1 - 4020 - 0226 - 2 ( hardback )

Thirty years after the untimely death of Imre Lakatos, the enduring influence of several Lakatosian issues and ideas asks for a systematic appraisal of his work. A significant step in this direction has been made in two workshops, organized by the Institute Vienna Circle and the Institute for History and Philosophy of Science of Eötvös University, which were held in Vienna and Budapest in Autumn 1997. The workshops resulted in the present substantial (382 pages) volume, which includes 17 papers dealing with Lakatos’ philosophy and biography and several documents and photographs about his work and life. The papers have been divided into three sections, concerning Lakatos’ philosophy of science (Section I) and mathematics (Section II), and his intellectual and political biography (Section III). The contributions collected in Section I deal especially with Lakatos’ methodology of scientific research programmes—henceforth, MSRP—and, more precisely, with the following issues: (1) the MSRP-solution to the Duhem problem and Lakatos’ analysis of the role of crucial experiments; (2) the notion of positive heuristic and, more generally, the possibility and the nature of a genuine logic of scientific discovery; (3) the adequacy and the justification of the MSRP-rules governing theory choice decisions. According to the Duhem thesis, the experimental observations made to test a theoretical hypothesis presuppose the acceptance of a network of auxiliary hypotheses. The Duhem thesis poses the following problem: given an experimental outcome conflicting with a group of hypotheses, which of them should be changed? The MSRP-solution to the Duhem problem amounts, roughly speaking, to the claim that, while the hypotheses included in the hard core of a research programme should be considered as experimentally irrefutable, any hypothesis belonging to the protective belt is a good candidate to