Over the years, nursing research and practice have been through remarkable transformations in response to evolving and emerging healthcare systems and practices. Regarding research, nurses moved beyond merely using the quantitative methodology to combining qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. In practice, nurses have transitioned from the delivery of medical‐based care to nursing theory‐guided practice, evidence‐based practice, knowledge translation and transformative practice. Some domains of nursing research and practice became progressive, while others degenerated. This paper aims to examine how different domains (...) of nursing research and practice progress and degenerate using Imre Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programs. Lakatos differentiated scientific and pseudoscientific knowledge and coined the idea of scientific research programs. He believed that science in any discipline develops so that some programs are more progressive and others’ degenerative. The degeneration and progression of programs occur steadily and rationally and are determined based on the extent of development and programs’ potential to predict new solutions to old problems. Adopting this idea could enable nurses to critically analyse research programs in everyday knowledge development to use valid and legitimate programs for informing nursing practice. (shrink)

Bernard Lavor and John Kadvany argue that Lakatos’s Hegelian approach to the philosophy of mathematics and science enabled him to overcome all competing philosophies. His use of the approach Hegel developed in his Phenomenology enabled him to show how mathematics and science develop, how they are open-ended, and that they are not subject to rules, even though their rationality may be understood after the fact. Hegel showed Lakatos how to falsify the past to make progress in the present. A critique (...) based on normal standards of fairness and honesty finds this argument an attack on rationality. The similarity of the methods Lakatos used as a Stalinist politician and those he used as a philosopher are pointed out. The Hegelian interpretation of his philosophy is an excuse for his misdeeds. Key Words: Lakatos • Popper • Agassi • research program • historiography. (shrink)

. In Minding God Gregory Peterson takes a careful look at the kind of freedom that human persons have. He concludes that humans are constrained to be free and unpacks this into a version of compatibilism. That is, humans are not metaphysically free under current existence because of the causal determination inherent in their physical nature, but they can take credit for the origination of selfforming decisions because the causes occur inside of us. Peterson does advocate an eschatological hope looking (...) forward to the breaking of causal determination by God's own action. Thus, Minding God presents an eschatologically limited compatibilism. Compatibilism of any kind, however, presents serious challenges to most Christian theologies and to many religious traditions broadly considered. After I interpret Peterson's position I make the argument that compatibilism is neither desirable nor required for a theological anthropology intent on serious engagement of cognitive science. (shrink)

. In Minding God Gregory Peterson takes a careful look at the kind of freedom that human persons have. He concludes that humans are constrained to be free and unpacks this into a version of compatibilism. That is, humans are not metaphysically free under current existence because of the causal determination inherent in their physical nature, but they can take credit for the origination of selfforming decisions because the causes occur inside of us. Peterson does advocate an eschatological hope looking (...) forward to the breaking of causal determination by God's own action. Thus, Minding God presents an eschatologically limited compatibilism. Compatibilism of any kind, however, presents serious challenges to most Christian theologies and to many religious traditions broadly considered. After I interpret Peterson's position I make the argument that compatibilism is neither desirable nor required for a theological anthropology intent on serious engagement of cognitive science. (shrink)

Havstad and Smith (2019) argue that Lakatos’ “methodology of scientific research programs” (MSRP) is a promising philosophical framework for explaining the perceived empirical success of the hypothesis that birds are maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs, and the perceived empirical failures or stagnation of alternatives to that hypothesis. These conclusions are rejected: Havstad and Smith’s account of the alternative “research programs” inadequately characterizes criticism of the hypothesis that birds are maniraptoran theropods and they neither offer sufficient modifications to MSRP to correct its known (...) difficulties in deriving logically or empirically satisfactory criteria for the assessment and preferential selection of “research programs” from historiographical data, nor proposals to mitigate its tendency to promote confirmation bias and dogmatism. Independent flight loss, an important problem in systematic ornithology with implications for the origin of birds, provides a supplementary demonstration of how the application of MSRP in the present context would tend systematically to mislead investigations of the evolutionary history of birds by promoting an uncritical perspective. Given these difficulties, MSRP is an unacceptable philosophical framework for evaluating alternative hypotheses for the origin of birds. (shrink)

