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

— Imre Lakatos

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More quotes by Imre Lakatos

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.

...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.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Imre Lakatos (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.