Popper In Popper’s view, the criterion form demarcating science from non-science is that the former builds knowledge by testing hypotheses that are falsifiable. Furthermore, science is characterized by problem solving. Problems give rise to falsifiable theories that are then tested. Science demands that the problem is first annunciated and then observations are made that address the problem, not the other way around. Popper then struggles because, although his idea of science demands that it is impossible to prove a non-trivial truth, a person practicing science does indeed feel that he/she is struggling to achieve what is, for all practical purposes, the truth. “Popper defines the quantitative verisimilitude which a statement ‘a’ possesses by means of a formula: Vs(a)=CtT(a) - CtF(a), where Vs(a) represents the verisimilitude of ‘a’, CtT(a) is a measure of the truth-content of ‘a’, and CtF(a) is a measure of its falsity-content. Scientific progress, in other words, could now be represented as progress towards the truth, and experimental corroboration could be seen an indicator of verisimilitude.” Stanford Encyclopedia on Popper In Popper’s view, any knowledge that includes human behavior (life?) cannot be a science because there are no rules and behavior is inherently unpredictable. Kuhn In Kuhn’s view, science was the sudden movement of knowledge due to a breakthrough (intuition, new facts). In between these periods of knowledge building, practitioners worked to modify existing ideas to fit new information, leading to increasingly unwieldly and inconsistent theories. These in-between periods were though to be a waste of time and were dominated by human dynamics and a paradigm, rather than true hypothesis testing. Other important differences between Kuhn and Popper is that Kuhn felt that new paradigms were only put into place when there was a replacement for the old paradigm, and the new paradigm could not be commensurate with the old paradigm: the “incommensurate thesis” (i.e., science does not build on science). [In this framework, Rossby waves would be incommensurate with a theory of General Circulation; gravity would be rendered incommensurate with general relativity.] Importantly, in Kuhn’s view, science does not march closer to the truth: rather, truth is a perspective that changes with the information at hand. After a millennium of experiences, theories could just as easily be much further from truth. In Kuhn’s view “Any replacement paradigm had better solve the majority of those puzzles, or it will not be worth adopting in place of the existing paradigm.” (Stanford Encyclopedia). My own personal experience doing science is inconsistent with Kuhn’s definition and description of science. It is mostly consistent with Poppers, albeit with the caveat that it is difficult to define a single falsifiable hypothesis (this too is consistent with Popper’s ideas and the antithesis of Kuhn’s idea of science). Some questions: · What is science? • A body of knowledge? A process? A culture – an agreement for how to build knowledge? · Is normal science just problem solving – going for the low-hanging fruit? Science provides a methodology for evaluating which of two hypotheses are farther from the truth, and helps illuminate anomalies … • Popper seems to outline a method for a mature (systematic) science (or for a well defined system) for getting closer to the truth (the process by which we build knowledge). • Pre-science: perhaps we can’t falsify things, but we are building a body of information to hone hypotheses. In Kuhn’s view, this applies to psychoanalysis as well as those times when scientists are grappling with new information and plodding along trying to modify existing ideas to fit with the new information. • Pre-science and science both tell stories about how the world works. In the case of science, the stories are analogies based on a knowledge we are reasonably confident (through tests and time) is likely to be on the right track. • A pre-science tells stories on weaker foundation. For the latter, how do you get closer to the truth? How do you make sure you are systematic way? What is the systematic way? • What if we thought of science as a conscious striving to define falsifiable hypothesis? This would include science and a prescience.

David's Comments on Kuhn and Popper