"It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached"
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Progress in science, Lakatos insists, isn’t a polite queue where everyone waits their turn until a theory politely admits defeat. The jab here is aimed at the comforting picture of “rational” research as a consensus-driven procession: a programme runs, then “exhausts” its usefulness, then the community collectively nods that it’s time to move on. Lakatos treats that as a fairy tale scientists tell after the fact.
His intent is tactical. He wants to legitimize intellectual insurgency: the right to start building a rival before the dominant framework is officially declared “degenerating.” The phrase “before everybody agrees” is doing the real work. It’s a warning against the tyranny of unanimity, where innovation becomes hostage to institutional inertia, sunk costs, reputations, and the human tendency to keep patching a beloved model with ad hoc fixes. In Lakatos’s vocabulary, a “degenerating” programme isn’t just wrong; it’s a programme that survives by retrofitting excuses rather than predicting something new. Waiting for it to “probably” reach that point is a recipe for stagnation, because the gatekeepers who benefit from the current programme are rarely eager to certify their own obsolescence.
Context matters: Lakatos is threading a needle between Popper’s trigger-happy falsificationism and Kuhn’s sociological portrait of paradigm lock-in. He offers a middle path: judge research by its track record and future yield, but keep the marketplace open. Rival programmes aren’t a sign of failure; they’re the mechanism that makes “reason” possible in the first place.
His intent is tactical. He wants to legitimize intellectual insurgency: the right to start building a rival before the dominant framework is officially declared “degenerating.” The phrase “before everybody agrees” is doing the real work. It’s a warning against the tyranny of unanimity, where innovation becomes hostage to institutional inertia, sunk costs, reputations, and the human tendency to keep patching a beloved model with ad hoc fixes. In Lakatos’s vocabulary, a “degenerating” programme isn’t just wrong; it’s a programme that survives by retrofitting excuses rather than predicting something new. Waiting for it to “probably” reach that point is a recipe for stagnation, because the gatekeepers who benefit from the current programme are rarely eager to certify their own obsolescence.
Context matters: Lakatos is threading a needle between Popper’s trigger-happy falsificationism and Kuhn’s sociological portrait of paradigm lock-in. He offers a middle path: judge research by its track record and future yield, but keep the marketplace open. Rival programmes aren’t a sign of failure; they’re the mechanism that makes “reason” possible in the first place.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Imre Lakatos, "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" (1970), in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos & A. Musgrave, Cambridge University Press — standard source for Lakatos's methodology-of-research-programmes formulation. |
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