 If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power. |
| The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies. |
| Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime. |
| Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind. |
| Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism. |
| The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology. |
| Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge. |
| Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one. |
| There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory. |
| Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic. |
| The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever. |
| It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached. |
