Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos (Debrecen, 1922 – London, 1974) was a Hungarian-born philosopher of mathematics and science, best known for his methodology of scientific research programmes and for his work on the philosophy of mathematics. Born Imre Lipsitz into a well-to-do Jewish family, he studied mathematics, physics and philosophy at the University of Debrecen. His career was shaped by the war, Hungarian communism and exile, and his thinking grew out of the tradition of Karl Popper, which he both followed and profoundly reshaped.

During the German occupation of Hungary he changed his surname to avoid antisemitic persecution; his mother and grandmother died at Auschwitz. After the war he worked in the Hungarian Ministry of Education and took a doctorate at Debrecen, but he was also involved in building the communist state. He was imprisoned in 1950 on charges of revisionism and, after his release, drifted away from the regime and joined dissident circles. Following the Soviet invasion of 1956 he fled to Vienna and later settled in England, where he earned a philosophy PhD at Cambridge in 1961 under R. B. Braithwaite. From 1960 he taught at the London School of Economics, where he joined the Popperian group and for years edited the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

His book Proofs and Refutations, drawn from his doctoral thesis, takes the form of a fictional classroom dialogue in which students try to prove Euler's formula for polyhedra. Each attempted proof is overturned by counterexamples, which Lakatos calls "monsters". Against the view that informal theorems are final, he argued that mathematical knowledge grows through a dialectic of conjectures, proofs and refutations, in which theorems are adjusted and their domains of validity extended.

In the philosophy of science he developed sophisticated falsificationism, a refinement of Popper. Theories are not discarded at the first anomaly; they are judged within research programmes. Each programme has a hard core protected by a belt of auxiliary hypotheses, and its progress is measured by its ability to predict novel facts. A programme is progressive when it achieves such predictions and degenerating when it only accommodates anomalies after the fact. The approach was also a response to Thomas Kuhn and his idea of paradigm shifts, and its influence now reaches the history of science and the social sciences.

Lakatos died suddenly of a heart attack in London in 1974, aged 51. His posthumous work Proofs and Refutations, and his correspondence with Paul Feyerabend, published as For and Against Method, made much of his thinking known, and it remains a subject of debate in the philosophy of science and of mathematics.