"Science became the most respectable kind of knowledge" there are different kinds of knowledge - mythical, dogmatic, technical, empirical, artistic - "what distinguishes knowledge from superstition, ideology or pseudoscience?"
The answer is complex as it has vital social and political importance.
A possible answer proposal to this question is: "a statement constitutes knowledge if a sufficiently large number of people believe in it, with sufficient conviction", but history shows that men believe and have believed in absurd ideas.
“What really characterizes scientific behavior is a certain skepticism even in relation to our most esteemed theories. The profession of blind faith in a theory is not an intellectual virtue, but an intellectual crime "
A statement can be scientifically valuable even if no one accepts it or believes in it, or be a pseudoscientific independent of its high degree of acceptance.
If we assume that theories are confronted by facts, how precisely can facts support a theory? "Well, today it is possible to easily demonstrate that a law of nature cannot be validly derived from a finite number of facts."
"Inductive logicians" tried to define the probabilities of different theories based on the total available evidence. If the mathematical probability is high it is qualified as scientific, if the probability is low zero is not scientific ”.
Karl Popper in 1934 “defended that the mathematical probability of all scientific or pseudoscientific theories is, for any magnitude of evidence, it is zero”.
Popper proposed a new demarcation criterion "a theory can be scientific if it does not have the shadow of favorable evidence and it can be pseudoscientific even if all the available evidence is favorable" that is to say, the scientific or non-scientific character is independent of the facts.
"A theory is scientific if we can specify in advance a crucial experiment (or observation) that can falsify it, and it is pseudoscientific if we refuse to specify such a potential falsifier."
"Is Popper's criterion of falsifiability the solution to the problem of the demarcation between science and pseudoscience?", Lakatos answers NO; Because Popper "ignores" the remarkable tenacity of scientific theories, scientists have thick skin, they don't abandon a theory simply because the facts contradict it.
"Do we have to capitulate and agree that a scientific revolution is only an irrational change of convictions, a religious conversion?" This is Kuhn's conclusion after discovering the naivety of Popperian falsificationism.
In recent years - says Lakatos - "I have defended the methodology of the Scientific Research Programs that solves some of the problems that neither Popper nor Kuhn managed to solve"
“In the first place I argue that the typical descriptive unit of great scientific achievements is not an isolated hypothesis but rather a research program. Science is not just trial and error, a series of conjectures and refutations "
Newtonian science is not just a set of four conjectures (three laws of dynamics and the law of gravitation). Those four laws only constitute the "firm core" of the Newtonian program.
But this hard core is tenaciously protected against rebuttal by a great "protective belt" of auxiliary hypotheses, and most importantly, the research program also has a heuristic, that is, a powerful problem-solving machinery, which, with the With the help of sophisticated mathematical techniques, he assimilates the anomalies and even turns them into positive evidence.
"How can we distinguish a scientific or progressive program from another pseudoscientific or regressive?"
“The research programs that I admire have a common characteristic. All of them predict new facts, facts that previously had not even been dreamed of or that had even been contradicted by rival previous programs ”.
"In this way, in a progressive research program, the theory leads to discovering new facts, hitherto unknown" "in regressive programs, theories are manufactured only to accommodate already known facts." “What really matters are the dramatic, unexpected, grandiose predictions, a few of these are enough to decide the outcome; if the theory lags behind the facts, this means that we are in the presence of poor and regressive PIC ”
“Contrary to Popper, the PIC methodology does not offer an instantaneous rationality, it is necessary to treat developing programs with benevolence: decades can pass… for them to become empirically progressive… Kuhn is wrong in thinking that scientific revolutions are a sudden and irrational change of point of view. The history of science refutes both Popper and Kuhn… both Popper's crucial experiments and Kuhn's revolutions are myths; what usually happens is that progressive PICs replace regressive ones "
"… the problem of the demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not a pseudo-problem for parlor philosophers, but has serious ethical and political implications."
Chapter 1
FALSATION AND THE METHODOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH PROGRAMS.
Science: reason or religion.
For centuries, knowledge referred only to knowledge proven either by the power of the intellect or by the evidence of the senses, since it was empirical knowledge for some and rational for others. Although the probative power of the senses and intellect had already been questioned by skeptics more than two thousand years ago, Newton's science, which was considered absolute, again created the confusion of evidential certainty.
