Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian-born philosopher of mathematics and science, born in Debrecen in 1922 and died in London in 1974. He fled Hungary in 1956 after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising and settled in Britain, where he taught at the London School of Economics alongside, and eventually succeeded, Karl Popper. His Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes reframes Popper's falsifiability criterion: rather than a single theory being falsified and discarded by one bad result, Lakatos argued science actually proceeds through research programmes, a protected core of assumptions surrounded by auxiliary hypotheses that absorb anomalies, and a programme is judged progressive or degenerating by whether it keeps predicting genuinely new facts or only patches itself to survive old ones. Whether this rescues Popper's demarcation project or quietly concedes its central claim, that a clean falsifying test exists at all, remains argued in the philosophy of science literature; Lakatos himself presented it as a refinement, not a rejection, of falsifiability.