A Comparison Between The Paradigms And The Scientific Research Programmes

Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos separately put forward their own complete theories of the methodology, called as Paradigms and The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. They both inherited the prior theories critically in their own theory and put forward a lot of their views, including standard of the science, dynamic mode of scientific development, and so on.It's feasible to investigate the comparison of the two theories in terms of the content of the theory, dynamic mode of scientific development and epistemology. On the content of the theory, Kuhn didn't provide a clear definition about the Paradigms theory, while Lakatos provided a clear definition about the Scientific Research Rrogrammes. Kuhn didn't analysed the inner structure of the Paradigms theory in detail. On the inner structure of the theory; Lakatos divided the inner structure of the theory of the Scientific Research Programmes into four parts, the hard core , protective belt , negative heuristic, and positive heuristic. In addition, he has described the detail of the relationship between parts with each other. On the dynamic mode of scientific development, Kuhn and Lakatos respectively provided their own dynamic mode of scientific development. Between the two scientific development dynamic modes, similarities and differences can be found. Both theories would be opposed to the simple falsification view of Popper, and the idea that the theory can be falsified by experience. They believed that only a new better theory could replace the old theory. Though Kuhn discussed the scientific progressive problem sometimes, he didn't put forward a clear progressive standard. However, Lakatos put forward a clear experience standard in his scientific research programmes theory. On the epistemology, Kuhn proved the truth notion of the pragmatism in his Paradigms theory,while Lakatos emphasized experiential foundation of the theory. Kuhn believed that it is incommensurable between different paradigms while Lakatos would be against this view. In Lakatos's Scientific Research Programmes theory, the new Scientific Research Programmes has already inherited something from the old scientific research programmes, and meanwhile it has surmounted the old one, that is to say, it is commensurable between different scientific research programmes.As the important part of the theory of historical school,Paradigms and Scientific Research Programmes theory not only inherited the prior theory dialectically, but also gave new views in many aspects to promote this school theory to develop forward. Both the two theories pay attention to solving the problem by the way of history ,and emphasized that scientific theories and scientific methods should all be examined by the history of science, in order to rectify the defect of describing the scientific theory only ,and to reflect certain progress.