Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

effectively preoccupied with the problem of howscience becomes someone’s Heimat. How can anactivity whose practice is so detached from everydaylife and whose products so aspire to transcendtheir place of production nevertheless be the sourceof community for a band of devoted followers?Moreover, once he came to accept the premises ofthis question, Kuhn was then faced with the furtherproblem of how such a tight-knit scientific Heimatmanages occasionally to elicit striking innovationsthat end up ‘revolutionising’ the community ofscientists.To Popper and his followers, Kuhn’s projectreduced science education to an indoctrinationstrategy. In the 1920s, proto-fascist parties ridiculedWeimar Germany’s tolerance for ambiguity andopen-mindedness as disabling people from makingany substantial commitments, thereby renderingthem rootless. This return to roots was also echoedin the philosophical rhetoric of the day – mostnotably Martin Heidegger – as the search for a prelinguistic‘Ground of Being’ beneath the clatter ofincommensurable discourses that littered publiclife. To Kuhn, Popper’s relentlessly dialectical sciencewas a formula for producing rootlessness, theremedy for which was to get at the ‘tacit dimension’of science, whereby knowledge is most intimatelytied to the scientist’s ‘being-in-the-world’.125