Imre Lakatos Quotes

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

Женщина с ребенком во чреве не может быть контрапримером для тезиса, что люди имеют одну голову.

[T]he problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not a pseudo-problem of armchair philosophers: it has grave ethical and political implications.

Главной ошибкой Дельты, пожалуй, будет его догматический уклон в понимании математического доказательства; он думает, что доказательство необходимо доказывает то, для доказательства чего оно было предназначено.

What, then, is the hallmark of science? Do we have to capitulate and agree that a scientific revolution is just an irrational change in commit­ment, that it is a religious conversion? Tom Kuhn, a distinguished Amer­ican philosopher of science, arrived at this conclusion after discovering the naivety of Popper’s falsificationism. But if Kuhn is right, then there is no explicit demarcation between science and pseudoscience, no distinc­tion between scientific progress and intellectual decay, there is no objec­tive standard of honesty. But what criteria can he then offer to demarcate scientific progress from intellectual degeneration?

Criticism is not a Popperian quick kill, by refutation. Important criticism is always constructive: there is no refutation without a better theory. Kuhn is wrong in thinking that scientific revolutions are sudden, irrational changes in vision. The history of science refutes both Popper and Kuhn: on close inspection both Popperian crucial experiments and Kuhnian revolutions turn out to be myths: what normally happens is that progressive research programmes replace degenerating ones.

Гамма. Я думаю, что если мы хотим изучить что-нибудь действительно глубоко, то нам нужно исследовать это не в его «нормальном», правильном, обычном виде, но в его критическом положении, в лихорадке и страсти. Если вы хотите узнать нормальное здоровое тело, то изучайте его, когда оно в ненормальном положении, когда оно болеет. Если вы хотите знать функции, то изучайте их странности. Если вы хотите познать обычные многогранники, то изучайте их причудливые обрамления. Вот только так можно внести математический анализ в самое сердце вещей. Но если даже в основе вы правы, разве вы не видите бесплодия вашего метода ad hoc? Если вы хотите провести пограничную линию между контрапримерами и монстрами, то этого нельзя сделать в припадках и срывах.

One can today easily demonstrate that there can be no valid derivation of a law of nature from any finite number of facts; but we still keep reading about scientific theories being proved from facts. Why this stubborn resistance to elementary logic?

Ламбда. Я все-таки верю, что свет абсолютной достоверности вспыхнет, когда взорвутся опровержения! Каппа. А взорвутся ли они? А что если Бог так со здал многогранники, что все правильные общие их определения, формулированные человеческим языком, будут бесконечно длинными? Разве не будет богохульным антропоморфизмом предполагать, что (божеские) верные теоремы обладают конечной длиной?

GAMMA: Your first mature intuition led you to your 'perfect proof-analysis'. You thought that your 'pencil' was absolutely sharp. ALPHA: I forgot about the difficulties of linguistic communication -especially with pedants and sceptics. But the heart of mathematics is the thought-experiment-the proof. Its linguistic articulation-the proof-analysis-is necessary for communication but irrelevant. I am interested in polyhedra, you in language. Don't you see the poverty of your counterexamples? They are linguistic, not polyhedral.

To sum up. The hallmark of empirical progress is not trivial verifi­cations: Popper is right that there are millions of them. It is no success for Newtonian theory that stones, when dropped, fall towards the earth, no matter how often this is repeated. But so-called ‘refutations’ are not the hallmark of empirical failure, as Popper has preached, since all pro­grammes grow in a permanent ocean of anomalies. What really count are dramatic, unexpected, stunning predictions: a few of them are enough to tilt the balance; where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes. Now, how do scientific revolutions come about? If we have two rival research programmes, and one is progressing while tire other is degenerating, scientists tend to join the progressive programme. This is the rationale of scientific revolutions.

