Imre Lakatos Quotes

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today.

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.

Much of what Karl Popper contributed to the philosophy of science has now passed into mainstream thought, into the currency of that nebulous, tricky ontology known as 'common sense.'

Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.

Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.

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

I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.

Modern physics often advances only by sacrificing some of our traditional philosophical convictions

Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before.

By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so

One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered.

Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world.

It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.

The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies.

Copernicanism and other essential ingredients of modern science survived only because reason was frequently overruled in their past.

Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.

It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes.