Lakatos's Research Programmes and Feyerabend's Anarchism

Imre Lakatos, a Hungarian-born philosopher who fled to England after the 1956 Hungarian uprising and joined the London School of Economics, where he worked closely with Karl Popper, sought in his methodology of scientific research programmes (MSRP), developed chiefly in his 1970 essay "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes," published in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, to reconcile Popperian falsificationism's normative rigor with the historical resilience Kuhn had documented in actual scientific practice. Lakatos proposed that the proper unit of appraisal in science is not the isolated theory or hypothesis but the research programme: a evolving sequence of theories sharing a "hard core" of fundamental, provisionally irrefutable assumptions, protected by a "protective belt" of auxiliary hypotheses that absorb anomalies and can be revised or replaced according to a "positive heuristic," a set of methodological guidelines directing how the programme should develop and extend itself over time.