Kuhn and Popper share that science does not grow by accumulation of eternal truths, both are inspired by the destruction of Newtonian physics carried out by Einstein, the main problems they share are the "scientific revolutions"; One of the main differences is that while for Popper science is in a "permanent revolution", for Kuhn the revolutions are exceptional and actually extra-scientific, in times of normal science criticism is anathema.
Kuhn in acknowledging the failure of both justificationism and falsificationism seems to regress to irrationalism; for Popper scientific change is rational or at least rationally reconstructable and belongs to the field of the Logic of research, for Kuhn scientific change belongs to the (social) Psychology of research, it is a kind of religious change.
In the logic of Popper's scientific research there are two conflicting points of which Kuhn only saw one, the naive falsificationism that I will call "naive methodological falsificationism." Popperian approach and may be immune to criticism initially presented (Kuhn).
"In the same way, I will present scientific revolutions as cases of rational progress and not of religious conversions." It is therefore necessary to look at the situation of the philosophy of science after the collapse of justificationism.
Justificationism: knowledge consists of proven propositions if it claims to be scientific. For the classical intellectualists or "rationalists" there are various kinds of tests - revelation, intellectual intuition, experience - these with the help of logic proved any scientific proposition. Empiricists only accept a small set of axioms that respond to "solid facts", experience constitutes the truth value, and is the "empirical basis" of science, and they propose "inductive logic"; thus all justificationists were either empiricists or intellectualists. For all of them it was required that nothing without evidence be affirmed, for the sake of scientific honesty. It turned out that no theory can be proven,this is how Kant was refuted with non-Newtonian physics and non-Euclidean geometry and with the empiricists with the impossibility of establishing an “empirical basis”.
As a consequence, probabilism arises, scientific honesty requires less than previously thought: it consists in expressing only very probable theories, or even in specifying for each scientific theory, the evidence and the probability of the theory in the light of the evidence. But it was Popper who subjected this appreciation of probabilism to criticism, "not only are all theories equally impossible to prove, but they are also improbable."
a- Dogmatic or naturalistic falsificationism; The empirical basis.
It is the weakest variety of falsificationism, it admits the fallibility of all scientific theories, without qualifications, but it retains an infallible empirical basis, it is empiricist without being inductivist; Scientific honesty consists in specifying an experiment in advance such that if the result contradicts the theory, the theory must be abandoned. Non-falsifiable propositions, "falsificationism dispatches them with one stroke: it considers them metaphysical and denies them scientific rank"
According to the logic of dogmatic falsificationism, science grows through repeated eliminations of theories with the help of solid facts, this dogmatic falsificationism is untenable because it rests on two false assumptions and a very restricted demarcation criterion between science and non-science.
- The first assumption: is that there is a natural, psychological frontier between theoretical and speculative propositions, on the one hand, and factual or observational or basic propositions on the other - part of the naturalistic approach to the scientific method -. The second assumption: is that If a proposition satisfies the psychological criterion of being factual or observational, then it is true, it can be said to have been proven by facts. - Thesis of the doctrine of the observational test.
Both assumptions are false; psychology testifies against the first and logic against the second, and methodological opinion testifies against the criterion of demarcation. So:
- It was not the pure and atheorical observations of Galileo that were at odds with Aristotle's theory, but rather Galileo's observations, interpreted by his optical theory, were at odds with the observations of the Aristotelians, interpreted by his theory of the heavens. In the same way that all justificationists who recognize the senses as the source of knowledge are forced to incorporate a psychology of observation. Logic destroys the second assumption, no factual proposition can ever be proved by experiment; Propositions can only be derived from other propositions and not from facts, this leads to the fact that the conflicts between theories and factual propositions are not falsifications, but simple inconsistencies.The most admired theories do not prohibit any observable event, if we accept that facts can prove factual propositions, we must accept that the most important theories in the history of physics are then metaphysical.
In short, classical justificationists admit only proven theories, neoclassical probable theories, and dogmatic falsificationists refutable ones. But Lakatos says: Not only are scientific theories equally unprovable and equally improbable, they are also irrefutable. The recognition that all propositions of science are fallible implies the collapse of all forms of dogmatic justificationism.
Methodological falsificationism. The "empirical basis".
If all scientific statements are fallible theories, we can only criticize them because of their inconsistency. Methodological falsificationism is a kind of conventionalism, so to understand it we must first discuss conventionalism in general.
There are theories of knowledge: active and passive
Passive: they maintain that authentic knowledge is the impression of nature in a completely inert mind.
