Popper, Kuhn, Churchland, Bartley, etc.

Steve Witham (sw@tiac.net)
Tue, 25 Mar 1997 00:47:22 -0400


Max writes (of Popper)-
>
>Doing away with verifiability hardly means science can't make progress.
>Popper is not Kuhn.

Does Kuhn doubt progress?? After all, Kuhn is just a different kind of
evolutionary epistemologist. His theory could be read to say that science
is rational (accomplishing a kind of criticism by attrition) *even when*
scientists themselves are not.

>...Perhaps a better account of scientific progress
>needs to be developed on a Popperian basis. (It would be a stimulating
>project to combine Churchland's account of scientific progress with
>Popper's account of the nature of science.)

Stove seems to say (in Reilly's quote) that Popper is flawed by
taking "observation" as a special category. I thought Bartley treated
that issue more uniformly, taking "observations" (& observational methods)
as just more ideas to hold-provisionally. More uniformly "irrational,"
meaning non-justificationist, of course.

--Steve

--
sw@tiac.net           Steve Witham          web page under reconsideration
"At the latter I was informal, at the former I wore my suit,
 I wore my swimming suit."  --Kate & Anna McGarrigle