Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

pure inquiry. Exceptionally disappointing was thatphysics ‘scaled up’ to accommodate the war effortwithout ever returning to its pre-war dimensions.Kuhn responded to this situation much as thelogical positivists had, namely, by never formallyacknowledging the technological dimension ofmodern science, where science most naturallyinterfaces with our pre-scientific understandingof reality. Even when writing about scientificexperiments, his focus remained fixed on the role ofexperiments in generating data, solving puzzles ortesting theories – not on their material character as,say, an economist concerned with ‘externalities’would treat experiments. In particular, he made apoint of not asking whether the instruments used inexperiments were inspired and/or applied in amilitary-industrial setting outside the experimentalcontext.From a psychiatric standpoint, the accounts ofscience put forward by the logical positivists andKuhn (and perhaps even Popper) were ‘reactionformations’ in response to traumas that had dealtsevere blows to their normative ideals of science.The traumas were, respectively, the 20th century’stwo world wars. In response, they promotedexcessively idealised visions of science that were theopposite of the tendencies they rejected in thescience of their day. For Kuhn, the ultimate89