In the last few years I have been advocating a methodology of scientific research programmes, which solves some of the problems which both Popper and Kuhn failed to solve. First, I claim that the typical descriptive unit of great scientific achievements is not an isolated hypothesis but rather a research programme. Science is not simply trial and error, a series of conjectures and refutations. ‘All swans are white’ may be falsified by the discovery of one black swan. But such trivial trial and error does not rank as science. Newtonian science, for instance, is not simply a set of four conjectures—the three laws of mechanics and the law of gravitation. These four laws constitute only the ‘hard core’ of the Newtonian programme. But this hard core is tenaciously protected from refutation by a vast ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses. And, even more importantly, the research programme also has a ‘heuristic’, that is, a powerful problem-solving machinery, which, with the help of sophisticated mathematical techniques, digests anomalies and even turns them into positive evidence. For instance, if a planet does not move exactly as it should, the Newtonian scientist checks his conjectures concerning atmospheric refraction, concerning propaga­tion of light in magnetic storms, and hundreds of other conjectures which are all part of the programme. He may even invent a hitherto unknown planet and calculate its position, mass and velocity in order to explain the anomaly.

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)

Triviality and certainty are Kinderkrankheiten of knowledge.

Merton was given an unusual amount of space in the American Journal of Sociology to argue on behalf of his thesis that to reject it on the basis of the evidence against it would be to commit what he called the ‘Fallacy of the Latest Word’. This ‘fallacy’ involves abandoning a theory ‘as soon as it appears to have been empirically falsified’. He then asked, ‘When are we to retain a hypothesis or theoretical conception in the face of facts that seem to refute it?’12 In answer, Merton quoted Imre Lakatos that ‘There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory’.13 Thus, Merton proposed that a false explanation of some phenomenon is better than none. How absurd.

Intellectual honesty does not consist in trying to entrench or establish one's position by proving (or 'probabilifying') it - intellectual honesty consists rather in specifying precisely the condi-tions under which one is willing to give up one's position.

Intellectual honesty does not consist in trying to entrench or establish one's position by proving (or 'probabilifying') it - intellectual honesty consists rather in specifying precisely the conditions under which one is willing to give up one's position. Marxists and Freudians refuse to specify such conditions: this is the hallmark of their intellectual dishonesty.

Intellectual honesty does not consist in trying to entrench or establish one's position by proving (or 'probabilifying') it - intellectual honesty consists rather in specifying precisely the conditions under which one is willing to give up one's position. Committed Marxists and Freudians refuse to specify such conditions: this is the hallmark of their intellectual dishonest.

Intellectual honesty does not consist in trying to entrench or establish one's position by proving (or 'probabilifying') it - intellectual honesty consists rather in specifying precisely the conditions under which one is willing to give up one's position. Committed Marxists and Freudians refuse to specify such conditions: this is the hallmark of their intellectual dishonesty

Justificationism, that is, the identification of knowledge with proven knowledge, was the dominant tradition in rational thought throughout the ages. Scepticism did not deny justificatonism: it only claimed that there was (and could be) no proven knowledge and therefore no knowledge whatsoever. For the sceptics 'knowledge' was nothing but animal belief. Thus justificationist scepticism ridiculed objective thought and opened the door to irrationalism, mysticism, superstition. This situation explains the enormous effort invested by classical rationalists in trying to save the synthetic a priori principles of intellectualism and by classical empiricists in trying to save the certainty of an empirical basis and the validity of inductive inference. For all of them "scientific honesty demanded that one assert nothing that is unproven." However, both were defeated: Kantians by non-Euclidean geometry and by non-Newtonian physics, and empiricists by the logical impossibility of establishing an empirical basis (as Kantians pointed out, facts cannot prove propositions) and of establishing an inductive logic (no logic can infallibly increase content). It turned out that all theories are equally unprovable. Philosophers were slow to recognize this, for obvious reasons: classi-cal justificationists feared that once they conceded that theoretical science is unprovable, they would have also to conclude that it is sophistry and illusion, a dishonest fraud. The philosophical import- ance of probabilism (or ' neojustificationism ') lies in the denial that such a conclusion is necessary.