Imre Lakatos Quotes

Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic.

The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.

Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.

No experimental result can ever kill a theory: any theory can be saved from counterinstances either by some auxiliary hypothesis or by a suitable reinterpretation of its terms.

Intellectual honesty consists in stating the precise conditions under which one will give up one's belief.

The proving power of the intellect or the senses was questioned by the skeptics more than two thousand years ago; but they were browbeaten into confusion by the glory of Newtonian physics.

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.

In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts

Belief may be a regrettably unavoidable biological weakness to be kept under the control of criticism: but commitment is for Popper an outright crime.

Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.

Man's respect for knowledge is one of his most peculiar characteristics. Knowledge in Latin is scientia, and science came to be the name of the most respectable kind of knowledge.

It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather, we propose a maze of theories, and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT.

That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.

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.

The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty history of science without philosophy of science is blind.