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Much of Lakatos’ work was a response the problems of Popper’s falsificationism, which was expressed in a series of works published between 1935 and the early '70's. Lakatos rejected the idea that a false prediction was alone grounds for rejecting a theory. Most theories, he pointed out, are born in an “ocean of anomalies” and are therefore falsified from the moment of their conception. For example, Copernican heliocentric astronomy predicts that the stars should change in apparent position as the Earth revolves around the sun, but for three centuries after Copernicus proposed his theory, all attempts to detect this stellar parallax failed. Astronomers nevertheless accepted the theory on other grounds. The failure of Newtonian mechanics to account for the motions of the planet Mercury was known for many decades, during which the theory also wasn't rejected <ref>Musgrave, A. and Pigden, C. 2016, Irme Lakatos, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edited by E. N. Zalta, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University </ref>. A well known criticism of falsificationism, which Lakatos championed, was that the failure of a prediction could be due to a problem anywhere in the network of theories and auxiliary assumptions responsible for that prediction. Lakatos thus argued that Popper's theory was overly restrictive and inconsistent with much of scientific practice. In scientific practice, Lakatos observed that if a theory is the best available of its kind, it is typically allowed to undergo modifications to account for all data and not rejected.
Lakatos also addressed problems raised by responded to Thomas Kuhn’s ''Structure of Scientific Revolutions'', published in 1962. He was troubled by Kuhn's incomensurability thesis, which asserts that theories with different taxonomies cannot be rationally compared. Lakatos accused Kuhn of depicting the process of scientific change as completely irrational. If there truly existed a problem of incommensurability in science, then there would be no method to demarcate between science and pseudoscience, and no way of measuring scientific progress. <ref>Lakatos, I. 1978 The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Philosophical Papers: Volume 1, Edited by J. Worrall and G. Currie, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press</ref>. However, like Kuhn, Lakatos believed that any theory of science must make sense of the history of science.
=== Lakatos on Theory Choice ===
Following the Quine-Duhem thesis, Lakatos recognized that scientific theories could not be appraised individually. Rather, all of the theoretical assumptions bearing on an experimental finding had to be assessed holistically, in terms of what Lakatos called a "research program". Lakatos proposed that Within a research program, not all theoretical assumptions are treated equally. Instead, scientists adhere to research programs. A research program consists of It contains a "hard core" of theoretical assumptions, which are its indispensable constituents. Any modification of the "hard core" results in the creation of a new research program. Adherents of a research program attempt to explain an increasingly wide range of relevant natural phenomena in terms of the core. In so doing, they create a "protective belt" of auxiliary propositions. This expansion of the range of applicability of the program constitutes its "positive heuristic". Scientists committed to a research program defend the "hard core" against change by using their ingenuity as needed to make alterations to the "protective belt" of auxiliary propositions to explain phenomena and avoid falsification of the core. This protection of the hard core is a research program's "negative heuristic". For example, the "hard core" of the Newtonian physics research program would consist of Newton's three laws of motion and Law of Universal Gravitation. The protective belt would include propositions such as "the Earth is an oblate spheroid" or "Neptune is 17 times more massive than Earth". In the nineteenth century, astronomers could not explain the movements of the planet Uranus using Newton's theory and known gravitational influences. Rather than modifying the theory itself, which would have obviated the Newtonian research program, they modified the protective belt by positing the existence of a new planet, whose Newtonian gravitational influence was affecting Uranus. The prediction was a stunning success, as the new planet, to be named Neptune, was discovered in 1846<ref>Chalmers, A. F. 2013. What is This Thing Called Science? Hackett Publishing.</ref><ref>Lakatos, I. 1978 The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Philosophical Papers: Volume 1, Edited by J. Worrall and G. Currie, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press</ref><ref>Solar System Exploration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Neptune: In Depth, http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/neptune/indepth</ref>.
Lakatos held that a research programme should be chosen for both its “explanatory power” and its “heuristic power”. That is to say that a theory is accepted for its ability to both explain past and present phenomena, as well as its ability to be applied to and posit the existence of future phenomena and anomalies. Given any evidence against a theory, if the theory possesses both greater heuristic and explanatory powers than its counterparts, its protective belt should be allowed to undergo modifications and avoid falsification. These modifications should be “progressive” and intended to save the research programme from degenerating. This, for Lakatos, represents the difference between falsification and rejection.