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About Imre Lakatos
Lakatos was a Hungarian-born philosopher of mathematics and science who rose to prominence in Britain, having fled his native land in 1956 when the Hungarian Uprising was suppressed by Soviet tanks. He was notable for his anti-formalist philosophy of mathematics. -
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Imre Lakatos
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Lakatos works- Proofs and Refutations
Proofs and Refutations is a highly original production. The issues it discusses are far removed from what was then standard fare in the philosophy of mathematics, dominated by logicism, formalism and intuitionism, all attempting to find secure foundations for mathematics. Its theses are radical. And its dialogue form makes it a literary as well as a philosophical tour de force.Its official target is “formalism” or “metamathematics”. -
Lakatos works- Proofs and Refutations cont.
“Formalism” doesn’t just mean “formalism” proper, as this term is usually understood in the Philosophy of Mathematics. Proofs and Refutations takes the form of an imaginary dialogue between a teacher and a group of students. It reconstructs the history of attempts to prove the Descartes-Euler conjecture about polyhedra, namely, that for all polyhedra, the number of vertices minus the number of edges plus the number of faces is two (V−E+F=2). -
Works
Proofs and Refutations (1963–4, 1976)
“Regress” and “Renaissance”
“Changes in the Problem of Inductive Logic” (1968)
“Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes” (1970)
“The History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions” (1971)
“Popper on Demarcation and Induction” (1974)
“Why Did Copernicus’s Research Programme Supersede Ptolemy’s?” (1976) -
Contribution to philosophy-Improving on Popper in the Philosophy of Science
Lakatos objects that although there is something to be said for Popper’s criterion, it is far too restrictive, since it would rule out too much of everyday scientific practice as unscientific and irrational. For scientists often persist—and, it seems, rationally persist—with theories, such as Newtonian celestial mechanics that by Popper’s standards they ought to have rejected as “refuted”, that is theories that have led to falsified predictions. -
