Imre Lakatos Quotes

18 quotes in 258 categories

• 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.
• 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…
• Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
• Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.
• 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…
• If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters,…
• 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…
• 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…
• That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.
• There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.
• Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic.
• 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.
• Belief may be a regrettably unavoidable biological weakness to be kept under the control of criticism: but commitment is for Popper an outright crime.
• The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.
• The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.
• 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…
• The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology.

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