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Ad Title: Lakatos Award 2022
Contact: LSE Philosophy
Email: philosophy@lse.ac.uk
Description:
LAKATOS AWARD 2022

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2022 Lakatos Award, which goes to Catarina Dutilh Novaes for her book The Dialogical Roots of Deduction (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

The Lakatos Award was made possible by a generous endowment from the Latsis Foundation, in memory of the former LSE professor Imre Lakatos. It is administered by an international Management Committee, which is organised from the LSE but entirely independent of LSE’s Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. The Committee decides the outcome of the Award competition on the basis of advice from an anonymous panel of selectors who produce detailed reports on the shortlisted books.

The prize winner will receive their Award and deliver their prize lecture at the LSE at a time and location to be confirmed later. The lecture will be open to the public.

The Dialogical Roots of Deduction is praised by the Selectors as a “masterwork” that is “absolutely fascinating” and in which “we have a breath-taking amount of knowledge revealed”: “the knowledge is breath-taking, the argument original, and the whole is an intellectual feat”. The book “develops a coherent, compelling and broadly articulated account of large parts of human reasoning that has wide relevance to understanding science as a particular development of human reason.” The book offers a “very intriguing, erudite, and potentially highly productive argument, namely that deduction is fundamentally a dialogical and collaborative phenomenon, and hence is not the outcome of individual activities based on rules or logic with reasoners in competition with each other, but instead should be viewed as a social activity.” In making this point, “the book clearly makes a very important contribution to our understandings of logic and mathematical reasoning”.

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Nominations are invited for the 2023 Lakatos Award, with a strict deadline of Thursday 1 September 2022. The 2023 award will be for a monograph in the philosophy of science broadly construed, either single authored or co-authored, published in English with an imprint from 2017 to 2022, inclusive. Anthologies and edited collections are not eligible. Any person of recognised standing within the philosophy of science or an allied field may nominate a book. Nominations must include a statement explaining the nominator’s reasons for regarding the book prizeworthy. Self-nominations are not allowed.

Please address nominations, or any requests for further information, to the Award Administrator, Tom Hinrichsen, at t.a.hinrichsen@lse.ac.uk.

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Imre Lakatos, who died in 1974 aged 51, had been Professor of Logic with special reference to the Philosophy of Mathematics at the LSE since 1969. He joined the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in 1960. Born in Hungary in 1922, he graduated (in Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy) from Debrecen University in 1944. He then joined the underground resistance. (His mother and grandmother perished in Auschwitz.) After the War, he was active in the Communist Party and had an influential position in the Ministry of Education. In 1950 he was arrested and spent the next three years as a political prisoner. After his release, he was given refuge in the Hungarian Academy of Science where he translated western works in science and mathematics into Hungarian. After the suppression of the Hungarian uprising he escaped to Vienna and from there, with the aid of a Rockefeller Fellowship, on to Cambridge, England. He there wrote his (second) doctoral thesis out of which grew his famous Proofs and Refutations (CUP, 1976, edited by John Worrall and Elie Zahar). Two volumes of Philosophical Papers, edited by John Worrall and Gregory Currie, appeared in 1978, also from CUP.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/lakatos-award/