Active: (conservatives) maintain that we are born with our basic expectations, and we turn the world into our world, a good development was raised by Kant, the pessimistic Kantians thought that the real world was unknowable, and the revolutionary activists understood that conceptual frameworks can be developed and replaced by better ones. From this revolutionary conventionalism arose two schools, Duhem's Simplism and Popper's methodological falsificationism.
Duhem accepts the conventionalist position that no physical theory ever collapses under the weight of refutations, but can collapse under the weight of constant repairs and complex reinforcement. So falsification depends on subjective tastes and scientific fashion.
The methodological falsificationist understands that fallible theories are implicated in the scientist's "experimental techniques" with which he interprets facts. Despite this, he applies such theories; in the given context, he regards them not as theories under test, but as problem-free fundamental knowledge, which we accept as unproblematic while we are testing the theory. Eg when we accept experimentation instruments.
Methodological falsificationists also point out that, in fact, these conventions are institutionalized and accepted by the scientific community: the verdict of the experimental scientists supplies the list of accepted falsifiers.
Thus the methodological falsificationist establishes his "empirical basis" this "basis" does not agree with the justificationist criteria because he has nothing proven, it is a "sand foundation". The methodological falsificationist argues that if we want the elimination selection method to work and ensure that only the fittest theories survive, then their struggle for survival must be severe. In general "we consider as decisive an intersubjectively verifiable falsification".
It proposes a new demarcation criterion: “only those theories (non-“ observational ”proposition) that prohibit certain observable events and that can therefore be falsified and rejected are scientific; that is, a theory is scientific or acceptable, if it has an “empirical basis” - this criterion highlights the difference between dogmatic and methodological falsificationism.
So far we have seen three decisions that methodological falsificationism must assume, which we can mention like this:
- Selection of "basic" or "observational" statement, not only for psychological character. Separation of the set of accepted statements from the others. Specify certain rules for rejection that make the evidence, interpreted statistics, "inconsistent" with the probabilistic theory.
But even these three decisions are not enough for us to "falsify" a theory incapable of explaining anything "observable" without the help of a ceteris paribus clause. Here the methodological falsificationist makes a further decision - fourth decision - when he tests a theory together with a ceteris paribus clause and discovers that this conjunction has been refuted, decides yes,
- Interpret the rebuttal as a rebuttal to the specific theory or as a rebuttal to the clause, or the conjunction.
A fifth decision would be,
- Eliminate even "syntactically metaphysical" theories that cannot have singular spatiotemporal potential falsifiers, due to their logical form - when they all use some (quantifiers) -.
In short, the methodological falsificationist offers an interesting solution to the problem by combining incisive criticism with fallibilism.
The risks of this falsificationism are very great; Decisions play a crucial role in this methodology, which can mislead us catastrophically. The falsificationist recognizes this problem but insists that a choice must be made between some kind of methodological falsificationism and irrationalism.
Two crucial characteristics that are common to the dogmatic falsificationist and the methodological falsificationist and that are clearly in contradiction to the actual history of science are:
- a contrast is, or should be made to be, a two-way confrontation between theory and experiment, so that in the final confrontation they are the only actors that the only interesting result of such a confrontation is falsification - conclusive - the only authentic discoveries are refutations of scientific hypotheses.
But the history of science suggests that
- the tests are at least trilateral confrontations between rival theories and experiments. Some of the more interesting experiments give rise, prima facie, to a confirmation rather than a falsification.
If, as it seems, the history of science does not confirm our theory of scientific rationality, then we have two alternatives, the first is to abandon attempts at rational explanation of the success of science; and explain “paradigm” shifts in terms of social psychology; The other alternative is to try to minimize the conventional element of falsificationism and substitute the naive truths of methodological falsificationism and propose a sophisticated version of greater rational force and that recovers the methodology and the idea of scientific progress. "Such is the path taken by Popper and the one I try to follow"
The naive and sophisticated methodological falsificationism, progressive and regressive changes of the problems.
Sophisticated falsificationism differs from naive both in its rules of acceptance or demarcation criteria and in its rules of falsification or elimination.
For sophisticated falsificationism a theory is "acceptable" or "scientific" only if it has an excess of corroborated empirical content in relation to its predecessor (or rival); that is, only if it leads to the discovery of new facts, this condition has two sections.
Acceptability 1: that the new theory has excess empirical content.
Acceptability 2: that a part of that excess content is verified.
The first requirement is immediately confirmed by a priori logical analysis, the second is empirical and may require indefinite time.
