Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science

Revolutions in Science

by Steve Fuller, John Turney (Editor)

Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" has sold over a million copies in more than twenty languages and has remained one of the ten most cited academic works for the past half century. In contrast, Karl Popper's seminal book "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" has lapsed into relative obscurity. Although the two men debated the nature of science only once, the legacy of this encounter has dominated intellectual and public discussions on the topic ever since.

Almost universally recognized as the modern watershed in the philosophy of science, Kuhn's relativistic vision of shifting paradigms--which asserted that science was just another human activity, like art or philosophy, only more specialized--triumphed over Popper's more positivistic belief in science's revolutionary potential to falsify society's dogmas. But has this victory been beneficial for science? Steve Fuller argues that not only has Kuhn's dominance had an adverse impact on the field but both thinkers have been radically misinterpreted in the process. This debate raises a vital question: Can science remain an independent, progressive force in society, or is it destined to continue as the technical wing of the military-industrial complex? Drawing on original research--including the Kuhn archives at MIT--Fuller offers a clear account of "Kuhn vs. Popper" and what it will mean for the future of scientific inquiry.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, History Of Science, Physics, History

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Steve Fuller graduated from Columbia University in History & Sociology before gaining an MPhil from Cambridge and PhD from Pittsburgh (1985), both in History and Philosophy of Science. He currently holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick.

He is the founder of the research program of social epistemology. It is the name of a quarterly journal he founded with Taylor & Francis in 1987, as well as the first of his more than twenty books. His most recent work has been concerned with the future of humanity, or 'Humanity 2.0'.

Reviews

[Nick Wellings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice introduction to the thoughts and consequences of each man's philosophical project. As some reviewers say, the 'struggle' of the title isn't quite shown. Fuller's treatment is quite measured, but tinged I think with a little of his own bias. (
I may be mistaken here though but Fuller does rehabilitate Popper a little. One gets the impression that he sees him as unfairly maligned and unjustly neglected. (I detected a little 'hero/villain' Popper as underdog vibe in Fuller's treatment.)

Stronger, the author has no compunction in trying to burst some hagiographical bubbles surrounding Kuhn, impugning (I wanted to say im-Kuhn-ing) him for his intellectual quiescence - his reluctance to engage with legacy of his (and his disciples') thought in the social and scientific arena.

In this regard, Fuller compares how opinion has come to regard Heidegger: orthodoxy largely excuses his Nazism whilst celebrating his thought. Orthodoxy excuses Kuhn's apparent consent for rightist authority, his passivity and lack of support for leftist politics by the same method: in celebrating his ideas his personality is eclipsed.

Fuller says that Kuhn saw himself near the end of his life as a lucky amateur. One gets the impression (I may easily be mistaken) that later life finds Kuhn a kind of sad Pandora trying in vain to cram his "revolutionary ideas" back into their jar. One may say in Kuhn's defence that though a man (or yes, a woman too) may birth an idea larger than himself, once the idea has grown beyond his tutelage or paternal sway, he can do little to oversee its decisions. The pain and pleasure of parenthood (intellectual parenthood too) one imagines, is that ones' children grow up to be autonomous in existence: thriving precisely because of happy support from friends and peers. Nevertheless, might an admonishing word, a carefully weighted glance have served to cause self reflection? Fuller suggests the history of science and indeed, perhaps the current condition of science as a largely commercialised, 'practical results' orientated enterprise, might have been different had Kuhn been less reticent as he watched his child overtop him and had Popper succeeded in politicising his vision for science as a viable alternative in the epistemic ecosystem. Fuller introduces the idea of 'negative responsibility' here and I'd not encountered the concept before. He also explains why Kuhn found his alma mater conducive to his thought, and how Government found his thought conducive to legitimising the role of knowledge as necessary to further military/industrial aspirations.

Though Kuhn and Popper naturally receive a lot of attention here, Fuller also dips into exploring Feyerabend, Lakatos, Adorno and Habermas. Richard Rorty gets a few pages for how he came to excuse Heidegger as person whilst raising him to status as philosopher ne plus ultra. So too do we encounter Foucault whose 'histories of the present' were adopted quickly at roughly the same time as Kuhn, but (critically says Fuller,) Foucault is careful to stand by his doctrines and opinions. Foucault was vocal in his presentation of marginalised voices - a writer who unlike Kuhn, actively courted interviews and approached rebuttal of criticism as method to promulgate his own opinions and the consequences following from their publication.

