Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

logic is for. For positivists, logic bolstered scientificauthority, whereas for Popper logic challenged it.Shorn of all philosophical significance, ‘deductivelogic’ is simply the derivation of a particularconclusion from a universal premise. However, forover a century now, developments in the theoryand methods of deduction have been cast inalgebraic notation. This practice has tended to maskthe profoundly different uses to which philosopherswould put the notation. For the positivists,deduction demonstrates the coherence of a body ofthought, specifically by showing how more generalknowledge claims explain less general ones, each ofwhich provide some degree of confirmation for themore general ones. For Popperians, deduction ismainly a tool for compelling scientists to test theconsequences of their general knowledge claims inparticular cases by issuing predictions that can becontradicted by the findings of empirical research.This is the falsifiability principle in a nutshell.Popper regarded it as much more than merely oneof many uses for logic. He treated it as the corescientific ethic.It follows that any belief whatsoever may bescientific or not, depending on whether or not onetries to falsify it, which is to say, to test the limits ofits validity. From Popper’s standpoint, what thepositivists found interesting about deduction was25