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In America, on the other hand, marriages are instant events like coffee. Some are also instantaneous events, but that is irrelevant to the issue at hand so we will disregard that. The moment a man notices any desirable trait in a woman or vice versa, (In practice this is limited to the size of physical endowments), a marriage agreement is struck between them. They then live together in harmony until such time as at least one of them discovers an undesirable physical or mental trait in the other. I know of one couple who split up after the wife learned her husband's name. It turned out that she didn't like it and he wasn't willing to change it. At this point, the marriage is said to be falsified and the bond discarded. Now, it might turn out on the odd occasion that the husband's views on a subject coincide with his wife's views. This incident is called a confirmation of the marriage. Accordingly, the more confirmations a marriage receives, the more likely it is to last longer. However, some philosophers like Popper say that no general marriage ever accumulates confirmations. The best we can hope for is to knock the marriage out, to falsify it. We'd rather do with no marriage at all than a bad marriage which doesn't break. If it is a good thing to knock a marriage out then the more potential knock-outs the better. What we want then are allegedly strong marriages, marriages in which the spouses claim so much about each other, that if some claims are false, it won't take long to find out what they are. Such is the typical view in Indian media of an American marriage. Substitute "Scientific theory" for "Marriage" here, and you end up with the Falsificationist view of Science.

Clearly, neither of the above idealized accounts gives us a satisfactory picture of a real marriage. There are, no doubt, many successful marriages that have been made without first researching data about the bride or groom and still many more in which several incompatibilities are known to exist between the husband and wife, but which have not adversely affected their basic relationship.

Kuhn's Paradigms

What we need then, is some way of describing how exactly a real marriage is made and sustained, and more importantly, what specific incidents in a married life can be called progress in the marital relationship. This is an appropriate point to introduce Kuhn's views on the subject. Thomas Kuhn claims that progress is the effect of revolutions, which are in turn caused by crises. In our context, Kuhn would probably say that a many-times divorcee, aged under 30, is technically superior to an octogenarian couple who married at 20, by virtue of his having passed through more revolutions. This is clearly absurd, but Kuhn's own reasons for saying so carry some weight, so we shall look at them here.

A marriage, according to Kuhn, can be in one of two major states. The first is the Normal state; the second is the Critical state. The Normal state is when the marriage is governed by a single paradigm, which sets the standards for the legitimate work within the marriage it governs. The Critical state is entered when the Normal state can no longer sustain itself for reasons we shall see shortly. Here, the stage is ripe for a divorce, which Kuhn calls a revolution. Thereafter, it enters a new Normal state and proceeds to exist in it governed by a totally new paradigm.

Now it is not at all clear what Kuhn means by a Paradigm. But it is clear that Kuhn himself is unclear as to what it is. So we can proceed to look at his theory without feeling terribly inferior about it. I take it that a Paradigm consists of a general statement of purpose combined with a rough set of instructive guidelines, sort of like The Bridegroom's Comprehensive Pocket Manual, written by the bride's father. In any case, I guess we can expect a minimal paradigm to include a full description of the personal likes and dislikes of the bride. The paradigm also includes some very sensible and general recommendations like "Make serious attempts to match your likes and dislikes with those of the bride. Any failures to do so will result in my shooting you." Also, the paradigm mentions some practical ways of dealing with common marital problems. In our example, it would perhaps tell the groom that the way to treat a bored wife is to take her out and not to hold a stag party in the living room. But in spite of all this, there are bound to be insuperable problems, of course. These are called fundamental incompatibilities between the spouses. When applied to Science, Kuhn calls them serious mismatches between the Paradigm and Nature. These, however, do not falsify the marriage as a falsificationist would have it, but must be viewed as anomalies - or problems resisting attempts to solve them.

