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Lakatos also responded to Thomas Kuhn’s ''Structure of Scientific Revolutions'', published in 1962.[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962)]] He was troubled by Kuhn's incommensurability 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.[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1978a)]] At the same time, Lakatos and Kuhn's views of science have important points in common. Both rejected the positivist, inductivist accounts of science popular in the early twentieth century, and both emphasized the importance of theory over observation. Both agreed that any theory of how science works must make sense of the actual history of science.[[CiteRef::Chalmers (2013)|pp. 103-114]]
|Major Contributions==== Lakatos on Theory Choice ===
Following the Duhem-Quine 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, as parts of what he called a '''research program'''.[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1970)|pp. 31-55]] While Kuhn supposed that, in a mature scientific discipline, only one paradigm generally existed at a time, Lakatos argued that it was generally the case that more than one research program existed in a field at any given time, and that large-scale processes of scientific change should be understood as competition between research programs.[[CiteRef::Godfrey-Smith(2002)|pp. 102-121]] Within a research program, not all theoretical assumptions are treated equally. The indispensable central theoretical assumptions of a research program are its '''hard core'''. Any modification of the hard core constitutes the abandonment of the research program and the creation of a new one. [[CiteRef::Chalmers (2013)|pp. 103-114]][[CiteRef::Lakatos (1970)|pp. 31-55]]
Auxiliary propositions that are relevant to the hard core, but are not part of it form a '''protective belt'''. 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 add to the 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'''.[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1970)|pp. 47-51]]
If any evidence is found against a theory, and if the theory otherwise possesses both greater heuristic and explanatory powers than known alternatives, Lakatos supposed that falsification should be averted by modifying the research program's protective belt. There thus can be no 'crucial experiments'; a research program cannot be instantly overthrown by a single experimental finding taken in isolation.
Lakatos held that a research program should be evaluated in terms of both its explanatory power; its ability to explain known phenomena, and its heuristic power; its ability to successfully explain newly discovered phenomena or to predict their existence. A modification to a research program is deemed '''progressive''' if it expands its scope to a larger set of cases; if some of these new cases are corroborated by experiments and observations, and if the modification is contiguous with the rest of the program.[[CiteRef::Lakatos (1978a1970)]] For instance, if the research program is Darwin's theory of natural selection, a modification which adds the proposition "extraterrestrial beings intervened in human evolution" would not be contiguous with the rest of the program.
New empirical content has been corroborated by experiments and observations, and if the modification is in organic unity with the rest of the program. A modification is deemed '''regressive''' if it does not increase the empirical content of a program by making novel predictions or improving its accuracy, or if it introduces excess empirical content, but fails to corroborate any of this excess content empirically, or if it is not in organic unity with the rest of the program. The term 'organic unity' is intended to mean that modifications should be contiguous with the rest of the program. For instance, if the research program is Darwin's theory of natural selection, a modification which adds the proposition "extra-terrestrial beings intervened with human evolution" would not be contiguous – not in organic unity – with the rest of the research program, and therefore regressive.