Reading the history and thought of both men, it is for me as if Kuhn tossed a stone into 'intellectual circles' or 'academia' and was content to turn his back and walk away, leaving the ripples to swell and muddy and merge. We are still feeling the effects of that stone, those ripples. Harder will be not to merely wait until they become past history, vanished to leave smooth water and unruffled traces: harder it will be to, like Foucault or Feyerabend - or like Popper himself - realise that though we may be in such a stone-tossed pond, we may yet try to ride the wavelets, try to alter our course, try and steer into the swell because it is right and brave. But won't that merely mean a paradigm shift? I can't say. It depends on who your guru is.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up to read along with Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" because it seemed to present an argument against Kuhn and in the defense of another philosopher of science, Karl Popper. After reading about Kuhn's paradigms, I wanted another viewpoint about his ideas.

This book was exactly that. The author clearly sympathizes with Popper, whose ideas were apparently not as widespread or accepted as Kuhn's were. The ideas against Kuhn were interesting and plausible most of the time, however, I think the book would have been better for me had I been more familiar with Popper.

For more information on Kuhn's ideas, see my review of "The structure of Scientific Revolutions". Popper as opposed to Kuhn, is famous for delineating the idea of "Falsificationism" in science. That is, science can't really prove that things are, only that they aren't something else. The author uses this fact to liken Popper to democracy, continually finding fault with itself in a constructive and progressive way, whereas later in the book, Kuhn gets analogized to the Nazis. (Nazis?? Yeah. He went there.) The author claims that Kuhn takes a "winner takes it all" attitude and implies that that is somehow less democratic, fair, and right. Additionally, he claims that Kuhn encourages scientists not to think outside the box, and to only stay within the current paradigm.

The problem, though, is that I'm not sure that Kuhn really wanted everyone to take his ideas and live within them. That is, I'm sure he believed that his paradigms and revolutions were what actually happened and will continue to happen throughout history, but I don't know if he wanted everyone to be aware of this and change their own philosophies accordingly. His book seemed more like a history of what inevitably happens, not a plea for everyone to change how they think. I'm not sure, I'm not an expert on Kuhn, or Popper. Still, the author's arguments against Kuhn's popularity were interesting, even if they did often sound like they came from a school yard.

"Mom, Kuhn's creating paradigms again!"

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 2003 polemic by Professor Steve Fuller was part of an excellent short series on key moments in the history of science from Icon Books which attempted to popularise the subject for the mass market while retaining intellectual integrity. In nearly all cases, it worked admirably.

I have problems with this particular book that I thought were down to my own ignorance and even stupidity but which, by the end, I realised were perhaps not and that the flaws in the book meant that it had failed the Icon mission as far as us 'great unwashed' were concerned.

It is a polemic and, in being a polemic, it has an angle. Having an angle is all well and good but not when you are introducing a subject to the general public rather than arguing with your peers. And it is also a polemic from a fairly rarefied 'historical epistemological' perspective.

This is not to say that it does not have insights into the philosophy of science and what this means for the handling of scientific endeavour in society and in history. There are moments when it engages and when it engages, one questions and learns.

It is almost certainly a valuable text for someone already engaged with philosophical questions who has the language to hand or someone actively engaged in science policy - and perhaps Fuller was, in fact, writing for them - but it could be obscure to the rest of us.

At one point, I did start to wonder whether I was a Kuhnian or a Popperian but came out more muddled than wiser since I saw the respective positions as possibly talking about very different things and the polemic therefore missing its mark.

Thinking about this, I came to the conclusion that Fuller had tried to do two things -polemicise and educate - and so failed at both. His polemic was no doubt a valuable contribution to the wider debate but, if so, he should have produced a well argued significant work outside the Icon format.

What seems to have happened is that he wanted to pack dense arguments and lots of ideas into a relatively short space. There are far too many places where the reader is assumed to know more than he or she does or where he uses unexplained technical language.

