Editing Imre Lakatos (section)

===Pseudoscience===
According to the [[Demarcation problem|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).<ref>See/hear Lakatos's 1973 Open University BBC Radio talk [https://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/science-and-pseudoscience-overview-and-transcript ''Science and Pseudoscience'' ].</ref> 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&nbsp;... The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one." See pages 34–35 of ''The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes'', 1978.

Lakatos's own key examples of pseudoscience were [[Ptolemaic system|Ptolemaic]] astronomy, [[Immanuel Velikovsky]]'s planetary cosmogony, [[Freud]]ian [[psychoanalysis]], 20th-century [[Soviet Marxism|''Soviet'' Marxism]],<ref>Lakatos notably only condemned specifically ''Soviet'' Marxism as pseudoscientific, as opposed to Marxism in general. In fact, at the very end of his last LSE lectures on Scientific Method in 1973, he finished by posing the question of whether [[Trotsky]]'s theoretical development of Marxism was scientific, and commented that "Nobody has ever undertaken a critical history of Marxism with the aid of better methodological and historiographical instruments. Nobody has ever tried to find an answer to questions like: were Trotsky's unorthodox predictions simply patching up a badly degenerating programme, or did they represent a creative development of Marx's programme? To answer similar questions, we would really need a detailed analysis which takes years of work. So I simply do not know the answer, even if I am very interested in it." [Motterlini 1999, p. 109] However, in his 1976 ''On the Critique of Scientific Reason'' Feyerabend claimed that [[Vladimir Lenin]]'s development of Marxism in his auxiliary theory of colonial exploitation had been "Lakatos-scientific" because it was "accompanied by a wealth of novel predictions (the arrival and structure of monopolies being one of them)". And he continued by claiming that both Rosa Luxemburg's and Trotsky's developments of Marxism were close to what Lakatos regarded as scientific: "And whoever has read Rosa Luxemburg's reply to Bernstein's criticism of Marx or Trotsky's account of why the Russian Revolution took place in a backward country (cf. also Lenin [1968], vol. 19, pp. 99ff.) will see that Marxists are pretty close to what Lakatos would like any upstanding rationalist to do&nbsp;..." [See footnote 9 of p. 315 of Howson (ed.) 1976].</ref> [[Lysenkoism|Lysenko's biology]], [[Niels Bohr]]'s quantum mechanics post-1924, [[astrology]], [[psychiatry]], and [[neoclassical economics]].

====Darwin's theory====
In his 1973 Scientific Method Lecture 1<ref>Published in ''For and Against Method: Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend'' by Matteo Motterlini (ed.), University of Chicago Press, 1999.</ref> 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 [[Charles Darwin|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
<blockquote>
our usual idea of corroboration as requiring the successful prediction of novel facts&nbsp;... Darwinian theory was not strong on temporally novel predictions.&nbsp;... however familiar the evidence and whatever role it played in the construction of the theory, it still confirms the theory.<ref>Cronin, H., ''The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today'', Cambridge University Press, 1993. pp. [https://books.google.com/books?id=y0wTY3z3nggC&q=%22For+darwinian+theory%2C+the+evidence%22 31–32].</ref>
</blockquote>