4/19 Questions

Q1: 1. who exactly is the person using Lakatos' writing and adding side comments in brackets?

2. I am wondering what these terms/sentences mean: "theological knowledge cannot be fallible: it must be beyond doubt", and "empirical progress".

3. How does the author believe the problem of demarcation can be solved? Since most of his writing is a criticism of Kuhn and Popper's approach to distinguishing between science and pseudoscience, I got a bit confused. For him, is science a program with "dramatic, unexpected, stunning predictions"? This doesn't really make sense to me. Also, he ends the paper by saying how distinguishing between science and pseudoscience "has grave ethical and political implications"... so to recap by question, does he even come up with a way to solve the problem of demarcation?

A1: (1) The paper was originally a "public lecture" that Lakatos gave. The side comments in brackets were added, by him, when he put it down in written format.

(2) With respect to "theological knowledge ..." . In this whole passage, L. is explaining why it is that the criterion for having knowledge is thought to be "proven from fact". In giving you this explanation, L. turns to the history of science, and shows that science inherited this criterion from theology, where knowledge was claimed to be beyond doubt. " Beyond doubt", when freed from theological authority, needs a bit more explaining (we can no longer give as reason for believing something "because God said so"). Thus, beyond doubt is interpreted as being proven from fact. If you can prove it from facts, then it is beyond doubt.

"Empirical progress" is just the growth of knowledge.

(3) Demarcation (delimiting what is knowledge (science) from what is not) is done through an evaluation of a research programme. One needs to evaluate a whole research programme and determine whether it is progressive or degenerative. Degenerative ones are not knowledge, progressive ones are. The "dramatic...stunning" bit is basically describing one aspect of progressiveness. But even if they are just "interesting and entertaining", that's progress, too. As long as they are not degenerating. Degeneration is identified by a research programme's inability to make new predictions, and also by it's method of handling conflicting experimental results -- it basically "patches up" the theory by adding ad hoc statements to account for the anomaly. So, yes, he does have a positive thesis regarding demarcation.
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Q2: It seems like Lakatos is setting up falsifiability as a bit of a straw man. Does Popper actually "preach" that "refutations are the hallmark of empirical failure," that in actual scientific inquiry a single piece of counter-evidence destroys a theory forever? It doesn't seem like it to me - Popper is describing a theoretical notion rather than something that corresponds to the history of science. How is Lakatos actually arguing against Popper? Or to rephrase, what is the version of falsifiability Lakatos is attacking?

Also, is Popper's falsifiability criterion the only aspect of his theory that can demarcate science from pseudoscience, as Lakatos seems to imply? What about P's notion that better theories lead to new and more interesting questions? That seems just as good if not better than Lakatos's sense that "in a progressive research program, theory leads to the discovery of hitherto unknown novel facts."

A2: The important criticism of Popper that Lakatos is making concerns the conclusion that one draws when one finds that one's theory about a matter predicts something that comes out false. For Popper (Lakatos claims) that is the death of the theory. Lakatos' claim is that it is not/should not be. And the simple reason for this is because the theory does not exist alone in the world. It come surrounded by a protective belt (see below), which is amended and modified in light of the failed prediction. The "hard core" (seriously, can you believe this terminology??) remains untouched.

I agree with you though. I think that Lakatos' exegesis leaves much to be desired. (In particular, Popper does have a positive proposal concerning the ability of a conjecture to make predictions, evaluating conjectures on the basis of those predictions that are confirmed, the refinement of conjectures and the development of new and interesting questions. One needs to ask how these features of knowledge acquisition might figure into, and cohere with, what Lakatos is saying about progressive research programmes.)

With respect to your second question: The emphasis is on what gets tossed, not what gets saved. What L. is actually objecting to is the idea that we would eliminate a conjecture from consideration merely because some experiment has gone awry (i.e. the ~P case). His claim is that there are a lot of reasons for why this might have happened, and not all of them entail that the theory is false. In fact most of them don't. So to say that, simply because a theory met with the unfortunate circumstance of making a prediction that came out false, we should therefore consider it non-knowledge, is to draw the demarcation line at the wrong place.

So, at least with respect to the question of what gets tossed out as non-sense, Popper (according to Lakatos) is acting too hastily. This is a generally accepted criticism of Popper.
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Q3: It's strange this tension between narratives and knowledge. It seems like we're reading lots of essays about fantastic objective knowledge and its attainability--and then reading books (only one so far) whose worth lies wholly in their subjectivity. Where's the middle ground here? Won't each group of texts deny the legitimacy of others? I'm in a difficult position because I'm conditioned by English to start from the text rather than starting against the text, which seems to be the method in philosophy. I've read the lakatos, and everything else and simply don't feel wholly engaged by it. I grasp it intellectually but it doesn't seem emotionally relevant--and Ayer or someone is telling me that anything that is emotionally relevant isn't real, or isn't verifiable, or doesn't matter. Is philosophy pseudoscientific? It doesn't seem to make surprising claims, like lakatos wants his sciences to, just to rationalize and connect existing facts of life.

