Reading Questions for Lakatos’ “Science and Pseudoscience” and Thagard’s “Why Astrology is a Pseudoscience”

Due Date: 9/13

Remember, this is to be NO MORE than 1 single spaced, typewritten page, no title page, no plastic cover, no title, just the name of the work read at upper left, your name at upper right. You must bring 2 COPIES of this to class, one to hand in, one to keep. Using your own words, answer all of the ASSIGNED QUESTIONS (the numbered ones). Use textual evidence to support your answers where appropriate. Remember to include one or two questions of your own.

Compare Lakatos’ statement, “Indeed, the hallmark of scientific behavior is a certain scepticism even towards one’s most cherished theories” (20), to Kuhn’s statement, “it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition to a science” (14). Are these two claims compatible? If not, who is right—or, more interestingly, how can we be so confused about the status of science?

What historical reason does Lakatos give to explain the resistance to admitting that science cannot provide proofs of laws?

Why are all theories unprovable? Why are all improbable? (See the commentary for a more in-depth discussion).

Which version of the falsifiability criterion—logical or prescriptive—does Lakatos attribute to Popper? Why does Lakatos reject this criterion?

1. Lakatos claims that the unit of scientific achievement is not the individual hypothesis, but what he calls a “research programme”. What are the three main parts of research programs, and how do they each function?

2. Page 24: “All theories...are born refuted and die refuted.” What, then, is the distinction that Lakatos makes between research programs? How is it like/unlike Popper, and like/unlike Kuhn?

How does Thagard reject Bok and Jerome’s indictments of astrology? How does he argue that the verifiability and falsifiability criteria each fail to explain astrology’s status as a pseudoscience?

3. What is the three-part matrix Thagard claims as relevant to demarcation, and what factors does it include which the authors of earlier readings did not? I.e., explain his demarcation principle and how it is like/unlike Kuhn’s or Lakatos’.

(When) Does astrology come out as a pseudoscience according to Thagard’s criterion?

4. Explain how Thagard’s criterion contains an element of historical relativism. Is this relativism a good/acceptable thing to you? Discuss whether, having admitted this sort of historical relativism, it is possible to avoid a sweeping cultural relativism, or even an all-out subjectivism, which undermines objective critical discourse.

5. Why is it important to Lakatos and to Thagard to have at least some way of marking science off from pseudoscience (even if the line is not particularly sharp)? Is this question of demarcation important to you? Why/why not?