Abstract
In this paper, I argue that Imre Lakatos’s account on the relation between the history and the philosophy of science, if properly understood and also if properly modified, can be valuable for the philosophical comprehension of the relation between the history and the philosophy of science. The paper is divided into three main parts. In the first part, I provide a charitable exegesis of the Lakatosian conception of the history of science in order to show that Lakatos’s history cannot be a caricature. In the second part, I describe what I believe are the real problems of Lakatos’s account on a metaphysical and on a methodological level. In order to address these problems, I take advantage of the recent critique of the so-called “confrontation model”. Finally, in the third part, I suggest that a proper modification of Lakatos’s perspective can resolve the aforementioned problems without distorting Lakatos’s central aspiration, which is that the philosophical theories of scientific rationality can be assessed with the help of the history of science without losing their normative content.
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Notes
The idea of confronting general philosophical frameworks with historical data does not necessarily lead to an ‘empirical science of science’ as Scholl (2018) recently suggested. The ‘confrontation model’ does not necessarily entail the radical naturalization of the philosophy of science. As I will attempt to show, Lakatos’ account is a version of the confrontation model which does not end up at full-blown radical naturalism.
Kuukkanen’s (2017) exegesis is similarly charitable. However, he focuses on historiographical issues.
See Hanson (1963: 458).
The term ‘explanation’ is used in its broadest sense here. It does not exclusively refer to scientific explanations in the way that contemporary naturalism implies. It also refers to normative explanations which, qua normative, play the role of justifications (see §2.3 below).
Lakatos (1978a: 123) characteristically wonders: ‘In their purely ‘methodological’ versions scientific appraisals, as has already been said, are conventions and can always be formulated as a definition of science. How can one criticize such a definition?’
The Hegelian conception of scepticism has been used by Kadvany (2001: 45–84) to shed light on Lakatos’s philosophy of mathematics.
For a fuller presentation of Hegel’s strategy against skepticism and its relation to twentieth century philosophy of science, see Dimitrakos (2017).
Here, of course, I am referring to general statements about the intrinsic features of things. I am not referring to statements about contingent characteristics such as ‘the honey in the table has been crystallized’.
Hegel detects this inconsistency of the skeptical conclusion in the Science of Logic (1816/2010, p. 343).
I owe this clarification to the comments of one anonymous reviewer.
It follows that in this philosophical context, unlike the context of contemporary logic, the intentional definitions of concepts are legitimate. Of course, one can dispute the legitimacy of this kind of definition. A discussion of this issue cannot take place here.
Note Quine’s (1951/1961, p. 21) example of ‘creature with a heart’ and ‘creature with kidneys’.
According to Lakatos, both dogmatism and scepticism are the faces of justificationism, ‘that is the identification of knowledge with proven knowledge’ (Lakatos 1978a: 11). He also believes that there is an alternative to these two choices: ‘[The] success [of scientific heuristic] may also yield a new appraisal of the sceptico-dogmatist controversy: it would remove it from the central position it still occupies in the mind of those who have not recognized the basic unity of the opposites and the possibility of their dialectical ‘Aufheben’ (quoted in Larvor 1998: 24). ‘Aufheben’ is a Hegelian term par excellence.
A priori here does not exclusively mean independent of experience but generally independent of (any kind of) sceptical tests.
‘The sceptic thus denies the possibility of producing any acceptable solution to the problem of appraising scientific theories’ (Lakatos 1978b: 108).
Interestingly, Lakatos chooses the term ‘scepticism’ for Feyerabend’s anarchism rather than the term ‘relativism’, which was far more common in his time.
An analogous argument has been provided by Laudan (1983, p. 124).
I shall come back to this in §3.
According to Lakatos (1978a: 124–125 fn3, 133 fn4, 146 fn1, 152 fn5), this ‘quasi-empirical’ method can be applied not only to the appraisal of theories of scientific rationality but to every normative field, such as ethics or aesthetics. Lakatos called this method ‘quasi-empirical’ in contradistinction to the aprioristic, ‘quasi-Euclidean’ approaches. This distinction can already be found in the Lakatosian philosophy of mathematics (Lakatos 1978b: 28–29).
At this point, Lakatos agrees with Kuhn (1970a: 144) who stresses that ‘scientific behaviour, taken as a whole, is the best example we have of rationality’.
See also Lakatos (1978a: 103 fn1), where he further adds: ‘methodology is separated from heuristics, rather as value judgments are from “ought statements”’.