For the sophisticated falsificationist, a scientific theory T remains falsified if and only if another theory T 'has been proposed and has the following characteristics:
- T 'has an excess of empirical content in relation to T, that is, it predicts new, improbable or even excluded events by T. T' explains the previous success of T; that is, all the uncontested content of T is included in the content T'.A part of the excess content of T 'is corroborated.
According to Popper, theories and factual propositions can always be reconciled with the help of auxiliary hypotheses. Saving a theory with the help of auxiliary hypotheses that satisfy certain well-defined conditions represents scientific progress; but doing it with hypotheses that do not satisfy them, represent a degeneration. These last hypotheses are called the inadmissible “ad hoc hypotheses” “conventionalist stratagems”. Any theory must be evaluated in conjunction with its auxiliary hypotheses, so what we evaluate are not isolated theories, but a series of theories. Applying the term scientific to a single theory is equivalent to mistaking the categories.
Sophisticated falsificationism states that there is no falsification without the emergence of a better theory, then falsification is a multiple relationship between rival theories and the original "empirical basis", that is, falsification has a historical character, in comparison we say that:
- Naive falsificationists insisted on "rebuttal" examples. For sophisticated methodological falsificationists, it is the corroborating cases - quite a few - of information overload that are crucial.
Science can grow without any refutation pointing the way, what prompts feverish scientific activity is the proliferation of theories instead of counterexamples or anomalies; the slogan "proliferation of theories" is far more important to the sophisticated falsificationist than to the naive. Sophisticated falsificationism offers new criteria for intellectual honesty, compared to naive falsificationism and justificationists like this:
- The justificationists demanded the exclusive acceptance of what had been proven and the rejection of all that lacking evidence. The neo-justificationists demanded that the probability of any hypothesis be specified taking into account the available empirical evidence. Naive falsificationism required the testing of the falsifiable. and the rejection of the non-falsifiable or falsified. Sophisticated falsificationism demands that things be seen from different points of view and that theories that have been superseded by other more powerful theories be rejected.
For sophisticated falsificationism, learning about a theory is fundamentally learning what new facts it anticipated; the only relevant evidence is anticipated evidence for a theory, where empirical character and theoretical progress are inseparably related.
This sophisticated falsificationism, as opposed to naive (methodological), requires a smaller number of methodological decisions; the fourth decision of naive falsificationism now becomes redundant. Therefore the sophisticated one is a falsificationism with a slower but safer procedure; the fifth decision is also not necessary, the sophisticated solution is obvious, we retain a syntactically metaphysical theory as long as the problematic cases can be explained by means of increasing content changes in the auxiliary hypotheses.
The first, second, and third class decisions of naive falsificationism cannot be avoided, but the conventional element in second and third class decisions can be slightly reduced; We cannot avoid decisions about the truth value of some "observational propositions", nor decisions about what kinds of propositions are "observational" or "theoretical"; sophisticated falsificationism can mitigate the arbitrariness of this second decision, accepting an appeal procedure.
But even this appeal procedure cannot do anything other than postpone the conventional decision, because the appeal court's verdict is not infallible either. Difficulties regarding the "empirical basis" confronting naive falsificationism cannot be avoided by sophisticated falsificationism either.
There is an objection applicable even to the sophisticated version, it is the so-called "paradox of addition", if we add to a theory some low-level hypotheses entirely unrelated, this can constitute a progressive change of problematic. These sentences are connected to the original sentences in a more intense way than the simple conjunction. This is a requirement analogous to that of simplicity (Duhem) which guarantees the continuity of the series of theories that can be said to constitute a problem.
A methodology of scientific research programs.
"I have analyzed the problem of objective evaluation of scientific growth in terms of progressive and regressive changes of problems for series of scientific theories." These changes occur in the PICs, the program consists of methodological rules: some tell us the research routes that must be avoided (negative heuristic), and others, the paths that must be followed (positive heuristic). Even as a whole science can be considered as a huge research program endowed with Popper's supreme heuristic rule "design conjectures that have more empirical content than their predecessors."
- The negative heuristic: the "firm center" of the program.
All scientific research programs can be characterized by their firm core. The negative heuristic of the program prevents us from applying Modus Tollens to this "firm center"; on the contrary, we must use our intelligence to incorporate and even invent the auxiliary hypotheses that form a protective belt around that center, and against them we must direct Modus Tollens. The protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses must receive the impacts of the contrasts and to defend the firm center, it will be adjusted and readjusted and even completely replaced.
