You reminded me of a tangentially related post idea I want someone to steal: “Ideologies as Lakatosian Research Programmes”.
Just as people doing science can see themselves as working within a scientific research programme, people doing politics can see themselves as working within a political research programme. Political research programmes are scientific/Lakatosian research programmes generalized to include normative claims as well as empirical ones.
I expect this to have some (mildly) interesting implications, but I haven’t got round to extracting them.
You’ve already been scooped. The “research programme” that Lakatos talks about was designed to synthesize the views of Kuhn and Popper, but Kuhn himself modeled his revolutionary science after constitutional crises, and his paradigm shifts after political revolutions (and, perhaps more annoyingly to scientists, religious conversions). Also, part of what was so controversial (at the time) about Kuhn, was the prominence he gave to non-epistemic (normative, aesthetic, and even nationalistic) factors in the history of science.
Did Kuhn (or Popper or Lakatos) spell out substantial implications of the analogy? A lot of the interest would come from that, rather than the fact of the analogy in itself.
You reminded me of a tangentially related post idea I want someone to steal: “Ideologies as Lakatosian Research Programmes”.
Just as people doing science can see themselves as working within a scientific research programme, people doing politics can see themselves as working within a political research programme. Political research programmes are scientific/Lakatosian research programmes generalized to include normative claims as well as empirical ones.
I expect this to have some (mildly) interesting implications, but I haven’t got round to extracting them.
You’ve already been scooped. The “research programme” that Lakatos talks about was designed to synthesize the views of Kuhn and Popper, but Kuhn himself modeled his revolutionary science after constitutional crises, and his paradigm shifts after political revolutions (and, perhaps more annoyingly to scientists, religious conversions). Also, part of what was so controversial (at the time) about Kuhn, was the prominence he gave to non-epistemic (normative, aesthetic, and even nationalistic) factors in the history of science.
Did Kuhn (or Popper or Lakatos) spell out substantial implications of the analogy? A lot of the interest would come from that, rather than the fact of the analogy in itself.