Even bright generalists may soon get lost as one lucid passage (for example the actual description of the only direct debate betwen the two men and its context) elides into something that we know is connected but we can't quite see how it is connected without an awful lot of hard work.

The polemic also creates the suspicion that the hard work that might be necessary to really understand what Fuller is saying might not be the best use of time - this is the trust issue involved in all polemics - and so the generalist is liable to skitter through frustrated.

Nevertheless, the polemical thesis - which might be reinterpreted as a somewhat grumpy view from an academic with difficulty getting his own paradigm accepted - that (as I understood it) we should look at scientific endeavour with a sociologist's eye has its merits.

I was not persuaded. however, that the weight of history should be quite so heavily placed on men like Kuhn, Popper, Heidegger, Adorno and Rorty. The critiques of these men by Fuller strike me as intelligent and useful but the way their moral responsibility is dragged into the matter less so.

Fuller appears to me to be part of a particular school of thinking that treats the Enlightenment as a moral project rather than simply offering an effective tool kit for humans whose morality is more contingent than that and derives from something essentially social and irrational.

Throughout the book, there is an undercurrent of the permanent-normative. You can tell he instinctively dislikes Heidegger for 'moral' reasons and feels almost personally affronted that so many people, like me in fact, admire his work regardless of his position on national socialism.

Similarly, he is kind to Adorno as I would not be and his view of Kuhn is clearly linked to some underlying sense that somehow he is responsible for the American military-industrial complex rather than a one-trick pony who rode the wave of intellectual fashion at a particular time.

By shifting moral responsibility from the people who use the tools to the people who create the tools, Fuller makes the mistake of a particular line of progressive thinking that places responsibility in elites alone and treats the mass as just so much matter to be worked.

This is the 'Guardian' approach to politics where there is moral responsibility on intellectuals to consider consequences yet under conditions where you cannot possibly know what the consequences can be of any one act or thought or conversation.

One can be precautionary and try to be wise before the event based on experience but, at the end of the day, over-caution leads to social sclerosis and responsibility really has to be shifted back to the tool-users and to those who are being worked on ... we the people.

The patrician-intellectual approach of Fuller's brand of progressivism is implicit rather than explicit here and perhaps works against Popper's primary concern which is to have all of us thinking about the conditions of our existence rather than have thinking done for us.

Such personal responsibility amongst those on whom the tools are used - who might otherwise be lemmings or turkeys voting for Christmas - does not require that philosophers be better than us but only that they be subject to the same critical thinking that they apply to the world.

Kuhn's 'paradigm' model can be recast as just a useful tool for ordering thinking. Fuller is right to raise doubts about its truth value and to ask us to question whether we over-use the tool or use it improperly or use it as cover for self or special interest.

He is also right to reintroduce Popper as a much more complex and varied thinker than the simplistic view of him as merely a critic of closed societies. He recovers him as a man of the 'Left' and as more complex in that context than the widespread current view.

But Fuller also has a particular political stance which he does not make clear in the book but only alludes to and I found this irritating, as if the totality of the book was designed to manipulate me into a particular moral stance with political implications but without full facts.

So, an intelligent but obscure book that fails to hit its mark but which, no doubt, students of the philosophy and history of science or those already educated in philosophy (but, I hope, with a critical eye) may find useful.

Personally, not being 'moral' or particularly sympathetic to Fuller's puritanical vision of progressive thinking, I simply was not prepared to put the work into the text that the author demanded. I insist on being a 'cavalier' Leftist, no doubt much to the irritation of his faction.

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Update: Fuller tweeted regarding this review, saying "This is actually quite a good review of my book from 15 years ago -- precisely because it seems to have got under its author's skin in just the right way." Take that how you will.

The original review:
The only good aspect of this book is that it's short. In Chapter 6, Fuller quotes Feyerabend as:

Kuhn’s ideas are interesting but, alas, they are much too vague to give rise to anything but lots of hot air. Never before has the literature on the philosophy of science been invaded by so many creeps and incompetents. Kuhn encourages people who have no idea why a stone falls to the ground to talk with assurance about the scientific method. Now I have no objection to incompetence but I do object when incompetence is accompanied by boredom and self-righteousness.

