Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

. CHAPTER 7 .WHY PHILOSOPHERS GET NORESPECT FROM SCIENTISTSHow can a mere philosopher devise criteriadistinguishing between good and bad science,knowing it is an inutterable mystic secret of theRoyal Society?Imre Lakatos, ‘Lecture One on theScientific Method’ (1973)The most striking feature of the history of thephilosophy of science is the inverse relationshipbetween the philosophical and the scientificsignificance of the people talked about. Even thevery greatest scientists, such as Galileo, Newton,Maxwell and Einstein, tend to be treated as no morethan passable philosophers of science. Sometimesothers in that scientific league, most notablyCharles Darwin, are relegated to polite philosophicalsilence. This curious feature first becomesnoticeable when examining periods when ‘naturalphilosopher’ is used as an expression to cover bothpeople who, by our lights, are scientists andphilosophers. For example, 17th-century natural73