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Mechanism of Theory Rejection (view source)
Revision as of 03:55, 14 March 2018
, 03:55, 14 March 2018no edit summary
|Prehistory=The question about the rejection of theories has been an important one throughout the history of science. Many philosophers of science have attempted to provide an answer to the question of how scientific theories get rejected. Both rationalists and empiricists thought that empirical theories can be rejected or disproved in an incontrovertible manner. Believing that there is an absolute method of science, they contended that theories are assessed by this method, and if they fail to satisfy the method’s requirements, they are conclusively rejected.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1970a)]] [[Immanuel Kant]] echoed their beliefs. He held that scientific theories (especially Newtonian mechanics) are synthetic ''a priori''. As their knowledge is gained independently of experience but is nevertheless synthetic, theories can never be rejected as no empirical evidence can contradict them.[[CiteRef::Kant (1781)]]
The rejection of Newtonian theory by Einstein’s general relativity in 1919 led philosophers of science to re-evaluate their notions notion of the status of scientific theories. The position of infallibilism of the earlier philosophers was replaced with fallibilism during the early 20th century. For example, logical positivists (or empiricists) of the '''Vienna Circle''' advanced a probabilistic understanding of theories based on inductive logic. [[CiteRef::Godfrey-Smith (2003)]] They argued that we cannot absolutely know whether a theory is true or false. Rather, they thought that empirical evidence is used as confirming or dis-confirming evidence for theories. A theory was thought to get rejected when it was confronted with a sufficiently great number of disconfirming instances, leading to a detrimental reduction in its probability.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1968a)]]
[[Karl Popper]] argued in [[Popper (1959)|''Logic of Scientific Discovery'']] in favor of '''falsificationfalsificationism''', which is the idea that scientific theories are tested via attempts to refute them. If an experimental result fails to contradict the predictions of a theory, the theory remains accepted. However, if the results of an experiment contradict the theory, the theory is rejected. The more attempts of falsification a theory ‘survives,’ the greater the confidence we can have in the theory. But since Popper believed in fallibilism, no theory was absolutely certain, and would be eventually be refuted. Like logical positivists, Popper posited that the applied his process of falsification can be applied to individual theories.[[CiteRef::Popper (1959)]]
In his [[Kuhn (1962a)|''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'']], [[Thomas Kuhn]] argued that science is conducted under paradigms, which can be defined as a set of related theories forming the ‘worldview’ of the scientific community. The paradigms were distinguished using ‘normal science’ and ‘scientific revolutions.’ Science conducted within a paradigm constituted normal science, while a scientific revolution characterized the transition from one paradigm to another. Most importantly, Kuhn believed that there is an accumulation of anomalies that theories often fail to explain. When there is a critical mass of anomalies that the theories within a given paradigm fail to explicate, a scientific revolution takes place that ushers in the era of a new paradigm whose theories provide sufficient explanations of anomalies. Crucially, the theories of the previous paradigm are rejected and replaced by those of the new paradigm. Hence, there is a whole-scale rejection of theories of one paradigm, which are replaced by those of the new one.[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962a)]] Interestingly, Kuhn differs from logical positivist and Popper, because the former takes theory evaluation as a ‘holistic’ process, while the latter two thought that individual theories can be tested and, therefore, rejected. Another important difference between Kuhn and the earlier philosophers is his emphasis on the contingent scientific community as opposed to the tendencies of explicating the universal method of science.
