Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes

Introduction

Lakatos presented an early version at the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science in London in 1965 and published the expanded paper in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970), which he edited with Alan Musgrave and which also contains contributions by Kuhn, Popper and Feyerabend. He criticises naive falsificationism – scientists rarely abandon a theory because of a single anomaly – but also Kuhn, in whose account, he says, theory change becomes a matter of “mob psychology”. The unit of appraisal is a research programme: a hard core shielded by a negative heuristic, a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses and a positive heuristic that guides research. A programme is progressive if it predicts novel facts, degenerating if it only accommodates them afterwards.

Connections

Responds to

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions1962 · Thomas S. Kuhn

Criticizes

• The Logic of Scientific Discovery1934 · Karl Popper

More works by Imre Lakatos

• 1976Proofs and Refutations