Imre Lakatos – Research Programs and Rational Reconstruction
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Mediation: Popper + Kuhn = ?
Imre Lakatos (1922-1974), a Hungarian-British philosopher of science, tried to mediate between Popper and Kuhn. Popper had emphasized falsification: a theory is scientific if it is in principle refutable. Kuhn had shown that in practice theories are not so easily refuted; anomalies are often tolerated for decades.
Lakatos’s solution: not individual theories but “research programs” are the unit of scientific development. A research program consists of a “hard core” (the basic assumptions that are not given up), a “protective belt” (auxiliary hypotheses that shield the core), and a “heuristic” (rules for further development).
Progressive and Degenerative Programs
Lakatos distinguishes progressive programs, which make and confirm new predictions, from degenerative programs, which merely adapt without discovering anything new. A research program should be abandoned when it degenerates – but this is not a logical rule, only a methodological recommendation.
Explicit References to Hegel: Proofs and Refutations
Lakatos’s early work Proofs and Refutations (1976, posthumous) is a dialectical analysis of the history of mathematics. Using the example of Euler’s polyhedron formula, he shows that mathematical proofs are not “discovered” and then accepted. They are criticized, modified, generalized, restricted – in a dialectical process that never ends.
Lakatos explicitly cites Hegel as a model for this view. He distances himself from Hegel’s “absolute idealism,” but acknowledges that Hegel understood that knowledge develops, that criticism is productive, that truth is a process.
Assessment: Sublation of Popper and Kuhn
Lakatos’s position is itself a kind of “sublation”: from Popper he preserves the importance of criticism and the ideal of progress. From Kuhn he preserves the insight that science operates in larger units and that anomalies are tolerated. He overcomes Popper’s naivety (individual falsifications do not decide the matter) and Kuhn’s apparent relativism (there are rational criteria).
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