Abstract
When the philosopher of science stands back from his field in order to try to situate the rapid developments of the past two decades, a variety of ways suggest themselves as to how one might best characterize these. In a lengthy article “History of science and its rational reconstructions”,1 the late Imre Lakatos proposed a four-fold division of what he regarded as the major ‘rival methodologies’: inductivism, conventionalism, falsificationism, and his own ‘methodology of scientific research programs’ (MSRP). It will be the task of this essay to evaluate this way of viewing the contemporary scene, and to propose a rather different one.
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Notes
Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. VIII, R. C. Buck and R. S. Cohen 1971, pp. 91–134 (abbreviated below as HSRR).
Op. cit., p. 116.
Lakatos himself in his Topper on Demarcation and Induction’, in P. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Popper, 1974, pp. 241–270, abbr. PDI; paper written in 1969) makes use of a distinction between ‘methodology’ and ‘metamethodology’, but does not elaborate on it.
HSRR, p. 92.
HSRR, p. 96.
HSRR, p. 97.
“Progress in the theory of rationality is thus marked by historical discoveries; by the reconstruction of a growing bulk of value-impregnated history as rational. This idea may be seen as a self-application of my theory of scientific research programmes to a (nonscientific) research program concerning scientific appraisals”, PDI, p. 251.
See HSRR, p. 109 seq.; PDI, p. 246 seq.
HSRR, p. 109.
HSRR, p. 96.
These are documented in the works of Kuhn, Polanyi, Toulmin, Feyerabend, and other critics of the logicist orthodoxy of yesteryear; McMullin, ‘Logicality and Rationality’, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. XI, 1974, pp. 415–430, and ‘Empiricism at sea?’, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. XIV, 1974, pp. 21–32.
McMullin, ‘What Do Physical Models Tell us?’, in B. van Rootselaar and J. F. Staal (eds.), Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, North-Holland Publ. Co., Amsterdam, 1968, pp. 389–396. See also R. Harré, Principles of Scientific Thinking, University Press, Chicago, 1970; and McMullin, ‘The Unit for Appraisal in Science’, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Lakatos Memorial, Volume XXXIX, 1976, pp. 395–432.
PDI, p. 256.
See R. Giere, ‘History and Philosophy of Science: Intimate Relationship or Marriage of Convenience’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 24, 282–297 (1973);
McMullin, ‘History and Philosophy of Science: a Marriage of Convenience?’, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. XXXII, 1975, pp. 515–531.
Logic of Scientific Discovery, Hutchinson, London, 1959, p. 79.
HSRR, p. 94.
Lakatos inherited from Popper a way of speaking that makes it uncertain who the ‘conventionalist’ is: “The conventionalist decides to keep the center of such a pigeonhole system intact as long as possible” (HSRR, p. 94). Is the ‘conventionalist’ a scientist who is acting in the way described? (do scientists always act this way? Did the conventionalists think they should?) Or is it a philosopher reflecting on what the scientist does and interpreting it in this way (without presuming to suggest any alteration of procedure)? But then this mode of speech is misleading. Or is it a philosopher reflecting on his own approach in philosophy of science, i.e. construing conventionalism as a second-order methodology? Popper’s way of describing conventionalism seems to make it hover on all these levels at once, and of course Lakatos explicitly makes it both a methodology and a metamethodology.
LSD, p. 109.
LSD, p. 109.
PDI, p. 261.
‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, University Press, Cambridge, 1970, pp. 91–195, abbr. FM; see p. 131.
FM, p. 134.
Method-schema: a description of procedures; methodology: a reflective theoretical account of a particular method-schema; metamethodology: a philosophic discussion of the warrant(s) appropriate to methodological argument, and an appraisal of the rival theories of science based on them. ‘Method-schema’ is used here in roughly the sense in which ‘methodology’ has been used above; what has been called metamethodology above would correspond to both ‘methodology’ and ‘metamethodofogy’ here. A distinction between these two would be helpful to this present discussion. The notion of metamethodology used throughout this essay covers several rather different activities, but for the purposes of the essay, it is usually not necessary to distinguish them. It will be obvious to readers of G. Radnitzky’s book, Contemporary Schools of Metascience (Akademieforflaget, Goteborg, 1970) that it corresponds to what is there called ‘metascience’, and that many of the issues raised in this essay find a place in the very similar perspective of Radnitzky’s work. He too is attempting to provide the categories needed to make a taxonomy of the major options in contemporary philosophy of science. The main difference between his approach and ours is that he devotes a great deal more attention to the hermeneutic approach than we have done.
HSSR, p. 121.
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© 1978 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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McMullin, E. (1978). Philosophy of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions. In: Radnitzky, G., Andersson, G. (eds) Progress and Rationality in Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9866-7_10
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