Lakatos’s research program attempts to explain the process by which scientists choose and develop theories, which compensates for the limitations of disproversialism, but Charmers argues that the methodology does not fully explain scientists’ choices. This article examines Lakatos’ theory and seeks to complement the explanation of scientific progress by suggesting that scientists’ tendency to believe in hypotheses that have withstood attempts at disproving them can guide the methodology.
The philosophy of science seeks to answer questions such as what is science and what is not science, whether it is possible to determine the methodology followed by scientific researchers as science develops, and if so, what it is, and by what mechanisms the history of the development of science can be explained. In modern philosophy of science, Popper’s disproversialism, Lakatos’s research program, and Kuhn’s paradigm are representative attempts to answer these questions. They offer different perspectives on science, each of which successfully answers the previous questions, but also has enough criticisms to be subject to debate and revision. Lakatos’s research program attempts to address the problems of disproversialism by inheriting it to some extent, but it also has methodological limitations. In reviewing Lakatos’s description of his research program and the limitations pointed out by Charmus in ‘ Contemporary Philosophy of Science,’ I noticed that it does not include anything related to the researcher’s trust in the theory, which is the subject of many failed attempts at disproving. In this article, I will briefly explain the above and, in light of this, propose another modification to Lakatos’s research program.
A key idea in Popperian disprovationalism is that empirical evidence cannot prove a theory to be true, but it can prove it to be false: even if a theory explains many observations well enough, there is no guarantee that future observations will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, if the observations are different from what the theory predicts, we know that the theory is wrong. The basis for scientists’ acceptance of a theory is that attempts to disprove it have failed, so acceptance is always provisional. Rather than simply reaffirming what is already known, evidence that a theory is wrong provides more information, which leads to scientific progress. For this reason, in disprovationalism, scientific progress is made when a hypothesis that was predicted to be true is disproved, or when an attempt to disprove a hypothesis that was predicted to be false fails.
However, observations that can disprove a theory also require that a number of hypotheses (such as the accuracy of the experiment, the accuracy of the observation instrument, and the truth of the theory on which the observation is based) are true in order for the observation to be true. These hypotheses, like theories, can be proven false, making both the approval and disapproval of a theory provisional. Also, historically, when observations are made that cannot be explained by a theory, they are often considered anomalies or errors in observation rather than leading to a disproof of the theory. These are historical events that are difficult to explain from a disprovationalist perspective, where theories are discarded by disproof.
To address this issue, Lakatos and Kuhn examined the historical development of science and came to the common conclusion that some theories should be understood as constructs: parts of a theory are more fundamental and are taken as fundamentally true by the scientists working on it. Even when observations arise that are inconsistent with the theory, they are thought to be caused by factors other than the basic assumptions. The remaining part is open to revision as research progresses and observations that don’t match the predictions emerge. However, the modifications must be clear enough that they can be independently verified. In the discovery of Neptune, for example, when Uranus did not follow the orbit predicted by Newtonian mechanics, rather than questioning the basic principles of Newtonian mechanics, researchers considered the possibility that there were other bodies outside of Uranus that were affecting its motion.
In Lakatos’ research program, the different hypotheses that make up a theory can be understood as having a solid core and a protective shell. Hypotheses that are considered fundamentally true are called the “solid core,” while other hypotheses that can be modified are called the “guardrails. A scientist considers a solid core to be unprovable, and in the event of a disconfirming observation, the protector is modified to protect the solid core. In doing so, the researcher follows two guidelines: negative discovery (not subjecting the nucleus to disprove) and positive discovery (modifying the nucleus to explain observations and predict new phenomena). Kuhn also proposed a similar concept of a research program, a “paradigm,” and described developments within such a research program as similar to developments during “normal science.
The difference between Lakatos and Kuhn is the change in the mainstream research program or paradigm. Kuhn explained paradigm shifts by giving them a historical context and saw interactions between groups of scientists as an important factor. Lakatos, on the other hand, evaluated the value of a research program based on its success in making new predictions: research programs that make new predictions and succeed in making them grow into the mainstream, while those that consistently fail to disprove them are discarded. This can be thought of as a loose form of disproof. A single disproof does not immediately lead to the abandonment of a theory, but a theory is abandoned if it consistently fails to be disproven.
