The Structure of Theory Development: The Nmr Programme Seen from the Structuralist Perspective

Abstract

The analysis of the development of nmr presented in the preceding chapters relied on the research programme terminology provided by Lakatos’s theory of scientific development. The language in which that theory in its existing expositions is formulated is rather informal, and as a consequence the claims of the theory as it stands are rather vague. In chapter III the descriptive claims of Lakatos’s theory were divided in a conceptual and an explanatory part. The conceptual part says what possible scientific developments look like: they have the format of developing research programmes (where the notion of a research programme in turn is defined in such terms as “hard core”, “specific theory”, “heuristic”). Next, the explanatory part expresses when a scientific development, thus described, is successful (by specifying a criterion of success formulated in terms of the relationship between the specific theories from a programme and the evidence put forward for those theories).