Imre Lakatos' conception of the history of science is explicated with the purpose of replying to criticism leveled against it by Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking, and others. Kuhn's primary argument is that the historian's internal—external distinction is methodologically superior to Lakatos' because it is "independent" of an analysis of rationality. That distinction, however, appears to be a normative one, harboring an implicit and unarticulated appeal to rationality, despite Kuhn's claims to the contrary. Lakatos' history, by contrast, is clearly the history (...) of a normatively defined discipline; of science and not scientists and their activities. How such history can be written, the historiographic and critical tools available for its construction, and its importance as history, are considered in detail. In an afterword, the prevalence of Lakatos' treatment of history in philosophical discussion is indicated: A related approach is shown to arise in social contract theory. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to generalize a pair of concepts that are widely used in the history of science, in art history and in historical linguistics – the concept of internal and external history – and to replace the often very vague talk of ‘historical narratives’ with this conceptual framework of internal versus external history. I argue that this way of framing the problem allows us to see the possible alternatives more clearly – as a limited number of (...) possible relations between internal and external history. Finally, I argue that while external history is metaphysically prior to internal history, when it comes to historical explanations, we need both. (shrink)

Based on the material in the Lakatos Archive, this paper reconstructs, and then re-assesses, Lakatos’ epistemological project by placing it in the context of the debate on the role of reason in the history of science, and of the justification of rationality as a normative notion. It is claimed that Lakatos’ most fruitful ideas come from a peculiar philosophical combination of Hegelian historicism and Popperian fallibilism. The original tension, however, cannot be ultimately resolved. As a consequence, the problems that Lakatos (...) has to deal with in his attempt to justify a set of genuinely epistemological canons of scientific rationality that are not reducible to psychology or sociology of knowledge stand as a warning for any normative philosophy of science that takes history at its face value.Author Keywords: Lakatos; History; Method; Rationality. (shrink)

This paper shows how late 1960’s student protests influenced the thought of Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend. I argue that student movements shaped their work from this period, specifically Lakatos’s “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes” and Feyerabend’s Against Method. Archival evidence shows that their political environments at London and Berkeley inflected their writing on scientific method, entrenching Lakatos’s search for a rationalist account of scientific development, and encouraging Feyerabend’s ‘anarchistic’ theory of knowledge. I document this influence and (...) draw two broader lessons: one lesson about the role of biography in philosophy and the other about the historiography of student protests. (shrink)

I argue in this article that an aspect of Imre Lakatos’s philosophy has been largely ignored in previous literature. The key feature of Lakatos’s philosophy of the historiography of science is its non-representationalism, which enables comparisons of alternative ‘historiographic research programmes’ without implying that the interpretations of history re-present or mirror the past. I discuss some problems of this interpretation and show specifically that Lakatos’s philosophy does not distort the history of science despite its normative ambitions. The last section is (...) devoted to updating Lakatos’s programme to answer the needs of contemporary history and philosophy of science. The standard of rationality used in comparative assessments should be understood as a tool for measuring the coherence of an account of history with regard to the ‘actual history’. This standard takes two forms: framework-dependent and framework-independent rationality. The latter is decisive in comparative assessments. (shrink)

Résumé Le problème de Duhem-Quine a été considéré comme un problème majeur de la philosophie des sciences et a donné lieu au déploiement de nombreux efforts pour tenter de le circonvenir ou d’affaiblir ses implications. Plus récemment, le problème est devenu une question majeure au sein de la méthodologie de l’économie expérimentale. Dans cet article, l’auteur soutient que la plupart de ces discussions soit sacrifient trop du pouvoir explicatif de la science, soit ne réussissent pas à traiter proprement du problème. (...) Dans le prolongement de discussions récentes en philosophie des sciences, on peut voir que le meilleur moyen de traiter du problème est de critiquer la conception même de la science développée par Quine. JEL Classification : B41. (shrink)

