Research Traditions
Laudan introduced the concept of research traditions in Progress and Its Problems (1977) as a deliberate alternative to Kuhn's paradigms. Where paradigms were total frameworks whose shifts constituted quasi-religious conversions, research traditions were more flexible — general metaphysical and methodological commitments that shape how a community identifies problems and evaluates solutions, but that permit internal modification without collapse. Research traditions cut across disciplines. They persist across theoretical revisions. They compete through the comparative measure that matters: which tradition solves more of the problems it faces while generating fewer anomalies? The framework replaces the search for a correct tradition with the auditable question of which tradition is progressive and which is degenerative.
In the AI Story
The concept emerged from Laudan's dissatisfaction with both the positivist picture of science — which assumed a fixed neutral standard for evaluating theories — and Kuhn's alternative, which seemed to make theory-choice arational. Research traditions preserve Kuhn's insight that frameworks shape perception while rejecting his implication that inter-framework evaluation is impossible. Traditions can be compared by their problem-solving effectiveness even when their standards for what counts as a problem differ.
What distinguishes a research tradition from a Kuhnian paradigm is internal flexibility. A tradition can undergo substantial modification — abandoning specific theories, adjusting methods, revising background assumptions — while remaining the same tradition. The problem-solving model evaluates the tradition's trajectory, not its static content. A tradition becomes progressive by expanding to address anomalies; it becomes degenerative by contracting to exclude them.
Applied to the AI discourse, the framework identifies two primary competing traditions — the triumphalist and the elegist — each organized around different problem sets, different standards of evaluation, and different conceptions of what AI is supposed to do. Neither tradition is irrational. Each solves real problems. Each generates real anomalies. The dispute between them cannot be resolved by appeal to a neutral standard because no neutral standard exists above the traditions themselves.
The framework thus reframes the AI debate from a contest between rationality and irrationality into a comparison between two partial rationalities — each progressive within its own problem set, each degenerative at the boundaries where the other's problems lie. This reframing is not neutral. It favors the silent middle — the population willing to hold the full problem set in view — over the clean narratives that dominate public discourse.
Origin
The concept was developed in Progress and Its Problems (1977) and refined in Science and Values (1984). Laudan spent decades defending the framework against realist critics who insisted progress must be measured by approximation to truth and against relativist critics who insisted no measurement was possible. His position held the middle, which is the position it now occupies in the AI transition.
Key Ideas
Flexibility over commitment. Traditions can revise their theories without abandoning their identity; paradigms cannot.
Cross-disciplinary reach. A tradition can span physics and psychology, economics and technology, because its organizing commitments are methodological rather than disciplinary.
Comparative evaluation. Traditions are not correct or incorrect; they are more or less progressive than their competitors.
Internal development matters. A tradition that takes its anomalies seriously and develops internal resources to address them becomes more progressive over time.
Debates & Critiques
Critics argue that the concept is too flexible to be useful — that any ad hoc modification can be defended as internal development, making the distinction between progressive and degenerative traditions unfalsifiable. Laudan's response was operational: the distinction is made through sustained comparative analysis over time, not through any single judgment call. A tradition that keeps generating anomalies while failing to develop tools to address them is degenerative, and the failure becomes visible through decades of comparison.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth (University of California Press, 1977).
- Larry Laudan, Science and Values: The Aims of Science and Their Role in Scientific Debate (University of California Press, 1984).
- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962).
- Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Cambridge University Press, 1978).
- Rachel Laudan, ed., The Nature of Technological Knowledge: Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant? (Reidel, 1984).