Kuhn and Popper

Eric S. Raymond’s “Armed and Dangerous” blog has a 2003 post (“Brother, Can you Paradigm?”) attacking the reputation of Thomas Kuhn’s work. I just saw it, and left the following comment:

If I mention Karl Popper in a lecture I can usually count on someone telling me that Popper is discredited and I should be talking about Kuhn and his successors, instead.

The trouble is, Popper offers me a practical tool for intellectual work: a reliable way of checking whether I may be deluding myself, which may help me get nearer to the truth.

Kuhn offers me only a passive sociological interpretation of how intellectual communities function. He may be right, but no interpretation can replace a functioning heuristic for finding error.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it’s that I shouldn’t be surprised that the world prefers Kuhn — that in itself is a lesson about the truth of both men’s ideas.

[Edit: The initial, briefly visible version of this posting misidentified the author of the blog.]