Science & Pseudoscience - Imre Lakatos (1973)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2025
- Imre Lakatos's most succinct public summary of his philosophy of science is presented in this 1973 BBC radio 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”. The talk includes his novel fallibilist analysis of the development of Newton’s celestial dynamics, Lakatos’s favourite historical example of his methodology.
#Philosophy #Epistemology #Science
Finally a hungarian philosopher. It's so good to hear elegant thoughts with our terrible accent lol
Def not a terrible accent!
I find his accent easy to follow & quite enjoyable 🤗❤
It doesn’t sound horrible to me
Love listening to Thomas Szasz who has the same accent.
"The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars ... likely to have planets circling around them. ... The simplest living things will multiply, evolve by natural selection and become more complicated till eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge. ... Yearning for fresh worlds ... they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth. - "And so," Fermi came to his overwhelming question, "if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they?" - It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to the Fermi Paradox: 'They are among us,' he said, 'but they call themselves Hungarians.'"
-György Marx
Accents are like food textures and I think Hungarian is quite pleasant, like a nice chewy bread.
Fantastic, very clear
Lakatos' model provides for the possibility of a research programme that is not only continued in the presence of troublesome anomalies but that remains progressive despite them.
Now that is logic. Thank you for sharing!
What’s his argument against Kuhn’s account of revolution? All I’m picking up so far is that he thinks Kuhnian revolutions are irrational but does he say why?
He said the Khun's account of revoluitons were wrong. Whereas to Khun revolutions were sudden to Lakatos revolutions evolved over a longer period of time.
This is his real voice? the audio is pretty good for that time
Audio recording was already very well developed by 1973. Elvis recorded That's All Right almost 20 years earlier, and his voice is plenty clear on that. (Even Big Boy Crudup's vocal on the original version from 1946 only distorts on the loud parts.) Pre-'70s recording equipment is still very much in demand because of how well it performs. If you're thinking of a low quality sound from a radio broadcast, it's probably the result of either tiny little low quality radio speakers or a poorly made copy of a copy of a copy of the original recording.
Currently, In which field of study is the demarcation between science and pseudoscience least clear?
The social sciences.
Copernicus was not excommunicated. In fact the Church hardly took any notice of him until Galileo provoked them.
Demarcation criteria. Love it!
All in all, I much prefer Popper and Kuhn. And Feyerabend, horrific heretic that I am. Thank you for posting this. I read about this guy a lot. Glad I finally heard what he had to say.
Seems like the real purpose of this lecture was to rather refute Marxism. What is common among all such refuters is the fact that how little they actually know about Marx's system. They take some of the more popularised observations or statements by Marx, and subject the said observations or statements to an analysis, according to their own presumed scientific methods or ways of inquiry, and then pronounce their judgement on the whole system which they are only elementarily familiar with.
Anyway, I have given this video a like, as I did gain some new perspective on the question of science vs pseudoscience by watching the video.
Lakatos was born in a communist society and was therefore bias against marxism, it comes natural to him to use marxism as an example. It dossent mean that the point if this video is to refute marxism, and it dossent mean that his points are invalid. The lecture is about distiguishing science from psuedo science and its a rather good lecture in my opinion.
NICE
Considering how bad the prediticions from economists, sociologists, and political scientists are. Any social science is pretty much bound to be designated as pseudoscientific, no?
Compared to physics, very much so. And yet they are called "sciences" simply by a choice of semantics. That's why Imre is saying that the distinction between science and not-science is important - it cannot be left to considerations like semantics, the strengths of beliefs and such
I overall agree, however I wonder how we can make this claim without disregarding the better aspects of the humanities. His last remarks seemed to be somewhat damning of valuable forms of epistemology that come from them.
The problem of demarcation is, in fact, insoluble. What makes any scientific discipline real science is a scientific attitude. This is fundamental.
Just to add, most of the social science programs are indeed pseudoscientific, however it must not be always so. The problem in this case is complexity, which In my belief, should be focused on. Therefore in social science, one should not tell a "story" about their beliefs, but try to entagle the complexity, which is on some point achievable. THEN one can give some theories and initiate programs about these observed complexities, however should be done without any "pseudoscientific" claims. Thats the reason why the social studies should have the extreme transparency so that we can check, if they have such claims or where their claims stands for.
Fromm hasn’t dated at all.
When i smells it, i knows it.
was with him right up until he had to drop the "liberals are suppressing research into the link between race and intelligence" 🙃
Exactly
If the Popperian falsification does not work, its the fault of the researchers who cling on to their revered theories, not the falsification criteria.
Indeed. He seemed to be dismissing it on the grounds that it is simply too idealistic of a demand for the scientific community to aspire to.
No, it's fundamentally problematic(at least the way it's understood, if not the way Popper meant it) The way it is understood applies very well to new theories that want to gain initial scientific respectability and acceptance. But it makes little sense to apply it to old theories. If we did for example we would take the perturbations in the orbit of Uranus to conclude that Newton's theory is false instead of the idea that there are more planets in the solar system(specifically Neptune which was discovered in this way) This is because an old established theory is part of a larger body of assumptions(which Irme calls a research program) and it might just as easily be other assumptions in this cloud rather than Newtonian theory which is mistaken. And given that there isn't even a clear list of these assumptions, identifying what assumption might be false is not easy and could take years. Besides many theories make probabilistic predictions which are NOT falsifiable by a single critical experiment. In such cases, even the falsification would consist of a wide-ranging series of tests. Finally given that theories are only supposed to be good functional models that approximate reality to a certain measure of accuracy, old theories are still useful as simple and "good enough" in limited contexts even if they are no longer considered universally valid. For example, steering a rocket within the solar system can be done very well using Newtonian Mechanics only(just as a simple map is more useful to a tourist than a more detailed map produced by a Geographical Society)
I think this might miss the point being made with "anomalies". It can be used as a dishonest excuse, but anomalies can remain a real thing challenging an overall good explanation, and to deal with the accuracy of one without disregarding the existence of the other is a worthy and important task.
Clinging to a theory in the face of anomalies isn't necessarily a vice; it's often what results in the improvement of a theory. Einstein developed special relativity to account for the observed behavior of light, which was anomalous according to the existing scientific framework. This development allowed for the successful prediction of novel phenomena, which is a scientific virtue.
That kind of predictive power isn't achieved by adjustments like scrapping the theory of electromagnetism or of optics-both of which were adopted in the first place due to their predictive power-even though they could also account for the anomaly. That's what makes special relativity a progressive scientific program while scrapping electromagnetism or a theory of optics are degenerative approaches.
Popperian falsification doesn't privilege one approach over the other. Both rework the existing framework into something that is not falsified by the anomaly but is still in principle falsifiable, so both satisfy the falsification criteria. However, there is a clear preference for one over the other. Lakatos's theory accounts for that preference.
Thank you ? and always keep asking , keep asking Questions ? That are important my humens falows ! becouse my friends it's by that " how could we , exactly turn into , a space movers araund the vast almighty univesrs that we just begon to explain it , with facts , rationalisam , and science and , criticism , and ideis ? ... Not with () .... Got the point , thank you all who work for this masterpiece ....