Degenerating Research Programme

A degenerating research programme, in Imre Lakatos's methodology, is one whose theoretical development consists increasingly of ad hoc adjustments designed to protect a central hard core from falsification, rather than the generation of novel predictions. Where a progressive programme expands into new empirical territory, a degenerating programme shrinks into defensive maneuvers — explaining away anomalies rather than predicting them. The diagnosis is not that the hard core is false, but that the programme has lost its heuristic power and become a self-sealing system.

The systems-theoretic reframing: degeneration is not a property of theories but a network property of the institutional ecosystem surrounding them. A programme degenerates when the costs of abandoning it exceed the benefits of continuing it — when tenure lines, funding streams, and professional identities are so densely coupled to the programme's hard core that revision becomes structurally impossible. The programme does not die because it is wrong. It dies when its adherents do.