standard explanation for the Standard Oil monopoly was wrong", which he said had been theoretically predicted by Aaron Director, his brother-in-law, and empirically confirmed by Magee. But he failed to identify exactly what novel economic phenomenon was thereby positively predicted and confirmed. Lakatos invited Friedman to submit a discussion note based on his December 1972 letter to Latsis for publication in a symposium on the issue of the scientific status or not of neoclassical economics,^[14] but Friedman never took up the invitation.

Three years later, in 1976, Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy".^[15]. Friedman's own predictions of an accelerating rate of inflation due to attempts to use expansionary monetary policy in order to attain an unrealistic employment target, as described in his Nobel lecture^[16] are cited by others as an example of a novel phenomenon successfully predicted by neoclassical economics.^[17] This research ultimately led to a break down of the popular belief in economics in the mid 20th century that there was a long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation. Robert E. Lucas argued that the Friedman-Phelps model was "as clear cut an experimental distinction as macroeconomics is ever likely to see". Roger Backhouse argued that Friedman and Phelps had predicted novel facts that were corroborated by the events of the 1970s. Mark Blaug argued that Friedman's 1968 paper and its successful prediction of novel facts was itself proof that Friedman's monetarist neoclassical research programme was a progressive research programme. ^[18]

Historiographical research programmes[link]

In his 1973 monograph History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions^[19] Lakatos proposed a dialectical historiographical meta-method for evaluating different theories of scientific method, namely by means of their comparative success in explaining the actual history of science and scientific revolutions on the one hand, whilst on the other providing a historiographical framework for rationally reconstructing the history of science as anything more than merely inconsequential rambling. The paper started with his now renowned dictum “Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.”

However neither Lakatos himself nor his collaborators ever completed the first part of this dictum by showing that in any scientific revolution the great majority of the relevant scientific community converted just when Lakatos’s criterion – one programme successfully predicting some novel facts whilst its competitor degenerated - was satisfied. Indeed for the historical case studies in his 1970 Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes he had openly admitted as much, commenting 'In this paper it is not my purpose to go on seriously to the second stage of comparing rational reconstructions with actual history for any lack of historicity.'

Criticism[link]

Feyerabend[link]

Paul Feyerabend argued that Lakatos's methodology was not a methodology at all, but merely "words that sound like the elements of a methodology."^[20] He argued that Lakatos's methodology was no different in practice from epistemological anarchism, Feyerabend's own position. He wrote in Science in a Free Society (after Lakatos's death) that:

Lakatos realized and admitted that the existing standards of rationality, standards of logic included, were too restrictive and would have hindered science had they been applied with determination. He therefore permitted the scientist to violate them (he admits that science is not "rational" in the sense of these standards). However, he demanded that research programmes show certain features in the long run — they must be progressive.... I have argued that this demand no longer restricts scientific practice. Any development agrees with it.^[21]

Lakatos and Feyerabend planned to produce a joint work in which Lakatos would develop a rationalist description of science and Feyerabend would attack it.

Notes[link]

See also[link]

• Scientific Community Metaphor, an approach to programming influenced by Lakatos's work on research programmes.
• List of Eastern Bloc defectors
• Lakatos Award set up in memory of him

References[link]

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Cronin, Helena (1991) The Ant and the Peacock Cambridge University Press
• Howson, Colin, Ed. Method and Appraisal in the Physical Sciences: The Critical Background to Modern Science 1800-1905 Cambridge University Press 1976 ISBN 0-521-21110-7
• Kampis, Kvaz & Stoltzner (eds) APPRAISING LAKATOS: Mathematics, Methodology and the Man Vienna Circle Institute Library, Kluwer 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0226
• Lakatos, Musgrave ed. (1970). Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-07826-1
• Lakatos (1976). Proofs and Refutations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29038-4
• Lakatos (1978). The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Lakatos (1978). Mathematics, Science and Epistemology: Philosophical Papers Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 05212176952
• Lakatos, I.: Cauchy and the continuum: the significance of nonstandard analysis for the history and philosophy of mathematics. Math. Intelligencer 1 (1978), no. 3, 151–161 (paper originally presented in 1966).
• Latsis, Spiro J. Ed. Method and Appraisal in Economics Cambridge University Press 1976 ISBN 0-521-21076-3
• Motterlini, Matteo FOR AND AGAINST METHOD Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend Chicago University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-226-46774-0
• Popper, K R, (1972), Objective knowledge: an evolutionary approach, Oxford (Clarendon Press) 1972 (bibliographic summary, no text).
• Zahar, Elie (1973) Why Einstein's programme superseded Lorentz's 'British Journal for the Philosophy of Science'
• Zahar, Elie (1988) Einstein's Revolution: A study in heuristic Open Court 1988

[edit] Archives

Imre Lakatos's papers are held at the London School of Economics. His personal library is also held at the School.

