ce" (155). Even here, Ball says that Kuhn's ideas are not clear or coherent. Ball says that Kuhn seems to contradict himself in his defense of his original ideas. In any case, Ball argues that "Kuhn's `big bang,' or revolutionary, account of scientific change does not fit the facts. . . . " (157). Ball says that Kuhn now admits this flaw in his work. Ball says that Kuhn sees change in science as evolutionary rather than revolutionary, because all important changes in scientific thinking are revolutionary, and, therefore, not truly revolutionary at all.
Ball says, however, that Kuhn has been helpful in an important way:
We must count among Kuhn's achievements the undermining . . . of the `textbook' conception of scientific progress as a steady growth-by-accumulation of ever-truer hypotheses and theories. . . . [Kuhn has reminded] us that the scientific enterprise is above all a dynamic and not wholly `cumulative' one (158).
Lakatos has taken Kuhn's ideas and gone beyond them. In the area of falsification, Lakatos agrees with Kuhn that "the history of science does not support the view that an elegant theory can be killed (or `falsified') by an ugly fact. Theories are made of sterner stuff, and facts are not so hard and unyielding as classical empiricists had supposed" (159). Lakatos says there are three types of falsification: dogmatic falsification, methodological falsification, and sophisticated falsification. Falsification is important because it lets scientists find out how true a theory is and how useful it is. Lakatos has come up with the third form, sophisticated falsification. He chooses this type because "it squares with the history of science; and . . . it avoids the sort of irrationalism implied by Kuhn's earlier a
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