Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

actual precursor but who are no less vivid asphantom presences in student textbooks. By hisown admission, Kuhn’s understanding of logicalpositivism was almost entirely of this character. Butso too was Popper’s sense of his favourite foes Platoand Hegel. Sometimes behind such scholasticfodder that frames philosophical debate lieopponents who are not so different from each otherafter all. For example, a closer look at ‘rationalists’like Descartes and ‘empiricists’ like Locke showsthem to be much more alike than suited Kant’s ownpurposes when he first distinguished the twotheories of knowledge at the end of The Critique ofPure Reason. But sometimes the stereotype, for all itscrudeness, does capture differences in sensibilitythat become deeper the more one looks. This iscertainly the case with Popper and Kuhn.Our investigation starts with a comparison ofwhat Kuhn and Popper said and how they werereceived in their day. It soon becomes clear thatthese thinkers regarded the significance of sciencerather differently. Kuhn was tightly focused onscience as a knowledge enterprise, whereas Popperinvested science with symbolic import as thestandard-bearer for critical rationality, a virtue in allwalks of life. Although both Kuhn and Popper havebeen subject to widespread misinterpretation,Popper’s followers understood the stakes sufficiently15