[edit] Further information

• Alex Bandy (2010). Chocolate and Chess. Unlocking Lakatos. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ISBN 978-963-05-8819-5
• Brendan Larvor (1998). Lakatos: An Introduction. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-14276-8
• Jancis Long (1998). "Lakatos in Hungary", Philosophy of the Social Sciences 28, pp. 244–311.
• John Kadvany (2001). Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-2659-0; author's Web site: http://www.johnkadvany.com.
• Teun Koetsier (1991). Lakatos' Philosophy of Mathematics: A Historical Approach. Amsterdam etc.: North Holland. ISBN 0-444-88944-2
• Szabó, Árpád The Beginnings of Greek Mathematics (Tr Ungar) Reidel & Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 1978 ISBN 963-05-1416-8

[edit] External links

• Science and Pseudoscience (including an MP3 audio file) – Lakatos' 1973 Open University BBC Radio talk on the subject
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Imre Lakatos", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Lakatos.html .
• Lakatos’s Hungarian intellectual background The Autumn 2006 MIT Press journal Perspectives on Science devoted to articles on this topic, with article abstracts.
• Economic research programme
• Official russian page

Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( /ˈkuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.

Kuhn has made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way; that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing accounts of reality which cannot be coherently reconciled. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity"; we must account for subjective perspectives as well.

Life[link]

Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his B.S. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively. As he states in the first few pages of the preface to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history (and philosophy) of science. He later taught a course in the history of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956 at the suggestion of university president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. Kuhn interviewed and taped Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr's death.^[1] At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work:^[2] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1994, Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer, of which he died in 1996.

Thomas Kuhn was married twice, first to Kathryn Muhs (with whom he had three children) and later to Jehane Barton Burns (Jehane R. Kuhn).

[edit] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) was originally printed as an article in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, published by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. In this book, Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase),^[3] in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving". Guided by the paradigm, normal science is extremely productive: "when the paradigm is successful, the profession will have solved problems that its members could scarcely have imagined and would never have undertaken without commitment to the paradigm."^[4]

During the period of normal science, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Popper's falsifiability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science.

In SSR, Kuhn also argues that rival paradigms are incommensurable—that is, it is not possible to understand one paradigm through the conceptual framework and terminology of another rival paradigm. For many critics, for example David Stove (Popper and After, 1982), this thesis seemed to entail that theory choice is fundamentally irrational: if rival theories cannot be directly compared, then one cannot make a rational choice as to which one is better. Whether Kuhn's views had such relativistic consequences is the subject of much debate; Kuhn himself denied the accusation of relativism in the third edition of SSR, and sought to clarify his views to avoid further misinterpretation. Freeman Dyson has quoted Kuhn as saying "I am not a Kuhnian!",^[5] referring to the relativism that some philosophers have developed based on his work.

The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn popularized the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions" in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase "paradigm shift" has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn’s analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution.^{[citation needed]}

Kuhn's work has been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations. Kuhn is credited as a foundational force behind the post-Mertonian Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.

A defense Kuhn gives against the objection that his account of science from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions results in relativism can be found in an essay by Kuhn called "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice."^[6] In this essay, he reiterates five criteria from the penultimate chapter of SSR that determine (or help determine, more properly) theory choice:

1. - Accurate - empirically adequate with experimentation and observation
2. - Consistent - internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories
3. - Broad Scope - a theory's consequences should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain
4. - Simple - the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam's razor
5. - Fruitful - a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena

He then goes on to show how, although these criteria admittedly determine theory choice, they are imprecise in practice and relative to individual scientists. According to Kuhn, "When scientists must choose between competing theories, two men fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions."^[6] For this reason, the criteria still are not "objective" in the usual sense of the word because individual scientists reach different conclusions with the same criteria due to valuing one criterion over another or even adding additional criteria for selfish or other subjective reasons. Kuhn then goes on to say, "I am suggesting, of course, that the criteria of choice with which I began function not as rules, which determine choice, but as values, which influence it."^[6] Because Kuhn utilizes the history of science in his account of science, his criteria or values for theory choice are often understood as descriptive normative rules (or more properly, values) of theory choice for the scientific community rather than prescriptive normative rules in the usual sense of the word "criteria," although there are many varied interpretations of Kuhn's account of science.

Polanyi–Kuhn debate[link]

Although they used different terminologies, both Kuhn and Michael Polanyi believed that scientists' subjective experiences made science a relativized discipline. Polanyi lectured on this topic for decades before Kuhn published "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

Supporters of Polanyi charged Kuhn with plagiarism, as it was known that Kuhn attended several of Polanyi's lectures, and that the two men had debated endlessly over the epistemology of science before either had achieved fame. In response to these critics, Kuhn cited Polanyi in the second edition of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,"^[7] and the two scientists agreed to set aside their differences in the hopes of enlightening the world to the dynamic nature of science.^{[citation needed]} Despite this intellectual alliance, Polanyi's work was constantly interpreted by others within the framework of Kuhn's paradigm shifts, much to Polanyi's (and Kuhn's) dismay.^[8]

Honors[link]

Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. He was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates.

