Imre Lakatos: biography of this Hungarian philosopher.

A summary of the life of Imre Lakatos, an important thinker dedicated to the philosophy of science.

Imre Lakatos was a philosopher and mathematician known for his philosophy of mathematics and science. He worked as a researcher and scholar throughout his life, starting in his native Hungary, visiting the Soviet Union and eventually living in the United Kingdom.

His life is that of a person who witnessed the rise of Nazism while his family was of Jewish origin, having to manage to avoid the bloody repression of the Nazis and, later, that of the Hungarian communist government. Let's take a look at his story through a biography by Imre Lakatos.

Short biography of Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian thinker of the last century, known for his philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. He contributed to these disciplines especially with his thesis on the fallibility of mathematics, exposing his methodology on proofs and refutations, as well as introducing the concept of research programs in his methodology on research, elaboration and refutation of scientific theories. as well as introducing the concept of research programs in his methodology on the investigation, elaboration and refutation of scientific theories.

As a person born at the beginning of the 20th century, he witnessed great political changes in his native Hungary, as well as seeing how the European panorama was disturbed during the first half of that century, especially for the Jewish community of which he was a member. He narrowly escaped Nazism, but despite being a follower of communist theses he would not be spared the oppression of the communist regimes of the 1950s, forcing him to develop his intellectual activity abroad.

Early years

Imre Lakatos was born Imre (Avrum) Lipschitz on November 9, 1922 in Debrecen, Hungary, into a Jewish family of ancient origins. family of ancient origins. As a teenager he witnessed the rise of Nazism in Central Europe, which is why he changed his name to Imre Molnár, which sounded more purely Hungarian, to avoid being a victim of anti-Semitic persecution. Unfortunately, his mother and grandmother were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Well into World War II, Imre was active in the anti-Nazi resistance. took an active part in the anti-Nazi resistance, at which point he adopted the name by which he is known today: Imre Lakatos. "Lakatos, meaning "locksmith" in Hungarian, was adopted in honor of Géza Lakatos, a Hungarian general who succeeded in overthrowing a pro-Nazi government.

Although these times are turbulent and convulsive, this does not prevent Lakatos from beginning to study mathematics, physics and philosophy at the University of Debrecen, obtaining his first academic degree in 1944. It was at this time that he he begins to have his first contacts with the philosophy of what is scientific and how mathematics can be considered as an object of philosophy, both to understand its reliability and its reliability.both to understand its reliability and its falsifiability. A few years later, in 1948, he defended his doctoral thesis at the same institution.

At a time when Nazism was committing its bloodiest barbarities, any ideology contrary to it seemed to be salvation. It was probably for this reason that Lakatos saw in communism an ideology full of goodness, applauding its arrival in 1947. He became part of the new regime, working as a senior official in the Hungarian Ministry of Education.

In communist Hungary

With the end of World War II came what seemed to be a time of peace and cultural revival. Hungary was filled with new ideas, among them those of the Marxist philosopher Györy Luckács, who on Friday evenings gave his private seminars, seminars that Lakatos attended religiously. It seemed that Lakatos was going to enjoy more peaceful times than those of his youth.

Soon, however, all good fortune would vanish. After studying philosophy at Moscow State University in 1949 under Sofya Yanovskaya he was to receive an unpleasant surprise. Returning to his homeland he saw his friends evicted from the communist party and Hungarian governments.. Hungary became a satellite state of the USSR, and anyone who was contrary to official communism was considered a "revisionist", and so was Imre Lakatos, being imprisoned between 1950 and 1953.

After serving his sentence he devoted himself fully to academic activity, especially focusing on research in mathematics. He would also make some translations into Hungarian, such as that of his compatriot György Polya's book "How to solve it", originally written in English. He tried to progress academically as far as the regime would let him, despite governmental pressure..

Although Lakatos called himself a communist, his political views changed markedly, mainly because of his unjust imprisonment. This motivated him to join student groups critical of Hungary's status as a satellite state, which materialized in the Hungarian popular uprising of October 1956. The following month the following month the USSR invades Hungary to quell the uprising, which is why Lakatos decides to leave the country, traveling first to Vienna first to Vienna and then to England.

Life in England and final years

Although he arrived in England fleeing from a communist regime, his background as a supporter of that ideology prevented him from becoming a British citizen and he was denied British citizenship twice, which is why he remained stateless until the date of his death. Despite this impediment, he had a quite relevant academic life in his host country, being the place where he would not only develop much of his philosophy but also meet great thinkers of the time.

He was appointed professor at the London School of Economics in 1960, where he taught philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science.. In the philosophy department of this institution worked philosophers such as Karl Popper, Joseph Agassi and John Watkins, with whom he was able to discuss their views and understand their philosophies first hand. A year later he received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.

Under the title "Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge" he edited, together with Alan Musgrave, the topics discussed at the International Colloquium on the Philosophy of Science, held in London in 1965. This work, published in 1970, contains the opinions of important epistemologists on Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". A year later he was appointed editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science..

