Kuhn Vs. Popper Vs. Lakatos
Essay by 24 • October 4, 2010 • 606 Words (3 Pages) • 2,434 Views
The articles of "Chance: An African view", "How to convince a reluctant scientist" and "Common sense of science" each involve a philosopher who tried to show how theories and facts in science is discovered. The article of "Chance: An African view"involves the theory of Popper, "How to convince a reluctant scientist" involves the theory of Kuhn and "Common sense of science" involves accumulation of both those theories in Lakatos. They are connected because "Chance: An African view" and "How to convince a reluctant scientist" are opposite of each other and Lakatos is a combination of the two.
The article of "Chance: An African View" involves the theory of Popper. Popper's theory implied that scientists should give up a theory as soon as they encounter any falsifying evidence, immediately replacing it with increasingly 'bold and powerful' new hypotheses. His theory, called falsifiability, is an important concept in the idea that a proposition or theory cannot be scientific if it does not admit the possibility of it being false. Falsifiable does not mean false. For a proposition to be falsifiable, it must be at least in principle possible to make an observation that would show the proposition to be false, even if that observation has not been made. For example, the proposition "All crows are black" would be falsified by observing one white crow. The article talks about how there is no such thing as chance. That there is a cause for everything, thus fact and being able to falsify it, Popper's theory, comes into motion.
"How to convince a reluctant scientist" is connected to "Chance" because it is the opposite of Popper's views. The theory this article is based on is that of Kuhn. Kuhn described science as consisting of periods of normal science in which scientists continue to hold their theories in the face of anomalies, interspersed with periods of great conceptual change. Kuhn'S periods of "normal Science" were when the scientific community all agreed that a theory was true. In the article it talks about how if the scientific community believes in a theory then it is true. That if the whole of scientists
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