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|Summary='''Imre Lakatos''' (1922–1974) was a Hungarian-born philosopher who studied demarcation criteria and theory choice in science.[[CiteRef::Musgrave and Pigden (2016)]][[CiteRef::Chalmers (2013)]] A protege of [[Karl Popper]], Lakatos attempted to respond to problems posed by the work of Popper and [[Thomas Kuhn|Kuhn]]. His [[Lakatos (1970)|''Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes'']] (MSRP) offers a holistic approach to theory choice which extends beyond Popper's falsificationism, and instead assesses a particular research program as progressive or degenerative, depending on its overall record of predictive and explanatory successes and failures. Lakatos later entered into a correspondence with [[Paul Feyerabend]], with the goal of addressing Feyerabend’s objections to the MSRP. He met an untimely death due to a heart attack at the age of 51. Some of Feyerabend’s objections remain challenging to this day.
|Historical Context=Much of Lakatos’ work was a response to the problems of Popper’s falsificationism, which was expressed in a series of works published between 1935 and the early '701970'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 inception. 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.[[CiteRef::Musgrave and Pigden (2016)]] A well known criticism of falsificationism, attributed to Duhem and Quine, and which Lakatos 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 responded to Thomas Kuhn’s ''Structure of Scientific Revolutions'', published in 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)]] However, like Kuhn, Lakatos believed that any theory of science must make sense of the history of science.
Feyerabend also argued that a problem exists with the notion of a time limit. If a research programme has been degenerating for some time, how do we know when to abandon it? Heliocentrism and atomism had degenerated for well over a millennium before being reinvigorated and subsequently accepted. On the other hand, fields such as homeopathy or psychoanalysis, which are nascent in comparison to the aforementioned theories, are easily ascribed the title of pseudoscience. Lakatos’ response was that there is no discernable time limit; but once again, he failed to address the actual problem.
|Related Topics=Mechanism of Scientific Change,
|Page Status=Review Needed
|Related Articles=[[Karl Popper]]