Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

suppressed by the first great authoritarian, Plato,who set a terrible precedent for the subsequenthistory of philosophy and politics. Plato’s crime,according to Popper, was to have perverted the ideaof progress. To be sure, Plato had both the good andbad versions of progress, but the bad version got thebetter of him and his followers. The good versionenvisages the goal of progress to be an ideal that weapproximate through trial and error, but withoutever assuming that each trial necessarily gets uscloser to the ideal. The bad version of progressenvisages that no matter the outcomes of our trials,we always end up closer to the ideal. This is theposition that Popper demonised as ‘historicism’.Historicism’s cardinal sin – at both the philosophicaland political levels – is its refusal to admitgenuine error and hence the need to alter one’scourse of belief or action.Popper found historicism lurking behind manyseemingly unrelated positions: e.g. knowledge byinduction, legitimation by tradition, salvation byProvidence, evolution by natural selection, not tomention the proletarian revolution by historicalmaterialism. As the Popperians read him, Kuhn alsoendorsed historicism as part of normal scientifictraining. But there is another subtext to TheOpen Society that tends to go unmentioned, thoughit becomes increasingly prominent, as Popper27