Editing Falsifiability (section)

===Ahistorical versus historiographical===

{{main|Imre Lakatos#Research programmes}}
Section {{slink||Methodless creativity versus inductive methodology}} says that both Lakatos's and Popper's methodology are not inductive. Yet Lakatos's methodology extended importantly Popper's methodology: it added a historiographical component to it. This allowed Lakatos to find corroborations for his methodology in the history of science. The basic units in his methodology, which can be abandoned or pursued, are research programmes. Research programmes can be degenerative or progressive and only degenerative research programmes must be abandoned at some point. For Lakatos, this is mostly corroborated by facts in history.

In contradistinction, Popper did not propose his methodology as a tool to reconstruct the history of science. Yet, some times, he did refer to history to corroborate his methodology. For example, he remarked that theories that were considered great successes were also the most likely to be falsified. Zahar's view was that, with regard to corroborations found in the history of science, there was only a difference of emphasis between Popper and Lakatos.

As an anecdotal example, in one of his articles Lakatos challenged Popper to show that his theory was falsifiable: he asked "Under what conditions would you give up your demarcation criterion?".{{sfn|Lakatos|1974|p=245}} Popper replied "I shall give up my theory if Professor Lakatos succeeds in showing that Newton's theory is no more falsifiable by 'observable states of affairs' than is Freud's."{{sfn|Popper|1974|p=1010}} According to David Stove, Lakatos succeeded, since Lakatos showed there is no such thing as a "non-Newtonian" behaviour of an observable object. Stove argued that Popper's counterexamples to Lakatos were either instances of [[begging the question]], such as Popper's example of missiles moving in a "non-Newtonian track", or consistent with Newtonian physics, such as objects not falling to the ground without "obvious" countervailing forces against Earth's gravity.{{sfn|Stove|1982|p=92}}