This paper supports the literature which argues that derivational robustness can have epistemic import in highly idealized economic models. The defense is based on a particular example from mathematical economic theory, the dynamic Walrasian general equilibrium model. It is argued that derivational robustness first increased and later decreased the credibility of the Walrasian model. The example demonstrates that derivational robustness correctly describes the practices of a particular group of influential economic theorists and provides support for the arguments of philosophers who (...) have offered a general epistemic justification of such practices. (shrink)

The circumstance that the text of Imre Lakatos' doctoral thesis from the University of Debrecen did not survive makes the evaluation of his career in Hungary and the research of aspects of continuity of his lifework difficult. My paper tries to reconstruct these newer aspects of continuity, introducing the influence of László Kalmár the mathematician and his fellow student, and Sándor Karácsony the philosopher and his mentor on Lakatos' work. The connection between the understanding of the empirical basis of exact (...) ideas—which is a common feature in the papers of the members of the Karácsony-circle—and Lakatos' way of thinking regarding mathematics is more direct and can be documented through his connection to Kalmár. The central element of Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics is criticism of formalism and his tendency is to use the empirical view. Discussions at the 1965 International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science in London were very helpful in clarifying the quasi-empirical conception. Kalmár's lecture in London, based on one of his papers published by Karácsony in 1942, emphasized the empirical character of mathematics. After this colloquium some elements of the heritage of the Karácsony-circle were integrated again in the development of Lakatos' way of thinking. First I will analyze the Kalmár lecture of 1965 at the Colloquium of Philosophy of Science and Lakatos's reflections on the problem of the foundation of mathematics. Then I will present their common Hungarian background, their education and the beginning of their career, which have many important common features; third I draw attention to the network of contacts of Karácsony-disciples. (shrink)

. The circumstance, that the text of Imre Lakatos' doctoral thesis from the University of Debrecen did not survive, makes the evaluation of his career in Hungary and the research of aspects of continuity of his lifework difficult. My paper tries to reconstruct these newer aspects of continuity, introducing the influence of László Kalmár the mathematician and his fellow student, and Sándor Karácsony the philosopher and his mentor on Lakatos' work. The connection between the understanding of the empirical basis of (...) exact ideas—which is a common feature in the papers of the members of the Karácsonycircle—and Lakatos' way of thinking regarding mathematics is more direct and can be documented through his connection to Kalmár. The central element of Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics is criticism of formalism and his tendency is to use the empirical view. Discussions at the 1965 International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science in London were very helpful in clarifying the quasi-empirical conception. Kalmár's lecture in London, based on one of his papers published by Karácsony in 1942, emphasized the empirical character of mathematics. After this colloquium some elements of the heritage of the Karácsony-circle were integrated again in the development of Lakatos' way of thinking. First I will analyze the Kalmár lecture of 1965 at the Colloquium of Philosophy of Science and Lakatos's reflections on the problem of the foundation of mathematics. Then I will present their common Hungarian background, their education and the beginning of their career, which have many important common features; third I draw attention to the network of contacts of Karácsony-disciples. (shrink)

I have always been a philosopher at heart. I write history of science and history of its philosophy primarily as a philosopher wary of his abstractions and broad conceptualizations. But that has not always been the case. Lakatos famously portrayed history of science as the testing ground for theories of scientific rationality. But he did so along the crudest Hegelian lines that did injury both to Hegel and to the history and methodology of science. Since science is ultimately rational, he (...) argued, rival methodologies can prove their mettle by competing for whose tendentiously reconstructed account of the history of science renders more of it rational! My own approach to the relationship between history and philosophy of science started out perhaps a little more open-mindedly than Lakatos’s, but in a manner no less crude. Over the years the relationship between the history I wrote and the philosophy to which I was committed took on a firmer and more reciprocal shape. It did so in the course of a process that I now realize exemplified the philosophical position it eventually yielded. I would like to trace that development in the following pages and reflect as best I can on where it has lead and left me. (shrink)

