Imre Lakatos Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

For centuries knowledge meant proven knowledge... Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge. But few realize that with this the whole classical structure of intellectual values falls in ruins and has to be replaced.

Imre Lakatos
There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.

Imre Lakatos
It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached.

Imre Lakatos
Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

Imre Lakatos
Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue; it is an intellectual crime.

Imre Lakatos
Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.

Imre Lakatos
It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather, we propose a maze of theories, and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT.

Imre Lakatos
Mathematics has been trivialized, derived from indubitable, trivial axioms in which only absolutely clear trivial terms figure, and from which truth pours down in clear channels.

Imre Lakatos
For the sophisticated falsificationist a scientific theory T is falsified if and only if another theory T' has been proposed with the following characteristics : (1) T' has excess empirical content over T: that is, it predicts novel facts, that is, facts improbable in the light of, or even forbidden, by T; (2) T' explains the previous success of T, that is, all the unrefuted content of T is included (within the limits of observable error) in the content of T'; and (3) some of the excess content of T' is corroborated.

Imre Lakatos
Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic.

Imre Lakatos
The great scientific achievements are research programmes which can be evaluated in terms of progressive and degenerative problemshifts; and scientific revolutions consist of one research programme superceding (overtaking in progress) another. This methodology offers a new rational reconstruction of science.

Imre Lakatos
Man's respect for knowledge is one of his most peculiar characteristics. Knowledge in Latin is scientia, and science came to be the name of the most respectable kind of knowledge.

Imre Lakatos
No experimental result can ever kill a theory: any theory can be saved from counterinstances either by some auxiliary hypothesis or by a suitable reinterpretation of its terms.

Imre Lakatos
Mathematics does not grow through a monotonous increase of the number of indubitably established theorems but through the incessant improvement of guesses by speculation and criticism, by the logic of proofs and refutations.

Imre Lakatos
Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.

Imre Lakatos
The proving power of the intellect or the senses was questioned by the skeptics more than two thousand years ago; but they were browbeaten into confusion by the glory of Newtonian physics.

Imre Lakatos
Where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes.

Imre Lakatos
Under the present dominance of formalism, one is tempted to paraphrase Kant: the history of mathematics, lacking the guidance of philosophy, has become blind, while the philosophy of mathematics, turning its back on the most intriguing phenomena in the of mathematics, has become empty.

Imre Lakatos
The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.

Imre Lakatos
The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.

Imre Lakatos
In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts

Imre Lakatos