Imre Lakatos (1922–1974)
Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend were friends and critics. Both studied under Karl Popper.
Lakatos saw himself as merely extending Popper's ideas, which changed over time and were interpreted by many in conflicting ways.
Feyerabend argued that Lakatos's methodology was not a methodology at all, but merely "words that sound like the elements of a methodology".[29] He argued that Lakatos's methodology was no different in practice from epistemological anarchism, Feyerabend's own position.
Lakatos contrasted Popper0, the "naive falsificationist" who demanded unconditional rejection of any theory in the face of any anomaly (an interpretation Lakatos saw as erroneous but that he nevertheless referred to often); Popper1, the more nuanced and conservatively interpreted philosopher; and Popper2, the "sophisticated methodological falsificationist" that Lakatos claims is the logical extension of the correctly interpreted ideas of Popper1 (and who is therefore essentially Lakatos himself).
On pseudoscience
According to the demarcation criterion of pseudoscience proposed by Lakatos, a theory is pseudoscientific if it fails to make any novel predictions of previously unknown phenomena or its predictions were mostly falsified, in contrast with scientific theories, which predict novel fact(s).[25] Progressive scientific theories are those that have their novel facts confirmed, and degenerate scientific theories, which can degenerate so much that they become pseudo-science, are those whose predictions of novel facts are refuted. . As he put it:
"A given fact is explained scientifically only if a new fact is predicted with it… "
In his 1973 Scientific Method Lecture 1[27] at the London School of Economics, he also claimed that "nobody to date has yet found a demarcation criterion according to which Darwin can be described as scientific".
Almost 20 years after Lakatos's 1973 challenge to the scientificity of Darwin, in her 1991 The Ant and the Peacock, LSE lecturer and ex-colleague of Lakatos, Helena Cronin, attempted to establish that Darwinian theory was empirically scientific in respect of at least being supported by evidence of likeness in the diversity of life forms in the world, explained by descent with modification. She wrote that
our usual idea of corroboration as requiring the successful prediction of novel facts… Darwinian theory was not strong on temporally novel predictions. … however familiar the evidence and whatever role it played in the construction of the theory, it still confirms the theory.[28]