Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge: Volume 4: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965

by Alan Musgrave and Imre Lakatos

Book Overview

Two books have been particularly influential in contemporary philosophy of science: Karl R. Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, and Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Both agree... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521096235
• ISBN13: 9780521096232
• Release Date: October 1970
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Useful confrontations

Kuhn was never able to solve the paradox within his idea of sciences: if his "language of incommensurability implies that we cannot understand another's scheme or paradigm" (Dasenbrock, TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES pp. 49), how can we then know that we can't understand this? Other people's sciences are so radically different from "our" science that we can never understand theirs or they ours and, yet, Kuhn can know that: he understands that; the rest of us don't. Kuhn's appeal to fallacy pervades all of his work in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Reflections on my Critics, and The Essential Tension. Basically, Kuhn alleges that we cannot even begin to understand other people's paradigms; we understand only our paradigm. Yet Kuhn understood enough to "see" this. He can use the "historical study of scientific development" to argue that Popper is wrong, but he also wants the rest of us to see that we cannot understand the science paradigm of previous centuries: Kuhn can use history and its language to attack ideas that punch holes in his idea (or to tell us about Aristotle's concept of science); the rest of us cannot use history because, you see, we cannot understand other paradigms. If Kuhn were right, then his theory would be nothing but a fad, a "paradigm" that will pass and be replaced by some other fad. In a sense this has happened, but only in the social sciences because Kuhn was "adopted" by a particular group of philosophers and literary critics who saw the usefulness of a theory that claimed that science, this spawn of the modernism, reason and humanism that Heidegger and more recent characters such as Foucault and Derrida have relentlessly attacked, was nothing but an opinion held by an old boys network. Now that such a philosophical fad has lost much of its appeal in France and the US, Kuhn's theory is seen for what it is: an opinion by a man who protected his opinion with fallacies. This opinion was interesting to many philosophers. These philosophers are either dead now, or interested in their next flavor-of-the-month. This is a good book if you believe, as Popper did, that the clash of ideas and opinions was the best way to get results. Kuhn confesses early on that he does not agree with this position: he has found "the" truth regarding science. Why can't everybody just accept it? Popper is excellent, Kuhn is unintentionally funny, Feyerabend is way out there (no news).

For and against normal science

Kuhn's "Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?" is a beautiful criticism of Popper. I. Criteria of demarcation should be based on the nature of normal science rather than revolutionary science (bold hypotheses, etc.). For example, astrology cannot be dismissed as unfalsifiable; in fact, it repeatedly made categorically false predictions, which were recognised as such. The reason why astrology is not a science is that it cannot digest these anomalies through puzzle solving. IV. Instead, to understand the development of science we must understand the mind of the scientist. "Knowing what scientists value, we may hope to understand what problems they will undertake and what choices they will make in particular circumstances of conflict." (p. 21) Everyone else hates Kuhn's "normal science." Popper thinks it is "dangerous" because it is dogmatic. Feyerabend thinks it is "boring", "pedestrian", "anti-humanitarian", etc. Toulmin thinks it is indistinguishable from revolutionary science. Watkins attacks it as a demarcation criteria since it would seem to include biblical scholarship as a science (where the puzzles of normal research would be to explain away apparent inconsistencies in the Bible); Feyerabend, similarly, because it would seem to include organised crime. The former type of criticisms are not addressed directly by Kuhn in his reply, except for his observation that history is on his side (thus, regardless of what philosophers may think about it, to reject normal science is to reject the vast bulk of all science throughout history). The latter examples are dismissed by Kuhn on the grounds that "no problems are thereby created" since his description concerned theories dealing with natural phenomena (p. 245). Much time is spent discussing Kuhn's alleged relativism, incommensurability, etc. Most contributors are too fanatically attached to the idea of science as super-knowledge to be able to argue constructively: anti-Kuhn criticism and rhetoric ranges from ridiculous and absurd (such as Popper's accusation that Kuhn is using logic (sic!)) to various forms of misrepresentation of Kuhn's theory and their (to these people) philosophically unacceptable implications. This debate is rather uninteresting not only because it lacks objectivity and reason but also because it is concerned only with whether science deserves its pedestal, and not with understanding actual science, which is what Kuhn emphasised initially and what one wishes the book would have been about. Lakatos' paper where he introduces his methodology of research programmes is very interesting, but would be even better if its perspective was reversed from pro-Popper & anti-Kuhn to anti-Popper & pro-Kuhn. His model plainly has much in common with Kuhn's. Kuhn points to some parallels: "hard core, work in the protective belt, and degenerative phase are close parallels for my paradigms, normal science, and crisis" (p. 256); one may add also that heuristic in Lakatos' model roug

If you want to understand Kuhn: buy it.

I've been a big Kuhn fan for years. I thought I understood his ideas, too, until I read this book. This gem is a debate among some of the most interesting philosophers of science in the twentieth century-- all trying to make sense of Kuhn, most concluding that his ideas are deeply flawed.The criticism helped me advance my own interpretation of Kuhn, but it was Kuhn's reply to the criticism that brought the whole thing into technicolor 3D. I could hardly have learned more if I had the man in my living room.-- James

Nice collection of Essays

This is a collection of "essays" about T.S. Kuhn's distiction between normal science and revolutionary science. Various philosophers, including Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, criticize various aspects of Kuhn's argument. Finally Kuhn presents a reply to his critics.