Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

would now say) awaiting propitious environmentsfor their full realisation.By analogy, starting in the 1880s, Mach, an archatavist, collected together two centuries’ worth ofdiscarded philosophical objections to Newtonianmechanics. While this struck Max Planck and thephysics establishment of the day as irrelevantantiquarianism, within a generation it served toinspire the revolutions associated with relativitytheory and quantum indeterminacy. A similarpreoccupation with historical atavism is evident inthe Popperian discussion of ‘Kuhn Loss’, named forKuhn’s belief that a consequence of any scientificrevolution is that some phenomena that had beenencompassed by the old paradigm are lost by thenew one, perhaps to be picked up by a paradigm inanother field or simply left to wallow in a prescientificstate. For Kuhn, such a ‘loss’ enables thenew paradigm to acquire a sense of focus andprogress lacking in the old one. But for Lakatos andFeyerabend, the lessons were more equivocal.Indeed, Feyerabend went so far as to mount aspirited defence of Aristotle’s unified inquiry intothe natural ends of motion, which drifted out ofphysics into biology and psychology, ultimately todisappear altogether from scientific view.99