Imre Lakatos: biography of this Hungarian philosopher

Imre Lakatos was a philosopher and mathematician known for his philosophy of mathematics and science. He worked as a researcher and academic 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 being his family of Jewish origin, having they have to manage to avoid the bloody repression of the Nazis and, later, that of the communist government Hungarian. Let's see his story through a biography of Imre Lakatos.

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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 theses on the fallibility of mathematics, exposing his methodology on proofs and refutations. at the same time introducing the concept of research programs in his methodology on the investigation, elaboration and refutation of scientific theories.

As a character born at the beginning of the 20th century, he witnessed great political changes in his native Hungary, in addition to seeing how the The European scene was clouded during the first half of that century, especially for the Jewish community of which he formed part. He was narrowly spared from Nazism, but despite being followers of communist theses, he would not be spared from the oppression of Nazism. the communist regimes of the 1950s, forcing him to develop his intellectual activity abroad.

Early years

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

Well into the Second World War, Imre He actively participated in the anti-Nazi resistance, this being the moment in which he would adopt the name by which we know him today: Imre Lakatos. "Lakatos", whose Hungarian meaning is "locksmith", he adopted in honor of Géza Lakatos, a Hungarian general who managed to overthrow a pro-Nazi government.

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

At a time when Nazism was committing its bloodiest atrocities, any ideology contrary to it seemed to be salvation. Surely it was for this reason that Lakatos saw in communism an ideology full of benefits, 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 like a time of peace and cultural revival. Hungary was filled with new ideas, including those of the Marxist philosopher Györy Luckács who Friday night he dictated his private seminars, seminars Lakatos attended regularly. religious. It seemed that Lakatos was going to enjoy more peaceful times than those of his youth.

However, soon all good luck would fade. After studying philosophy at Moscow State University in 1949 under Sofya Yanovskaya, he would receive an unpleasant surprise. Returning to his homeland, he saw that his friends were evicted from the communist party and Hungarian governments.. Hungary became a satellite state of the USSR, and anyone who was against communism The officer was considered a “revisionist”, and thus Imre Lakatos was considered, 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 do some Hungarian translations, such as his compatriot György Polya's book "How to solve it", originally written in English. He tried to progress academically within what the regime allowed him, despite government pressure.

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

Life in England and last years

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

He was appointed as a professor at the London School of Economics in 1960, where he developed his work teaching philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science.. Philosophers such as Karl Popper, Joseph Agassi and John Watkins, with whom he was able to discuss his views and understand first-hand his philosophies. A year later he received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.

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

Lakatos continued teaching at the London School of Economics until his death, caused by a stroke on February 2, 1974. This same institution has since awarded the Lakatos Prize in memory of him. In 1976 "Proofs and Refutations" would be published, a posthumous work by Imre Lakatos that brings together his philosophy of mathematics and science based on the works and conferences that he did in life, especially his work as a doctor in soil English.

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Proofs and refutations

Lakatos 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 exposes his particular philosophy in a curious way, resorting to a fictitious dialogue in a class of mathematics in which students make several attempts to prove Euler's formula for topology algebraic.

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 him Lakatos tried to explain that no theorem of informal mathematics is perfect, and that one should not think that a theorem has to be true simply because a counterexample has not been found.

Thus Lakatos proposes an approach to mathematical knowledge based on the idea of ​​heuristics, an idea that he tries to expose in his book "Proofs and refutations" that, although there are those who consider it as an idea not fully developed, the philosopher is recognized for having proposed some basic rules to find proofs and counterexamples in the conjectures.

Imre Lakatos considered mathematical thought experiments to be a valid way to discover mathematical conjectures and proofs and, on some occasions, he referred to this philosophy as "Quasi-empiricism". He considered that the mathematician community had carried out a kind of dialectic to decide which mathematical proofs were valid and which were not.. He disagrees with the formalist idea of ​​tests that can be found in the works of Frege and Russel, who defined tests in terms of formal validity.

Scientific research programs

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

On many occasions it is stated that Popper's theory suggests that the scientist must rule out a theory if it finds falsificationist evidence and that it should replace it with new, more refined. In contrast, Kuhn describes science as a body of knowledge that has consisted of periods of "normal sciences", in which the Scientists maintain their theories despite having anomalies or not entirely viable data, interspersed with periods of conceptual changes deep.

Popper recognized that certain new and apparently solid theories could become inconsistent with earlier theories that, although not so recent, were well founded empirically. However, Kuhn argued that even good scientists can ignore or discard evidence contrary to their theories, while Popper considered negative testing as something to take into account to modify or explain a theory.

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

That of those 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 the attempts to falsification behind a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses, something that Popper considered as hypotheses ad hoc. Lakatos considered that developing such a protective belt was not necessarily detrimental to a research program.

Instead of asking if a hypothesis is true or false, Lakatos considered that it should be analyzed whether one research program is better than another and what is rational to prefer it. He actually went on to show that in some cases a research program can be considered progressive, while his rivals can be degenerative. In the progressive ones, their growth and contribution of new forceful facts is evident, while the 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 developed over time. In fact, he differentiated between different Poppers: Popper 0, Popper 1, and Popper 2. Popper 0 was the rudimentary falsificationist, existing only in the minds of critics and supporters who had not understood Popper's true ideas. These true ideas were understood as Popper 1, what Popper actually wrote. Popper 2 was the 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 towards other beliefs. The falsificationist theory holds that scientists expound theories and that, through observation inconsistent, this theory should be rejected as it does not correspond to reality or nature. Lakatos, on the other hand, considers that if a theory is proposed and that it presents some inconsistency with the nature, this inconsistency can be resolved without necessarily abandoning the research program or theory.

Lakatos stated that a research program contains methodological rules, some of which instruct on the aspects research to avoid (negative heuristic) and some that instruct on the aspects to follow (heuristic positive). The positive heuristic widens the protective belt around the hard nucleus, while the negative one implies adding auxiliary hypotheses. to protect that very core against any possible rebuttal.

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 rebuttals 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.