Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

the incommensurable theories are truly scientific,they aspire to universality, which means that therewill be cases that they have yet to explain or predict.These cases may then serve as relatively neutralground for designing a crucial experiment to decideamongst the theories.In many respects, the postmodern conditionassociated with Kuhn’s ascendancy marks a returnto a pre-modern sensibility. What is often called‘relativism’ – be it in praise or condemnation – issimply the ancient attitude, perhaps most clearlydefended by Aristotle, that all knowledge must beadequate to its objects. Ethnographic sociologistsnow speak of ‘context sensitivity’ and cognitivepsychologists of ‘domain specificity’ to mean muchthe same thing. While it may be possible to derivesome abstract categorical principles (or ‘metaphysics’)from the various forms of knowledge,those principles are treated simply as objects intheir own right with no expectation that they willshape the conduct of the first-order inquiries fromwhich they were abstracted. This aspect of thehistory of Western thought follows a course similarto that of the great Eastern intellectual cultures ofChina and India, none of which ever managed toacquire the dynamism associated with modernWestern science.67