Theme 1: Theory of Science Post-reflection

When I saw the title of this week's theme "Theory of Science" I immediately thought of a book I read when I was about to start at KTH. At the time, I thought that becoming a university student I should have some knowledge about what science is, and how to separate good science from bad. A friend of mine who at the time was a student of philosophy at SU recommended me to read the book What is this Thing Called Science? by A.F. Chalmers. It proved to be a very instructive and comprehensive book which mapped out the most important theories of science chronologically. In this blog post I will try to remember what I learned.

Induction

Induction is the process of drawing a conclusion from a number of systematical observations. The difference between deduction and induction is that induction doesn't have to be logically valid. It is however more useful as the premises of deductive reasoning are impossible to come up with without observations. For an inductive argument to be "good", Chalmers states that it needs a lot of observations, that the observations are done during a big time span with a lot of different circumstances and that none of the observations may contradict the conclusion. Chalmers then point out the shortcomings of these criteria, namely that they are too hard to fulfil.

Falsifiability

Karl Popper presented the notion of falsifiability as an alternative to induction in the 1920's. It continues where induction left off with a lot of observations but instead focuses on that theories should be falsifiable. An example of a simple falsifiable proposition is "It never rains on Wednesdays". Such a proposition has the benefit of being both logically valid and practically observable (unlike induction and deduction, respectively). To advance science we should propose new, relevant, bold and falsifiable theories and whenever they are falsified replace them with better ones.  There are some problems however. One of them is that an observation may falsify a theory when it is in fact the initial conditions that are wrong. An historical example of this is how observed perturbations of Uranus orbit seemingly falsified Newton's law of universal gravity. The perturbations were in fact caused by the then undiscovered planet Neptune (which was actually predicted using these perturbations!) .

Paradigm

Thomas Kuhn argues that scientific revolutions have followed structures that doesn't reflect on the theories of induction and falsification. These structures are that of this schema: pre-science–normal science–crisis–revolution–new normal science–new crisis etc. According to Kuhn a new normal science is achieved when the scientific society join its paradigm. The paradigm is more universal, encompasses several theories and provides the scientific society with both problems and solutions. A paradigm goes into a state of crisis when its anomalies begins to form big problems and is followed by a period of "pronounced professional uncertainty". The seriousness of the crisis is increased when a competing paradigm emerges. A historical paradigm is the one based around Maxwell's electromagnetic theories. This was eventually replaced by the Einsteinian paradigm which most importantly rejects the idea of æther, a medium through which electromagnetic waves was thought to propagate.

Research Programme

How do we know that one paradigm is better than the other? Imre Lakatos' research programme is very similar to Kuhn's paradigm, but combines it with falsifiability. A problem for science is that researchers within a paradigm, according to Lakatos, create help-hypotheses that protect the central theories from being falsified. To deal with this problem Lakatos differentiates between progressive and degenerative research programmes. A progressive research programme should produce novel, revolutionary results without a too big increase in help-hypotheses. An important difference between the two first and the two last notions I have presented is that the former focus on observations and facts whereas the latter focuses on theories.

Final Thoughts

Being somewhat a pragmatist I find the theory of science/methodology most satisfying that can provide healthy conditions for a progressive scientific society that produces high quality results. I think that Lakatos' research programme gets close to this, and it makes me envision science as a big research project that encompasses a lot of people doing smaller or larger contributions.


References: 

• Chalmers, A.F. (2003). Vad är vetenskap egentligen?. (3., rev. ed.) Nora: Nya Doxa.