Lakatos program

BAB I. Latar Belakang. Ilmu pengetahuan merupakan permasalahan yang tiada habisnya untuk dibahas. Segala yang berhubungan dengan ilmu pengetahuan baik itu teori, metode, filsafat dan lain sebagainya secara detail telah dibahas dan diteliti mulai zaman nenek moyang kita.

Pembahasan mengenai filsafat ilmu tentu tidak lepas dari membahas sejarah awal mula ilmu dan pengetahuan, pengertian, proses, jenis-jenisnya, prosedur, paradigma, kerangka dasar teori keilmuan, dan lain sebagainya. Sebagaimana yang kita tau, bahwa sesuatu dapat dikatakan sebagai ilmu jika telah melalui proses penelitian, pembuktian dan lain-lain.

Pembahasan mengenai kerangka dasar teori keilmuan, meliputi metode induksi, eksperimen, data positif empiris, logika induksi, verifikasi, falsifikasi, revolusi sain, dan metodologi program riset. Pembahasan-pembahasan sebagian dari yang tersebut, telah dijelaskan.

Maka dalam makalah ini akan dijelaskan mengenai revolusi sain dan metodologi program riset yang dikembangkan oleh Thomas S. Khun dan Imre Lakatos. Tujuan Penulisan Makalah. Adapun tujuan makalah ini ditulis ialah untuk mengetahui:. Latar belakang pemikiran Imre Lakatos. Elemen-elemen penting dalam Program Riset.

BAB II. Imre Lakatos: Metodologi Program Riset. Latar Belakang Pemikiran Lakatos. Imre Lakatos lahir di Hungaria pada tanggal 9 Nopember Karirnya diawali dengan jabatan Mentri Pendidikan, namum pemikirannya dipandang menyebabkan kekacauan politik sehingga pada tahun dipenjara selama tiga tahun, kemudian beliau menerjemah buku-buku matematika kedalam bahas Hungaria.

Karena pada tahun terjadi revolusi , Imre Lakatos lari ke Wina yang akhirnya sampai ke London. Di London inilah kemudian Imre Lakatos melanjutkan studi di Cambridge University dan memperoleh gelar doktor setelah mempertahankan desertasinya: Proofs and Refutations: The Logic Of Matematical Discovery karya yang membahas pendekatan terhadap beberapa metodologi matematika sebagai logika penelitian. Pada masa-masa ini banyak gagasan tentang teori keilmuan.

Menurut Lakatos, persoalan pokok yang berhubungan dengan logika penemuan Logic of Discovery tidak bisa dibahas secara memuaskan kecuali dalam kerangka metodologi program riset.

But logic leaves us with a choice. The conjunction of the hard core plus the auxiliary hypotheses has to go, but we can retain either the hard core or the auxiliary hypotheses. What Lakatos calls the negative heuristic of the research programme, bids us retain the hard core but modify the auxiliary hypotheses:. It is this protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses which has to bear the brunt of tests and gets adjusted and re-adjusted, or even completely replaced, to defend the thus-hardened core.

Thus when refutation strikes, the scientist constructs a new theory, the next in the sequence, with the same hard core but a modified set of auxiliary hypotheses. How is she supposed to do this? Well, associated with the hard core, there is what Lakatos calls the positive heuristic of the programme.

Alternatively, if stellar parallax is not observed, we can try to refute this apparent refutation by refining our instruments and making more careful measurements and observations. Lakatos evidently thinks that when one theory in the sequence has been refuted, scientists can legitimately persist with the hard core without being in too much of a hurry to construct the next refutable theory in the sequence. On the one hand, they connect the central theses of the hard core with experience, allowing to them to figure in testable, and hence, refutable theories.

On the other hand, they insulate the theses of the hard core from refutation, since when the arrow of modus tollens strikes, we direct it at the auxiliary hypotheses rather than the hard core.

So far we have had an account of what scientists typically do do and what Lakatos thinks that they ought to do. But what about the Demarcation Criterion between science and non-science or between good science and bad? Even if it is sometimes rational to persist with the hard core of a theory when the hard core plus some set of auxiliary hypotheses has been refuted, there must surely be some circumstances in which is it rational to give it up!

The Methodology of Scientific Research Programme has got to be something more than a defence of scientific pig-headedness! As Lakatos himself puts the point:. Each of them, at any stage of its development, has unsolved problems and undigested anomalies. All theories, in this sense, are born refuted and die refuted.

