Kuhn or Popper?

[CDarwin]

Apparently there is some tension in the philosophy of science between Kuhn a Popper, as I've deduced largely from discussions here. I can't say I know much about either of them. I've got Structure of Scientific Revolutions but I haven't read it yet, and I've never come across anything of Popper's. I think I'll Wiki it and education myself a bit better. But in any event, I was curious, to which philosopher do you subscribe? Is this just a false dichotomy? How many other important camps am I missing? Respond away.

[ecoli]

I had to read Kuhn's Structure of Sci. Rev. for a class and analyze it. It's an ok book, and his basic principle seems to be right. You'll never want to hear the word "paradigm shift" again after reading it though.

 

I've never read anything by Popper, however,

[SkepticLance]

Karl Popper promoted the Falsification Principle as the core idea in science. If a scientific idea could not, in potential, be falsified by properly designed experiment or novel observation, then the idea was not scientific.

 

Wiki

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper

 

"Sir Karl Raimund Popper (July 28, 1902 – September 17, 1994) was an Austrian and British[1] philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is counted among the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. Popper is known for repudiating the classical observationalist/inductivist account of scientific method by advancing empirical falsification instead; for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy"[2] and for his vigorous defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism which he took to make the flourishing of the "open society" possible."

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn

 

"In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase),[2] in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving". Thus, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Popper's refutability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science."

[ecoli]

That doesn't seem like it's inconsistent with Kuhn... I wonder where the controversy is.