The question is, how long does it take to fail to make a new prediction before the research program is abandoned? Copernicus’ 16th-century prediction of precession was not measurable until the 19th century. Because the guardrails of regressive research programs can be modified to make them more forward-looking, evaluating whether a research program is superior to competing programs can only be done by looking back in time.
“In ‘ Contemporary Philosophy of Science,’ Charmus suggests that there are limitations to viewing Lakatos’s research program as a methodology consciously followed by scientific researchers. It is one thing to describe historical scientific developments in terms of rules, but it is another to determine the norms that researchers actually followed at the time. The former describes the process of theory change, while the latter describes the choices that researchers made that led to that change. Lakatos’s research program and the negative-positive discovery method have been proposed as methodologies to explain researchers’ choices as the norms within which discoveries are made, but Charmus points out the limitations of these explanations.
His criticisms are as follows Lakatos fails to provide criteria for choosing between competing research programs. He cannot explain researchers’ choices because it is impossible for researchers to know immediately how progressive a particular program is at the time, and the changes that scientists made before Lakatos’ theory was proposed cannot be attributed to following the recently devised Lakatos methodology.
Charmus suggests modifying the research program so that it only accounts for theory change, not researcher choice. Lakatos did not separate theory change from researcher choice, but he acknowledged that he could not provide norms for choice and sought to separate the two to account for theory change. He uses the concept of degree of power to objectively express the amount of potential for a particular theory to develop. Researchers don’t need to know the degree of power, only the assumption that science evolves over time toward higher-powered programs. Since researchers do not know the norms of theory selection, the study of regressive theories is also reasonable.
However, I do not believe that the Lakatos methodology should abandon explanations of scientists’ choices. The criticisms offered by Charmus are refutable. It is true that Lakatos fails to provide norms for choosing between competing theories, but if theory choice and theory change are separated, the methodology can function as a description of the common paths followed by researchers. It cannot be a guide that guarantees success for individual scientists, but it can be a methodology that includes the thinking required to select a successful theory.
As a guide, it can suggest confidence in hypotheses that have withstood more attempts to disprove them. Hypotheses within a given theory that have withstood more attempts to disprove them, have been studied for longer, and have been successful in making predictions, are more reliable than those that have not. For example, the decision of researchers to follow Newtonian mechanics in the discovery of Neptune need not be explained as a methodological decision. The basic assumptions of Newtonian mechanics are the inverse square law and the laws of force and acceleration, and many predictions have been made based on these assumptions without contradiction. The fundamental hypotheses of Newtonian mechanics have a long history of validation, which leads researchers to consider the possibility that the guardian hypothesis is wrong more than the possibility that the fundamental hypothesis is wrong. This leads to the idea that it would take a long period of unresolved errors to dismiss the basic hypothesis.
This idea is unlikely to apply to the choice between all competing research programs, but it can influence the choice if the hypotheses within each research program are similar but have different nuclei. If a particular hypothesis is the basis for more predictions, researchers will tend to choose a research program that nucleates that hypothesis. While it is possible for old theories to be disproved, this tendency is not a problem in explaining scientific progress.
In this article, I have described Lakatos’s theory of historical events, discussed Charmus’s criticisms and revisions of it, and shown that it is possible to accept Charmus’s revised research program and still account for the common thinking of researchers. While acknowledging, like Charmus, that it is impossible for a scientist to choose the exact theory that is more successful at the time, he criticized Charmus’s position that there is no methodology that researchers consciously follow when advances in science occur. While the impossibility of choosing a successful theory may lead to the impossibility of presenting the methodology that led to the success of individual scientists, it is possible to present the methodology that scientists followed. As one of the guidelines of this methodology, he suggested trusting hypotheses that have withstood more disproof. This discussion is productive as philosophy of science attempts to explain more, and perhaps in the future we can discover these guidelines to better understand the choices scientists make.
