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

— Imre Lakatos

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More quotes by Imre Lakatos

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.

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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.