Abstract
Philosophers of science have put forward various methodologies for appraising the scientific merits of theories. These methodologies have usually been backward-looking in the sense that they treat theories as finished products and appraise their scientific value mainly in terms of their empirical performance to date.
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Notes
Descartes, [1628], p. 9.
Ibid.
Herschel [1831], p. 59; the second set of italics are mine.
Polanyi is the modern philosopher whose views of heuristics in science seem to lie closest to the Cartesian view. For example he claims: “There is no doubt… of the scientist’s capacity to assess in outline the course of an enquiry that will lead to a result which at the time he makes the assessment, is essentially indeterminate”. It is on account of this capacity, Polanyi argues, that in science “it is rare to come across years of futile efforts wasted”. (Polanyi [1972], p. 44.)
Popper [1972], p. 198.
Popper [1963], p. 189.
Popper [1963], p. 192.
Popper [1934], section 2; my italics. These statements of Popper’s actually contain several theses and I cite them only to bring out Popper’s view that the invention of a new idea cannot be logically reconstructed, that its origins are essentially mysterious. I will argue against this thesis in the next part. However, I do not dissent from the other major thesis expressed in these quotations, namely that the origins of a theory are irrelevant to an appraisal of its objective merits.
Hempel [1945], p. 4.
Whewell [1858], p. 59; my italics.
Reichenbach [1951], p. 231. Medawar, in the same vein, claims that ‘the generative act in scientific enquiry, “having an idea”,… represents the imaginative or logically unscripted episode in scientific thinking’ (Medawar [1969], p. 55).
Popper [1972], p. 201; my italics.
Ibid., p. 202.
Lakatos [1970], p. 92.
Lakatos [1971a], p. 101 and Lakatos [1971b], p. 174.
Lakatos [1971c], p. 77.
Planck [1897].
Ostwald [1927], in retrospect. See Clark [1976] for a detailed examination of the kinetic and thermodynamics research programme.
Nature, August 7, 1943; my italics. I am grateful to Roy Wolfe for drawing my attention to this quotation.
Duhem ([1906], p. 221) poked gentle fun at the ‘layman’ who naively looks on a scientific hypothesis as the product of a sudden creative leap and who believes that: ‘‘this fairy who… he calls by the name of science has touched with his [sic] magic wand the forehead of a man of genius and that the theory immediately appeared alive and complete like Pallas Athena emerging fully armed from the forehead of Zeus. He thinks it was enough for Newton to see an apple fall in the orchard in order that the effects of falling bodies, the motions of the earth, the moon and the planets and their satellites, the trips of comets, the ebb and flow of the ocean, should all come to be suddenly summarised and classified in that one proposition: Any two bodies attract each other proportionally to the product of their masses and inversely to the square of their mutual distance.”
Watkins [1974], p. 406.
See Merton [1957], [1961] and [1963].
In the past, scientists locked up their discoveries in coded summaries and learned societies provided special facilities for recording the date of a discovery. More recently, rapid-publishing journals such as Nature have provided a similar service.
See e.g. Lakatos [1970], p. 155. It seems that it was Noretta Koertge’s criticisms in her [1971] which first persuaded Lakatos that “in appraising research programmes one has to take into account the different powers… of their positive heuristics”. (Lakatos [1971b], p. 177.)
See Zahar [1973] for a detailed account of the relativity research programme.
Descartes’ laws of impact were not only underivable and known to be underivable from Cartesian metaphysics, they were also irrelevant to the vortex theory since they only applied under the imaginary conditions of bodies colliding in a vacuum. They could not be transferred to a continuous fluid medium.
See Mach [1912], p. 199.
Stephen Toulmin discusses a similar notion to my objective promise, which he calls ‘ripeness’ and which he too regards as an ‘intrinsic feature’ of a ‘field of enquiry’. However, he gives no general criteria by which ripeness is appraised nor any description of the unit of appraisal. However Toulmin’s excellent examples suggest that he regards what I called ‘autonomy’ as the major feature of a ripe ‘field of enquiry’. (See Toulmin [1972], pp. 211–2.)
See above, p. 104.
Zahar provides one significant piece of evidence for this conjecture by showing that, in their early transfer of allegiance from Lorentz’s to Einstein’s programme, scientists’ major consideration was the greater heuristic power of the relativity programme. (See Zahar [1973].)
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© 1978 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Urbach, P. (1978). The Objective Promise of a Research Programme. 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_5
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