Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

under Wilhelm von Humboldt (about whom morein chapter 12). In any case, Weber probably providesthe clearest source for Popper’s falsificationism.Popper was inspired to characterise science as the‘open society’ by Bergson’s last major work, TheTwo Sources of Religion and Morality (1932), wherethe phrase first appears. In Bergson’s original terms,the closed society follows the Catholic, Hindu andPlatonic practice of using degrees of knowledge andignorance to stratify and stabilise the populace,while the open society follows the prophet whoseeks to recover humanity’s original connection toGod by breaking through the layers of mythology,superstition and institutionalised dogma. ForBergson, the history of religion is marked by phasesof institutional consolidation and reformation: forevery Catholicism, there is Protestantism; for everyHinduism, Buddhism; for every Kuhn, Popper.To appreciate what the open society as a religiousorientation might mean, we may start withPopper’s life-long fascination with the form ofrepublican democracy that constituted theAthenian civil religion, and then move to considerChristianity’s preoccupation with the nature ofbelief, which over the last century and a half hascome to be secularised as the ‘problems ofknowledge’ with which epistemologists are mostfamiliar.104