Our project hasn’t seen much public-facing action, but it’s still happening. For my part, I have (so far) read Lakatos’s lectures that were meant to form the basis for his joint project with Feyerabend.

Before I jump into it, let me start with my favorite quote:

The social sciences are on a par with astrology, it is no use beating about the bush. (Funny that I should be teaching at the London School of Economics!)

Imre Lakatos, p. 107 For and Against Method

These lectures were an entertaining evisceration of some old (and still prevalent) superstitions about the functioning of science, plus Lakatos’s own view on how science actually works. I think his picture (which I’ll describe below) is a pretty good one, but doesn’t actually solve the demarcation problem.

The Big Question (TBQ) is this: how do we separate good science from bad? Lakatos presents three main schools of thought (besides his own):

1. Demarcationism — a set of schools of thought that share a belief in something like an objective answer to TBQ.
2. Authoritarianism — the belief that there are some people who can identify good science, but can’t necessarily enunciate their positions.
3. Anarchism — which argues (according to Lakatos) that there is no good or bad science.

He quickly rejects the various flavors of Demarcationism. These schools of thought are either logically impossible (e.g. inductivism), inconsistent with the history of science, and/or too subjective. They’re popular caricatures of science–cartoons with heroic scientists battling ignorance, limited only by funding. But they aren’t true.

For example, Falsificationism (which is alive and well, half a century later, in the minds of many practicing scientists) tells us that scientists are only swayed by disconfirmatory evidence. But in practice scientists tend to ignore anamolies (i.e. disconfirmatory evidence) with the hope that they’ll be explained away later–and they tend to be swayed by confirmatory evidence in spite of Falsificationist priors.

All told, Demarcationists run into the problem of not being able to come up with a theory that doesn’t make significant errors such as classifying Newton as bad science.

On the far side of the spectrum are anarchists. Far from believing in any formula, criteria, or line in the sand, they say TBQ misses the point entirely. There isn’t such thing as “good” science or “bad” except from the perspective of whatever the current orthodoxy says. For the objective-truth-seeking philosopher, science ultimately boils down to “anything goes!”

For Lakatos, the anarchists have basically surrendered in the face of the demarcation problem. But it’s not clear to me that Lakatos hasn’t joined them. He’s got his progression criterion (more on that later), but can we really pin that down in any objective way? Motterlini seems to think Feyerabend thought Lakatos was really an anarchist after all, and I’m inclined to agree based on what (little) I’ve seen. Lakatos offers heuristics, but makes no guarantees that any formula will work reliably.

Let me come back to Authoritarianism after describing Lakatos’s theory of research programs.

A research program is (if I’m understanding this correctly) basically a mix of scientific framework and community. Austrian Economics is a research program comprised of a common theoretical view (with some disagreements), a network of citations, and a social network across space and backwards through time. Austrian Econ contains smaller programs within it: entrepreneurship, political economy, history of thought, capital theory, etc.

Any given research program (RP) may look relatively “good”(ish) or “bad” at any given time, but the future is always uncertain. I wouldn’t bet money on it, but how am I to prove that astrology won’t turn out to be true at some point? It’s the Grue problem writ large.

What we can evaluate is whether an RP is “progressing” or “degenerating.” In the former case it’s gaining predictive power. In the latter case it’s turning into an ad hoc mess in the face of evidence.

It’s up to individual scientists to make the entrepreneurial [my word, not his] decision to invest some effort in whichever program they think is promising. The natural move would be to join a progressing RP. But there might be an opportunity to save a degenerating RP.

In other words, Lakatos wants to describe what science is doing, but he wants to avoid making value judgements about unknown futures. Rather than draw a demarcation line he instead offers a way to ask if a RP is going in the right direction (right now or retrospectively).

Let’s digress a minute and consider objective reality. Putting aside Cartesian skepticism, it seems reasonable to take the existence of an objective universe as a basic axiom. But just as surely, that objective universe has far more complications than humanity will ever be able to fully account for. The universe has more dimensions than us; what did you expect? In considering science’s ability to grasp objective reality, we have to understand that there’s always going to be some degree of (radical) uncertainty, even at the best of times.

“Good” science is that science that gets us closer to capital-T Truth. But we’ll never be in the omniscient position necessary to conclusively judge a bit of science as actually being good or not.

I think Lakatos and I share a sense that there is this objective reality that we can move towards. I think we also share an understanding that this objective reality is fundamentally inaccessible. I also share his position that the demarcationists are wrong. But I’m not ready to give up on the anarchists or the authoritarians.

Authoritarians basically argue that although there is good and bad science and that they can identify them even if they can’t explain how. Lakatos deals mostly with the uglier side of this school of thought, but misses a nicer side. That nicer version, ironically, includes him telling us things like astronomy is more valid than astronomy. To be fair, he hedges by acknowledging that the future is always uncertain… maybe in 1000 years astrology switches from a degenerating body of knowledge to a progressive one.

Hayek’s notion of tacit knowledge applies to scientific knowledge. The tacit knowledge of scientists allows them to tell future scientists things like “don’t even bother with alchemy.”

Still, just because you know something, doesn’t mean it’s right. We all “know” that Roman soldiers spoke with English accents because that’s how they’ve always been portrayed in movies. Try imagining Gladiator with Italian accents; it doesn’t work!

Sometimes authorities give us useful advice like distinguishing between astronomy and astrology. But sometimes they turn out to be wrong (after encouraging us to pursue eugenics in the meantime).

Authority is a useful guidepost, and represents the (current) structure of knowledge. I am not willing to give up my own authority because when it comes to economics, I know it’s not a matter of “anything goes!”

Reading Lakatos, I can’t quite settle on a camp between the anarchists and authoritarians. The anarchists are literally correct, but the authoritarians are able to actually make bets on a reality I think exists.

We’re all in the position of the blind men and the elephant. When someone tells me an elephant is like a tree, I think it behooves me to a) accept that as evidence about what the world is like, and b) take it with a grain of salt. The bumper sticker version of my stance might be “the Truth is out there… and its bigger than you think.”

So what about Lakatos? It’s all a bit rusty at this point so please push back in the comments. But here’s my tl;dr:

• Don’t trust anyone who tells you they’ve got the formula for “good science.”
• The way science actually works (as opposed to the mythology we’re taught in high school science) is that RP’s build up complex bodies of knowledge around a few core postulates. Normal science is concerned with attacking the knowledge that isn’t in that core.
• Scientific progress (e.g. the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics) isn’t an Occam process… we’re not eliminating anomalies, but changing the set of anomalies we deal with.
• The mark of bad science is adding ad hoc theory that hand-waves away anomalies but doesn’t generalize to describing novel facts (if Nasim Taleb were in the audience, he’d be shouting via negativa! right now)