An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

Introduction

In this chapter and the next we will consider the contributions of Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, respectively. They were contemporaries of Thomas Kuhn who shared some of Kuhn's commitments but developed them into strikingly different visions of the scientific enterprise.

Like Kuhn, both Lakatos and Feyerabend emphasize that an adequate philosophy of science has to answer to the history of science (though they disagreed on the exact role history should play). Like Kuhn, they insist that the theoretical framework in which a scientist works influences the way that she interprets her evidence, making the logical empiricists' sharp distinction between theoretical and observational vocabularies untenable.

Yet Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend offer very distinct philosophies with different aims. An important difference concerns the rationality of science. For Kuhn, an adequate account of revolutionary science must allow for rational disagreement among scientists, but beyond that rationality is not central to his analysis. For both Lakatos and Feyerabend, the problem of rationality is central, but they take positions that are, at least on the surface, diametrically opposed. Lakatos seeks to demonstrate the (at least partial) rationality of the historical progression of scientific thought (and to distinguish it from irrational pseudoscience). Feyerabend, on the other hand, argues that any attempt to constrain science by a philosophical model of rationality (whether that of the logical empiricists, or Popper, or anyone else) will prove counter productive, inhibiting the free development of the individual scientist and blocking the growth of scientific knowledge.