Kitcher and Aspray distinguish a mainstream tradition in the philosophy of mathematics concerned with foundationalist epistemology, and a ‘maverick’ or naturalistic tradition, originating with Lakatos. My claim is that if the consequences of Lakatos's contribution are fully worked out, no less than a radical reconceptualization of the philosophy of mathematics is necessitated, including history, methodology and a fallibilist epistemology as central to the field. In the paper an interpretation of Lakatos's philosophy of mathematics is offered, followed by some critical discussion, (...) and an extension to a social constructivist position (which might well have been unacceptable to Lakatos). (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Imre Lakatos’s account on the relation between the history and the philosophy of science, if properly understood and also if properly modified, can be valuable for the philosophical comprehension of the relation between the history and the philosophy of science. The paper is divided into three main parts. In the first part, I provide a charitable exegesis of the Lakatosian conception of the history of science in order to show that Lakatos’s history cannot be (...) a caricature. In the second part, I describe what I believe are the real problems of Lakatos’s account on a metaphysical and on a methodological level. In order to address these problems, I take advantage of the recent critique of the so-called “confrontation model”. Finally, in the third part, I suggest that a proper modification of Lakatos’s perspective can resolve the aforementioned problems without distorting Lakatos’s central aspiration, which is that the philosophical theories of scientific rationality can be assessed with the help of the history of science without losing their normative content. (shrink)

A case study of the development of quantum field theory and of S-matrix theory, from their inceptions to the present, is presented. The descriptions of science given by Kuhn and by Lakatos are compared and contrasted as they apply to this case study. The episodes of the developments of these theories are then considered as candidates for competing research programs in Lakatos' methodology of scientific research programs. Lakatos' scheme provides a reasonable overall description and a plausible assessment of the relative (...) value of these two programs in terms of progressive and degenerating problem shifts. Also discussed are the roles of various types of models as they have been used in these areas of theoretical high-energy physics. (shrink)

The ArgumentRecent studies in the philosophy of mathematics have increasingly stressed the social and historical dimensions of mathematical practice. Although this new emphasis has fathered interesting new perspectives, it has also blurred the distinction between mathematics and other scientific fields. This distinction can be clarified by examining the special interaction of thebodyandimagesof mathematics.Mathematics has an objective, ever-expanding hard core, the growth of which is conditioned by socially and historically determined images of mathematics. Mathematics also has reflexive capacities unlike those of (...) any other exact science. In no other exact science can the standard methodological framework usedwithinthe discipline also be used to study the nature of the discipline itself.Although it has always been present in mathematical research, reflexive thinking has become increasingly central to mathematics over the past century. Many of the images of the discipline have been dictated by the increase in reflexive thinking which has also determined a great portion of the contemporary philosophy and historiography of mathematics. (shrink)

The paper exposes the principal procedures of assessing methodological theories. The first one is based on a consensus about the aims of science, the second uses epistemological criteria, and the third checks the adequacy of methodological requirements against the history of science. This third procedure is singled out for a more detailed treatment. It is argued that rational reconstruction constitutes a separate level of historiography and concerns historical explanation. The subject of a rational reconstruction is the methodological explanation of all (...) basic value judgments, whereas all additional factors are not determined by methodological rules. It is further specified in which way rationally reconstructed history should correspond to the actual course of historical events, i. e. to which extent rational reconstruction is free to interpret history according to methodological categories. In the last paragraph the connection between scientific progress and the growth of knowledge is discussed. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo analizamos críticamente el modo en que el Estructuralismo Empirista de van Fraassen caracteriza la relación de representación entre las teorías y los fenómenos. Nuestro objetivo es ofrecer argumentos que destaquen el papel del objeto en la construcción de modelos de datos. Asimismo, nos proponemos mostrar que la opción metodológica sugerida en su obra reciente resulta insuficiente para recuperar un vínculo plausible entre los modelos de datos y los fenómenos.

