ABSTRACT

In developing his model of science Lakatos saw himself as correcting the deficiencies in and developing the insights of Popper. His model, which is considerably less simplistic than Popper’s, is indeed an improvement. In this section I outline the model. In the following section it will be shown that in spite of its virtues it embodies serious internal tensions and confusions. These preclude, as will be argued in Section 3, the possibility of using the model as Lakatos hoped to distinguish between science and non-science and to give hard advice on how to decide between rival theories. In addition, Lakatos, as a rationalist, wished to use the model in giving rational explanations of scientific changes. In this chapter the manner in which he sought to do this is noted, leaving a detailed evaluation of this aspect of his programme until our general discussion of the explanation of scientific change in Chapter X. Lakatos was not interested in questions of meaning and did not take up the challenge presented to a rationalist by the arguments for incommensurability. He was, however, particularly concerned with the question of how a rationalist could vindicate his principles of comparison (his methodology). His criterion for the selection of a methodology will be outlined and found wanting in Section 4. It will be seen (Section 5) that he is unable to establish that the methodology he takes to be selected by this criterion is a means to what he takes to be the goal of science, increasing verisimilitude. Like Popper he fails to establish the link the rationalist needs between the methods of

science and its goal. Until that juncture of the chapter I shall be reading Lakatos as a neo-Popperian. In the final section I consider the embryonic, non-Popperian, neo-Hegelian Lakatos that Hacking claims to have discerned.2 While one may well doubt that this reading is faithful to Lakatos’s intentions, it does present a picture of the scientific enterprise of interest that merits critical evaluation.