No experimental result can ever kill a theory: any theory can be saved from counterinstances either by some auxiliary hypothesis or by a suitable reinterpretation of its terms.

The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.

Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.

In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts

The history of mathematics, lacking the guidance of philosophy, [is] blind, while the philosophy of mathematics, turning its back on the most intriguing phenomena in the history of mathematics, is empty.

Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.

Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.