Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos ( born November 9, 1922 in Debrecen, Hungary, † February 2nd 1974 in London, England) was a Hungarian mathematician, physicist and philosopher of science.

Life

Lakatos was born in Hungary Imre Lipschitz. In order to escape persecution by the Hungarian Horthy regime and to conceal his Jewish origins - he could so escape the Hungarian Jewish laws - changed Imre Lipschitz during the Second World War, his name first in Imre Molnár and after the war in Imre Lakatos.

He studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Debrecen and deepened his knowledge in Budapest and Moscow. In 1948 he was involved to prevent the teaching of Freudian psychoanalysis in Budapest. He was scientifically and politically very active, but long imprisoned for revisionism. After his escape to the West in 1956, he continued in Cambridge continued his studies. He got several jobs as a lecturer and was a professor at several universities.

Besides work on mathematical proof theory, which was influenced by the Hegelian dialectic and Marx's, Lakatos tried to bridge the difference between the position taken by Karl Popper Falsifikationsbegriff and the development of science, as it was shown by TS Kuhn.

He died of an intracerebral hemorrhage in 1974.

Falsificationism

Basic problem

The notion that theories must be abandoned altogether if they falsified, that is refuted by experimental or empirical results, Lakatos rejected as " naive falsificationism ". His criticism concerned three things:

A new theory should, however, always an epistemological and empirical content surplus with the old theory have ( "progressive problem shift ").

A whole new theory that one is old, not only development, also has a positive and a negative heuristic. A " positive heuristic " is according to Lakatos, what a research community hopes to achieve on some findings with the new theory. The "negative heuristic " is a hard core of basic beliefs that may be abandoned under any circumstances and against any facts.

" Refined falsificationism " Lakatos calls this model because he sees it as a further development of Popper's falsificationism. It is disputed, however, that this model is still a falsificationism in the epistemological sense. Lakatos also speaks even when " sophisticated falsificationism " from a historical falsification, which means something like: the history and - in Lakatos ' imagery - Darwinian struggle for existence of the world best-fit theories falsify it were retrospectively the theories proved to be impractical.

For example, according to Lakatos disputable the three Newtonian laws as part of the core of Newtonian mechanics. Only by introducing additional falsifiable laws ( law of gravitation, Coulomb's Law, etc.), the Newtonian laws testable theory be extended. Falsification of a theory consisting of the Newtonian laws plus power law, so that it does not lead to the abandonment of Newtonian laws, but only to modify the laws of force. Newtonian mechanics was in principle only abandoned, as was the special theory of relativity, a new powerful research program.

Research programs

Lakatos assumes that theories are never isolated, but only as parts of larger systems of theories and methods rules, so-called " research programs " can be assessed. His concept of the research program is related to the paradigm - term Kuhns. Theories are usually structured as research programs so that they continue to contain unique assumptions and rules as they are established and will be further developed.

In contrast to Kuhn, however, Lakatos believes that different research programs can be rationally compared and discussed. Science can make progress and develop reasonable. Lakatos does not consider progress of science, however, as a continuous approximation to the truth, but as a series of problem shifts that allow us to reach a higher level constantly.

Components of a research program:

• Negative heuristic = inviolability of the hard core and avoid ad - hoc modifications of the protective belt. There is here no degenerative problem shift ( " How can we not do it ?")
• Protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses to the hard core
• Positive heuristics: Rough guidelines on how the research program could be developed. There is a progressive problem shift ( = explanation of new phenomena by changing the assumptions: " How should we proceed? " )

Due to further expansion of the research program, or the theory of the system, caused degenerative problem shifts. This immunization against the falsification allows introduction of ad hoc auxiliary assumptions. However, although these additional assumptions can contradict, they are based on valid the hard core and not refute him.