Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

Legend has it that while Popper liked to confess tothe murder of logical positivism, Kuhn really didthe dirty deed. In this tall tale, Popper is portrayedas a kind of renegade positivist, someone who triedto break away from the positivists’ scholasticfixation on logic but did not quite succeed the wayKuhn did. To their credit, no Popperians werefooled by this story, especially since the relationshipamong the principals was rather moreintimate. In particular, Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970),doyen of the logical positivists, was among theeditors who agreed to publish both the originalGerman edition of Popper’s Logic and the firstedition of Kuhn’s Structure.Seen from London in the 1960s, Kuhn retainedthe most objectionably conservative features oflogical positivism, the very things against whichPopper had revolted – only now in a less technicallyforbidding and more engagingly written form. BothKuhn and the positivists assumed that sciencerequires stable foundations for both legitimisingand directing inquiry. But whereas the positivistsaspired to completely universal foundations,covering all sciences for all times and places, Kuhnwas satisfied with contingent foundations drawnfrom the actual history of science. Thus, instead ofrelying on the positivists’ formal logic and neutralobservation language, Kuhn proposed under the35