Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

engagement, even from academic colleagues,especially Paul Feyerabend, who had read Structurein draft, taught the finished product at Berkeley,and wrote Kuhn several detailed and pointed lettersaround the theme of Structure as ‘ideology coveredup as history’ – to which Kuhn never gave an adequateresponse, even after Feyerabend publishedthe paper as ‘Consolations for the Specialist’ in thefollow-up volume to Lakatos’ 1965 conference.Very unlike Foucault, Kuhn’s pattern of writtencommunication reveals someone who respondedgenerously only to those few who read his work ashe himself did. Perhaps the most notable exceptionis a three-month exchange with the US sociologistJessie Bernard in 1969–70, in which she managed toengage Kuhn on the competing demands from‘the establishment’ and ‘the movement’ on thenatural sciences. Here Kuhn remarked that naturalscientists, unlike social scientists, were unlikely toallow such external pressures to reorient theirresearch significantly. On the contrary, Kuhnbelieved they might even become more focusedon their normal puzzle-solving activities. Thiscertainly described Kuhn’s response to his ownsimilar situation.Given Kuhn’s studied distance from the ideasinvoked in his name, it is reasonable to supposethat, as in the case of Heidegger, proximity to the202