I'm taking the inclusion of this as some kind of Freudian slip, where Fuller accidentally includes a devastating critical description of his own book. It's fine to not like a philosopher, but this was such a hatchet job for the most part, it's hard to believe this isn't some elaborate spoof of science studies.

To be fair to Fuller, there is one legitimate criticism of Kuhn he actually does make, which is that Kuhn focuses too much on the "internal history" of science, which takes what scientists are doing and saying at face value, ignoring the broader context and effects of science:

Even when writing about scientific experiments, [the Kuhnian's] focus remained fixed on the role of experiments in generating data, solving puzzles or testing theories – not on their material character as, say, an economist concerned with ‘externalities’ would treat experiments. In particular, he made a point of not asking whether the instruments used in experiments were inspired and/or applied in a military-industrial setting outside the experimental context.

This is a real and serious charge because, although Kuhn doesn't, it actually is important to consider the role science plays in society, given its prestige and ability to supplement the power of those who can shape and wield it. That's not unfair. There really does need to be serious thought about professionalization, the role university-centred academic practices shape science, the ways in which the needs of industry stealthily hijack the agenda, etc. If this was all Fuller had written about, this would have been a pretty good book.

The problem is that Fuller takes this legitimate criticism that there are aspects of science Kuhn does not take seriously, and warps it into a total denunciation of everything he stood for. Which isn't necessarily illegitimate, except Fuller doesn't seem to understand what the point of Kuhn's study was. An internal history might miss out on some aspects of science, but that helps bring others into focus. Specifically, what Fuller doesn't seem sensitive to is that science is fucking hard, and an analysis of how its various internal elements (observation, experimentation, theory, prediction, alteration, etc) come together is actually incredibly insightful. Fuller's reliance on an overly simplistic view of science keeps showing:

After all, physicists gain the respect of their peers by designing clever experiments whose results can be captured by elegant mathematical formalisms, all the while remaining agnostic about the metaphysical significance of their inquiries. This is what makes physics a specialised science, as opposed to a total ideology.

It's this idea that science as some ridiculously straightforward activity that causes him to dismiss the arduous job Kuhn insists on doing. So while Fuller thinks just reading a lot of philosophy equips him to deal with Kuhn, without a scientific background he isn't able to see what role Kuhn's ideas play.

For example, he claims:

Popper held that truth is always ‘transcendent’ of the community of inquirers, whereas for Kuhn truth is always ‘immanent’ in the community. If Kuhn located truth within a scientific paradigm, Popper found it in a ‘meta-language’ into which the knowledge claims of the paradigm may be translated and evaluated.

But the point of a paradigm isn't that truth isn't located within the paradigm, but rather that to engage in science you have to take onboard an enormous amount of assumptions and technical apparatus, to truly stand on the shoulder of giants. Neptune wasn't discovered through clever experiments that popped out of nowhere; the cumulative knowledge of centuries of people within the Newtonian paradigm was necessary before it could even be suspected to exist. That science might not be about simplistic testing, but using assumptions and creativity to learn more about the world completely evades Fuller.

This insensitivity to how hard and complicated science actually is leads Fuller to become incensed that philosophers are being too deferential to science. Which isn't necessarily bad criticism, since the aspects of science which makes it so important to society necessitate that philosophers care about broader contexts. But Fuller apparently wants to criticize scientists for their science itself:

Post-Kuhnians have come to accept scientists’ working assumptions at face value, including the counter-intuitive implication that reality consists of many distinct worlds, each roughly corresponding to a scientific discipline. For example, whereas Lakatos had called on historians, philosophers and sociologists to master the technical details of contemporary science so as not to depend on scientists’ own ex cathedra pronouncements about the merits of their research programmes, Kuhn’s progeny master such details in order to impress scientists that they are sufficiently competent to be taken seriously at all. Kuhn’s reduction of the ends of science to the trajectories already being pursued by particular sciences has now inspired two generations of philosophers to believe that they should be taking their normative marching orders from the sciences they philosophise about, and hence do not question them unless the scientists themselves have done so first.

Apparently philosophers are going to find something that the entire peer-reviewed establishment missed. And how can you start without accepting that there are distinct domains of inquiry in science? There is such naivete you know this can't be really be about understanding or wanting to get science to live up to its ideals.

This brings us to what's actually going on with Fuller's criticism. Driven by moral concerns, Fuller seems insistent on denying that knowledge requires such discipline, that certain discoveries can only be made through cumulative build-up:

In science, this sense of ‘irrationality’ is most evident in its slavish adherence to track record – what Popper demonised as ‘induction’ – whereby the sheer fact that a particular discovery was made under the aegis of a particular theory is used as the basis for claiming that only upholders of that theory have proper access to that discovery.

Sure, sometimes Fuller tries to phrase this as simply claiming that sometimes being in a paradigm might limit progress, but the general text makes clear that his views are more radical. In opposition to this paradigm-driven science he support's Popper's views, where a perpetual openness to change is necessary to evade fascism. Otherwise philosophers and scientists would simply be evading their responsibility.

While neither Kuhn nor Popper would care to deny that a specific paradigm may dominate the understanding of a particular slice of reality at particular time, they differ over whether it should be treated as a source of stability (Kuhn) or a problem to be overcome (Popper)

If all that's being said is that scientists shouldn't be too complacent, then great, Kuhn can agree too. But the allusion to fascism makes clear that Fuller is anti-paradigm itself, which means his views aren't even remotely similar to anything actually done in science, which to my mind makes it somewhat useless.

And I know I've dunked on Fuller, but maybe the worst aspect of the book is that large parts of it aren't even arguments, they're just random name-dropping and idea scattering:

Whereas Popper treated the scientific laboratory as a site for making decisions, each of which may be reversed by a later one, Kuhn regarded the laboratory as a site for engaging in practices that deepen the scientist’s susceptibility to forming certain beliefs that will contribute to a clearer grasp of the vision of reality projected by her paradigm. Here Kuhn follows a long line of post-Augustinian thinkers from Blaise Pascal to the John Henry Newman for whom ‘justified belief’ or ‘real assent’ was characterised in most un-Popperian terms by a willingness to risk one’s life on an idea through practical devotion, a return to the etymological roots of ‘religion’ in the enchanted ritualisation of life.

Apart from the poor reading and understanding of Kuhn and science, what exactly is the role of regarding this as "post-Augustinian"? Is this meant to merely point out a quaint similarity between unconnected ideas, or something more substantive? I just imagine Fuller going ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To wrap up, there really are some great questions about the sociology of modern science and its effects on the creation of knowledge within the current set-up. But it's hard to read this book and not think that, to quote Kuhn out of context, Fuller too "has left scholarship behind for politics".

[Kaveh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Steve Fuller explains the views of two prominent science philosophers of the 20th century, and the relevance of their debate in today's scientific endeavor. In 1965, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn sat down to debate about the nature of scientific progress. The legacy of this encounter has influenced intellectual discussions on the topic ever since.

Kuhn viewed paradigms (a set of received and accepted beliefs) as an essential component of the scientific inquiry. A paradigm molds a group into a discipline, around which specialized journals and societies shape. He called science activities performed within a paradigm as "normal science". This is basically what majority of scientists do most of the times. Doing routine research in this sense is basically like solving a puzzle. Puzzles have rules. Puzzles generally have predetermined solutions, which are determined by the paradigm. Occasionally, anomalies start to build up and scientists begin to lose faith in their paradigm. Despite the initial resistance, this eventually leads to a shift in the paradigm.

Popper, on the other hand, saw a monstrous gap in philosophy and science: inductive reasoning. According to him, for a theory to be scientific, it must be able to be proven wrong – falsified by anyone and with results that are reproducible.

Fuller describes Kuhn as an authoritarian and Popper as a libertarian in their positions to science. This point has been mostly forgotten, if not inverted, by those who regard ‘Kuhn vs Popper’ as a landmark in modern philosophy of science.

Unfortunately, 40 years later, Kuhn seems to have had the last laugh and his views became more widely accepted by the scientific community.

Steve Fuller argues that not only has Kuhn's dominance had an adverse impact on the field but both thinkers have been radically misinterpreted in the process.

This book assumes that the reader is well aware of Kuhn's and Poper's views of scientific progress and their influences on the scientific community. It would have been nice if it covered the basics of these views before jumping onto the social and political contexts of them.

