Science and Scientific Change Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Science and Scientific Change - Essay ExampleI regard Kuhns contribution to the field as one of the most historic, not because I hazard hes correct, but because it radically changed the way people think about the nature and use of information. Before Kuhn, philosophers generally regarded erudition as a rational and logical enterprise, with strict standards that guaranteed objectivity. What Kuhn shows, in his The social structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), is that science, as well as scientific change, is not as rational as we think. Scientists themselves argon guided not by a set of objective principles, but by their personal interests and determine as much as anything else. Many philosophers and scientists have criticized Kuhn for portraying scientific change as an ill-advised process, one of them being Imre Lakatos. In this paper, I shall focus on the debate betwixt Kuhn and Popper, as exclamatory by Lakatos in his Falsification and The Methodology of Scientific Re search Programmes.I shall divide this paper into quaternion main parts the first part will discuss Poppers views on science and scientific change. Part two will be devoted to Thomas Kuhns analysis of the irrationality of science and paradigm shifts. The third part will synthesize the Popperian and Kuhnian debate. Here I will introduce Lakatos revaluation against Kuhn. Finally, I shall end my paper with my conclusion regarding the said issue at hand. Karl Popper What is the main difference between scientific theories and non-scientific theories? This is often referred to as the demarcation problem, which asks, what criterion can we use to distinguish scientific claims from non-scientific claims? What demarcates science from non-science? This is Karl Poppers most renowned contribution. Yet what settlement did Popper offer to his said problem? Poppers solution to the demarcation problem is really quite simple. He says that what distinguishes scientific claims from non-scientific one s is its falsifiability. Thus, a hypothesis is scientific if and sole(prenominal) if there is some way in which it can be falsified by means of some experiment. If we cannot work up an experiment, which can potentially falsify a hypothesis, then the hypothesis, even if meaningful, is really not scientific. In notation with these two theories that are foundational to Poppers philosophy, it is clear that Popper views science as a rational enterprise, where conjecture-change is characterized by scientific progress. According to Popper, science changes through a two-step cycle. Stage one is conjecture, and the second stage is essay refutation. Under the stage of conjecture, a theory is proposed as an attempt to solve the problem at hand. The theory is then put to test by attempted refutations. Attempted refutation occurs when the hypothesis is subjected to critical testing, in an attempts to show that it is false (Godfrey-Smith 61). Moreover, Popper notes that after the hypothesis is refuted, the process repeats again starting from a new conjecture, and so on and so forth. If the theory is corroborated, then it is temporarily accepted as un-refuted, but not justified. What is important to take note of here is that as the process