Skip to content

Imre Lakatos Quotes

1922–1974 Hungary

Imre Lakatos (November 9, 1922 – February 2, 1974) was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his methodology of scientific research programmes.

Hungary
Academics

Also known as: Lakatos, Imre

Random Imre Lakatos quote

6 quotes

Where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes.

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.

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

...scientific enterprise, according to Kuhn revolution is exceptional and, indeed, extra-scientiﬁc, and criticism is, in ‘normal’ times, anathema.

For the sophisticated falsificationist a scientific theory T is falsified if and only if another theory T' has been proposed with the following characteristics

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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Imre Lakatos (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.