Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

190 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
the theologians, on whom the scientists look down with more or less tolerant
condescension. Not surprisingly, Popper’s notion has been absorbed
into the orthodoxy of science and is incorporated into the image many
scientists have of what they do. It is cited in this way, for instance, by
Stephen Hawking in his popular book A Brief History of Time (10). So
while Popper attacked the intellectual arrogance of Logical Positivism, he
flattered the scientists by portraying science as ruthlessly skeptical. After
all, it was philosophers, not scientists, who had insisted that science produced
a body of certain fact. And Popper makes explicit what is implied by
Shaw’s view of what science should be.
Thomas Kuhn
Then came Thomas Kuhn, a historian as well as a philosopher of science, to
point out that this is not the way science actually works. It could not work,
in fact, because falsification is far more difficult than the theory implies.
The reason is suggested by the old proverb “The exception proves the
rule.” The sense of “proves” is “tests” (as in “proving ground”), and the
meaning of the saying is that every rule is tested by apparent exceptions.
Galileo’s rule that light and heavy objects fall at the same rate is not falsified
by the fact that under normal circumstances a feather and a brick do
not fall at the same rate. Air pressure affects the objects differently, so the
rule becomes manifest (with those particular objects) only in a vacuum.
The trouble is that in nature many different factors influence the course of
events, and one can never be certain, no matter how rigorously controlled
the experiment may be, that all “hidden” factors have been eliminated. If a
single counterinstance were always fatal to a scientific theory, science
would get nowhere.
Science actually moves in a way sharply different from the orthodox
myth of scientific progress. Science is historically a dialectical process in
which periods of “normal science” are punctuated by “revolutions.” The
accepted myths about scientific thinking come closest to being realized
during the revolutions, but normal science, which is what most scientists
do most of the time, is entirely different. This historical rhythm is controlled
by “paradigms,” models of the natural world, or aspects of it, that
serve as a kind of archetype on which scientific investigation is based.
“Paradigm” is somewhat loosely defined and is used to represent both the
fundamental assumptions that are shared by nearly all scientists and the
more narrowly applicable models appealed to by specialists. They are