Imre Lakatos's most succinct public summary of his philosophy of science is presented in this 1973 BBC radio talk. He outlines his distinctive view of the importance of 'the demarcation problem' in the philosophy and history of science, namely the normative methodological problem of distinguishing between science and pseudo-science, and of why its solution is not merely an issue of ‘armchair philosophy’, but also one of vital social and political significance, and even of life and death itself. It reviews what he saw as the inadequacies of previous attempted solutions, such as both probative and probabilist inductivism, and how his own methodology of scientific research programmes solves some of the problems posed by the history of science for those of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. He proposes that scientists regard the successful theoretical prediction of stunning novel facts – such as the return of Halley’s comet or the gravitational bending of light rays – as what demarcates good scientific theories from pseudo-scientific and degenerate theories, and in spite of all scientific theories being forever confronted by “an ocean of counterexamples”. The talk includes his novel fallibilist analysis of the development of Newton’s celestial dynamics, Lakatos’s favourite historical example of his methodology.

#Philosophy #Epistemology #Science

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