Imre Lakatos Quotes
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Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic.
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The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.
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If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.
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The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology.
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It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached.
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Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
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Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.
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The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.
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Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.
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There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.
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Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.
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Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.
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For the sophisticated falsificationist a scientific theory T is falsified if and only if another theory T' has been proposed with the following characteristics :
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Where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes.