A research program (

British English British English is the set of Variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom, especially Great Britain. More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to ...

: research programme) is a professional network of scientists conducting basic research. The term was used by

philosopher of science Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...

Imre Lakatos to blend and revise the normative model of science offered by

Karl Popper Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian–British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the ...

's '' The Logic of Scientific Discovery'' (with its idea of

falsifiability Falsifiability (or refutability) is a deductive standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses, introduced by the Philosophy of science, philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book ''The Logic of Scientific Discovery'' (1934). ...

) and the descriptive model of science offered by Thomas Kuhn's '' The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' (with its ideas of normal science and paradigm shifts).Imre Lakatos, auth, John Worrall & Gregory Currie, eds
''The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers''
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) Lakatos found falsificationism impractical and often not practiced, and found normal science—where a paradigm of science, mimicking an exemplar, extinguishes differing perspectives—more monopolistic than actual. Lakatos found that many research programs coexisted. Each had a ''hard core'' of theories immune to revision, surrounded by a ''protective belt'' of malleable theories., ch 4 "Post-positivist philosophy of science", subch "Lakatosian research programmes", pp 60-63 A research programme vies against others to be most ''progressive''. Extending the research program's theories into new domains is ''theoretical progress'', and experimentally corroborating such is ''empirical progress'', always refusing falsification of the research program's hard core. A research program might ''degenerate''—lose progressiveness—but later return to progressiveness.

References

Examples

United States Global Change Research Program

World Climate Research Programme
program Concepts in the philosophy of science {{Science-philo-stub