Lakatos continued to teach at the London School of Economics until his death, caused by a stroke on February 2, 1974. This same institution has been awarding the Lakatos Prize in his memory ever since. In 1976 "Proofs and Refutations" was published, a posthumous work by Imre Lakatos that brings together his philosophy of mathematics and science based on the works and lectures he gave during his lifetime, especially his doctoral work on English soil.

Proofs and refutations

Lakatos's philosophy of mathematics takes inspiration from both Hegel and Marx's dialectics, as well as Popper's theory of knowledge and the work of the mathematician Györy Polya.. Imre Lakatos expounds his particular philosophy in a curious way, resorting to a fictitious dialogue in a mathematics class in which students make several attempts to prove Euler's formula of algebraic topology.

This dialogue tries to represent all the historical attempts to prove this theorem on the properties of polyhedra, attempts that were invariably refuted by counterexamples. With it Lakatos tried to explain that no theorem of informal mathematics is perfect, and that it should not be thought that the theorem of the properties of polyhedra is perfect.and that one should not think that a theorem must be true simply because one has not succeeded in finding a counterexample.

Thus Lakatos proposes an approach to mathematical knowledge based on the idea of heuristics, an idea that he tries to put forward in his book "Proofs and refutations" which, although some consider it as an idea not fully developed, the philosopher is credited with having proposed some basic rules for finding proofs and counterexamples in conjectures.

Imre Lakatos considered mathematical thought experiments to be a valid way of discovering mathematical conjectures and proofs and sometimes referred to this philosophy as "quasi-empiricism". He considered that the community of mathematicians had engaged in a kind of dialectic to decide which mathematical proofs were valid and which were not.. He disagreed with the formalist idea of proofs that can be found in the works of Frege and Russell, who defined proofs in terms of formal validity.

Scientific research programs

One of Lakatos' most outstanding contributions to the philosophy of science has been his attempt to resolve the conflict between Popper's falsificationism and Kuhn's revolutionary structure of science.

It is often claimed that Popper's theory suggests that the scientist should discard a theory if he finds falsificationist evidence and replace it with new, more refined hypotheses. In contrast, Kuhn describes science as a body of knowledge that has consisted of periods of "normal science," in which scientists maintain their theories despite anomalies or not entirely viable data, interspersed with periods of profound conceptual change.

Popper recognized that certain new and apparently sound theories could become inconsistent with earlier theories that, although not as recent, were well grounded empirically. However, Kuhn maintained that even good scientists can ignore or discard evidence contrary to their theories, while Popper considered negative contrastation as something to be taken into account in order to modify or explain a theory.

Imre Lakatos wanted to find a methodology that would allow him to harmonize these two apparently contradictory points of view. A method that could give a rational description of scientific progress consistent with the historical record. He said that what we might normally consider as a "theory" could actually be a set of different theories with some differences but sharing a common idea: the hard core.

That part of these theories that was not fixed and unstable Lakatos called "research programs".. The scientist involved in a research program will try to shield the theoretical core from falsification attempts behind a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses, something Popper regarded as ad hoc hypotheses. Lakatos considered that developing such a protective belt was not necessarily detrimental to a research program.

Instead of asking whether a hypothesis is true or false, Lakatos believed that one should analyze whether one research program is better than another and what is rational for preferring it. In fact, he went so far as to show that in some cases a research program can be considered progressive, while its rivals can be degenerative. Progressive ones are evidenced by their growth and contribution of new hard facts, while degenerative ones are characterized by lack of growth.

In his work, Lakatos claimed that what he was doing was simply exposing Popper's ideas and how they had been developed over time. In fact, he differentiated between different Poppers: Popper 0, Popper 1 and Popper 2. Popper 0 was the rudimentary falsificationist, who existed only in the minds of critics and supporters who had not understood Popper's true ideas. These true ideas were understood as Popper 1, that which Popper actually wrote. Popper 2 was that same author but reinterpreted by his disciple Lakatos (Poppatos).

Lakatos agreed with Pierre Duhem's idea that one can always protect a belief against hostile evidence by redirecting criticism to other beliefs.. The falsificationist theory holds that scientists put forward theories and that, through inconsistent observation, that theory must be rejected when it is found not to correspond to reality or nature. Lakatos, on the other hand, considers that if a theory is proposed and it presents some inconsistency with nature, this inconsistency can be resolved without necessarily abandoning the research program or theory.

Lakatos asserted that a research program contains methodological rules, some of which instruct on aspects of research to avoid (negative heuristics) and some of which instruct on aspects to follow (positive heuristics). Positive heuristics widen the protective belt around the hard core, whereas negative heuristics involve adding auxiliary hypotheses to protect that same core against any possible refutation.

Lakatos stated that not all changes in the auxiliary hypotheses of a research program are equally acceptable. These changes must be evaluated both for their ability to explain refutations and to produce novel results. If both are achieved, the changes will be progressive. On the other hand, if they do not lead to new facts, they are only ad hoc or regressive hypotheses.