But are they [all] equally good? Lakatos, of course, thinks not. Some science is objectively better than other science and some science is so unscientific as to hardly qualify as science at all. To begin with, the unit of scientific evaluation is no longer the individual theory as with Popper , but the sequence of theories, the research programme.

Rather we ask ourselves whether the sequence of theories, the research programme, is scientific or non-scientific or constitutes good or bad science. What is it for a research programme to be progressive?

It must meet two conditions. Firstly it must be theoretically progressive. That is, each new theory in the sequence must have excess empirical content over its predecessor; it must predict novel and hitherto unexpected facts FMSRP: Secondly it must be empirically progressive.

Thus a research programme is degenerating if the successive theories do not deliver novel predictions or if the novel predictions that they deliver turn out to be false. Novelty is, in part, a comparative notion. A prediction is novel if the theory not only predicts something not predicted by the previous theories in the sequence, but if the predicted observation is predicted neither by any rival programme that might be in the offing nor by the conventional wisdom.

A programme gets no brownie points by predicting what everyone knows to be the case but only by predicting observations which come as some sort of a surprise. Before Newton, astronomers might have noticed a comet arriving every seventy-two years though they would have been hard put to it to distinguish that particular comet from any others , but they could not have been as exact about the time and place of its reappearance as Halley managed to be.

This programme made the stunning prediction that if one measures the distance between two stars in the night and if one measures the distance between them during the day when they are visible during an eclipse of the sun , the two measurements will be different. Thus, in progressive research programme, theory leads to the discovery of hitherto unknown novel facts.

A degenerating research programme, on the other hand unlike the theories of Newton and Einstein either fails to predict novel facts at all, or makes novel predictions that are systematically falsified. Has…Marxism ever predicted a stunning novel fact successfully? It has some famous unsuccessful predictions. It predicted the absolute impoverishment of the working class. It predicted that the first socialist revolution would take place in the industrially most developed society.

It predicted that socialist societies would be free of revolutions. It predicted that there will be no conflict of interests between socialist countries. Thus the early predictions of Marxism were bold and stunning but they failed. Marxists explained all their failures: they explained the rising living standards of the working class by devising a theory of imperialism; they even explained why the first socialist revolution occurred in industrially backward Russia.

But their auxiliary hypotheses were all cooked up after the event to protect Marxian theory from the facts. The Newtonian programme led to novel facts; the Marxian lagged behind the facts and has been running fast to catch up with them. Thus good science is progressive and bad science is degenerating and a research programme may either begin or end up as such a degenerate affair that it ceases to count as science at all. If a research programme either predicts nothing new or entails novel predictions that never come to pass, then it may have reached such a pitch of degeneration that it has transformed into a pseudoscience.

Does this mean that no research programme should be given up in the absence of a progressive alternative, no matter how degenerate it may be? If so, this amounts to the radically anti-sceptical thesis that it is better to subscribe to a theory that bears all the hallmarks of falsehood, such as the current representative of a truly degenerate programme, than to sit down in undeluded ignorance. The ancient sceptics, by contrast thought that it is better not to believe anything at all rather than believe something that might be false.

But consider again the case of Marxism. What Lakatos seems to be suggesting in the passage quoted above, is that it is rationally permissible—perhaps even obligatory—to give up on Marxism even if it has no progressive rival, that is, if there is currently no alternative research programme with a set of hard core theses about the fundamental character of capitalism and its ultimate fate.

After all, the later Lakatos probably subscribed to the Popperian thesis that history in the large is systematically unpredictable. In which case there could not be a genuinely progressive programme which foretold the fate of capitalism. See Piketty So although Lakatos thinks that the scientific community seldom gives up on a programme until something better comes along, it is not clear that he thinks that this is what they always ought to do.

There are numerous departures from Popperian orthodoxy in all this. To begin with, Lakatos effectively abandons falsifiability as the Demarcation Criterion between science and non-science. A research programme can be falsifiable in some senses but unscientific and scientific but unfalsifiable.

First, the falsifiable non-science. Every successive theory in a degenerating research programme can be falsifiable but the programme as whole may not be scientific.

This might happen if it only predicted familiar facts or if its novel predictions were never verified. Secondly, the non-falsifiable science. For a start, an inconsistent research programme need not be condemned to the outer darkness as hopelessly unscientific. This is not because any of its constituent theories might be true. Lakatos rejects the Hegelian thesis that there are contradictions in reality.

