Mo’s Response for week2

September 12, 2011 at 2:07 pm | Posted in Week 2 | 3 Comments

Lakatos discusses what constitutes science.  In his transcript, he overviewed two core thinkers, Kuhn and Popper, both of whom published influential arguments about the concept of science.  Then, Lakatos advances his own idea by identifying problems of these two thinkers’ arguments.  First, Lakatos does not agree with Kuhn’s idea that scientific development rests on revolutions that involve sudden, irrational changes in vision.  Rather, Lakatos explains scientific progress as gradual changes.  He says, when there are multiple conflicting research programs and one particular program progresses, scientists tend to join the progressive program.  According to Lakatos, this process results in scientific revolution.  Second, Lakatos also do not contend that Popper’s concept of falsifiability is the core element that distinguishes science from pseudo-science.  In the actual practice, research programs are much more generous to ‘falsifying evidence’, and usually regard it as outlier or totally ignores it.  What is more important characteristic of science is, as Lakatos argues, the ability of theory that predicts certain dramatic, unexpected phenomena, not that provides ad-hoc explanations.

While reading articles, a question struck me was that science may not be the only way of being closer to truth.  For instance, regarding the controversy between Intellectual Design and Evolutionism, nobody provides the truth so far.  I suppose, evolutionism might be closer to science just because it has provided tangible evidence while ID hasn’t, but it is hardly the case that the evidence for evolutionism is persuasive enough to prove the theory is a true story.  I claim that science is a certain way of knowing, though it has been known to be the most effective way that human beings can employ, but not the only way of knowing the truth.