31 Quotes by Imre Lakatos

The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.

There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.

Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.

That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.

Man's respect for knowledge is one of his most peculiar characteristics. Knowledge in Latin is scientia, and science came to be the name of the most respectable kind of knowledge.

It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather, we propose a maze of theories, and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT.

Belief may be a regrettably unavoidable biological weakness to be kept under the control of criticism: but commitment is for Popper an outright crime.

The history of mathematics, lacking the guidance of philosophy, [is] blind, while the philosophy of mathematics, turning its back on the most intriguing phenomena in the history of mathematics, is empty.

In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts