What is it about?
Humankind faces problems such as COVID-19 and we are failing to solve longstanding sociopolitical problems. This paper highlights Lakatos's perspective that pseudoscience can be considered to be the failure to uncover novel facts. The implication is that social science should re-focus on discovering novel facts, or it may fall foul of Lakatos's definition.
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Why is it important?
This paper makes the argument that if social science fails to uncover novel facts, then it may suffer from a fundamental lack of innovative capabilities. Social science is responsible for the study of the natural research process, which is responsible for solving important problems. A failure of social science to uncover novel facts may have contributed to disasters such as the current coronavirus epidemic.
Perspectives
This paper contributes to important debates about the role of social science in improving natural science, and the research process itself, before it is too late. I hope to create awareness about the urgent need to improve the scientific research process so that it can solve the potentially catastrophic problems that currently threaten us.
Chris Callaghan
University of the Witwatersrand
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Lakatos revisited: Innovation and ‘Novel facts’ as a foundational logic for the social sciences in an era of ‘Post-truth’ and pseudoscience, Cogent Business & Management, September 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/23311975.2019.1672489.
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