What do the Marxist “Dialectics of Cognition” and Lakatos’s “Sophisticated Falsificationism” Have in Common?

Abstract

The article shows that Marxist dialectics and the social philosophy of science, whose influence was obvious in Imre Lakatos's early philosophical experiments, underwent substantial reinterpretation during the mature period of his creative activity. Being implicit heuristic sources of his "sophisticated falsificationism" or methodology of scientific research programs, they take on a conceptual form in which they lose the "excess" of authentic contents. Therefore, the philosophical views of "mature Lakatos" may be called close to the Marxist philosophy of science only with many important reservations and specifications.