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Lakatos call objective knowledge and those
which pursue different aims and have different intellectual
trajectories.
Appraising scientific theories
Hence Lakatos provides no forward-looking assessments of present competing scientific theories. He
can at best look back and say why, on his criteria, this research programme was progressive, why
another was not. As for the future, there are few pointers to be derived from his `methodology'. He says
that we should be modest in our hopes for our own projects because rival programmes may turn out to
have the last word. There is a place for pig-headedness when one's programme is going through a bad
patch. The mottos are to be proliferation of theories, leniency in evaluation, and honest `score-keeping'
to see which programme is producing results and meeting new challenges. These are not so much real
methodology as a list of the supposed values of a science allegedly free of ideology.
If Lakatos were in the business of theory appraisal, then I should have to agree with his most
colourful critic, Paul Feyerabend. The main thrust of the often perceptive assaults on Lakatos to be
found in Chapter 17 of Against Method is that Lakatos's `methodology' is not a good device for advising
on current scientific work. I agree, but suppose that was never the point of the analysis which, I claim,
has a more radical object. Lakatos had a sharp tongue, strong opinions and little difference. He made
many entertaining observations about this or that current research project, but these acerbic asides
were incidental to and independent of the philosophy I attribute to him.
Is it a defect in Lakatos's methodology that it is only retroactive? I think not. There are no significant
general laws about what, in a current bit of research, bodes well for the future. There are only truisms.
A group of workers who have just had a good idea often spends at least a few more years fruitfully
applying it. Such groups properly get lots of money from corporations, governments, and foundations.
There are other mild sociological inductions, for example that when a group is increasingly concerned
to defend itself against criticism, and won't dare go out on a new limb, then it seldom produces
interesting new research. Perhaps the chief practical problem is quite ignored by philosophers of
rationality. How do you stop funding a program you have supported for five or
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fifteen years a program to which many young people have dedicated their careers and which is
finding out very little? That real-life crisis has little to do with philosophy.
There is a current vogue among some philosophers of science, that Lakatos might have called `the
new justifications'. It produces whole books trying to show that a system of appraising theories can be
built up out of rules of thumb. It is even suggested that governments should fund work in the
philosophy of science, in order to learn how to fund projects in real science. We should not confuse
such creatures of bureaucracy with Lakatos's attempt to understand the content of objective
judgement.
Internal and external history
Lakatos's tool for understanding objectivity was something he called history. Historians of science,
even those given to considerable flights of speculative imagination, find in Lakatos only ` an historical
parody that makes one's hair stand on end'. That is Gerald Holton's characterization in The Scientific
Imagination (p. 106); many colleagues agree.
Lakatos begins with an `unorthodox, new demarcation between " internal " and " external" history'
(I, p. 102), but is not very clear what is going on. External history commonly deals in economic, social
and technological factors that are not directly involved in the content of a science, but which are
deemed to influence or explain some events in the history of knowledge. External history might
include an event like the first Soviet satellite to orbit the .earth Sputnik which was followed by the
instant investment of vast sums of American money in science education. Internal history is usually
the history of ideas germane to the science, and attends to the motivations of research workers, their
patterns of communication and lines of intellectual filiation who learned what from whom.
Lakatos's internal history is to be one extreme on this spectrum. It is to exclude anything in the
subjective or personal domain. What people believed is irrelevant: it is to be a history of some sort of
abstraction. It is, in short, to be a history of Hegelian alienated knowledge, the history of anonymous
and autonomous research programmes.
This idea about the growth of knowledge into something
objective and non-human was foreshadowed in his first major philosophical work, Proofs and
Refutations. On p. 146 of this wonderful dialogue on the nature of mathematics, we find:
Mathematical activity is human activity. Certain aspects of this activity as of any human activity
can be studied by psychology, others by history. Heuristic is not primarily interested in these aspects.
But mathematical activity produces mathematics. Mathematics, this product of human activity,
`alienates itself' from the human activity which has been producing it. It becomes a living growing
organism that acquires a certain autonomy from the activity which has produced it.
Here then are the seeds of Lakatos's redefinition of `internal history', the doctrine underlying his
`rational reconstructions'. One of the lessons of Proofs and Refutations is that mathematics might be
both the product of human activity and autonomous, with its own internal characterization of
objectivity which can be analysed in terms of how mathematical knowledge has grown. Popper has
suggested that such objective knowledge could be a `third world' of reality, and Lakatos toyed with
this idea.
Popper's metaphor of a third world is puzzling. In Lakatos's definition, `the "first world" is the
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