In a research program, we can be frustrated by a long series of "refutations" before some ingenious, fortunate, and highly empirical auxiliary hypothesis turns a string of defeats into what will later be seen as a resounding success story, either by reviewing some false facts or by adding new auxiliary hypotheses. Therefore, it is necessary to demand that each stage of a PIC increases the content in a consistent way, which constitutes a "consistently progressive change of theoretical problems"
- The positive heuristic: the construction of the "protective belt" and the relative autonomy of theoretical science.
The positive heuristic consists of a partially structured set of suggestions or clues on how to change and develop the "rebuttable versions" of the research program, on how to modify and complicate the rebuttable protective belt. The program's positive heuristics prevent the scientist from getting lost in the ocean of anomalies. The positive heuristic establishes a program that lists a sequence of increasingly complicated simulators of reality.
In research programs we speak of models, a model is a set of initial conditions (possibly in conjunction with some observational theories) that is known to be substituted in the subsequent development of the program, and even how it should be substituted (in greater or lesser extent).
The positive heuristic is more flexible than the negative heuristic; This progresses almost without taking into account the refutations, thus, we can also evaluate the programs even after they have been eliminated, due to their heuristic power, the PIC methodology explains the relative autonomy of theoretical science, this is not accepted by the naive falsificationists who maintain that whenever a theory is disproved by experiment it is irrational and dishonest to continue to develop it, “the old disproved theory must be replaced by a new, uncontested one.
- Two illustrations: Prout and Bohr.
He presents the Prout example as a program of research progressing through an ocean of anomalies and the Bohr program progressing on inconsistent foundations.
Some of the most important PICs in the history of science were grafted onto older programs with respect to which they were clearly inconsistent. But consistency must continue to be an important regulating principle. If science seeks truth, it must seek consistency; if you give up consistency, you give up the truth. Pretending that we must be modest in our demands, that we must resign ourselves to continual inconsistencies remains a methodological vice. This does not mean that the discovery of an inconsistency should immediately stop the PIC, it may be rational to put the program in a “temporary quarantine”.
In relation to a program there are two extreme and irrational positions:
- The conservative position: consists of stopping the new program until the basic inconsistency in relation to the old program is somehow solved: it is irrational to work on inconsistent foundations. The anarchist position: with regard to the grafted programs, it consists in exalting the anarchy of the foundations as a virtue and in considering weak inconsistency, either as a basic property of nature or as an ultimate limitation of human knowledge.
But Lakatos praises a rational position regarding the treatment that should be given to a grafted program, for which he exposes the example of Newton:
"The best characterization of the rational position is Newton's attitude, the rational position is to explore its heuristic power without resigning itself to the fundamental chaos on which it is being built", thus showing that progressive change can provide credibility and rationality to a program inconsistent… also that in most cases we do not need refutations to know that a theory requires urgent replacement.
The dialectic of the PIC is not necessarily an alternating series of speculative conjectures and empirical refutations. The interaction between program development and empirical brakes can be very diverse; the pattern that is met in reality only depends on historical accidents.
- A Reexamination of Crucial Experiments: The End of Instantaneous Rationality.
It would be wrong to assume that you must be faithful to a PIC until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that you should not introduce a rival program before everyone agrees that the level of regression has probably already been reached. It is necessary to mention that in fact the PICs have rarely achieved a complete monopoly and this only for relatively short periods of time, despite the efforts of some. The history of science has been and must be the history of competing PICs or, if you prefer, paradigms, but it has not been and must not become a succession of periods of normal science (Kuhn); the sooner the competition starts the better, “theoretical pluralism” is better than “theoretical monism” on this point Popper and Feyerabend are right and Kuhn is wrong.
Faced with the question, how are research programs eliminated?; Lakatos says: "Such an objective reason is supplied by a rival program that explains the previous success of its rival and surpasses it by means of an additional display of heuristic power." To understand this assessment, it is necessary to understand the concept of "factual novelty", since it is related to the ability to predict a new event that can only be appreciated when a long period of time has elapsed.
“This indicates that we cannot eliminate a growing research program simply because for the moment, it has not managed to overcome its powerful rival, we should not abandon it if it constitutes a progressive change in the problem… as long as a program can be rationally reconstructed as a change Progressive from troubled, he must be protected for a time from his powerful established rival.
Of the examples established by the author (Lakatos), in the subtitles d 1, d 2, d 3, only mention will be made of the criticism against the "crucial experiments":
Only an extremely difficult and indefinitely long process can establish the victory of a program over its rival; being unwise to use the expression "crucial experiment" in a hasty way. It seeks to raise the absence of instant crucial experiments; because to this a new difficulty is added "the enormous difficulties that exist in deciding exactly what it is that we learn from experience, what it proves us and what it refutes".
d 4. conclusion: The requirement of continuous growth.
