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The brilliant Hungarian
Born in Hungary in 1922, Imre Lakatos served his country during the second world war, developed a love for mathematics, science, and philosophy, and eventually fled to Britain in 1956 when his home country was over ruined by the Soviets. He picked up roots as a professor where his work as a philosopher took off. -
Lakatos vs. Popper
Lakatos develops a new system he calls the "Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes". In short, its a different way of applying the work of Karl Popper. Poppers belief is a "theory is only scientific if is empirically falsifiable, that is if it is possible to specify observation statements which would prove it wrong"(1). Lakatos agrees with some of Popper's ideas, but he also believes the scientific method can't be that restrictive. -
Odd Man Out
Lakatos's argument against Poppers scientific method is later applied when the discovery of Mecury's unusual orbit. Newton had originally claimed that all planet orbits follow the same principle, but Einstein is able to disprove that by understanding Mercury's. Lakatos acknowledges that even though Newton's theory about all the planets wasn't correct as previously thought, we shouldn't abandon Newton's principles since it still held valuable information about astronomy. -
Facts vs Facts
With the release of Lakatos's book "Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge", Lakatos is able to create balance between Kuhn's principle of socio-psychologic" and "logico-methodological". The focus of theses forms of reasoning is to continue progressive understanding of the subject at hand instead of getting stuck in a degenerative state. This was Lakatos's main objective to present across the philosophy of science community before his death in 1974. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YBrhzqKJWo