Day Three / Four: Pool Party at Popper's House

We waded into the deep end of the pool at Karl Popper's house. Luckily, Thomas Kuhn was in for the weekend, and he provided a slightly less brutal view of how science progresses. According to Kuhn, fields of study go through several stages:

1. Prescience-Folks working really hard to understand phenomena well enough to begin to propose a tentative suggestion of a solution. Once a set of conceptually linked theories, or paradigm, has its collective phaser set on falsify, the body of work moves to...
   
2. Normal Science-- Scientists go about their daily work of moving the body of knowledge slowly but surely forward. Errors and unexplained results happen and are recorded. They don't cause the disposal of the entire paradigm, since no more successful set of theories exists.
   
3. Eventually, however, enough problems, missteps, and falsified claims accumulate and cause an entire paradigm to be overthrown. This is revolutionary science.

Popper's version of scientific progress looks as tame as a Mayberry Cake raffle for the Daughters of the American Revolution compared to the cataclysmic shifts in power Kuhn described. "Ultimately this view is naive," shouts Lakatos from the diving board. Lakatos took Popper's wel-behaved linear model, folded in Kuhn's Great Battles in Norse Mythology style of progress, and combined the best parts of both.

According to Lakatos, families of conceptually linked scientific theories and methods are linked in a research program. Competing research programs do slow and steady battle every day. After a given research program gains prominence, it may begin to recede (become increasingly complex without contributing more knowledge) and be overtaken by one that is progressive (produces new knowledge). This shift in power between research programs can be considered a revolution, but not a discontinous event. It is instead the result of a long, steady tension between programs.