Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

Intellectual life turns out to be remarkablyresilient to counter-historiography. While much ismade of the difficulties of tracking the causaltrajectory of ideas, these difficulties are more ofteninvoked to shield intellectuals from the badconsequences of their ideas than to withdraw creditfor their good consequences. Thus, scientistshappily take responsibility for developmentsthat enhance the human condition, even if theyoccurred several decades after the original intellectualinnovation (e.g. Newton’s responsibilityfor the Industrial Revolution), while distancingthemselves from developments that diminish thehuman condition, even if they were brought aboutby the original intellectual innovators (e.g. theresponsibility of the founders of modern atomicphysics for nuclear weapons).Even in these postmodern times, we still creditLocke with inspiring American democracy, as wecontinue to chastise those who would blameNietzsche for seeding Nazism. In the case of Kuhn,the asymmetrical treatment may occur in the samebody of work: philosophers of science chastise selfstyledKuhnians who read ‘too much’ relativismand political radicalism into his work, as they themselvesfixate rather selectively on Kuhn’s intermittentdiscussions of paradigms as conceptualexemplars for high praise and deep interpretation.176