Imre Lakatos
1922-1974 · Hungarian-British · Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mathematics, Historiography of Science
Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
Imre Lakatos was born Imre Lipschitz in Hungary in 1922, changed his name to survive the Nazi occupation, threw himself into postwar Communism, and was then imprisoned for three years in the Stalinist purges he had once served. When Soviet tanks crushed the 1956 revolution he fled to England, finished a Cambridge doctorate, and reinvented himself at the London School of Economics as one of the sharpest minds in the philosophy of science. The dialectical Hegelian-Marxist formation he carried out of Budapest never quite left the Anglo-American philosopher he became.
Topics Imre Lakatos addresses
- methodology of scientific research programmes
- hard core
- protective belt
- negative heuristic
- positive heuristic
- progressive vs degenerating problemshifts
- the method of proofs and refutations
- monster-barring
- lemma-incorporation
- quasi-empirical mathematics
- rational reconstruction
- internal vs external history of science
- sophisticated methodological falsificationism
- Euler's polyhedra theorem
- the dialogue form
- the Euclidean deductivist style
- fallibilism in mathematics
- the logic of mathematical discovery
- conjecture and refutation
- counterexamples in mathematics
- heuristic vs axiomatic presentation
- the unit of appraisal problem
- Popper-0, Popper-1, Popper-2
- incommensurability
Questions to put to Imre Lakatos
Research Programmes and Scientific Rationality
- What do you mean by a scientific research programme?
- What's the difference between the hard core and the protective belt?
- How do you decide whether a research programme is progressive or degenerating?
- Why isn't a single failed prediction enough to refute a theory?
- How does your view preserve scientific rationality against Kuhn's incommensurability?
Proofs and Refutations in Mathematics
- How does the method of proofs and refutations actually work?
- What's monster-barring and why does it matter?
- Why do you say mathematics is fallible rather than certain?
- How did Euler's polyhedra theorem develop through conjecture and counterexample?
- What's wrong with the formalist picture of mathematics as deductive proof?
Rational Reconstruction and the History of Science
- What do you mean by rational reconstruction of scientific history?
- Why should external factors go in footnotes rather than the main narrative?
- How can you rationally reconstruct history when actual scientists were sometimes irrational?
- What's at stake for you in the Kantian gloss about philosophy and history of science?
- How would you rationally reconstruct the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy?
Popper, Kuhn, and Feyerabend
- What's the difference between Popper-0, Popper-1, and Popper-2?
- How is your methodology different from naive falsificationism?
- Why do you reject Feyerabend's 'anything goes' approach to science?
- What did the 1965 colloquium with Kuhn and Popper accomplish?
- Are you really a Popperian or something else?
The Hungarian-Hegelian Formation
- How did your time in Lukács's circle shape your philosophical method?
- What's the connection between Hegel's dialectic and your proofs-and-refutations method?
- Why did you suppress the Hegelian-Marxist dimension of your work at LSE?
- How did the 1956 Hungarian Revolution affect your thinking about reason and history?
- Are there really two Lakatoses, as Kadvany argues?
Converse with Imre Lakatos on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Imre Lakatos's own writing, cited to the page.