The discovery of an inconsistency—or of an anomaly—[need not] immediately stop the development of a programme: it may be rational to put the inconsistency into some temporary, ad hoc quarantine, and carry on with the positive heuristic of the programme FMSRP: Thus it was both rational and scientific for Bohr to persist with his research programme, even though its hard core theses on the structure of the atom were fundamentally inconsistent FMSRP: 55— Thus what Lakatos seems to be suggesting is here though he is not as explicit as he might be is that, when it comes to assessing scientific research programmes, we should sometimes employ a contradiction-tolerant logic; that is a logic that rejects the principle, explicitly endorsed by Popper, that anything whatever follows from a contradiction FMSRP: 58 n.

Thus he is neither a follower of Popper with respect to theories nor a follower of Hegel with respect to reality. See Priest and , especially ch. For Lakatos being scientific is a matter of more or less, and the more the less can vary over time. A research programme can be scientific at one stage, less scientific or non-scientific at another if it ceases to generate novel predictions and cannot digest its anomalies but can subsequently stage a comeback, recovering its scientific status. Thus the deliverances of the Criterion are matters of degree, and they are matters of degree that can vary from one time to another.

We can seldom say absolutely that a research programme is not scientific. We can only say that it is not looking very scientifically healthy right now , and that the prospects for a recovery do not look good. Thus Lakatos is much more of a fallibilist than Popper. For Popper, we can tell whether a theory is scientific or not by investigating its logical implications. For Lakatos our best guesses might turn out to be mistaken, since the scientific status of a research programme is determined, in part, by its history, not just by its logical character, and history, as Popper himself proclaimed, is essentially unpredictable.

There is another divergence from Popper which helps to explain the above. As Lakatos himself put the point in his lectures at the LSE:. The demarcation problem may be formulated in the following terms: what distinguishes science from pseudoscience? This is an extreme way of putting it, since the more general problem, called the Generalized Demarcation Problem, is really the problem of the appraisal of scientific theories, and attempts to answer the question: when is one theory better than another?

We are, naturally, assuming a continuous scale whereby the value zero corresponds to a pseudo-scientific theory and positive values to theories considered scientific in a higher or lesser degree. For Popper has one criterion to distinguish science from non-science or science from pseudoscience if it is a theory with scientific pretensions and another to distinguish good science from bad science. Being good science is a matter of degree, since a theory may give more or less hostages to empirical fortune, depending on the boldness of its empirical predictions.

For Lakatos on the other hand, non-science or pseudo-science is at one end of a continuum with the best science at the other end of the scale. But although Lakatos evidently considered Marxism to be in bad way, he could not consign it to the dustbin of history as definitively finished, since as he often insisted degenerating research programmes can sometimes stage a comeback. Proofs and Refutations is a highly original production.

The issues it discusses are far removed from what was then standard fare in the philosophy of mathematics, dominated by logicism, formalism and intuitionism, all attempting to find secure foundations for mathematics.

Its theses are radical. And its dialogue form makes it a literary as well as a philosophical tour de force. Formalism sees mathematics as the derivation of theorems from axioms in formalised mathematical theories. The philosophical project is to show that the axioms are true and the proofs valid, so that mathematics can be seen as the accumulation of eternal truths. An additional philosophical question is what these truths are about , the question of mathematical ontology.

Lakatos, by contrast, was interested in the growth of mathematical knowledge. How were the axioms and the proofs discovered? How does mathematics grow from informal conjectures and proofs into more formal proofs from axioms? Philosophy of mathematics consists of the logical analysis of completed theories. Against the orthodoxy, Lakatos paraphrased Kant the paraphrase has become almost as famous as the original :.

See Hanson Suppose we agree with Lakatos that there is room for heuristics or a logic or discovery. Still, orthodoxy could insist that discovery is one thing, justification another, and that the genesis of ideas has nothing to do with their justification.

Lakatos, more radically, disputed this. First, he rejected the foundationalist or justificationist project altogether: mathematics has no foundation in logic, or set theory, or anything else. Second, he insisted that the way in which a theory grows plays an essential role in its methodological appraisal.

This is as much a central theme of his philosophy of empirical science as it is of his philosophy of mathematics. As noted above, Proofs and Refutations takes the form of an imaginary dialogue between a teacher and a group of students. The teacher presents an informal proof of this conjecture, due to Cauchy.

We now have, as well as the original conjecture or conclusion, the subconjectures or premises, and the meta-conjecture that the latter entail the former. Equally clearly, any of these conjectures might be refuted by counterexamples.

