Imre Lakatos Quotes

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

If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.

- Imre Lakatos

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

- Imre Lakatos

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.

- Imre Lakatos

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

- Imre Lakatos

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

- Imre Lakatos

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

- Imre Lakatos

The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology.

- Imre Lakatos

Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.

- 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 positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.

- Imre Lakatos