Crucial experiments do not exist, at least if we mean experiments that can instantly destroy a research program, a hasty scientist may pretend that his experiment defeated a program, but if a defeated field scientist proposes an explanation a few years later scientist of the supposedly crucial experiment, according to the defeated program, the title of "crucial experiment" can be withdrawn and become a new victory of the "defeated" program. Therefore the theories of instantaneous rationality constitute a failure, rationality works more slowly than we tend to think and also fallible.
This exhibition implies a new criterion of demarcation between mature science, which consists of research programs and immature science that consists of a patched sequence of trial and error. Mature science consists of PICs that anticipate not only new facts but also, in an important sense, new ancillary theories. This requirement of continuous growth is the rational reconstruction of the widely accepted requirement of "unity" or "beauty of science."
Lakatos shares with Popper “the dogmatic attitude of holding on to a theory for as long as possible is of considerable importance. Without it we could never discover what is in a theory, we would abandon the theory before we had had a real chance to discover its power and consequently no theory would ever be able to perform its function of putting order in the world, of preparing us for future events, of draw our attention to events that we would never otherwise observe "
Lakatos continues “I look at the continuity of science through Popperian glasses; where Kuhn sees paradigms (socio-psychological), I also see rational "research programs", in this last "rational" appreciation he is thinking of Popper.
The Popper and Kuhn Research Programs.
Kuhn is right to object to naive falsificationism and also to insist on the continuity of scientific growth, on the tenacity of some theories. But he is wrong in thinking that by rejecting naive falsificationism all varieties of falsificationism were also rejected.
Watkins points out that the growth of science is inductive and irrational according to Hume; inductive and rational according to Carnap and non-inductive and rational according to Popper; Lakatos adds that "for Kuhn it is the growth of science that is not inductive and irrational." For according to Kuhn there can be no logic but only a psychology of discovery, thus scientific revolutions are irrational, the object of study of mass psychology.
Kuhn certainly proved that the psychology of science can reveal important and actually sad truths. But the psychology of science is not autonomous; the rationally reconstructed growth of science essentially takes place in the world of ideas, in the third world of Plato and Popper, in the world of articulated knowledge that is indispensable to the subjects who know. "It is not possible to understand the history of science without taking into account the interaction of the three worlds."
APPENDIX: Popper, falsificationism and “The Duhem Quine Thesis”.
Popper began as a dogmatic falsificationist in the 1920s, the conflict between the thesis that science is both critical and fallible, constitutes one of the basic problems of Popperian philosophy.
Lakatos in 1968 c distinguished three Popper, Popper 0, Popper 1 and Popper 2, Popper 0 is the dogmatic falsificationist who never published a single word: he was criticized first by Ayer and then by others. Lakatos says I am confident that this article will finally end this ghost. Popper 1 is the naive falsificationist, Popper 2 the sophisticated falsificationist; the real Popper evolved from dogmatic falsificationism to his naive version of sophisticated falsificationism in the 1920s; arrived at the "acceptance rules" of sophisticated falsificationism in the 1950s.
Thus the authentic Popper, “still interprets falsification as the result of a duel between theory and observation without another better theory being necessarily involved. The real Popper has never explained in detail the appeals procedure by which some "accepted basic statements" can be removed, so the real Popper consists of Popper 1 with some elements of Popper 2.
According to the Duhem-Quine thesis, with sufficient imagination any theory can be permanently saved from refutation by suitable adjustments to the basic knowledge in which it is embedded. As Quine says "you can keep the truth of any statement whatever happens if we make drastic enough adjustments in other parts of the system… and on the contrary, for the same reasons no statement is immune from revision" the system is "the whole of the science".
The sophisticated falsificationist allows any part of the whole of science to be substituted, but only on the condition that it be substituted in a "progressive" way, so that the substitution successfully anticipates new events. In his rational reconstruction of falsification "negative crucial experiments" play no role. "Scientists dream fantasies and then go on a very selective hunt for new facts that fit those fantasies."
This tenacity criterion will be treated with much argumentation by Paúl Feyerabend
Read "The structure of scientific revolutions" by Thomas S Kuhn, or the summary of this text prepared by Eutimio Mejía Soto.
