Science & Tech Quote by Imre Lakatos

Lakatos is needling the comforting fairy tale that science is a clean meritocracy where the best ideas win on evidence alone. The line lands like a dare: if even the “hard” sciences sometimes decide between theories by counting believers and measuring their volume, what chance do the social sciences have? It’s an intentionally bleak syllogism, sharpened by the mock-legal phrasing (“no a way,” “but by”) that mimics the voice of procedural objectivity while smuggling in the accusation that procedure is theater.

The subtext is not that evidence is irrelevant, but that evidence rarely speaks without an institution to amplify it. “Number, faith and vocal energy” is a brutal little triad: science as coalition-building, conviction, and PR. Lakatos is drawing a straight line from lab politics to disciplinary politics, from peer review to gatekeeping, from what gets funded and published to what gets called “true.” In the social sciences, where phenomena are messier and experiments less decisive, he suggests the power dynamics are harder to hide and easier to rationalize as “interpretation.”

Context matters: Lakatos is writing in the shadow of Popper’s falsification ideal and Kuhn’s paradigm wars, trying to explain scientific change without treating scientists as either saints or mobs. His own “research programmes” framework admits that theories survive by protective belts, reputation, and time. “Truth lies in power” isn’t a surrender to cynicism so much as a warning: if you want better knowledge, you can’t ignore who gets to speak, who gets heard, and who gets to call the argument over.