Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

But the complete alienation of philosophy ofscience from mainstream science was best epitomisedin the training of Karl Popper, who wasnearly a dozen years younger than Carnap. Hehovered in the periphery of the Vienna Circle, as heworked on a doctorate in educational psychology,a subject that officially aimed to make scienceeasier to assimilate, not criticise. Popper’s ownoriginal interest in the field, however, was inspiredby children’s resistance to novelty, or in theKierkegaardian terms that Karl Jaspers hadpopularised among psychologists, ‘anxiety towardthe unknown’. However, Popper soon becameequally disillusioned by Vienna’s socialist educationalauthorities, who were keen on force-feedingstudents with reformist dogmas that were themselvesnever subjected to scientific scrutiny.In the middle third of the 20th century, whenlogical positivism and the Popperian heresyreached their institutional peak in the Englishspeakingworld, practising scientists accordedthem little more than polite notice, even whenthey seemed to be making epistemological andontological claims of grave import. For example,the American pragmatist philosopher who madethe most successful transition to positivism,Ernest Nagel (1901–85), worried about the fateof science, if physical causation dissolved into77