The Popperian Podcast #6 – Steve Fuller – ‘Karl Popper vs. Thomas Kuhn’

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Apr 11, 2021

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INSIGHT

Core Disagreement between Kuhn and Popper

Popper saw science's distinctiveness in a critical attitude towards propositions, emphasizing testing and challenging assumptions.
Kuhn focused on scientific consensus within paradigms, valuing agreement on facts, theories, and methods.

ANECDOTE

Differing Responses to Science in Wartime

Popper, critical of the scientific community's role in wartime atrocities, felt a responsibility to defend a new vision of science.
Kuhn, disillusioned with science's direction, left active research to become a historian and philosopher of science.

INSIGHT

Paradigm Dominance: Stability vs. Problem

Kuhn viewed paradigm dominance as a source of stability, while Popper saw it as a problem to overcome.
This difference reflected a moral disagreement, with Popper seeing Kuhn's view as a potential moral failure.

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This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Steve Fuller. They speak about Steve’s book Kuhn Vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science, how Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn each regarded the scientific method, the differences between these two conceptions, the significance of the arguments involved and how they defined both science and public opinion (and continue to do so), the history of science and how it should be understood, the moral implications and responsibilities associated with each man’s theory, how the disagreement played out over time, and what happened at the infamous 1965 Popper-Kuhn debate at Bedford College, University of London.

Steve Fuller holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He is the founder of the research program of social epistemology, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the UK Academy of Social Sciences, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, the leading ‘ecomodernist’ think-tank, and an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the leading ‘transhumanist’ think-tank. Steve is the author of twenty-five books, which have been translated into more than twenty languages.

*** Kuhn Vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science (Results for Kuhn Vs.Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science | Book Depository).

*** You can follow Steve Fuller’s ongoing work at: Steve Fuller (warwick.ac.uk) and Steve Fuller | University of Warwick - Academia.edu.

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*** Underlying artwork by Arturo Espinosa