Anomalies, Crises and Revolutions

An anomaly is the root cause of a crisis. The more annoying an anomaly is, the more powerful it is in causing a crisis and overthrowing the paradigm. An anomaly is to be regarded as particularly serious if it is seen striking at the very fundamentals of the paradigm and yet persistently resists attempts to remove it. For example, a serious anomaly results when it is in the husband's intrinsic nature to snore in bed and in the wife's intrinsic nature to be a light sleeper and hate wearing ear plugs. This problem attacks the fundamentals statutes of the paradigm, which asks them to sleep together, but persistently resists attempts to solve it because neither solution prescribed by the paradigm appears tenable - the husband considers the uvula to be his second most important organ and consequently shudders at the very thought of a uvulectomy and the wife claims she breathes through her ears at night and so can't wear ear plugs to bed.

Anomalies are also regarded as serious if they are important with respect to some pressing social need. That is, a failure of a paradigm to help the system it governs accomplish something urgently needed by the society is to be viewed as a serious shortcoming. For example, if a wife in Hamlin is stubborn in her resolution to abort her pregnancy after a recent visit by the Pied Piper, that is a serious anomaly. There are no children in her town, and the society urgently demands that more children be produced to guard against extinction. At this stage, the husband will be urged by the society to seek a new wife who can bear him children.

Obviously, the following factors are also influential in determining the viability of a paradigm - The number of anomalies and the length of time one or more anomalies resist attempts to resolve. But most important, and perhaps even decisive in the life of a paradigm, is the appearance of a rival paradigm - a more beautiful woman, or one with more aspects in common with the dissatisfied husband. This is usually the straw that breaks the camel's back. A revolution sets in, the old wife is divorced and the new woman married. The husband is now said to have progressed along the ladder of matrimony.

Incommensurability of rival paradigms

For the first few months with his new wife, the husband is practically blind to her shortcomings. All he can remember are only the faults of the earlier wife and how his new wife has none of them. This thought is positively delightful and almost makes him feel like he has met his ideal match at last. But in the course of time, however, the impression begins to wear off. He discovers new anomalies - new incompatibilities between himself and his new wife, some of which he feels, might even be worse than those of his former wife.

But then, he starts to wonder, wives cannot be judged or compared in this fashion. When he decided to remarry, it was because he found the old paradigm to be unsatisfactory. Was the new wife not, then, incompatible with the old set of standards? He realizes that it is impossible to compare a wife with an earlier one, not because one might be no better than the other, but simply because there is very little in common between the two wives. So while for the first few months, when his new wife asks "Am I better than her, Dear?" he could unambiguously reply "Of course you are, Honey," he realizes pretty soon that it becomes more and more difficult for him to maintain his position on the issue. His answer rapidly deteriorates into "You are incomparable to anyone else, Darling." and then into "You're special in your own way, Dear." Very soon, all that he can manage to mutter in reply to that question will be "It's hard to say, Love. You are so different from her." The husband then realizes that each wife is superior to the others judged by her own standards. At this point, he is said to be enlightened about the incommensurability of paradigms.

After a remarriage, the husband is responding to a totally different world by his own choice. By definition, therefore, his new life is incommensurable with his old one. There is no objective way in which one wife can be judged superior to another. Such being the case, how can one say that there has been any progress at all? The husband can only be said to have traded in one set of problems for another. Little progress can be seen in a transition from the guillotine to the gallows. The superiority of one wife over another is not a self evident truth. This has serious implications. It charges Kuhn's theory with relativism. Because rival paradigms are incommensurable, Kuhn is unable to provide any objective incentive for a switchover from one wife to another. In other words, he is unable to objectively account for the divorce. Too much is left to the personal tastes of the husband who makes the decision to divorce and remarry based on his own subjective values. It is thus that I find Kuhn's account of progress inadequate.

The Lakatosian Account

According to Lakatos, a marriage must be viewed as a structure, with a protected inner kernel and a protective outer shell - just like a nut. The kernel of the structure is, more than anything else, its defining characteristic. This kernel, or hard core, is rendered unfalsifiable by a methodological decision of its protagonists�. The protective belt, however, can be twisted and turned around and reformed in any way we fancy so that it screens the kernel from modification.

