Science and Pseudoscience
by bipodThe London School of Economics and Political Science has a nice tribute to philosopher of science Imre Lakatos. Included is an actual audio recording of his Science and Pseudoscience lecture.
Science and Pseudoscience is Lakatos's most succinct public summary of his philosophy of science. In this talk he outlines his distinctive view of the importance of 'the demarcation problem' in the philosophy and history of science, namely the normative methodological problem of distinguishing between science and pseudo-science, and of why its solution is not merely an issue of 'armchair philosophy', but also one of vital social and political significance, and even of life and death itself. It reviews what he saw as the inadequacies of previous attempted solutions, such as both probative and probabilist inductivism, and how his own methodology of scientific research programmes solves some of the problems posed by the history of science for those of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. He proposes that scientists regard the successful theoretical prediction of stunning novel facts - such as the return of Halley's comet or the gravitational bending of light rays - as what demarcates good scientific theories from pseudo-scientific and degenerate theories, and in spite of all scientific theories being forever confronted by "an ocean of counterexamples".
MP3 audio of a Lakatos lecture
June 14th, 2005 at 3:39 am
Bipod, what are the lessons you draw for the ID movement from Lakatos' views?
Comment by tom_kbel — June 14, 2005 @ 3:39 am
June 14th, 2005 at 8:43 am
tom_kbel, am I your little kindergarden kid? What lesson did I draw…give me a freakin' break. If anything, Lakatos' demarcation criteria do not give us much to distinguish ND from ID.
Here's a nice quote that maybe you'd like to draw a lesson from:
"where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes."
Comment by bipod — June 14, 2005 @ 8:43 am
June 14th, 2005 at 4:06 pm
The lesson I draw is that while Darwinism is clearly a progressive research program by Lakatos' definition; ID is not even capable of becoming a progressive research program in principle until they make a firm commitment to not only a hard core to its program, but also develops auxilliary hypotheses making it possible to predict emperical facts from that hardcore; and also a heuristic to procede by.
As it stands, ID refuses to make commitments about auxilliary hypotheses - with major proponents often dismissing the demand for them as unwarranted. It has no heuristic for research, and nor can it develop one without developing clear auxilliary hypotheses. Unlike Lakatos, I do not call a discipline pseudo science just because it is degenerating; but only if it is so structured that logically it cannot become a progressive research program, or if its proponents handle all counterexamples by conventionalist strategies, ignoring the examples, and incorrectly stating the known facts in a way more consistent with their theory. ID is pseudoscience on the first ground, YEC on the second.
Comment by tom_kbel — June 14, 2005 @ 4:06 pm
June 14th, 2005 at 9:43 pm
Tom:
Because they are in fact not warranted. Many ID testable hypothesis such as Wells paper, do not really involve motive. Meyers's paper is simply based on the observation that we only have experience of intelligent agents generating specificed complexity.
Some ID hypothesis require motive to further examine the hypothesis, such as the hypothesis that the nitrogenase was designed to terraform the earth.
None of this means that ID is pseudoscience, there is no justification for that assertion.
I already showed you a clear heuristic for research found here . Please do not repeat these assertions in light of the fact that a clear heuristic does exist, and that many ID hypothesis do include motive , what you call "auxilliary hypotheses".
Comment by Guts — June 14, 2005 @ 9:43 pm