Reconstructing Lakatos: a reassessment of Lakatos' epistemological project in the light of the Lakatos Archive
Abstract
Based on the material in the Lakatos Archive, this paper reconstructs, and then re-assesses, Lakatos' epistemological project by placing it in the context of the debate on the role of reason in the history of science, and of the justification of rationality as a normative notion. It is claimed that Lakatos' most fruitful ideas come from a peculiar philosophical combination of Hegelian historicism and Popperian fallibilism. The original tension, however, cannot be ultimately resolved. As a consequence, the problems that Lakatos has to deal with in his attempt to justify a set of genuinely epistemological canons of scientific rationality that are not reducible to psychology or sociology of knowledge stand as a warning for any normative philosophy of science that takes history at its face value.
- Publication:
-
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
- Pub Date:
- 2002
- DOI:
- 10.1016/S0039-3681(02)00024-9
- Bibcode:
- 2002SHPSA..33..487M
- Keywords:
-
- Lakatos;
- History;
- Method;
- Rationality