Other references used and further readings:
1) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, 1962
2) The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper, 1934
3) Outlines and summary of Kuhn's work, Frank Pajares, https://tinyurl.com/gpyymoq

[Tiredstars · Rating 3 out of 5]

"How can a mere philosopher devise criteria distinguishing between good and bad science, knowing it is an inutterable mystic secret of the Royal Society?" - Imre Lakatos (1973)

I don't know much about Thomas Kuhn or Karl Popper. What I was expecting from this book was a brief and accessible introduction to debates about the scientific method, using the tension between the two as a hook. What it actually turns out to be is a bit of a hatchet job on Thomas Kuhn. Probably the book is best read by someone with a basic grounding in the subject already, something I don't have, but it was still clear enough to be worth reading.

This is a bit more of a summary than a review as such.

Roughly speaking, Popper and Kuhn's approaches are as follows. For Popper, to decide between rival theories, scientists must set a test. Each theory makes a claim, and whichever is falsified fails the test should be discarded, regardless of its longevity or authority. (If your claim is unfalsifiable, it's not scientific.) Popper's vision is one of constant challenge for scientific theories, and regular failure, in which scientists themselves have to be protected from the consequences of being wrong.

For Kuhn, scientists work within "paradigms". "Normal science" is an incremental advance. It increases the power of a paradigm but also brings up problems. When the collection of problems gets too great, a successful new paradigm emerges and a scientific revolution occurs. Most famous scientists engaged in "revolutionary science" rather than (boring) "normal science".

The concept of paradigms is key to Kuhn's work, and he has been criticised for not having a clear definition. Different paradigms are "incommensurable", which may be an even more problematic term. What I think it means is that there is such a gap between them that it is impossible to translate a claim made by one theory into terms that can be made to verify the other. So there can be no independent test.

This leads to a fracture in the scientific community, which remains until the supporters of the losing theory "die off". At this point, the winning scientists rewrite history to make it look like science was always heading their way. There's certainly a good criticism of the Whig interpretation of history here.

However Fuller argues there are a number of negative effects of Kuhn's view of science. One is to break science into a multiplicity of specialised paradigms, which are protected from criticism from inside and out. This served the Cold War military-industrial complex. It persuaded scientists to work on incremental improvements rather than to think freely.

Kuhn's position relegated philosophers to "underlabourers" working at fringe problems to support scientists. It was explicitly uncritical, both epistemologically and normatively. Popper was critical of science on both counts. I think this lack of critical faculties affects 'serious' science (the dubious claims of evolutionary psychology, the maths of advanced physics, far from experimental verification) and the popularity of pseudo-science.

Oddly, I came out feeling I had a much better understanding of Kuhn's philosophy than Popper's, although I did come out wanting to find out more about Popper. Another disappointment was that some of the most important parts were also the least clear.

If you want a carefully balanced, broad introduction to this subject, Kuhn vs. Popper is not the place to go. Still, it's not a bad read, despite that.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up in the hopes that I would get some kind of synopsis of both of these philosopher's views. Fuller summed them up like this "Kuhn = paradigms; Popper = falsification." While I don't doubt that this is true I was hoping for a bit more than that. Instead of summation of the views of the philosophers' views, Fuller is more concerned with the implications of their views. He dives into how their views have interacted over time. The philosophical and religious influences to each of their views is covered, which I found to be a very interesting part of the book, I was continually surprised about how much religion Fuller injects into the conversation.

In any case, even though the book wasn't what I thought it was going to be, I feel as though I understand the philosophers better than when I started. I would recommend reading the philosophers' main works first or at least a good review of them before picking this book up.

A quick note on Fuller, he sometimes gets lost in examples or illustration that quickly get confusing.

[Reem]

لن اقيمها. الترجمة بالنسبة لي تبدو سيئة و فشل المترجم في نقل أسلوب الكاتب.
يبدو أنه كان يقوم بالتعريب فقط حتى أن اللغة الأصلية للكتاب أسهل من الترجمة !
ربما اقرأ النسخة الإنجليزية، لكن خاب أملي في المركز القومي للترجمة في هذا الكتاب =) !

