Between Popper and Kuhn: Imre Lakatos and A New Proposal for the Scientific Methodology

Discussions on how to make the distinction between science and non-science have been a priority for the philopsophers throughout the history of 20th century. Lakatos who has a privileged place in philosophy of science at this point started out by emphasizing the necessity of knowing history of science and set to work on a philosophical analysis which enables to distinguish science from other activities. In this context of The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes is deserved to be examined in terms of understanding basic issues such as scientific rationality. In Lakatos’s The Methodology of Scientific Research, Popper’s idea of falsification seperates into three section as “dogmatic falsification”, “methodological falsification”, and “sophisticated falsification”. Lakatos tried to reveal how scientific rationality develops in the history of events by making a reckoning with the design of history which developed by Kuhn in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. According to the logic of scientific research program(s) prescribed by Lakatos, different theories are interconnected within the framework of a research program, and all the researches converge on an the axis of a common “core”. In this study, Lakatos’s building attempts a new scientific logic will be examined because of the fact that presented one of the most striking example of how this subject will be evaluated without overdoing and understatement in his investigations.