Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge

The published record of the 1965 London colloquium where Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend confronted each other's views on how science changes. Lakatos's contribution — the methodology of scientific research programmes — is the most lasting: a framework that mediates between Popper's falsificationism and Kuhn's paradigm shifts by showing how research programmes can be progressive or degenerating without requiring a single decisive experiment. For product direction the book is useful because the Kuhn-Popper debate maps directly onto how product organisations argue about evidence, learning and when to change course. Short papers, densely argued, worth the effort. The Lakatos essay alone justifies the book.