Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

. CHAPTER 3 .POPPERIAN SUSPICIONS ANDKUHNIAN VINDICATIONWhen it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientificcommunity simultaneously renounces, as a fitsubject for professional scrutiny, most of the booksand articles in which that paradigm had beenembodied … [The] result is a sometimes drasticdistortion in the scientist’s perception of hisdiscipline’s past. More than practitioners of othercreative fields, he comes to see it as leading in astraight line to the discipline’s present vantage. Inshort, he comes to see it as progress. No alternativeis available to him while he remains in the field.Inevitably those remarks will suggest that themember of a mature scientific community is, likethe typical character of Orwell’s 1984, the victimof a history rewritten by the powers that be.Furthermore, that suggestion is not altogetherinappropriate. There are losses as well as gains inscientific revolutions, and scientists tend to bepeculiarly blind to the former.Thomas Kuhn,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions34