{"agent_id":"lakatos","agent_name":"Imre Lakatos","slug":"rational-reconstruction-and-the-internal-external-history-di","label":"Rational reconstruction and the internal/external history distinction: is the history of science to be written as the rational reconstruction of the internal logic of research programmes, against Kuhn's sociology-of-knowledge historicism?","topic":"Rational reconstruction and the internal/external history distinction","question":"Is the history of science to be written as the rational reconstruction of the internal logic of research programmes, against Kuhn's sociology-of-knowledge historicism?","position":"The history of science is to be written as the rational reconstruction of the internal logic of competing research programmes — the appraisal in retrospect of which programmes were progressive, which were degenerating, what the protective-belt adjustments accomplished, what the positive heuristic was reaching toward. \"External\" factors — social context, biographical accident, sociological pressure — appear in footnotes when needed but do not bear the primary explanatory weight. Against Kuhn's sociology-of-knowledge historicism: science is rational and its history can be rationally reconstructed even where the actual historical agents were sometimes irrational, even where social context shaped the institutional conditions of the work. The famous Kantian gloss the 1971 essay opens with — philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind — captures the methodological reciprocity that the rational-reconstruction project was built to enact.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The history of science is to be written as the rational reconstruction of the internal logic of competing research programmes — the appraisal in retrospect of which programmes were progressive, which were degenerating, what the protective-belt adjustments accomplished, what the positive heuristic was reaching toward.","n":[]},{"t":"\"External\" factors — social context, biographical accident, sociological pressure — appear in footnotes when needed but do not bear the primary explanatory weight.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Against Kuhn's sociology-of-knowledge historicism: science is rational and its history can be rationally reconstructed even where the actual historical agents were sometimes irrational, even where social context shaped the institutional conditions of the work.","n":[]},{"t":"The famous Kantian gloss the 1971 essay opens with — philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind — captures the methodological reciprocity that the rational-reconstruction project was built to enact.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"\"History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions\" (1971, in *Philosophical Papers Vol I*); the methodology and historiography sections of \"Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes\" (1970); the historiographical case studies in *Philosophical Papers Vol II* — particularly the Bohr early quantum theory essay, the Michelson-Morley essay, the Copernican astronomy essay; the 1973 LSE lectures in *For and Against Method* on the history of science. Reception: Worrall on the orthodox Lakatosian historiography; Brendan Larvor on the rational-reconstruction methodology; John Kadvany on the relation between Lakatos's internal/external distinction and the Hegelian-historicist inheritance; the contemporary historiography-of-science tradition (Hasok Chang, Peter Galison) that has built on and complicated the rational-reconstruction methodology.","works":["\"History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions\" (1971, in *Philosophical Papers Vol I*)","the methodology and historiography sections of \"Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes\" (1970)","the historiographical case studies in *Philosophical Papers Vol II* — particularly the Bohr early quantum theory essay, the Michelson-Morley essay, the Copernican astronomy essay","the 1973 LSE lectures in *For and Against Method* on the history of science"],"reception":"Worrall on the orthodox Lakatosian historiography; Brendan Larvor on the rational-reconstruction methodology; John Kadvany on the relation between Lakatos's internal/external distinction and the Hegelian-historicist inheritance; the contemporary historiography-of-science tradition (Hasok Chang, Peter Galison) that has built on and complicated the rational-reconstruction methodology.","status":"settled-as-articulated","era":"1922-1974","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Philosophical Papers Vol I - The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes","page":"pp. 109–110","canonical":"","quote":"INTRODUCTION 'Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind. Taking its cue from this paraphrase of Kant's famous dictum, this paper intends to explain how the historiography of science should learn from the philosophy of science and vice versa.","label":"Philosophical Papers Vol I - The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, pp. 109–110"},{"n":2,"work":"Philosophical Papers Vol I - The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes","page":"pp. 127–128","canonical":"","quote":"McMullin (1970]). Kuhn's criticism of my exposition ran essentially on the same lines: he thought that it was a specifically philosophical exposition: 'a historian would not inchide in his narrative a factual report which he knows to be false. If he had done so, he would be so sensitive to the offence that he could not conceivably compose a footnote calling attention to it. (Cf. Kuhn [19706], p.","label":"Philosophical Papers Vol I - The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, pp. 127–128"},{"n":3,"work":"I SCIENCE: REASON OR RELIGION","page":"pp. 59–60","canonical":"","quote":"The real difficulties for the theoretical scientist arise rather from the mathematical difficulties of the programme than from anomalies.","label":"I SCIENCE: REASON OR RELIGION, pp. 59–60"},{"n":4,"work":"Philosophical Papers Vol I - The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes","page":"pp. 198–199","canonical":"","quote":"But we need another type of psychological theory to explain why they behaved in the same way if we are (or assume them to be) inductivists.","label":"Philosophical Papers Vol I - The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, pp. 198–199"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-methodology-of-scientific-research-programmes","label":"The methodology of scientific research programmes: is the unit of appraisal the research programme rather than the individual theory, against Kuhnian incommensurability, against Feyerabend's anything-goes, and against naive Popperian falsificationism?"},{"slug":"the-method-of-proofs-and-refutations","label":"The method of proofs and refutations: is mathematics fallible, quasi-empirical, and historically developing, with the dialectical method of conjecture-counterexample-lemma-incorporation as the actual logic of mathematical discovery, against Hilbertian-Bourbakian formalism?"},{"slug":"the-popper-relationship-and-the-popper-0-popper-1-popper-2-d","label":"The Popper relationship and the Popper-0/Popper-1/Popper-2 distinction: is Lakatos the sophisticated methodological falsificationist Popper's late work was reaching for, or is the SRP framework a covert subversion of orthodox Popperianism?"},{"slug":"the-hungarian-hegelian-formation","label":"The Hungarian-Hegelian formation: are there 'two Lakatoses' (the Anglo Popperian successor and the buried Hungarian-Hegelian whose Lukácsian-Marxist inheritance shapes the dialectical method of Proofs and Refutations and the historicist architectonic of the SRP framework)?"}]}