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Normal Science, Scientific Revolutions and the History of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2014

L. Pearce Williams
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Summary

I should like to comment very briefly on the Kuhn-Popper disagreement over the essential nature of science and the genesis of scientific revolutions. If I understand Sir Karl Popper correctly, science is basically and constantly potentially on the verge of revolution. A refutation, at least if it is big enough, constitutes such a revolution. Professor Kuhn argues, on the other hand, that most of the time devoted to the pursuit of science is what he calls ‘normal’ science—that is, problem solving, or working out chains of argument implicit in previous work. Thus, for Kuhn, a scientific revolution is a long time a-building and occurs only rarely because most people are not trying to refute current theories. Both sides have presented their positions in considerable detail but there seems to me to be a very important gap in both theories. It is, simply, how do we know what science is all about? The question may sound startlingly naive, but I shall now attempt to justify it.

There are, essentially, two respectable scholarly ways to go about answering the question. One is sociological; the scientific community may be treated like any other community and subjected to sociological analysis. Note that this ‘may’ be done, but that it has not yet been done. To put it another way, most scientific activity may be directed toward refutation or toward ‘problem solving’, but we don't know whether it is or not.

Type
Chapter
Information
Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge
Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965
, pp. 49 - 50
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1970

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