Methodology of Scientific Research Programs

[Manthor]

The Methodology of Scientific Research Programs


http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=RRn ... &q&f=false


I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who wants to have some good literature on empiricism and the philosophy of science.

[Surlethe]

Can you add some detail, please? A summary and a critical review?

[RazorOutlaw]

The book is about Imre Lakatos' unpublished papers. From what little I've read of him (mostly in Feyerabend's introduction to "Against Method") he seems like a pretty interesting fellow.

Anyway here's a product description I grabbed from Amazon.com:

Imre Lakatos' philosophical and scientific papers are published here in two volumes. Volume I brings together his very influential but scattered papers on the philosophy of the physical sciences, and includes one important unpublished essay on the effect of Newton's scientific achievement. Volume II presents his work on the philosophy of mathematics (much of it unpublished), together with some critical essays on contemporary philosophers of science and some famous polemical writings on political and educational issues. Imre Lakatos had an influence out of all proportion to the length of his philosophical career. This collection exhibits and confirms the originality, range and the essential unity of his work. It demonstrates too the force and spirit he brought to every issue with which he engaged, from his most abstract mathematical work to his passionate 'Letter to the director of the LSE'. Lakatos' ideas are now the focus of widespread and increasing interest, and these volumes should make possible for the first time their study as a whole and their proper assessment.

[Packbat]

Imre Lakatos, naturally, is the same fellow responsible for the book Proofs and Refutations - a rather extraordinary little book about the nature of, well, mathematical proofs and refutations. It begins with dialog concerning the Euler characteristic of polyhedrons (number of vertices minus edges plus faces - equal to 2 for regular polyhedra) and goes through a process of examining proofs of a theorem regarding this, counterexamples to the proofs, and ways in which the proof is modified to recognize these counterexamples.

I have not read the papers collected in The methodology of scientific research programmes, unfortunately, but I can attest that Lakatos was a subtle and careful thinker.