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Imre Lakatos & the philosophy of bad science

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https://aeon.co/essays/imre-lakatos-and-...ad-science

EXCERPT (Jim Baggott): . . . The average scientist’s acquaintance with philosophy [of science] tends to be of the passing variety. This is a great pity. Deep-rooted, seemingly intractable problems in foundational theoretical physics – the physics of matter and radiation, space, time and the Universe – have now frustrated progress for 50 years or more. We’re living through a period in the history of foundational physics in which ideas about nature are cheap, but gathering the empirical facts needed to show that these ideas have anything at all to do with the real world has become extraordinarily expensive, protracted and time-consuming, and without guarantee of success. It turns out that this is a period in which Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn can’t really help us. We need to look further afield.

This is particularly true for those foundational theoretical physicists who favour string theory as the new paradigm-in-waiting. [...] Other than vaguely ‘predict’ the possible existence of so-called supersymmetric particles (which, to date, have not been found), string theory appears quite incapable of predicting anything at all. It is irrefutable. Concern that the string theory programme had lost all contact with reality led in 2006 to the ‘string wars’. Popper’s falsifiability criterion was used in an attempt to bring string theorists to account. String theorists hit back, rejecting the diktat of philosophical principles and the views of the ‘Popperazi’.

With hindsight, this was a missed opportunity, as the problems with Popper’s criterion have been known to philosophers for some time, and there is a ready alternative that incorporates aspects of both Popper’s and Kuhn’s philosophies. This is Imre Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes. Among all the most notable philosophers of science, it is perhaps Lakatos who embodies philosophy as lived experience.

[...] The problems with Popper’s principle of falsifiability were by this time well-known: this is just not how science works. As Kuhn had observed, strict falsificationist principles, naively applied, rule out much of what passes for normal, everyday scientific practice. [...] the resulting predictions are never derived directly from the theory itself, but rather from the theory as adapted by one or more ‘auxiliary’ hypotheses. If these predictions are then falsified, it’s never clear what’s gone wrong. It might be that the theory is indeed false, but it could be that one or more of the auxiliary hypotheses is invalid: the evidence can’t tell us which.

Lakatos wrote: "Is this [disagreement] regarded as a refutation of Newtonian science? No. Either yet another ingenious auxiliary hypothesis is proposed or … the whole story is buried in the dusty volumes of periodicals and the story never mentioned again."

Suitably imaginative adjustment of the hypotheses can in principle render any scientific theory virtually irrefutable.

Lakatos argued that Popper’s criterion is just too restrictive. But he was also uncomfortable with Kuhn’s description of the process of scientific revolution. If, as Kuhn argued, the standards we use to judge the success of scientific theories change from one paradigm to the next, then the question of which is ‘better’ becomes rather moot. For Kuhn, a revolution is driven by a crisis of confidence, and the contagious panic that results. Lakatos wrote: ‘Thus in Kuhn’s view scientific revolution is irrational, a matter for mob psychology …’ This leads to a rather ambiguous notion of scientific progress based on human psychology and sociology, and thence to accusations of relativism. Kuhn resisted this charge, but it is hard to discount.

Despite these contradictions, Lakatos saw merits in both Popper’s and Kuhn’s approaches. His ‘research programme’ has parallels with Kuhn’s paradigm. A research programme consists of a ‘hard core’ theory or collection of theories surrounded by a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses. The auxiliary hypotheses serve two purposes. They help to connect the hard core to the empirical world through predictions, and they also serve to insulate the core and render it essentially irrefutable. It is the combination of hard core and auxiliary hypotheses that is subjected to empirical test and is in principle falsifiable.

In what Lakatos referred to as the ‘negative heuristic’, failed predictions encourage scientists to retain the irrefutable hard core and tinker with the hypotheses. The ‘positive heuristic’ is the ‘partially articulated set of suggestions or hints on how to change, develop the “refutable variants” of the research programme, how to modify, sophisticate, the “refutable” protective belt’. Or, if you prefer, ‘conjectures’. Albert Einstein’s work on general relativity developed not from puzzling over awkward unexplained anomalies such as the precession of the perihelion of Mercury (the negative heuristic), but rather from a creative shift – the conjecture that gravity is related to the curvature of space-time – in the positive heuristic of his programme.

This methodology allows for a rather fascinating take on demarcation. Lakatos judged a programme to be ‘progressive’ if it is both theoretically progressive – the hard core plus auxiliary hypotheses predict novel empirical facts – and experimentally progressive: at least some of these novel facts can be tested. In contrast, a programme is ‘degenerating’ if it is theoretically degenerating – it doesn’t predict any novel facts – or it is theoretically progressive but experimentally degenerating: none of the novel facts can be tested... (MORE - details)

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