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Theory Pursuit (Barseghyan-2015) (view source)
Revision as of 10:11, 4 December 2018
, 10:11, 4 December 2018no edit summary
|Authors List=Hakob Barseghyan,
|Formulated Year=2015
|Description=TODO: Description here In Barseghyan’s work, pursuit is defined as the following:
“A theory is said to be pursued if it is considered worthy of further development.”
Ideas that tried to distinguish pursued theories and accepted theories can be found in works by [[David Hume]], [[Imre Lakatos]], [[Larry Laudan]] and [[Stephen Wykstra]].
A possible early attempt to distinguish acceptance and pursuit can be identified in the work of [[David Hume]]. In his book ''A Treatise of Human Nature'', Hume brought up the distinction between believing and entertaining.[[CiteRef::Hume (1739/40)|p. 83]] In the book, the concept of believing can be seen as accepting certain theories, as believing may indicate taking certain theories as truths or best available descriptions of the subject. On the other hand, entertaining means finding certain theories valuable without believing or accepting them.[[CiteRef::Hume (1739/40)|p. 83]]
Hume did not make the distinction explicit and obvious; hence it is reasonable to trace the first explicit distinction back to [[Imre Lakatos]], as he stated in his scientific method regarding how to evaluate pursued theories.[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1970)]] In his ''Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes'', he came up with criteria that determine which competing theory is better. This is a clear indication that Lakatos distinguished accepted theories and pursued theories, because it is impossible for theories to be competitive if all theories are equally accepted. Moreover, Lakatos made the concept of pursuing theories even clearer by describing the progress of scientific knowledge as pursuing new facts to fit “phantasies” that scientists came up beforehand [[CiteRef::Lakatos (1978a)|pp. 8-101]]. Understanding Lakatos’ theory is a good starting point to understand Barseghyan’s theory in terms of theory pursuit not only because Lakatos was arguably the first person who explicitly distinguished accepting and pursuing. Lakatos does not believe that scientists need to be restricted when they decide which theory is worth pursuing; the idea is closely related to Barseghyan’s idea that pursued theories do not need to have any use values at the moment.
