How is Lakatos's hard core of theoretical assumptions different than Kuhn's paradigm?

Question

Listening to a course on philosophy of science, Lakatos was presented as a middle way between Popper and the positivists strictly rational description of scientific theories and Kuhn's historical/social account scientific theories.

However going into the details, I fail to understand the difference between Lakatos's view and Kuhn's view of science.

Lakatos says that a scientific theory can be divided into two components:

• A hard core of principles or assumptions which form the basis of the theory. If these change then the theory is abandoned in favor of a new one.
• Auxiliary hypotheses which can be changed to make the theory compatible with new experimental results, while still upholding the core assumptions of the theory.

A theory is then in a progressive phase if the changes being made to the auxiliary hypotheses improve its predictive power and are being driven from within the theory. It is regressive (and hence in need of change) if the auxiliary changes are being made as responses to outside challenges which question the theory's validity.

From what I see, Lakatos's hard core corresponds to a Kuhnian paradigm, and his progressive phase is just Kuhn's normal puzzle solving mode of science. A theory in the regressive phase is just the crisis phase that precedes Kuhn's revolutionary science phase.

1. How exactly is Lakatos's description of science different from Kuhn's?
2. How is his concept of a hard core of assumptions different than Kuhn's paradigm?
3. What is common between Lakatos's view and Popper's view (as far as I can see there's no overlap) that makes Lakatos's approach a middle ground between Popper and Kuhn?

Answer 1

To my mind, Lakatos's approach does not resist Kuhn, or mediate between Kuhn and Popper. It fully accepts Kuhn, and just solves a problem in his framing (whether Lakatos himself saw it that way or not.) It allows for 'ongoing revolution'.

One main problem with Kuhn for a lot of people is that neither strictly normal nor strictly revolutionary science seems to happen very often. Normal scientists do tweak theories. Revolutions don't halt the ongoing process of normal science. There is always something halfway in-between.

Even in the most rigid periods of science, theories evolve and do not just elaborate. And even during clearly revolutionary periods, we see piecemeal advancement that remains dependent upon some of the old paradigm and yet usually gets integrated into the new one.

The awareness of Lakatos's 'divider' between 'the core and the mantle' of a paradigm, and the idea that it moves back and forth (or rather in and out), including more or less material in the core, allows for a notion of ongoing normal and revolutionary science to happen in parallel.