Imre lakatos

Imre Lakatos, born Imre Lipschitz (Debrecen, Hungary, November 9, 1922-London, February 2, 1974), was an economist, philosopher and mathematician Hungarian recognized for his contributions to the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics.

Biography

Lakatos was born in Hungary in 1922, into a Jewish family, changing his name to Imre Molnár before the Nazi invasion of Hungary, which claimed the lives of millions of people, including his mother and his grandmother, died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He completed his education at the University of Debrecen in 1944, graduating in mathematics, physics, and philosophy. After the war, Imre, at the time an active communist, realized that he would have difficulty wearing his embroidered initials"IL" calling himself Imre Molnár, so he changed his name again choosing the name of the Hungarian working class, Lakatos. In 1947 he was appointed to a high post in the Hungarian Ministry of Education. In 1950 he was arrested for being "a revisionist" and had to spend three years in a Stalinist prison. He received his doctorate from the University of Debrecen in 1948, and the following year he studied at Moscow State University with the Russian mathematician Sofya Yanovskaya. In 1956 he learned that he might be arrested again and fled to Vienna, fleeing from the police. Russian authorities after the failed Hungarian revolution aborted by the Soviets. He subsequently settled in London, where he collaborated at the London School of Economics. In 1961 he received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Cambridge. There he did his studies in the philosophy of science under the tutelage of Sir Karl Popper. He was a professor at the LSE from 1960 to 1974, the year he suddenly died on February 2.

Trajectory

Despite his relatively short career as a philosopher of science, Lakatos has been highly influential in both the natural and social sciences. His work is best known and recognized as a valuable scheme for evaluating the progress (and/or degeneration) of knowledge in any scientific area of inquiry.

Lakatos unveiled his "methodology" in 1965, on the occasion of the International Colloquium on the Philosophy of Science, held in London. On that occasion the LSE group (informally called "the Popperian group") criticized Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and the "new image" of science that derives from it.

In the beginning, he joined the school of Karl Popper, in what Lakatos calls sophisticated falsificationism, he reformulates falsificationism in order to solve the problem of the empirical basis and the problem of escape from falsification that the two previous classes of falsification did not solve. falsificationism which he calls dogmatic falsificationism and naive falsificationism.

Lakatos covers certain aspects of Thomas Kuhn's theory, including the importance of the history of science for the philosophy of science. Lakatos questions Popper, since the history of science shows that scientists do not use falsification as a criterion to discard entire theories, as Popper defended, but to make them develop and improve. And, on the other hand, the confirmation of the scientific assumptions is also necessary, according to Lakatos, since it allows us to keep them current.

Falsification

For Lakatos, falsification consists of a double confrontation between two rival theories and experience. Rival theories are confronted with experience; one is accepted and the other is refuted. The refutation of a theory depends on the overall success of the rival theory. Thus Lakatos proposes a new unit of analysis: the scientific research program (PIC).

Imre Lakatos's writings contain abundant comparisons of his own views with those of other authors. He himself highlights these relationships by underlining his debt to Popper. He considers that the conception that he is willing to defend constitutes a development of Popper's ideas, a more evolved version of falsificationism, but in this evolution he recognizes the influence exerted on Lakatos's thought by the incisive arguments put forward by other philosophers who question the Popper's epistemological model.

Scientific Research Program (PIC)

It consists of a succession of interrelated theories, so that some are generated from the previous ones. These theories that are within a PIC share a firm or hard core (NF). The firm core is protected by a Protective Belt (CP) that consists of a set of auxiliary hypotheses that can be modified, eliminated or replaced by new ones in order to prevent the firm core from being falsified.

Within a PIC there is a negative heuristic and a positive heuristic. The positive one serves as a guide and indicates how to continue the program, while the negative prohibits the refutation of the firm core.

When a PIC faces empirical anomalies that it could not theoretically predict, it is replaced by a rival PIC. In the event that there is no rival PIC that preserves the elements not refuted from the previous PIC, and at the same time has solutions for the new anomalies, the PIC remains in a regressive stage until it recovers.

PICs can be degenerative, when the program does not predict new phenomena for a long time; or progressive, when the program is successful.

In Proofs and Refutations, he stated that Karl Popper's theory that science is distinguished from other branches of knowledge because theories can be "falsified" by establishing its creators as "potential counterfeiters" is incorrect, since every theory (like Newton's, which he studied in depth), is born with a set of & # 34; facts & # 34; that refute it at the very moment it is created.

This led him to consider that science was incapable of reaching the "truth," but he suggested in his scientific research programmes, that each new theory was capable of explaining more things than the previous one, and above all, to predict new facts that no one had even considered before (such as Halley's comet that returned exactly the same year in which it had been calculated using Newton's theory). Although this did not distance him much from his friend and collaborator Paul Feyerabend. One of his most important works is his work on sophisticated Falsificationism.

Additional bibliography

• Alex Bandy (2010). Chocolate and Chess. Unlocking Lakatos. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ISBN 978-963-05-8819-5 (in English)
• Reuben Hersh (2006). 18 Unconventional Essays on the Nature of Mathematics. Springer. ISBN 978-0-387-29831-3 (in English)
• Brendan Larvor (1998). Lakatos: An Introduction. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-14276-8 (in English)
• Jancis Long (1998). "Lakatos in Hungary", Philosophy of the Social Sciences 28, pp. 244–311. (in English)
• John Kadvany (2001). Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-2659-0; author's web site: johnkadvany.com. (in English)
• Teun Koetsier (1991). Lakatos' Philosophy of Mathematics: A Historical Approach. Amsterdam etc.: North Holland. ISBN 0-444-88944-2 (in English)
• Szabó, Arpád The Beginnings of Greek Mathematics (Tr Ungar) Reidel & Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 1978 ISBN 963-05-1416-8 (in English)