Lakatos, Imre (1922—74)
Hungarian philosopher of science and mathematics best known for his fallibility thesis. Born in Debrecen, Hungary’s second largest city, to a Jewish family, Imre Lipschitz (as he was originally named) studied philosophy, mathematics, and physics. When the Nazis invaded, he changed his name to Molnár to disguise his Jewish descent. After the war, he changed his name to Lakatos to honour General Géza Lakatos who overthrew the Nazi puppet government in Hungary in 1944 and halted the deportation of Jews to death camps. He worked as a public servant in the Education Department while he worked on his PhD, which he completed in 1948. He then went to Moscow University to continue his studies, but on his return to Hungary in 1950 he was imprisoned for three years on charges of revisionism. He left Hungary for good when the Soviet Union invaded in 1956 and moved to the UK. He completed a PhD at Cambridge, which was published posthumously as Proofs and Refutations (1976), and then took a post at the London School of Economics in the newly formed philosophy department headed by Popper, Karl. Proofs and Refutations attempts to reconcile what Lakatos saw as a rift between Popper’s falsification model of scientific progress and Kuhn, Thomas Samuel’s paradigm change model; for Popper, change in scientific thought should occur as soon as it is discovered that a theory is in part or in whole false, whereas Kuhn argued that scientists frequently cling to theories even when their imperfections are known. His solution, later heavily criticized by his colleague and friend Feyerabend, Paul, was to describe scientific theories as ‘research programmes’ and treat them as provisional (not to say ad hoc) attempts to search for truth. Research programmes can then be evaluated in terms of whether they are progressive or not.