Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.
Imre Lakatos
Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.
It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached.
The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.
Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.
Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic.
Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.
Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.
There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.
The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology.
The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.
