The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes

Summary

The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes is the first volume of Imre Lakatos's Philosophical Papers, edited after his death by John Worrall and Gregory Currie and published by Cambridge University Press in 1978. It gathers his principal essays in the philosophy of science, written between about 1968 and 1974, around a single idea: the unit of scientific appraisal is not an isolated theory but a research programme, a series of theories that develop over time from a shared core. The volume opens with an Introduction, a talk broadcast by the Open University in 1973, which states the problem of demarcation plainly. Lakatos argues that neither the number of a theory's supporters nor its apparent confirmations can show that it is scientific, and that Karl Popper's test of falsifiability is too simple, because scientists routinely keep theories in the face of contrary evidence. The long first chapter, Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (first published in 1970 in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge), develops the alternative. Every programme has a hard core of central assumptions which its followers agree not to abandon; the negative heuristic forbids aiming refutations at it. Around the core lies a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses, which are adjusted to absorb anomalies, and a positive heuristic, a plan for developing ever more sophisticated models. A programme is progressive when each new version predicts novel facts, some of which are then confirmed; it is degenerating when it only explains facts after the event, patching its belt without new successes. Lakatos illustrates the view with Newton's gravitational theory, William Prout's hypothesis that atomic weights are whole numbers, and Niels Bohr's model of the atom, and he argues that crucial experiments are usually recognized as crucial only long afterward. The second chapter, History of Science and its Rational Reconstructions (1971), proposes that rival methodologies be judged by how much of the actual history of science they can present as rational. The remaining chapters examine Popper's views on demarcation and induction, explain why Copernicus's programme superseded Ptolemy's (with Elie Zahar), and discuss Newton's effect on scientific standards. The book is still in print and under copyright; the library holds no text.

Top Lessons

• Theories are not abandoned one test at a time

  Lakatos observes that real scientists keep promising theories alive despite anomalies, adjusting auxiliary assumptions rather than giving up their central ideas. This is not stubbornness but method, provided the adjustments lead to new discoveries.

• Progress means predicting the new

  For Lakatos, the mark of a healthy programme is that it predicts facts no one expected, and some of those predictions come true. A programme that only explains what is already known, after the fact, is degenerating, however ingenious its explanations.

• History tests philosophy

  Lakatos insists that a theory of scientific method must be checked against the actual history of science. A methodology that would condemn Newton or Copernicus as irrational has, in his view, refuted itself.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book contains no medical material. Its framework has, however, been borrowed by historians and philosophers of medicine and psychiatry to ask whether a line of clinical research is progressive, yielding new confirmed predictions, or degenerating, accommodating failures after the fact; such applications belong to later literature, not to Lakatos's text.