Prominent Philosophers of Science in the Twentieth Century
Ralte,
Rodinmawia. The Interface of Science and Religion: An Introductory Study. New
Delhi: Christian World Imprints, 2017.
Vinck,
Dominique. The Sociology of Scientific Work: The Fundamental Relationship
between Science and Society. Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.,
2010.
There are five
prominent philosophers of science in the twentieth century. They are: Michael
Polanyi, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Fayerabend.
1. Michael Polanyi
Michael Polanyi
(1891–1976) was born to a Viennese family living in Hungary. After obtaining a
medical degree, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I, then
chose Austrian citizenship in the aftermath of the war. While on sick leave, he
wrote an article on the adsorption of gases that became the foundation for his
doctoral research in physical chemistry at Karlsruhe in Germany. In his later
work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and the University of Manchester
in England, Polanyi also worked on crystallography and reaction kinetics. After
fleeing to England from Nazi Germany, Polanyi gradually turned away from
physical chemistry to studies in economics, social and political analysis,
philosophy, theology, and aesthetics. The biography traces the development of
Polanyi's theory of tacit, personal knowledge and shows how his scientific
career shaped his philosophy of science and his view of religion in general and
Christianity and Judaism in particular.
His main contributions
in the field of Philosophy of Science lie in his idea that personal judgments
and human values are the essential components of scientific research. Polanyi
says, “Objectivism has totally falsified our conception of truth, by exalting
what we can know and prove, while covering up with ambiguous utterances all
that we know and cannot prove, even though the latter knowledge underlies, and
must ultimately set its seal to, all that we can prove.” According to him, “the
act of knowing, like the act of perception, is essentially an acquired skill. Knowledge
is only possible when the knower’s talent is integrating a variety of elements
into a perspective around that particular point which is the focus of his or
her attention.
In Polanyi
schemes of thought, knowledge is explicit, thus access to it is possible only
by participating in the community which is structured according to the
traditions which contains the prerequisite subsidiary-focal patterns. Polanyi
is also against the notion that science is purely based on objective research. He
maintains that objectivity is a false idea because this posits a kind of
knowing in which the knowing object is eliminated or ignored.
2. Karl Popper
Karl Popper
(1902-1994) is one of the biggest names in the history of the philosophy of
science. Karl Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers
of science of the twentieth century. He taught at Canterbury University College
in Christchurch, new Zealand, and also in London School of Economics and the
University of London. Among his students were great philosophers like Lakatos,
Feyarabend, etc.
Popper tried to
delineate between science and non-science, arguing that metaphysics was
non-observational, and therefore could not be science. He championed the idea
of falsification, where a hypothesis must be potentially disprovable for it to
be regarded as scientific. According to him, theological, epistemological, and
metaphysical questions were not falsifiable, and therefore not scientific. For
Popper, the growth of human knowledge proceeds from our problems and from our
attempts to solve them. The priority of problems in Popper’s account of science
is paramount, and it is this which leads him to characterize scientists as
“problem-solvers”. As Popper succinctly concludes, “The fact that we predict
eclipses does not, therefore, provide a valid reason for expecting that we can
predict revolutions”.
3. Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos
(1922–1974) was a Hungarian-born philosopher of mathematics and science who
rose to prominence in Britain, having fled his native land in 1956 when the
Hungarian Uprising was suppressed by Soviet tanks. He taught at London School
of Economics from 1960 until his untimely death in 1974.
Lakatos’ mjor
contribution to the philosophy of science is on scientific growth rather than on
falsification and its use of the notions of progressive and degenerating
problem-shifts.
The best-known
of Lakatos’s “Conference Proceedings” is Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge,
which became an international best-seller. It contains Lakatos’s important
paper “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes”
(FMSRP). This led to the discoveries of two development-first, the discovery that falsification could be developed so as to
deal with these apparently anomalous aspects of scientific development and, secondly, the discovery of the critical role played in
science by the heuristic principles whose importance for mathematics. According
to him, scientists work with the research programme at the heart of which is a ‘hard
core’ theory that determines the shape and identity of the programme.
4. Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922–1996) is one of the most influential
philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential.
His 1962 book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ is one of the most
cited academic books of all time. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of
science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines but also
inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the
history of science. His account of the development of science held that science
enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions. To this
thesis, Kuhn added the controversial ‘incommensurability thesis’, that theories
from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of
comparability.
Kuhn main contribution in the field of philosophy of science is his
concept of ‘Paradigm and Paradigm shift. Paradigm according to Kuhn is
an “universally recognized scientific achievement that for a time provide model
problems and solutions to a community of practitioners”. He explains Paradigm
and Paradigm shift in terms of Normal science and Revolutionary science. According
to Kuhn, normal science means, research firmly based upon one or more past
scientific development and achievements which were put into science textbooks for school and universities to learn about science.
5. Paul Fayerabend
Paul Fayerabend (1924-1994) was an Austrian-born philosopher of
science. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley
for three decades from 1958-1989. He was one of the twentieth century's most
famous philosophers of science. He was known for his critique of Karl Popper’s “critical
rationalism”. He became a critic of philosophy of science itself, particularly of
“rationalist” attempts to lay down or discover rules of the scientific method. His
landmark book, Against Method (1978) coined the phrase epistemology anarchy,
which holds that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules
governing the progress of science or the growth of knowledge. It holds the idea
that science can or should operate according to universal and fixed rules in
unrealistic, destructive, and detrimental to science itself.
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