[Alan Rodriguez Tiburcio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightful for a short little thing. The author’s anti-establishmentarianism creeps in slowly but unsubtly. Framing it as a book about how Kuhn and Popper *actually* represent near-antinomies of their popular presentations is a fun, dialectical twist; that said, I’m skeptical of the thesis that a person’s *actual* position matters in the light of their popular position — between two understandings, the one that takes less effort will tend to succeed.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chapters 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 are the most useful and can be read independently.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kuhn's basic concept was “paradigm”, which is the “idea that scientific inquiry is anchored in an exemplar that researchers then use as a model for future investigations”. Kuhn sees a paradigm as an irrefutable theory that becomes an irreversible policy (ie., researchers only work toward things they know rather than radical change. Therefore, Kuhn's concept is conformist and inherently uncritical. He has a backward look. He is an elitist who sees science as a stabilizing social practice.

Popper's basic concept is “falsification” through testing, which draws the demarcation line between science and non-science. Science is the standard-bearer for critical rationalism. Scientific inquiry and democratic politics are alternative expressions of an “open” society. Popper is looking forward because our knowledge is always subject to improvement.

Kuhn was “historicist” (Things could be no other than they are) and more likely to be somewhat authoritarian as he sees science as rewriting history to show the latest find as in line with everything that has led up to it, while Popper was “criticist” (We can always do better) and thus could be seen as somewhat libertarian. (This is pretty interesting as Kuhn is associated, at least in thought, with folks like Derrida and Foucault, who are very leftist (Not that there have not been authoritarian leftists.) and Popper has a reputation of being conservative rather than libertarian.)

[Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title of the book, "Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science" is a bit over the top. I doubt many scientists thought the very essence of science was up for grabs as Thomas Kuhn's paradigmatic perspective of science was pushing back against Karl Popper's concept of falsification, itself a reaction to the positivism of the early 20th century. The folks actually doing science were too busy doing science. In a way, this is part of Fuller's point: scientists would do well to come up for air every now and then and see what others are thinking and saying regarding the progress of science in general. As someone who use to do science and now teaches science, I'm sympathetic to Fuller's argument. Albeit in a significantly less philosophically technical way, many other observers of science (Mooney and Nisbett to name two) are making this same point.

"Kuhn v. Popper" is a short book, but it's not an easy read. Don't go near this book unless you already know the relevant details of normal science, paradigm shifts, falsification and positivism.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book if only because of the way it provides a social context for the history of the interaction of Kuhn's and Popper's ideas. There is very little literature available that so straitforwardly discusses the implications of these ideas within academia (not just Philosophy of Science per se).

I do have a problem with the author (Steve Fuller) providing anti-science testimony on the side of the creationists during the famous Dover Creationism vs Evolution Trial. That alone should've kept me from this book, but with that in mind, I dove in anyway and was delighted by his juxtapositions of the titular figures with other well known thinkers (e.g. Popper with Adorno, Wittgenstein, & Lakatos; Kuhn with Conant, Polanyi, Feyerabend, & Heidegger). Fuller has a gift for fluid, vivid language that captures tensions between various (and often seemingly unrelated) thinkers and their ideas.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a book about the thoughts and ideas of these two men. It has some summary but not as much as I was hoping for. It does however explain how there ideas interact and differ. It gives some history and some context. I am glad I am reading it.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a helpfully thought provoking book and explained to me why ever since I was a student of philosophy of science student under a former PhD student of Popper I had some things I could not reconcile

very interesting and as it was my first book by Fuller I am tempted to read more of his work

[Createpei · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting comparison of Popper and Kuhn, their similarities and differences. As other reviews reveal, the author has his biases towards on of the two philosophies, however, this was a good primer to compare the two philosophical lenses.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

A much better book than it had to be. I was expecting a blow-by-blow report, but this is a patient and far-reaching analysis of Kuhn and Popper's respective world-views and their reception across the 20th century.

[Justin Salisbury · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a load of crap, there may be 50 people that care about the (mostly fantastical) battle between Kuhn & Popper. If you are one of these people... find a hobby.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was critically blasted to pieces - I wanted to see what the bruhaha was all about. Read it if you want to keep up on your philosophy of science parerga.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vague and verbose.

[H Wesselius · Rating 4 out of 5]

favours popper

[أحمد الحفني]

ترجمة سيئة جداً!