Education Quote by Imre Lakatos

Lakatos is twisting the knife into an old intellectual fantasy: that science can deliver certainty on demand, stamped PROVEN the way a theorem is. By invoking Einstein, he’s not praising physics so much as weaponizing it. Relativity didn’t just add a new chapter to the textbook; it made the textbook look provisional. Newton wasn’t “refuted” in the everyday sense - he still works brilliantly in most practical domains - but he was dethroned as the final word. That’s the rhetorical punch: if even the most successful scientific framework can be re-framed, limited, or absorbed into a deeper theory, then “proof” starts to sound like a category error.

The subtext is a turf war between philosophers and scientists who want science to inherit the authority of mathematics. Lakatos is saying: you can keep the authority, but you don’t get the metaphysics of certainty. Scientific knowledge wins because it survives contact with reality, not because it’s logically unassailable. Einstein becomes the emblem of a modern scientific humility: today’s laws are powerful bets, not eternal verdicts.

Context matters. Writing in the post-positivist hangover after logical positivism’s collapse, Lakatos is advancing his “research programmes” view: science progresses through competing frameworks that protect their “hard core” while adjusting around anomalies. “Very few” is a pointed sociological claim, too - a reminder that what counts as knowledge is policed by communities, and Einstein re-trained the police.