Post-Kuhnian Philosophy of Science: Imre Lakatos (2 of 3)

In this video I walk through the Imre Lakatos' idea of a 'scientific research program' and how this idea helps us evaluate scientific ideas, understand scientific change, and demarcate science from pseudoscience.

[jaredprince]

I had already watched several of your lectures when I began to become increasingly uncomfortable. Finally, I went to the doctor. She asked me what I had been doing before the symptoms manifested. She suddenly became quite cheerful. "My dear boy, " she said, "you are Lakatose intolerant."

[GoldPhoenix]

Nice video, but a small technical correction: String theory is M-theory is "brane theory, " at least as a research program. There's an interesting complex history there, but a better example would have been "Sting theory" vs "Loop quantum gravity." Of course, even here we technically don't even know whether or not they are or aren't equivalent, since there's too little understood on the topic of quantum gravity, but right now they are at least competing research programs.

[LeonhardEuler]

@12:30: Just FYI, "brane theory" and M-theory are synonmous (one of the things people often say the M stands for in M-theory is "membrane"), and string theory is a subset of M-theory (the original forms of string theory arise in situations when certain parameters go towards certain limits). A competitor of string theory/M-theory would be something like loop quantum gravity.

[thomaskelly]

I appreciate you're great fairness to Marxism by restating that Marx's guesses for the future not coming true does not undermine the crux of what man had to say. You couldn't call it a science and most Marxists today wouldn't dare call it that and are horrified by such positivism but what you can definitely call Marxism is economically-informed revolutionary socialism. I feel like when Popper talks about Marxism being Pseudoscience he is correct in the sense that Marx and Engels definitely considered themselves to be scientists like many other economists and sociologists and historians of their period would and like Popper I would agree that social science is not science. However, Popper's picking on Marxism as his choice example of a pseudoscience is an extremely political act, which at the very least implicitly tries to pass Karl Marx off as some snake oil salesmen who prayed on the unhappy. At least Karl Marx had the nerve to be clear about his ethical stance toward his subject matter. He was a partisan to cause of universal emancipation of working people not just in the formal democratic sense but in the sense of their economic lives. Karl Popper on the other hand masked his ideology from scrutiny by attempting to discredit Marxism's positivist excesses from a coldly scientific stance in order to discredit socialism in general. Karl Popper belonged to the Mont Pelerin Society, claiming he valued the Open Society which in the face of Communist Dictatorships existing at the time is superficially understandable, however what really disgusted Popper and the Mont Perlin Society wasn't state terror like they ostensibly claimed but any redistribution of wealth that favored the people that produced that wealth in the first place, even along Keynesian lines. His falsification of Marxism is 100 percent political and not neutral even if one concedes Marxism isn't a science.

[billthompson]

And yet the context is a "cause" of sets and categories thus any criticism of any truth has to describe them and thus the contexts become a (another) truth that can be criticized

[jonathanbirchley]

Nice insights!
Ca 15 min. I don't understand why anybody should expect the possibility of rational guideline on whether to persevere with a scientific program or abandon it.
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards"

[Pfhorrest]

I think perhaps degeneration can be rationally quantified in terms of Popperian "risk-taking" of beliefs: if you save a theory from anomalies by having the theory say less at all and therefore be less vulnerable to *any* falsification, such that it is retreating closer to unfalsifiability, then it is degenerating in an unscientific way. If on the other hand in response to anomalies a theory is shored up in a way that it ends up making even more specific claims that make it even more vulnerable to falsification (and yet it continues to be unfalsified), then it is progressing.

[Flamingbob]

I like Lakatos, definitely more then I liked Kuhn's theories, I appreciate Feyerabend's complaint although it doesn't strictly seem like a refutation or anything of his work. It simply means there is work to be on the end to determine the rationalist way of when to change theories (as I would argue the no rational basis for when to switch is a belt of his idea, not core.)

[omaramer]

Amazing lectures !! I am watching them all ! .

What kind of one book would give a bird's view of philosophy of science ?

I have read Kuhn, Popper and feyerabend books but I need more collective picture .

[yuriarin]

The chinese strand of marxism is a quite progressive research program tho. I think it is quite overlooked when marxism is used as the posterchild of degenerating research programmes

[Pfhorrest]

The "communist" revolutions that took off in pre-industrial societies like Russia *did not* play out according to Marx's predictions, and instead have all degenerated into state capitalism. Meanwhile in post-industrial societies, more socialist programs are flourishing, and in the future as technology becomes even more post-industrial (100% automation, for example) we may see something even more like Marx's predictions play out.

[iagorondello]

Clearly this guy doesn't know much about the evolution of marxist thought throughout the 20th century...