Lakatos goes on to provide us with guidelines which are supposed to encourage matrimonial progress, that is to say, strengthen the marital relationship. These guidelines consist of positive and negative thumb-rules. The negative thumb-rule is very simple and straightforward. It says: "Never ever modify the kernel. So there!". In the case of a marriage, the state of living together would be its defining characteristic. So the negative thumb-rule would state, "Don't ever walk out on your partner. So there!" Any person who wishes to modify the kernel has opted for a different nut. Accordingly, he or she files a divorce suit and the marriage can be said to have degenerated.

The positive thumb-rule, however, is much milder. It consists of a rough set of guidelines on how to protect the kernel from possible attack should one arise. It recommends the building of auxiliary hypotheses such that the kernel is rendered immutable. Let's look at an example. Suppose that the husband is positively outraged by his wife inviting an incredibly bothersome friend of hers for a chat every Saturday. Suppose also that the wife finds Saturday afternoons unbearably boring and that talking to this friend alleviates her boredom to a great extent and is therefore unwilling to sacrifice it. This incompatibility, insignificant though it may seem, actually targets the kernel. If something is not done about it right away, the husband is well on his way to develop further disagreements with his wife and ultimately break the marital bond. A falsificationist marriage, as we have seen, will already call it quits at this stage.

`Progress' according to Lakatos

However, Lakatos' program actually relies on these incompatibilities for progress. It is easy to see how. The husband, knowing that the kernel of the marriage - their living together cannot be changed, makes an auxiliary proposal to counter this newly discovered incompatibility. For instance, he might propose to his wife that they could try out a game of golf every Saturday afternoon. This might eventually turn out to be such an enjoyable pastime, that it might even reinforce the marital bond. Thus, the discovery of an attempt to falsify the kernel of the program has actually led to the discovery of a previously unknown means of reinforcing it, while maintaining the kernel intact!

Typically, in a scientific theory, if the Copernican system was the hard-core of this research program for instance, then discrepancies in the orbit of a planet which try to falsify the core assumption of Copernicus will be tackled by postulating an auxiliary hypothesis about a new hidden planet which influences the orbit and explains the observed anomaly. Thus the core of Copernicus' program is retained, but a newly advanced postulate in its protective belt has taken the brunt of the attack by this attempt to falsify it. Should this new planet actually be discovered, then not only has its discovery rendered the kernel of the Copernican program safe from the attack, it can even be said to have reinforced it.

Lakatos' exclusions from the Positive Thumb-rules

Since it is clear that reinforcement in marital relationships or scientific theories occurs as a result of advancing this kind of novel proposals, Lakatos had to exclude two kinds of moves from within the positive thumb-rule. The first is that ad hoc hypotheses must not be made in the protective belt. One cannot postulate an unfalsifiable or untestable hypothesis to account for an incompatibility between observation and the kernel. Using our earlier example of an irate husband and a bored wife, the husband cannot say that he is naturally disposed to become irate at his wife every Saturday afternoon, no matter what he does or who she is. That is equivalent to turning a blind eye to the incompatibility - although it might save the kernel, it does nothing towards improving the marital relationship. The second move is that the proposed hypothesis should be consistent with the Kernel. In our example, again, the husband cannot decide to start having an affair to take his mind off his wife and her stupid friend. It goes against the core postulate of a marriage. Now this, I think, is a pretty satisfactory account of progress, although for reasons we shall see perhaps not the best.

Shortcomings of the Lakatosian account

However attractive Lakatos' account of matrimony may be, there are two serious drawbacks it faces. The first is that it does not give us a practical indication of the stage at which a marriage can be abandoned. Secondly, it fails to give us a satisfactory way of choosing between two different possible marriages. Looking back over Kuhn's account, we find that Lakatos is faced with more or less the same problems that he sought to overcome in Kuhn's theory. Besides, there are on record many people who, after a divorce, have remarried the same spouse and lived happy lives. Any comprehensive theory of marriage should also account for these incidents. But Lakatos' clearly does not. Also, just like Kuhn, Lakatos fails to give us an adequate means of quantifying the merits of one program over another. Thus, in a sense, the Lakatosian programs are also objectively incommensurable.

Are our expectations realistic?⁴

The accounts we have examined so far seem particularly unsatisfactory because they give the appearance of being highly one-sided. We always seem to accept or reject one spouse based upon the likes and dislikes of the other. This isn't fair. Many people would say that this is a very chauvinistic account of marriage - In this article, for example, the husband gets to decide which wife to accept or reject based upon his tastes, not the other way around. In a sense, this is exactly the way in which we have also viewed Nature up till now. We expect some things from Nature and she has fulfilled our expectations. When we encounter the unexpected, however, we are confounded. We dare not question our own expectations - rather, we try to look for alternate theories that explain the phenomenon based upon our original expectations. A classic example of this is found in the life of Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg was trying to explain the genuinely acausal nature of atomic events to Grete Hermann, a young philosopher who was enamoured with neo-Kantian philosophy which insists that the universe is purely deterministic, a totally unfounded expectation of Nature that we all seem to have:

"...But we cannot - and this is where the causal law breaks down - explain why a particular atom will decay at one moment and not the next, or what causes it to emit an electron in precisely this direction rather than that. And we are convinced for a variety of reasons, that no such cause exists.

"That is precisely," Grete Hermann said, "where so many people think modern physics has gone wrong. The mere fact that no cause for a certain effect has yet been discovered does not mean that no such cause exists. I myself would simply conclude that atomic physicists must go on searching until they discover the cause...In other words, you will have to keep looking.

"No, we think that we have found all there is to be found in this field," I insisted, "for from other experiments with Radium B we know that there are no determinants beyond those we have established.⁵

So much for Heisenberg's unsuccessful attempts to convince Grete Hermann that she had to fundamentally alter her expectations of Nature. Let's see what Schrodinger has to say about this in his own essay:

"Surely astonishment and wonder are what we feel on encountering something that differs from what is normal, or at least from what is for some reason or other expected. But this whole world is something we encounter only once. We have nothing with which to compare it, and it is impossible to see how we can approach it with any particular expectation. And yet we are astonished; we are puzzled by what we find, yet are unable to say what we should have found in order not to be surprised, or how the world would have to have been constructed in order not to constitute a riddle!⁶

It is not my purpose here to defend that a personal transformation is the only alternative left for the husband or that scientists can only accept Nature for what it is without understanding it. But a realistic picture, I feel, must also share the same sentiments expressed by physicists such as Bohr and Heisenberg decades ago:

"Science progresses not only because it helps to explain newly discovered facts, but also because it teaches us over and over again what the word `understanding' may mean." ⁷

That is why I think a radical rethink of the nature of Science and Marriage must be on its way after listening to Lakatos and Kuhn. A successful marriage does not always mean that the ideal spouses have gone through the ordeal of marriage over and over again till they found each other. It could also mean that sometimes, one has to change one's own expectations of his or her partner so that the match is rendered perfect.

Conclusion

As I indicated initially, we have mainly discussed only the accounts of Lakatos and Kuhn, which in my opinion were the most influential after Popper's. Obviously, Lakatos' account is an improvement upon Kuhn's. Historically, Kuhn makes his appearance in the field earlier than Lakatos. Lakatos himself is known to have admitted adapting some of his views to those of Kuhn. However, in spite of Lakatos' improvements of Kuhn's account, we have still found the Lakatosian program to be wanting, particularly in the area of describing degeneracy and progress. We must conclude therefore, that although we have come a long way from Naive Inductivism, we still haven't got a satisfactory account of either Science or Marriage at this stage.

So when someone remarks to us about the groom during a wedding: "The poor fellow doesn't know what he's letting himself into" we really ought to commend him on his penetrating observation. There are a great many married people who haven't the faintest idea what Marriage is all about. Trying to understand this business of Marriage is not at all as easy as it looks from the outside. Some people say that the best way to understand something is to dive right into it. But personally, I'd rather not learn to swim by jumping into the Mariana Trench⁸. While this is not meant to poke fun at those who are married, it certainly gives us compelling reason not to underestimate the pragmatic value of celibacy.