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"Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions has sold over a million copies in more than twenty languages and has remained one of the ten most cited academic works for the past half century. In contrast, Karl Popper's seminal book The Logic of Scientific Discovery has lapsed into relative obscurity. Although the two men debated the nature of science only once, the legacy of this encounter has dominated intellectual and public discussions on the topic over since." "Almost universally recognized as the modern watershed in the philosophy of science, Kuhn's relativistic vision of shifting paradigms - which asserted that science was just another human activity, like art or philosophy, only more specialized - triumphed over Popper's more positivistic belief in science's revolutionary potential to falsify society's dogmas. But has this victory been beneficial for science? Steve Fuller argues that not only has Kuhn's dominance had an adverse impact on the field but both thinkers have been radically misinterpreted in the process."--Jacket.… (more)
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Language is a means to manipulate thoughts and opinions. Thus it matters how science is defined. Fuller looks at the social environment in which science is carried out, and he includes this social environment within the methods of science. Furthermore he deems science’s domain is to cover all knowledge. Thus he adds traditional sciences’ antithesis, sociology, as part of science. What he is really describing is not science but a scientific culture based on an assortment of philosophical ideas, analytical procedures, systematic organization and sociological influences. This mingling of a broad science and its culture lets him present sociology as the common thread and legitimate central controller of his science.
Now, sociology makes decisions by argument and debate as in parliament (the dialectic model). In contrast, traditionally scientific opinion is tested by experimentation but is always more tentative and qualified. The postmodern critics of traditional science argue that because science does not deliver absolute certainty all other suggestions should be given equal prominence. Except that they do not entertain the argument (heresy) that attention be paid to the conditional likelihoods of all arguments. Their objections reveal fear and incomprehension of conditionals. Thus the refusal of traditional science to give equal credence to unsupported political belief causes Fuller great consternation. To him science is being irrational.
Of course there is much to read and mull over in the text. He discusses how history is written by victors, how each person’s writings can be interpreted in opposing ways, various deductive fallacies, and how scientific results have social consequences. Thus scientists have an ethical responsibility for the social consequences of both their actions and inactions. He likes to drop the occasional incendiary. As an example I will end with his contention that the sciences do not belong in universities. He opines that science’s purposeful narratives alienate the humanities who are the generic central corps of the university.