Imre Lakatos
Alan Musgrave, Charles Pigden,
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Apr 30, 2021
This is quite a good biography and overview of Imre Lakatos, a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science who fled to Britain in 1956 and landed at the London School of Economics. There is complexity upon complexity in Lakatos's life and philosophy, so to say that he sought to find the ground between Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms and Popper's theory of falsification is at once accurate but overstated. What he developed was a theory of research programmes, which are more organized and rational than paradigms, but less rigid and unreal than falsification. Lakatos also shared (and disputed) common ground with Paul Feyerabend on the idea of scientific method. A study of Lakatos not only helps the reader understand why traditional models of scientific method (eg., hypothesis and deduction) are wrong, but also what science has developed over time as a reasonable (if messy) alternative. Take some time over the weekend to give this article a nice slow read and then, perhaps, have a look at Lakatos's Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Pogrammes. Image: Wikipedia.
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