[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

of science fails to fit his model because it is ` irrational', but he imposes on himself the demand that
one should allow this only if one can say what the irrational element is. External elements may be
political pressure, corrupted values or, perhaps, sheer stupidity. Lakatos's histories are normative in
that he can conclude that a given chunk of research `ought not to have' gone the way it did, and that
it went that way through the interference of external factors not germane to the programme. In
concluding that a chosen case was not `rational' it is permissible to go against current scientific
wisdom. But although in principle Lakatos can countenance this, he is properly moved by respect for
the implicit appraisals of working scientists. I cannot see Lakatos willingly conceding that Einstein,
Bohr, Lavoisier or even Copernicus was participating in an irrational programme. `Too much of the
actual history of science' would then become `irrational' (I, p. 172). We have no standards to appeal
to, in Lakatos's programme, other than the history of knowledge as it stands. To declare it to be
globally irrational is to abandon rationality. We see why Feyerabend spoke of Lakatos's elitism.
Rationality will simply be defined by what a present community calls good, and nothing shall
counterbalance the extraterrestrial weight of an Einstein.
Lakatos then defines objectivity and rationality in terms of progressive research programmes, and
allows an incident in the history of science to be objective and rational if its internal history can be
written as a sequence of progressive problem shifts.
Cataclysms in reasoning
Peirce defined truth as what is reached by an ideal end to scientific inquiry. He thought that it is the
task of methodology to characterize the principles of inquiry. There is an obvious problem: what if
inquiry should not converge on anything? Peirce, who was as familiar in his day with talk of scientific
revolutions as we are in ours, was determined that `cataclysms' in knowledge (as he called them) have
not been replaced by others, but this is all part of the self-correcting character of inquiry. Lakatos has
an attitude similar to Peirce's. He was determined to refute the doctrine that he attributed to Kuhn,
that knowledge changes by irrational 'conversions' from one paradigm to another.
((1 27))
As I said in the Introduction, I do not think that a correct reading of Kuhn gives quite the apocalyptic
air of cultural relativism that Lakatos found there. But there is a really deep worry underlying
Lakatos's antipathy to Kuhn's work, and it must not be glossed over. It is connected with an important
side remark of Feyerabend's, that Lakatos's accounts of scientific rationality at hest fit the major
achievements `of the last couple of hundred years'.
A body of knowledge may break with the past in two distinguishable ways/ By now we are all familiar
with the possibility that new theories may completely replace the conceptual organization of their
predecessors. Lakatos's story of progressive and degenerating programmes is a good stab at deciding
when such replacements are ` rational'. But all of Lakatos's reasoning takes for granted what we may
call the hypothetico-deductive model of reasoning. For all his revisions of Popper, he takes for granted
that conjectures are made and tested against some problems chosen by the protective belt. A much
more radical break in knowledge occurs when an entirely new style of reasoning surfaces. The force of
Feyerabend's gibe about `the last couple of hundred years' is that Lakatos's analysis is relevant not to
timeless knowledge and timeless reason, but to a particular kind of knowledge produced by a
particular style of reasoning/ That knowledge and that style have specific beginnings. So the Peircian
fear of cataclysm becomes: Might there not be further styles of reasoning which will produce yet a new
kind of knowledge? Is not Lakatos's surrogate for truth a local and recent phenomenon?
I am stating a worry, not an argument. Feyerabend makes sensational but implausible claims about
different modes of reason-ing and even seeing in the archaic past. In a more pedestrian way my own
book, The Emergence of Probability (1975), contends that part of our present conception of inductive
evidence came into being only at the end of the Renaissance. In his book, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the
European Tradition (1983), the historian A/C. Crombie, from whom I take the word `style', writes of six
distinguishable styles/ I have elaborated Crombie's idea elsewhere/ Now it does not follow that the
emergence of a new style is a cataclysm. Indeed we may add style to style, with a cumulative body of
conceptual tools. That is what Crombie teaches. Clearly both
((128))
nd Laudan expect this to happen. But these are matters only recently broached, and are utterly ill-
understood. uld make us chary of an account of reality and objectivity rts from the growth of
knowledge, when the kind of scribed turns out to concern chiefly a particular knowieved by a
particular style of reasoning.
e matters worse, I suspect that a style of reasoning may the very nature of the knowledge that it
produces/ The anal method of the Greeks gave a geometry which long the philosopher's model of
knowledge. Lakatos inveighs e domination of the Euclidean mode. What future Lakatos h against the
hypothetico-deductive mode and the theory h programmes to which it has given birth? One of the most
eatures of this mode is the postulation of theoretical which occur in high-level laws, and yet which
have atal consequences. This feature of successful science endemic only at the end of the eighteenth
century/ Is it ible that the questions of objectivity, asked for our times are precisely the questions
posed by this new knowledge? n it is entirely fitting that Lakatos should try to answer stions in terms
of the knowledge of the past two centuries. zld be wrong to suppose that we can get from this specific [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]