Quotations

Imre Lakatos


View the biography of Imre Lakatos


That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.
Quoted in P Davis and R Hersh The Mathematical Experience (Boston 1981).
The history of mathematics, lacking the guidance of philosophy, [is] blind, while the philosophy of mathematics, turning its back on the most intriguing phenomena in the history of mathematics, is empty.
Proofs and refutations (Cambridge, 1976).
No experimental result can ever kill a theory: any theory can be saved from counterinstances either by some auxiliary hypothesis or by a suitable reinterpretation of its terms.
Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes
Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.