Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper

While a student of theoretical physics at Harvard, Thomas Kuhn wrote his influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Through this work, Kuhn argued that scientific progress was indeed not progress at all, that instead, it was work within and bound by the existing paradigm. In making such a claim, the philosopher popularized the term “paradigm” and opened a door for many considerations as well as doubts. A paradigm was, in essence, a framework; a viewpoint through which the world is seen. Kuhn argued that scientific work happens within a paradigm and that a revolutionary idea will force the collapse of that framework and result in a new paradigm; this circumstance is called a “paradigm shift.” Kuhn’s work carried the assumption that no scientific work, natural or social, was capable of objectivity. Instead, he argued that all researchers apply standards they know and understand to their work and thereby are naturally subjective. This argument has of course come under some criticism from more positivist thinkers who believe objectivity is possible in research.

Karl Popper

Karl Popper was a great and influential philosopher of science in the 20th century; much of his work arose as a critique of the positivist and Behavioralist tendencies to use numbers to find verifiable truths. Instead, the thinker encouraged the idea that objective knowledge is possible, but that it comes by refutation rather than verification. With this, Popper is likely most famous for his ideas of falsification and deduction. When dealing with knowledge, there is a tendency to believe that research results in truth; Popper, at least in an academic sense, changed this trend. It is because of this man that researchers now work to disprove a null hypothesis rather than to prove their own hypothesis. Furthermore, it is never said that research “proves X to be the case”; instead, it is more popular to say that “evidence supports that X is the case”. All these structured concerns with the validity of our knowledge come from Karl Popper.

 

Falsification: Many would like to believe that it is possible to know an idea through verification. We may be able to, for example, look at the world and say “this is round”. However, it is somewhat ignorant and naïve to make this assumption because it could actually be the case that someday we are proven wrong in this regard. At one time it was fully believed that the world was flat, and therefore circumnavigation was impossible and its attempt would result in death. Falsification protects us from the potential ignorance of our viewpoint by encouraging the idea that we only know what is true by knowing that it is false. Therefore, we do not know that the world is round; we simply know that it is not flat.

Deduction: Popper wrote as a critic of the inductive approach to understanding. The philosopher argued that while it may appear that induction is possible, that we are able to separate ourselves from our ideas so much that we can make reasonable extrapolations from our current understanding. In actuality, Popper noted, all research uses the deductive approach because all study begins with a theory.