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Imre Lakatos
November 9, 1922 – February 2, 1974 -
Period: to
Education
Earned his PhD from Debrecen University in 1948. Studied at Moscow State University in 1949. Earned a doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge in 1961. -
Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes
In Lakatos’s Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, he lays out his Research Programme, an attempt to recocile conflict between Popper’s falsification and Kuhn Paradigm. Instead of one paradigm at a time, Lakatos suggested many of them, he called programmes, could compete or even colaberate in any given branch of science (1970). -
Lakatos's Programmes
Lakatos seen his programmes composed of theoretical assumptions, or hard core, that are essentual to the programme. These hard cores can’t be altered or abandoned without abandoning the programme entirly. Surounding and protecting the hard core are auxiliary hypoteses, known as the protective belt. They are expendable, alterable, or abandonable without serious damage to the integrity of the programme. -
Proofs and Refutations
In Proofs and Refutations, Lakatos introduced the idea of mathematical knowledge where he laid out rules finding proofs and counterexamples to conjectures. He used thought experiments as a way to discover conjectures and proofs, called quasi-empiricism. His work was influenced by Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, Karl Popper, and George Pólya. -
References
Lakatos, I., Worrall, J., & Zahar, E. (1976). Proofs and refutations: the logic of mathematical discovery. Musgrave, A., & Pigden, C. (2016). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/ -
References
Lakatos, I., Feyerabend, P., & Motterlini, M. (1999). For and against method: including Lakatos’s lectures on scientific method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend correspondence. University of Chicago Pr Lakatos, I. (1970). Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. (I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave, Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139171434
