 Lakatos and his followers (e.g., Worrall 1988, 1989) conceived MSRP as a fixed and final methodology by contrast with Kuhn’s, Toulmin’s, and (eventually) Laudan’s changing methodologies. The idea that all previous history of science was working up to this final methodology that Lakatos was first to divine—the end-of-history for methodology, so to speak—was one of the broadly Hegelian themes in Lakatos’s work. Another was that there is no instant rationality as proposed by the formal approaches of standard confirmation theory. Writes Daniel Little (in the entry on  philosophy of history)  “Hegel finds reason in history; but it is a latent reason, and one that can only be comprehended when the fullness of history’s work is finished… ”. The owl of Minerva flies out at dusk. For Lakatos rational judgments can only be made retrospectively. For example, one cannot judge an experiment as crucial at the time it occurs, only in historical retrospect (1970: 154ff). Appraisals are made with hindsight. (See the entry on  Lakatos.)