Bibliography[link]

• Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000. ISBN 1-902683-10-2
• Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-26894-2
• Sal Restivo, The Myth of the Kuhnian Revolution. Sociological Theory, Vol. 1, (1983), 293-305.
• Hoyningen-Huene, Paul (1993): Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Kuhn, T.S. The Copernican Revolution: planetary astronomy in the development of Western thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. ISBN 0-674-17100-4
• Kuhn, T.S. The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science. Isis, 52(1961): 161-193.
• Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. ISBN 0-226-45808-3
• Kuhn, T.S. "The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research". pp. 347–69 in A. C. Crombie (ed.). Scientific Change (Symposium on the History of Science, University of Oxford, 9–15 July 1961). New York and London: Basic Books and Heineman, 1963.
• Kuhn, T.S. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977. ISBN 0-226-45805-9
• Kuhn, T.S. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ISBN 0-226-45800-8
• Kuhn, T.S. The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-45798-2

References[link]

• Black-body theory and the quantum discontinuity: 1894-1912 (1978)

External links[link]

• Thomas Kuhn entry by Alexander Bird in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Thomas Kuhn (Biography, Outline of Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
• "Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm" (obituary by Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times, 19 June 1996)
• Thomas S. Kuhn (obituary, The Tech p9 vol 116 no 28, 26 June 1996)
• Review in the New York Review of Books
• Color Portrait
• History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science BOOK VI: Kuhn on Revolution and Feyerabend on Anarchy - with free downloads for public use.
• article on his Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays
• Thomas Khun's Theory of incommensurability
• John Horgan's Interview http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/shapers/kuhn/
• Thomas S. Kuhn, post-modernism and materialist dialectics
• Errol Morris, The Ashtray: The Ultimatum (Part 1 [of 5 parts]), a critical view and memoir of Kuhn. [1]

Karl Popper
CH FRS FBA

Sir Karl Popper c. 1980s
Born	Karl Raimund Popper (1902-07-28)28 July 1902 Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	17 September 1994(1994-09-17) (aged 92) London, England
Era	20th century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Critical rationalism Liberalism
Main interests	Epistemology Rationality Philosophy of science Logic Social and political philosophy Philosophy of mind Philosophy of art Origin of life Interpretation of Quantum mechanics
Notable ideas	Critical rationalism Falsificationism Universal evolutionary trial and error model of life and knowledge Propensity interpretation Open society Cosmological pluralism Modified essentialism Axiomatic formalization of probability Active Darwinism Spearhead model Truthlikeness Objective Hermeneutics
Influenced by Socrates · Lycophron · Aristotle · Kant · Schopenhauer · Hegel  · Einstein · Kierkegaard · Wittgenstein · Vienna Circle · Hayek · Tarski · Selz · Russell · Campbell · Burke · Mill  · Hume  · Wächtershäuser
Influenced Virtually all philosophy of science since 1930s · Hayek · Friedman · Lakatos · Feyerabend · Soros · Miller · Agassi · Bartley · Gombrich · Jarvie · Dahrendorf · Levinson · Schmidt · Munz · Magee · Lorenz · Shearmur · Medawar · Dimitrakos · Albert · Gellner · Soroush · Taleb · Deutsch

Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS^[1] FBA (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austro-British^[2] philosopher and professor at the London School of Economics.^[3] He is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century;^[4][5] he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy.

Popper is known for his attempt to repudiate the classical observationalist/inductivist form of scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. He is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy".^[6] In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he came to believe made a flourishing "open society" possible.

Personal life[link]

Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902, to upper middle-class parents. All of Karl Popper's grandparents were Jewish, but the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before Karl was born.^[7] Karl's father Simon Siegmund Carl Popper was a lawyer from Bohemia, and mother Jenny Schiff was of Silesian and Hungarian descent. After establishing themselves in Vienna, the Poppers made a rapid social climb in Viennese society: Simon Siegmund Carl became a legal partner^{[clarification needed]} of Vienna's liberal mayor Raimond Grübl and, after his death in 1898, took over the firm (Karl received his middle name from the mayor).^[7]

Popper received a Lutheran upbringing and was educated at the University of Vienna.^[8] His father was a doctor of law at the Vienna University and a bibliophile who had 12,000–14,000 volumes in his personal library.^[9] Popper inherited both the library and the disposition from him.^[10]

In 1919, Popper became attracted by Marxism and subsequently joined the Association of Socialist School Students. He also became a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria, which was at that time a party that fully adopted the Marxist ideology.^[11] After the June 15, 1919 street battle in the Hörlgasse, when police shot eight of his unarmed party comrades, he became disillusioned by what he saw to be the pseudo-scientific historical materialism of Marx, abandoned the ideology, and remained a supporter of social liberalism throughout his life.

In 1928, he earned a doctorate in psychology, under the supervision of Karl Bühler. His dissertation was entitled "Die Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie" (The question of method in cognitive psychology).^[12] Then, from 1930 to 1936, he taught secondary school. Popper published his first book, Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery), in 1934. Here, he criticised psychologism, naturalism, inductionism, and logical positivism, and put forth his theory of potential falsifiability as the criterion demarcating science from non-science.