Draft:Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos was a philosopher of science and mathematics.

He is known for his criticisms of falsificationism as proposed by Karl Popper, which held that scientific theories can be demarcated from pseudoscientific ones based on whether or not they are falsifiable, as well as for his own proposed solution to the demarcation problem.

Research programs
Lakatos argued that scientific theories can be grouped into different research programs. Research programs are composed of a "hard core" of essential propositions, a belt of auxiliary hypotheses that are used to make predictions in combination with the hard core that is open to change, a positive heuristic to modify the auxiliary belt in response to empirical evidence supporting the predictions made using the propositions in the belt, and a negative heuristic to modify the auxiliary belt in response to empirical evidence contradicting the predictions made using the propositions in the belt. Research programs that make successful, novel predictions can be classified as progressive. Research programs that consistently make incorrect predictions will have to modify the auxiliary belt in response to the failures, and can be classified as degenerating.

According to Lakatos, pseudoscientific research programs will tend to degenerate. However, he thought that it was still possible for a research program that has degenerated in the past to become progressive in the future. Because of this, Paul Feyerabend argued that Lakatos's demarcation criteria did not actually allow for any theories to be rejected as pseudoscientific, and was therefore no different from his own position of "epistemological anarchism", which held that there is no useful way to separate science from pseudoscience.