"Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes." "A series of theories is theoretically progressive ... if each new theory has some excess empirical content over its predecessor, that is, if it predicts some novel, hitherto unexpected fact. ... [It] is also empirically progressive ... if some of this excess empirical content is also corroborated, that is, if each new theory leads to the discovery of some new fact. Finally, let us call a problemshift progressive if it is both theoretically and empirically progressive, and degenerating if it is not." (pp. 33-34). "Justificationists valued 'confirming' instances of a theory; naive falsificationists stressed the 'refuting' instances; for the methodological falsificationist [i.e. Lakatos] it is the---rather rare---corroborating instances of the excess information which are the crucial ones ... We are no longer interested in the thousands of trivial verifying instances nor in the hundreds of readily available anomalies." (p. 36). One implication is that it may be perfectly rational to work on a theory even if it rests on false assumptions. "Indeed, some of the most important research programmes in the history of science were grafted on to older programmes with which they were blatantly inconsistent." (p. 56). In quantum mechanics, for example, "the decision to go ahead with temporarily inconsistent foundations was taken by Einstein in 1905, but even he wavered in 1913, when Bohr forged forward again" (p. 59). Similarly, "Cartesian push-mechanics" was "inconsistent with Newton's theory of gravitation," but "Newton worked both on his positive heuristic (successfully) and on a reductionist programme (unsuccessfully), and disapproved both of Cartesians who, like Huyghens, thought that it was not worth wasting time on an 'unintelligible' programme and of some of his rash disciples who, like Cotes, thought that the inconsistency presented no problem" (p. 59). Another consequence is that "The history of science has been and should be a history of competing research programmes ..., but it has not been and must not become a succession of periods of normal science: the sooner competition starts, the better for progress. 'Theoretical pluralism' is better than 'theoretical monism'" (p. 69).
I think Lakatos makes too much of the Popper/Kuhn dichotomy. Lakatos points out again and again that he "followed, and tried to improve, Popperian tradition" (p. 95), and has copious quotations and precise footnotes pointing to Popper. By contrast, Kuhn's theory is brusquely misrepresented without proper referencing; e.g. "there is no particular rational cause for the appearance of a Kuhnian 'crisis' ... 'Crisis' is a psychological concept; it is a contagious panic" (p. 90), for which there is no reference other than an inconspicuous "Kuhn [1970]" elsewhere on the page. This is all the more unfortunate since "Popper never abandoned his earlier (naive) falsification rules. He has demanded, until this day, that 'criteria of refutation have to be laid down beforehand: it must be agreed, which observable situations, if actually observed, mean that a theory is refuted'" (p. 94), which Lakatos has just demonstrated to be utter folly (e.g., pp. 17, 65ff.).
"Why did Copernicus's research programme supersede Ptolemy's?" Ptolemy's "research programme" was clearly degenerate. "Every single move in the geostatic programme ran counter to the Platonic heuristic" (p. 181), e.g. equants, and "it always lagged behind the facts" (p. 182). "Copernicus's programme was certainly theoretically progressive. It anticipated novel facts never observed before" (p. 183), such as the phases of Venus. But none of these anticipated novel facts were corroborated until the phases of Venus were observed in 1616. "It seems then that the Copernican Revolution only became a fully fledged scientific revolution in 1616, when it was almost immediately abandoned for the new dynamics-oriented physics" (p. 184). Hardly very satisfying, but we are saved by "Elie Zahar's modified methodology of scientific research programmes" (p. 185). "Zahar's modification lies primarily in his new conception of 'novel fact'. ... Zahar's claim is that several important facts concerning planetary motions are straightforward consequences of the original Copernican assumptions and that, although these facts were previously known, they lend much more support to Copernicus than to Ptolemy within whose system they were dealt with only in an ad hoc manner, by parameter adjustment. From the Copernican model ... the following facts can be predicted prior to any observation: (i) Planets have stations and retrogressions. ... (ii) The periods of the superior planets, as seen from the Earth are not constant. ... (iv) The elongation of the inferior planets is bounded" (pp. 185-186). Furthermore, "the determination of planetary distances represents excess content of Copernicus's theory over Ptolemy's" (p. 187). "But it turned out that apart from his initial successes, Copernicus could save all the Ptolemaic phenomena only in an ad hoc and, in its dynamical aspects, very unsatisfactory, way. So Kepler and Galileo took off from the Commentariolus rather than from De revolutionibus. They took off from the point where the steam ran out of the Copernican programme." (p. 188). Here Lakatos seems to forget that Copernicus determination of the planetary distances was necessary for Kepler's cherished polyhedral theory.
"History of science and its rational reconstructions." A philosophy of science (or a "logic of scientific discovery") "can be criticized by criticizing the rational reconstructions to which they lead" (p. 122). For example, "the internal history of inductivists consists of alleged discoveries of hard facts and of so-called inductive generalizations. The internal history of conventionalists consists of factual discoveries and of the erection of pigeon hole systems and their replacement by allegedly simpler ones. The internal history of falsificationists dramatizes bold conjectures ... and, above all, triumphant 'negative crucial experiments'. The methodology, finally, emphasizes long-extended theoretical and empirical rivalry of major research programmes [and] progressive and degenerating problemshifts." (p. 118). History is the ultimate test for any philosophy of science in that "history may be seen as a 'test' of its rational reconstructions" (p. 123). "If a historian's methodology provides a poor rational reconstruction, he may either misread history in such a way that it coincides with his rational reconstruction, or he will find that the history of science is highly irrational." (p. 127).
Lakatos apparently felt that the last article, on Newton, was "in need of substantial revision" (p. 193) and one can only agree. For one thing, Lakatos claims that "Newton turns the negation of his theory into its own foundation" (p. 210) just because the law of gravitation is derived from Kepler's laws with which it is strictly speaking inconsistent. This is hardly a very balanced statement, especially not from someone who accuses Kuhn of feeding "the New Left" (p. 136).