A3: But there is a middle ground here -- a middle ground between objectivity and subjectivity. We can only see that once we recognize that this thing we've been aiming for -- objective knowledge -- is non-existent. Ultimately, there is no objectivity. Anything that we might have thought of as objectivity -- a god's-eye view of the world, the view from nowhere, a value-free, perspectiveless account of reality -- is unattainable because there is no magic method that drives the subject out of our claims about the world. But it is only through an understanding of this failure that we can come to see why (1) we are not propelled into a radical subjectivism or even strong social constructivism and (2) subjectivity -- and, more importantly, the explicit recognition of subjectivity -- is the path to knowledge.
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Q4: I don't really understand the concept of not being able to derive a
law of nature from a finite number of facts. I understand the
unreliability of facts in the sense that we can never achieve finite (Editor's note: do you mean `infinite' here?)
knowledge, but then how do laws exist at all? If they can never be
proven, what differentiates laws from theories? I always thought that
laws were, in fact, proven theories. Along the same lines, I don't
understand Popper's statement that a theory is only scientific if it
can be falsified. Are there really no concrete scientific findings?

A4: To put the answer to your first question most simply, a law makes a universal claim about ALL occurrences of a particular event or property (i.e. PE=mgh, Potential energy can be calculated as the product of the mass of an object, gravity and the height of the object above the earth). Since we haven't experienced all cases of objects resting at some distance above the earth, this is a statement that goes beyond what we actually have experienced to predict something about future such events. So laws, to the extend that they `exist', are actually unproven assumptions -- assumptions that things will continue to be just as we have experienced them (and, for that matter, were like this prior to our having experienced them.)

Your second question is important to understand. What Popper is saying is not that a conjecture (theory) must, IN FACT, we falsified, but rather that it be the kind of statement that, POTENTIALLY, can be falsified. So, does the conjecture make a claim about the world that we can actually go out and tests? There are absolute scientific findings according to Popper (N.B. Lakatos will disagree) -- conjectures that we have shown to be false. And there are scientific findings that are well supported -- we keep doing tests, different sorts of them, we keep refining the conjecture, coming up with new predictions, and these keep coming out true, so our conjectures are more probable than not.
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Q5: I don't understand the part about value. I think people have to assign value to things, things just don't objectively come with it. Thus, I could manage to believe pseudoscience can have scientific value if believed but how can a theory no one believes or understands be valuable (even if it's "really" progressive)? Would a dollar be valuable if no one believed in it's worth or understood it's purpose? Could it just be POTENTIALLY valuable if it's worth would just be understood or discovered? Is there such thing as objective value?

A5: What L. is really trying to say here is clearer if you focus on his distinction, made in the first paragraph, between knowledge and things that are not knowledge -- superstition, ideology, pseudoscience (i.e. false claims). His point, I believe, is that whether or not something is true is independent of whether anyone believe it. Many things that are false are believed by a lot of people, and many things that are true are believed by nobody (just think of things that have yet to be discovered). He is probably trying to stay away from the true/false dichotomy since, on his account, theories won't be known to be true or false, but will make novel predictions, explain a lot of phenomena and, in general, be progressive. So, if you interpret "valuable" in this sense -- i.e. help a research programme to be progressive.

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Q6: Who are Mendelians? ("communist party persecuted mendelians")
Does anyone actually think of marxism as a science? why does lakatos hate commies?

A6: People who studied early genetics and followed Gregor Mendel's theory that phenotypic traits (like plant height, seed color, etc.) sort into dominant and recessive traits (tall, short; green, yellow) that are determined by genes.

Marxism is a political theory, and to the extent that it predicts the rise and fall of politico-economic systems, yes it is a scientific theory.

Lakatos was a Hungarian citizen and witnessed the invasion of his homeland by communist forces during WWII.
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Q7: I am having problems understanding how the value of a scientific theory is independent of the human mind that creates it/understands it. If it such a grand and valuable idea, then how does it get assigned value other than when people use it? I can't see how scientific theories can have intrinsic value because there they can only be appreciated by those who work with them and use them or by those who create them to explain phenomena as it exists in the world.

Also, is only scientific theory knowledge because of the "value" that it has? Can pseudoscientific theory be knowledge or can we have knowledge of pseudoscientific theory even if it doesn't really have much value? (which goes back to the question of how theories are assigned value independently of people)
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Q8: Lakatos's comments about Popper's view on the line between science and pseudoscience trouble me. If I understood Popper correctly, in order to be scientific, something must be directly testable. In this sense, Marxism would be refutable by the same sense that Lakatos eventually arrives at-- its predictions fail to come true. I also feel like recalcitrant results can be explained in Popper's sense- that they do not in fact represent a falsification of the meat of the theory, but they serve to make the theory more refined. They are new "problems" as I understand it. This said, what is really the difference between Popper and Lakatos's definitions of science?

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Q9: Can a programme still work or be true if it is degenerative? for instance, if one is looking at some specific historical event and one formulates a theory for why and how such an event came to pass, there isn't really a way to predict novel facts, because the information is already laid out: one already knows what happened before, and what heppened after, and the consequences; one knows all the circumstances already. First of all would this be a degenerative theory? And if so, can it still be valid?
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Q10: Marxism is offered as an example of a degenerating program, but it seemed a little out of place in the context of the whole paper. What is another example of a degenerating program, in the realm of science, (not history)?
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Q11: How does anyone decide when a scientific program is lagging behind the facts and when it is merely dealing with a few anomalies? Both ways it seems that it is trying to provide an answer to refutations, so when is it okay to use the "problem-solving machinery" and when is that a sign of a degenerating program?
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Q12: Would Lakatos consider the Marxist theories scientific in the beginning, before things happened that were contrary to its predictions, or would he believe that it was always pseudoscience?
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Q13: In this article, Lakatos mentioned, "In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts". But don't some anomalies that we discover today lead to minor changes in details of larger theories? Why can a theory not be modified in order to explain a particular anomaly, as long as such a modification still helps to explain all other observations?
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Q14: Is it possible for theories categorized as pseudoscience to be scientifically proven if it is studied from a different prospective?