Definition
Lakatosův výzkumný program (Lakatosian research programme, MSRP) is the methodology of science developed by Imre Lakatos in The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (1978) as a refinement of Popperian falsifikace. Lakatos accepted the Quine-Duhem point that single hypotheses are not tested in isolation, but rejected the relativist conclusion. Instead he reconstructed scientific practice as the development of research programmes with three structural elements:
- Hard core — a small set of fundamental claims treated as not directly subject to refutation; the identity of the programme.
- Protective belt — auxiliary hypotheses that absorb empirical conflict and can be revised without abandoning the programme.
- Heuristic — positive (paths of theory development) and negative (which moves are forbidden) rules that constrain belt revision.
The decisive innovation is the progressive vs. degenerative distinction:
- A progressive problem-shift introduces auxiliary hypotheses that predict novel facts not previously known — empirical content increases with the rescue.
- A degenerative problem-shift introduces auxiliary hypotheses solely to neutralize counter-evidence, with no novel predictions — empirical content decreases (or stays constant) with the rescue.
The same protective move ("we add the assumption that X") can be either, depending on whether it is content-increasing or content-decreasing. Lakatos's criterion is therefore diachronic (judged over time, by track record) rather than synchronic (judged at the moment).
Within the Kompendium epistemické a kognitivní anihilace, MSRP is the canonical tool for distinguishing legitimate epistemic conservation from EA-1.3.1 immunization. EA-1.3.1 patterns are exactly degenerative shifts: every counter-evidence triggers a content-empty belt-revision that preserves the hard core but generates no new predictions. Legitimate science also revises auxiliaries — but the revisions are progressive: they specify new observable consequences that were not implied before.
Context
Within the Prismatic Platform, Lakatos's distinction is operationalized as a content-delta metric on belief revisions:
- The Decision Engine tracks every revision to a belief's auxiliary structure and computes the content delta — does the revision generate new testable predictions, or only neutralize the prior counter-evidence? Revisions with negative or zero content-delta are flagged as candidate degenerative shifts and weight the belief's calibration score downward.
- NABLA Infinity maintains per-belief auxiliary-hypothesis ledgers with timestamps and prediction registrations, so the progressive/degenerative judgment can be made post-hoc against the actual record rather than against narrative reconstruction.
- The Color Teams Red Team explicitly seeds platform reasoning with degenerative-shift patterns to verify that the content-delta gating intercepts them before they harden into kognitivní anti-rekurzivita.
- The complement is the honest hard-core declaration: the platform requires explicit identification of which beliefs are core (not subject to single-evidence revision) versus belt (revisable). Concealed hard cores — beliefs that behave as hard core while being presented as evidence-driven — are a documented EA pattern.
The MSRP framework also clarifies why naïve falsificationism fails as a defense: any practitioner can rescue a theory by belt-revision, and the question is not whether a rescue is permitted but what kind of rescue. The Decision Engine therefore does not flag rescue per se — it flags rescues whose track record is degenerative. Czech-language treatment: /kompendium/04-mechanismy/lakatos/.
See Also
- Falsifikace — Predecessor framework refined by Lakatos
- Epistemická anihilace — Threat model whose EA-1.3.1 is precisely degenerative shift
- Konfirmační bias — Underlying vulnerability
- Taxonomie EA — Maps degenerative patterns to specific codes
- Hermeneutika — Distinct legitimate framework for non-empirical revision
- Kognitivní anti-rekurzivita — Hardened endpoint of degenerative pattern
- Kompendium EA — Full taxonomy
- Kompendium — Czech-language reference
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Created by Tomáš Korcak (korczis) | Open Source under GHL