All my homies love meta science

A course I took in undergrad on the history and philosophy of science really stayed with me, and is a really helpful way of understanding how science actually works.

Karl Popper wrote the revolutionary work The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which proposed that what separated science from pseudoscience as whether the discipline actually makes predictions that can be proven wrong, and whether it changes its own rules when it observes exceptions to those rules.

Well, Thomas Kuhn came along and wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argued that not all scientific theories were equally falsifiable. Kuhn argued that science actually tolerated a lot of anomalous observations without actually rejecting the discipline’s own paradigms or models. In Kuhn’s view, scientists performed “normal science” by accumulating knowledge under an established paradigm, including tolerating observed anomalies, until someone would have to come along and use the accumulated anomalies to actually propose something revolutionary that breaks a lot of previous models, and throws away a lot of the work that came before, in a scientific revolution. Under Kuhn’s description, science is quite resistant to criticism or falsifiability under the “normal science” periods, even if it accepts that revolutions are occasionally necessary.

The prominent example was that Mercury’s orbit didn’t quite fit Newton’s theory of gravity, and astronomers and physicists kept trying to rework the formula on the edges without actually challenging the core paradigm. For decades, astronomers simply shrugged their shoulders and said that they knew that the motion of Mercury tended to drift from the predictive model, but they didn’t have anything better to turn to, if they were to reject Newtonian gravity. It wasn’t until Einstein’s general relativity that scientists did have something better, and learning that Einstein’s theory works even when near a large gravity well was revolutionary.

Others include the phlogiston theory of combustion that persisted for a bit even after it was measured that combustion of metallic elements increased the mass of the resulting burned stuff, as if phlogiston had negative mass.

Imre Lakatos tried to bridge the ideas of Popper and Kuhn, by observing that each discipline had their own “Research Programs” that weren’t necessarily compatible with others in their own field. Quantum physics was aware of cosmology/relativity, and it didn’t much matter that these two sets of theories and research methods had different scopes, and contradicted each other at times. But each Research Program had its own “hard core” that was not subject to questioning or challenge, while most scientists did the work in the “protective belt” around that core. And even when a particular Research Program gets battered by a series of contradictory observations, it’s perfectly rational for scientists in that field to rally in defense of that hard core to see if it can be revived, at least for a time until that defense becomes untenable. In a sense, Lakatos described the fields where Kuhn’s “normal science” and “revolutionary science” actually happened, and how Popper’s falsifiability criterion fit into each space.

Paul Feyerabend also added a lot of color to these theories, too. He described the tenacity of ideas as being driven by more than simple falsifiability, but also of just how attractive of an idea it was. In his descriptions, ideas basically fought for popularity on many different metrics, and the sterile ideas of falsifiability didn’t actually account for how ideas compete in the marketplace, even among allegedly rational scientists.

So yeah, this comic is basically Karl Popper’s views. The world as a whole, though, has definitely moved on from that definition trying to demarcate between science and pseudoscience.

I can see how this would be the case judging by the boomers around me. Do you have any examples?

Or “my research is true because of conspiracy theories”