Preface

Abstract

In every-day activities in science and the humanities we very often compare and evaluate hypotheses, theories, and whole disciplines. When people say that, for example, the humanities represent a much lower stage of development than science, or that science contributes almost nothing to solving existential human problems while the humanities are very helpful in this field, they are comparing whole sets of sciences and theories. Comparisons of this kind are made mostly in informal conversation. In print, they are common in reviews.The ways and criteria of differentiating between theories have not been systematically scrutinized. One can evaluate and compare theories with respect to hundreds of attributes (more general, more precise, explanatorily useful. influential, and so forth). There have been some very interesting attempts to put forward a theory of theory comparison but as a rule they are confmed to theories in science and have little in common with comparing of conceptions in the humanities. Even in the case of theories in sciences not all comparisons are taken into account. The inter~st of methodologists is mostly directed at comparing successive theories in the same domain of research. In this restricted field some theories of comparison have been invented (K Popper, I. Lakatos, 1. Laudan, I. Niiniluoto and the structuralists may be mentioned here).We would like the present book to be a kind of contribution to a more general theory of theory comparison, i.e. a theory that goes beyond the realm of mathematics and science. The authors of the essays collected in this volume describe -from a systematic as well as a historical point of view -various conditions, difficulties and ways of comparing and evaluating theories, using different metascientific concepts and views (e.g. the concept of system in the Bertalanffyan sense, the concept of explanatory power, the model of multidimensional social choice, some AI results, and the structuralist view). Hence, the title On Comparing and Evaluating Scientific Theories reflects the general idea of this collection.