Editing Paradigm (section)

===Imre Lakatos and research programmes===
However, many instances exist in which change in a discipline's core model of reality has happened in a more evolutionary manner, with individual scientists exploring the usefulness of alternatives in a way that would not be possible if they were constrained by a paradigm. [[Imre Lakatos]] suggested (as an alternative to Kuhn's formulation) that scientists actually work within [[Imre Lakatos#Research programmes|research programmes]].<ref>[16] Lakatos, I. (1970), ''"Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes", '' in Lakatos, I. and Musgrave, A. (eds.) (1990), ''Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge.'' Cambridge.</ref> In Lakatos' sense, a research programme is a sequence of problems, placed in order of priority. This set of priorities, and the associated set of preferred techniques, is the '''positive heuristic''' of a programme. Each programme also has a '''negative heuristic'''; this consists of a set of fundamental assumptions that – temporarily, at least – takes priority over observational evidence when the two appear to conflict.

This latter aspect of research programmes is inherited from Kuhn's work on paradigms,{{citation needed|date=July 2012}} and represents an important departure from the elementary account of [[Scientific method|how science works]]. According to this, science proceeds through repeated cycles of observation, induction, hypothesis-testing, etc., with the test of consistency with [[empirical evidence]] being imposed at each stage. Paradigms and research programmes allow anomalies to be set aside, where there is reason to believe that they arise from incomplete knowledge (about either the substantive topic, or some aspect of the theories implicitly used in making observations).