Beyond Footnotes: Lakatos’s meta-philosophy and the history of science, in: R. Frigg, J. Alexander, L. Hudetz, M. Rédei, L. Ross, and J. Worrall (eds.): Proofs and Research Programmes: Lakatos at 100. Synthese Library, vol 498. Springer, 2025 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-88213-5_11

In this chapter I revisit Lakatos’s meta-philosophy concerning the use of historical facts for the purpose of philosophical theorizing about science. Despite Lakatos’s bad reputation on that question—which mostly springs from his suggestion that the actual history could be detailed in the footnotes of texts of rational reconstructions of science—Lakatos in fact had quite reasonable things to say about the meta-philosophy of science. In particular, Lakatos’s writings contain the idea that any philosophical methodology of science should aim at the maximization of rationally explainable facts, albeit without pretence to ever be able to explain all historical facts as rational. I will discuss this idea in the light of the contemporary meta-philosophical literature. Finally, I assess how Lakatos’s own account of science -- namely the methodology of research programmes -- fares in the light of his meta-philosophical criteria, by comparing it to Kuhn’s, account.