Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes

The methodology of scientific research programmes is Imre Lakatos's account of how scientific theories are organized and evaluated over time, set out mainly in his 1970 paper Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, with earlier versions of the view appearing from 1968. Lakatos described a research programme as built around a hard core of central assumptions its practitioners treat as not open to direct refutation, protected by a surrounding belt of more flexible auxiliary hypotheses that can be revised or replaced when evidence goes against a prediction. A positive heuristic guides scientists in developing new versions of the programme, while a negative heuristic keeps their revisions away from the hard core itself. Lakatos judged a programme progressive when its successive versions predict genuinely new facts that are later confirmed, and degenerating when it stops producing new predictions or its predictions are repeatedly falsified. The account was offered as a middle position between Karl Popper's falsificationism, which called for immediate rejection of a refuted theory, and Thomas Kuhn's description of scientists persisting with a paradigm through anomalies, replacing Kuhn's sociological account of that persistence with Lakatos's own logical and methodological criteria for judging when it is rational to keep doing so.