Is Science Rational?

I agree with Hacking that the appropriate answer to that question is, who cares?

A lot of people took Kuhn to be saying that science isn't rational. Some responded by attacking Kuhn, and others by denying that science has any special epistemic status: So some people believe in physics, others astrology, we are entitled to believe what we want, neither is preferable. Or, scientists only get listened to because they are set up as authorities, we have no special reason to trust what scientists say.

Kuhn was shocked by the reaction. It had never occurred to him that what he said could be taken that way. What Hacking says, in part, explains that: Kuhn wasn't interested in some idle notion of rationality, he was rather interested in the appropriate reasons why scientists do what they do in various settings for various reasons.

Hacking quotes (226–227) Laudan's list of what it is generally accepted Kuhn's work does show about such issues (though he doesn't think Laudan gets it completely right).

• Science is not cumulative. Some things get lost during changes of theory.
• Theories are not rejected because they have anomalies, and not accepted because they are empirically confirmed.
• Debates about scientific theories often turn on conceptual issues not empirical support.
• The "principles of scientific rationality" change along with scientific theories.
• Scientists don't just accept or reject theories, they pursue theories, entertain them, etc. This claim is incompatible with what Kuhn says, but it has been a consequence drawn from further developments.
• The standard move of those who believe in the cumulative nature of science is to say that new theories are more accurate or broader in scope than the old theores, but the new theories incorporate the old theories on their limited domains or as approximations. That is an ad hoc move: what really happens is that the old theories get displaced or eliminated.
• It is normally the case that there are rival theories, and theory evaluation is a comparative affair.

Kuhn takes his own talk about scientific revolutions to be a metaphor of limited application: in revolutionary periods, there is no accepted governing system that can be used to adjudicate disputes. Feyerabend thinks the comparison is much more exact, to the extent that he thinks that the best philosophers from whom to learn about scientific revolutions include Lenin, Mill, Hegel, Kropotkin—all political philosophers. He thinks that the claim that science makes use of a rational method is not only false, but harmful and dangerous, not only to the development of science, but also harmful to the lives of the scientists.

-- ShaughanLavine - 21 Feb 2006