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|Summary='''Imre Lakatos''' (1922–1974) was a Hungarian-born philosopher who studied demarcation criteria and theory choice in science.[[CiteRef::Musgrave and Pigden (2016)]][[CiteRef::Chalmers (2013)]] A protege of [[Karl Popper]], Lakatos attempted to respond to problems posed by the work of Popper and [[Thomas Kuhn|Kuhn]]. His [[Lakatos (1970)|''Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes'' ]] (MSRP) offers a holistic approach to theory choice which extends beyond Popper's falsificationism, and instead assesses a particular research program as progressive or degenerative, depending on its overall record of predictive and explanatory successes and failures. Lakatos later entered into a correspondence with [[Paul Feyerabend]], with the goal of addressing Feyerabend’s objections to the MSRP. He met an untimely death due to a heart attack at the age of 51. Some of Feyerabend’s objections remain challenging to this day.
|Historical Context=Much of Lakatos’ work was a response to the problems of Popper’s falsificationism, which was expressed in a series of works published between 1935 and the early '70's. Lakatos rejected the idea that a false prediction was alone grounds for rejecting a theory. Most theories, he pointed out, are born in an “ocean of anomalies” and are therefore falsified from the moment of their inception. For example, Copernican heliocentric astronomy predicts that the stars should change in apparent position as the Earth revolves around the sun, but for three centuries after Copernicus proposed his theory, all attempts to detect this stellar parallax failed. Astronomers nevertheless accepted the theory on other grounds. The failure of Newtonian mechanics to account for the motions of the planet Mercury was known for many decades, during which the theory also wasn't rejected.[[CiteRef::Musgrave and Pigden (2016)]] A well known criticism of falsificationism, which Lakatos championed, was that the failure of a prediction could be due to a problem anywhere in the network of theories and auxiliary assumptions responsible for that prediction. Lakatos thus argued that Popper's theory was overly restrictive and inconsistent with much of scientific practice. In scientific practice, Lakatos observed that if a theory is the best available of its kind, it is typically allowed to undergo modifications to account for all data and not rejected.