When Lakatos says that science is not just conjectures and refutations, he is thinking of Karl Popper, who precisely has a book entitled, "Conjectures and Refutations" - the development of scientific knowledge - a book divided into two parts, the first dedicated to conjectures. and the second to refutations.
Professor Nodier Botero Jiménez (Universidad del Quindío) in his book "Discourse and Science", in relation to the analysis that Kuhn makes of Newton tells us: "as a great man of modernity Newton rationalized a non-static universe, discernible through rules and exact laws. In developing his physical theory, he proposed us a real, absolute time, subject to predictions… the Newtonian vision of nature, once subjected to the mathematical and experimental verification tests, became a true paradigm of paradigms. Kuhn explains to us how from this worldview he gave meaning to other theories "
Under this methodology, Professor Leandro Cañibano Calvo, professor of Accounting Theory at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain), presents three PICs for accounting: the legalistic, the economic and the formalized one. This work is presented in the book “Current Theory Accounting ”and mainly in its first chapter entitled“ The concept of accounting as a research program ”
In light of this assessment, we can ask ourselves the current state of accounting, if the last program proposed by Cañibano (formalized) is a progressive or regressive PIC. Or even more so, submit them all to a rigorous review, the same as the adopted methodology.
Professor Vicente Montesinos Julve, professor of Accounting Theory at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), has a proposal for research programs for accounting that he collects in a work entitled "Historical training, doctrinal currents and accounting research programs", raises the existence of an ongoing PIC but that has a long way to go: it is "the Integral economic communicational PIC", this program presents a much more powerful heuristic than the preceding programs, it uses a more rigorous language, thus, "the recourse to classical notions is insufficient and it is necessary to introduce concepts of cybernetics and information theory, decision theory, measurement, behavioral science, etc.so the training of accountants has to be more profound and the researcher's specialization in smaller areas seems to disappear ”.
The text cites the example of Mendelian genetics that led to its defenders dying in Russian concentration camps by order of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, but also history is full of similar examples: such as that of the Dominican Giordano Bruno, and the "Galileo heresy" from which it is recommended to read the text of accusation and condemnation by the court of the "holy" inquisition. Its text can be found in the module "Social theory of science and technology" pages 15 and 16, published by the Open and Distance National University.
Karl Popper in an article entitled "On the sources of knowledge and ignorance", presents a critique of these two epistemological positions, that is, the empiricist and the rationalist, although both can be grouped into a single position: epistemological optimism.
Kant writes his "Critique of Pure Reason", starting from the premise of the certainty of Newton's physics as a true science and not subject to doubts, despite being (Kant) influenced to a great extent by the skeptic David Hume who as Kant himself recognizes "he woke me up from the dogmatic dream"; Popper's thought has taken up much of Kantian work but has exceeded the criterion of certainty that inspired it, due to a skepticism towards knowledge thanks to Einstein's Physics that surpassed Newton's physics by erasing its character of absolute science.In this regard Popper wrote an article entitled "The nature of philosophical problems and their roots in science" This article was presented in an address on April 28, 1952 at a meeting of the group of philosophy of science of the "British Society history of science "
In Kuhn's work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" the concepts of paradigm, normal science, revolutionary science, scientific community, enigma and anomaly are developed; Eutimio Mejía Soto presents a synthesis of the text "the structure…" (1962) and of the postscript (1969), where the term paradigm is reconceptualized, which received criticism for using it in his text with more than twenty-one different meanings, Kuhn modifies his postscript the term paradigm for that of "disciplinary matrix"
Professor Tua Pereda (Spain) in chapter 11 "Sociology of knowledge and scientific socioepistemology" of the book "Accounting principles and standards" quotes Rudolf Carnap particularly on the subject dealt with in the book "Philosophical Foundations of Physics", where he emphasizes that Carnap says: “the validity of an induction always rests on probability functions, with which the necessary requirements of the classical conception are not indispensable. Such as the regularity of the observed phenomena themselves which, on the other hand, give this procedure an evident circularity: that of assuming regularity before undertaking one's own observation… ”it is Carnap himself who substitutes“ the term verification for the confirmation ”.
In the text they appear scattered throughout the explanation of methodological falsificationism, thus the first decision page 34, second page 35, third page 38 and although here I only explain three, the fourth decision that I will talk about next is on the page 39 and a fifth decision is on page 41.
"Feyerabend, who probably contributed more than anyone to the dissemination of Popper's ideas, it seems that now he has gone to the enemy side", this author worked on the thesis of methodological anarchism.
"Popper's failure to distinguish between 'theories' and' theory sets' prevented him from having fortunate access to the basic ideas of sophisticated falsificationism" footnote # 111 in Lakatos' text.
Lakatos cites Popper's example with regard to his analysis of Marxism.
Lakatos quotes Feyerabend “the best criticism is provided by those theories that can replace the rivals they have destroyed”, Lakatos continues “the refutation without an alternative shows only the poverty of our imagination to supply a saving hypothesis”; At this point it is necessary to stop along the way to think about Accounting, to think: what are theories in accounting? What series of theories does accounting have? What has been refuted in accounting? We wonder if we maintain a knowledge refuted only by lack of imagination to present an alternative theory.
This criterion gives us more light for the discussion between the choice of Positivism or Normativism at the time of the construction of accounting science; As we see this criterion of value judgments, and the desire to achieve a greater degree of objectivity in science, is achieved through a conventionalism of generalized acceptance, of shared intersubjectivity, as a criterion of objectivity rather than as objectivity itself.. Below I make a reference to an author of the social sciences, in order to achieve an assimilation to our accounting field, since the Lakatosian orientation has its focus on the natural sciences and specifically on Physics.
Raymond Aron in the introduction to the book "The Politician and the Scientist" by Max Weber in its sections says "the choice of facts, the elaboration of concepts, the determination of the object, said Max Weber, are marked by the orientation of our curiosity. Natural science selects in infinity the sensible data the phenomena that can be repeated and builds the edifice of the laws. The science of culture selects in the infinity of human phenomena what refers to values, values of contemporaries or values of the historian, or else of history, the sage fixes his attention on the unique sequence of events or events. societies,either the various social sciences that consider regular consequences or relatively stable sets… in terms of economic or sociological propositions… those truths are partial and the values to which man refers are multiple; it is rare that the foreseeable consequences of any measure are consistent with all our values and agreeable to all individuals; it is not the subjectivity and relativity of science that make choice necessary, but the partial nature of scientific truths and the plurality of values. "it is not the subjectivity and relativity of science that make choice necessary, but the partial nature of scientific truths and the plurality of values. "it is not the subjectivity and relativity of science that make choice necessary, but the partial nature of scientific truths and the plurality of values. "
Professor Leandro Cañibano Calvo, in his book "Current Theory of Accounting" in the first chapter "The concept of accounting as a research program" presents an accounting study under the Lakatosian methodology where he exposes three Accounting PICs (Legalistic, Economic and formalized)
This rule also called the Tollendo Tollens, which we denote by TT, establishes that given a conditional and the negation of its consequent, we can conclude the negation of its antecedent
p then q (premise 1)
-q (premise 2)
-p (conclusion)
In this section, since they are examples of physical science, I will not make a synthesis of it, I will limit myself to extracting ideas that may constitute a logical and methodical tool for the analysis of accounting, which is the subject that concerns us.
The first world is the world of matter, the second is the world of consciousness, and the third is the world of propositions of truth and criteria: the world of objective knowledge.
Alfred J. Ayer is influenced by Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, which are the result of the logical empiricism of Berkeley and David Hume. Ayer also says that "the philosophers with whom I am in the most perfect agreement are those who make up the" Viennese circle "under the direction of Moritz Schlick and who are known, generally as logical positivists, and among them I declare myself a debtor, above all by Rudolf Carnap. Furthermore, I must acknowledge what I owe to Gilbert Ryle, my first philosophy tutor, and to Isaiah Berlin, although they are both dissatisfied with much of what I affirm. " This quote is taken from the foreword and introduction of the text "Language, truth and logic" by Alfred J. Ayer.
To conclude this chapter, it is significant to mention that Lakatos is one of the main representatives of what can be called in Philosophy of Science as the Post-Popperian current, he has also been included in the group of historicists, but to be fair we cannot qualify it radically as historicist, since it is worth highlighting in it, a joint construction between history and logic, to support this idea I will quote the Kantian paraphrase with which the second chapter of this text begins entitled "The history of science and its reconstructions rational ", the opening sentence of the introduction reads" The philosophy of science without the history of science is empty; the history of science without the philosophy of science is blind ”.
In the book "Principles and accounting standards" Professor Tua Pereda in his chapter 11 "Sociology of knowledge and scientific socio-epistemology" makes mention of this phrase on page 408, but with the quotation of the text "evidence and refutations", " the logic of mathematical discovery ”. University Alliance. Madrid, page 18, Lakatos 1978.
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