Resumen Un diagnóstico más que difundido acerca de la obra de Lakatos señala que su proyecto soslayó por completo la cuestión de la verdad como parte central del análisis del conocimiento científico. En una línea semejante, Hacking afirma que Lakatos encontró en la metodología un sustituto para la verdad. Incluso quienes descreen de estas interpretaciones acuerdan respecto de que Lakatos falla en dar cuenta de la relación entre el desarrollo del conocimiento y el aumento de la verosimilitud. En el presente (...) trabajo argumento que el problema de la verdad es central al proyecto filosófico de Lakatos, y es posible construir una interpretación alternativa en la que su proyecto de establecer un vínculo entre método y verdad pueda tenerse como exitoso. Propongo una lectura davidsoniana que adjudica a Lakatos un realismo epistémico.A widespread interpretation of Lakatos’ work says his project completely sidestepped the question of truth as a central part of the analysis of scientific knowledge. In a similar vein, Hacking states that Lakatos found in methodology a substitute for truth. Even those who are skeptical of these interpretations agree that Lakatos failed to give an account of the relation between the growth of knowledge and increasing verisimilitude. In this paper I maintain that the problem of truth is central to Lakatos’ philosophical project, and it is possible to develop an alternative interpretation in which his project to establish a link between method and truth can be seen as successful. I put forward a Davidsonian interpretation that ascribes to Lakatos an epistemic realism. (shrink)

I became acquainted with Lakatos’s work in 1965 when I started studying at London School of Economics—where Lakatos taught. As his work was developed over the succeeding years until his death in 1974, one thing always puzzled me: his work seemed to contain such conflicting tendencies. He would continue developing his ideas along a progressive line, and suddenly would insert an element which appeared to me quite reactionary. By ‘reactionary’, I should hasten to add, I mean imbued with the spirit (...) of Positivism—a person of different bias might reverse the labels!When I was given this opportunity to reflect again on Lakatos’s work I did not try to resolve the puzzle by looking into Lakatos’s intellectual history1; rather I attempted to separate clearly those aspects of Lakatos’s work which seemed to me driving in the right and the wrong directions. Both aspects concern the research program which has dominated both philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics in the twentieth century. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations.

Resumen En la filosofía de Lakatos existe una tensión entre falibilismo y optimismo epistemológico. En el presente artículo propongo la reconstrucción de dos elementos clave para resolver positivamente esa tensión: una noción de verdad empírica, que neutralice el convencionalismo, y una noción de verdad parcial, que dé cuenta de la creciente verosimilitud de los programas de investigación. Para esto último, reviso un aspecto de la obra de Lakatos frecuentemente ignorado por los críticos: su posición en el debate acerca de las (...) leyes de la naturaleza.There is a tension between fallibilism and epistemological optimism in Lakatos’s philosophy. This article proposes the reconstruction of two key elements to positively resolve such tension: a notion of empirical truth that could neutralize conventionalism, and a notion of partial truth, capable to account for the increasing verisimilitude of research programs. For the latter, I review one aspect of Lakatos’s work often ignored by the critics: his position on the debate regarding laws of nature. (shrink)

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) debate is gaining ground in contemporary evolutionary biology. In parallel, a number of philosophical standpoints have emerged in an attempt to clarify what exactly is represented by the EES. For Massimo Pigliucci, we are in the wake of the newest instantiation of a persisting Kuhnian paradigm; in contrast, Telmo Pievani has contended that the transition to an EES could be best represented as a progressive reformation of a prior Lakatosian scientific research program, with the extension (...) of its Neo-Darwinian core and the addition of a brand-new protective belt of assumptions and auxiliary hypotheses. Here, we argue that those philosophical vantage points are not the only ways to interpret what current proposals to ‘extend’ the Modern Synthesis-derived ‘standard evolutionary theory’ (SET) entail in terms of theoretical change in evolutionary biology. We specifically propose the image of the emergent EES as a vast network of models and interweaved representations that, instantiated in diverse practices, are connected and related in multiple ways. Under that assumption, the EES could be articulated around a paraconsistent network of evolutionary theories (including some elements of the SET), as well as models, practices and representation systems of contemporary evolutionary biology, with edges and nodes that change their position and centrality as a consequence of the co-construction and stabilization of facts and historical discussions revolving around the epistemic goals of this area of the life sciences. We then critically examine the purported structure of the EES—published by Laland and collaborators in 2015—in light of our own network-based proposal. Finally, we consider which epistemic units of Evo-Devo are present or still missing from the EES, in preparation for further analyses of the topic of explanatory integration in this conceptual framework. (shrink)