At this point it may seem that I equate science with a mere set of beliefs and scientific change with belief modification. One may object that this equation reflects a pre-Kuhnian, theory-centered conception of science which is obsolete. I do that for reasons of brevity. I agree that this conception is obsolete and I don’t want to equate science with a mere set of beliefs. Science is also, if not primarily, a set of practices. I think that the same reconstruction can be done if we take into consideration rational principles that govern practices.
A possible counterargument here is that a historian could start, in a purely descriptive way, from that which scientists of a given period believe is scientific. But this move just leads to another problem: who count as a scientist and who does not. The sociological point of view can only indicate who is considered a scientist. But then we are blind to the difference between who is considered as scientist and who actually is.
See Popper (1978).
See also Lakatos (1978b: 115–116, 242)
Galileo discovered the phases of Venus in 1610. Lakatos was careless with chronology here. I owe this correction to the remark of one anonymous reviewer.
Lakatos (1978a: 185–156) considers the following facts as novel facts in the Zaharian sense: a) Planets have stations and retrogressions b) The periods of the superior planets, as seen from the Earth are not constant c) I f an astronomer takes the Earth as the origin of his fixed frame, he will ascribe to each planet a complex motion one of whose components is the motion of the Sun.
Giere (1973) argued that the idea that normative philosophy of science can be informed by historical studies faces the old Humean is/ought problem. For a more recent reformulation of the metaphysical problems faced by the confrontation model, see Schickore (2011: 458) and Arabatzis and Schickore (2012: 398). The argument goes as follows: the history of science is a descriptive enterprise and the philosophy of science is a normative endeavor (Burian 1977; Pinnick and Gale 2000; Shapin and Schaffer 2011). Hume’s law entails that any derivation of norms from a set of descriptive facts consists of a logical fallacy (Hume [1739] 2000: §3.1.2, 302). To my mind, Lakatos’s acceptance of the Popperian third-world leads to major difficulties related to the above-mentioned metaphysical problems. The most obvious of these difficulties are the following: a) this kind of autonomous territory seems spooky or ‘queer’ (Mackie 1977: 38) and probably incompatible with what we often call the ‘Modern Scientific Worldview’ (Korsgaard 1996: 18); b) it is hard to explain how two completely heteronomous ontological territories may interact with each other (Boyle 2016: 536). I am not going to discuss these difficulties here. I shall take for granted that liberal naturalism is a viable option and is the sort of naturalism that Lakatos should have endorsed. For a detailed examination of the metaphysical problems entailed by the confrontation model, see Dimitrakos (2020).
Bolinska and Martin (2019) have recently shown that these are not the only possibilities of bias in the process of selecting historical cases for testing philosophical perspectives. Since the aim of this paper is to discuss the particular Lakatosian conception of the relation between the history and the philosophy of science I chose to refer to the issues that are more relevant to this conception.
While this philosophical strategy may already be found in the Platonic dialogues, it took its name from Sextus (see Tindale 2010, ch. 6).
Even if it would be easy to show that inductivism is not inductively proved, it would be quite challenging to show why conventionalism is not a simple meta-criterion. Lakatos implies that a thorough historical scrutiny will discredit the conventionalist idea that major scientific changes consist of the transition from more complex to simpler theoretical systems. He also implies that this entails conventionalism’s self-refutation. But this is not the case. Conventionalism would be self-refuted only if it was proved not simple or at least more complex than the other methodologies, just as falsificationism was self-refuted because it was falsified. Lakatos argumentation is rather sloppy at this point.
I will come back to this argument.
Lakatos (1978a: 72)—pace his younger (more Hegelian) self—rejects the idea that there is a ‘natural saturation point’ for research programs.
Again, if a community’s value judgement were the only measure of rationality then the Kuhnian elitism or the Feyerabendian anarchism would be far better historiographical detectors of rationality. But Lakatos explicitly rejects such positions. He strongly believed that there are objective criteria of rationality independent of a community’s value judgements.
Compare Lakatos’s assumption with Hegel’s (1820/2005: 20) famous quote: ‘[w]hat is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational’.
I am not implying here that scientific research is based on any kind of ‘raw data’. I merely claim that, despite the theory-ladenness of the observational data, the consensus between rival scientific theories about what counts as ‘basic’ or ‘protocol’ statements is easier to achieve than the consensus between rival philosophical theories of rationality about what counts as a genuinely rational attitude.
At least those which are successful enough.
Most of the time not explicitly.
‘The generalized demarcation problem is, it seems to me, the primary problem of philosophy of science.’ (Lakatos 1978b: 107).
Laudan (1983) announced the ‘demise of the demarcation problem’.
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Dimitrakos, T. Reconstructing rational reconstructions: on Lakatos’s account on the relation between history and philosophy of science. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 10, 29 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00293-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00293-x