The counterexamples are of three kinds:. For example, a picture-frame is a polyhedron with a hole or tunnel in it:. This suggests a deeper problem than finding the domain of validity of the original conjecture—finding a general relationship between V , E and F for all polyhedra whatsoever. Counterexamples help us to improve our proof by finding hidden lemmas.

And proofs help us improve our conjecture by finding conditions on its validity. Either way, or both ways, mathematical knowledge grows. And as it grows, its concepts are refined. We begin with a vague, unarticulated notion of what a polyhedron is. We have a conjecture about polyhedra and an informal proof of it. Can this process yield, not fallible conjectures and proofs, but certainty? Quite so. A rigorous proof in classical logic may not be valid in intuitionistic or paraconsistent logics.

And the key point is that a proof, however rigorous, only establishes that if the axioms are true, then so is the theorem.

If the axioms themselves remain fallible, then so do the theorems rigorously derived from them. Providing foundations for mathematics requires the axioms to be made certain, by deriving them from logic or set theory or something else. To what extent is this imaginary dialogue a contribution to the history of mathematics? Lakatos explained that.

It was to attract much criticism, most of it centred around the question whether rationally reconstructed history was real history at all. The trouble is that the rational and the real can come apart quite radically. At one point in Proofs and Refutations a character in the dialogue makes a historical claim which, according to the relevant footnote, is false. Lakatos says that the statement.

This should not worry us: actual history is frequently a caricature of its rational reconstructions. See Bandy One critic said that philosophers of science should not be allowed to write history of science.

This academic trade unionism is misguided. You do not falsify history by pointing out that what ought to have happened did not, in fact, happen. There is an important pedagogic point to all this, too. The dialectic of proofs and refutations can generate, in the ways explained above, quite complicated definitions of mathematical concepts, definitions that can only really be understood by considering the process that gave rise to them.

But mathematics teaching is not historical, or even quasi-historical. But students nowadays are presented with the latest definitions at the outset, and required to learn them and apply them, without ever really understanding them. One question about Proofs and Refutations is whether the heuristic patterns depicted in it apply to the whole of mathematics.

While some aspects clearly are peculiar to the particular case-study of polyhedra, the general patterns are not. Here Popper predominates and Hegel recedes. Russell sought to rescue mathematics from doubt and uncertainty by deriving the totality of mathematics from self-evident logical axioms via stipulative definitions and water-tight rules of inference.

For some of the axioms that Russell was forced to posit—the Theory of Types which Lakatos sees, in effect, as a monster-barring definition elevated into an axiom that avoids the paradoxes by excluding self-referential propositions as meaningless; the Axiom of Reducibility which is needed to relax the unduly restrictive Theory of Types; the Axiom of Infinity which posits an infinity of objects in order to ensure that every natural number has a successor; and the Axiom of Choice which Russell refers to as the multiplicative axiom —were either not self-evident, not logical or both.

When pure mathematics is organized as a deductive system…it becomes obvious that, if we are to believe in the truth of pure mathematics, it cannot be solely because we believe in the truth of the set of premises. Some of the premises are much less obvious than some of their consequences, and are believed chiefly because of their consequences.

Russell []: Because it means that mathematics has the same kind epistemic structure that science has according to Popper. The difference between science and mathematics consists in the differences between the potential falsifiers. Truth can trickle down from the axioms to their consequences and falsity can flow upwards from the consequences to the axioms or at least to the axiom set. But neither truth nor probability nor justified belief can flow up from the consequences to the axioms from which they follow.

However the inductivism that Lakatos scornfully rejects in Renaissance is just the kind of inductivism that he would be recommending to Popper just a few years later. In Lakatos turned from the history and philosophy of mathematics to the history and philosophy of the empirical sciences.

The Proceedings ran to four volumes Lakatos ed. Lakatos himself contributed three major papers to these proceedings. The first of these Renaissance has been dealt with already.

It is remarkable both for its conclusions and for its methodology. The conclusion, to put it bluntly, is that a certain brand of inductivism is bunk. The prospects for an inductive logic that allows you to derive scientific theories from sets of observation statements, thus providing them with a weak or probabilistic justification, are dim indeed.

According to Lakatos, the main source of competition in favor of science research programs, each of which also has an internal development strategy. Some of them for some time become dominant, while others are pushed into the background, and others — are processed and reconstructed. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.

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