This study will summarize two articles on political science.
Terence Ball, in his article "From Paradigms to Research Programs: Toward a Post-Kuhnian Political Science," is trying to do two things. First, he wants to show that Thomas S. Kuhn's ideas have been misunderstood by political scientists. Second, he wants to show that the ideas of Imre Lakatos are more useful and "satisfactory" than the ideas of Kuhn.
Ball writes that "Kuhn's reception by political scientists has in the past decade gone through three more or less distinct phases" (152). The first two phases were uncritical acceptance. Political scientists saw Kuhn's ideas as giving a new perspective on the science. Kuhn showed that political scientists had been looking at their field from different "paradigms" which kept them from talking in the same way about the same subjects. However, "The only trouble was that no one agreed as to whether the emerging paradigm [which would be used by them all] was to be interest-group analysis, structural functionalism" (152-153) or some other paradigm. Each group saw in Kuhn what they wanted to see to support their own approach. The third phase was to reject Kuhn:
Frightened by the specter of epistemological relativism, political scientists are nowadays tempted to resort to pre-Kuhnian cliches about objectivity, testability and falsification, and the like. This temptation . . . should be resisted, inasmuch as it represents a retreat to the comfortable---albeit questionable---pre-Kuhnian verities (154).
This brings Ball to the positive part of his article---the support of the ideas of Lakatos. Ball says political science does not need to abandon Kuhn or to go back to a pre-Kuhnian position. His position is that a post-Kuhnian view is best. Ball argues that political scientists have wrongly focused on Kuhn's work with paradigms, when what Kuhn is really talking about is his "distinction between `normal' and `revolutionary' scien...