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by Animats 2626 days ago
No, Kuhn represented the "pro-humanities" view. The hard line was from Karl Popper: if it's not falsifiable, it's not science. If you can clearly demonstrate a violation of F = m*a, it's gone.

Popper's standards exclude sociology, psychology, theology, economics, and most of the "soft" sciences. This annoyed many people who claim to be doing science. Kuhn was willing to consider them science, but had to redefine science to make that work.

Falsifiable theories allow reliable predictions. So they lead to engineering, and stuff that works. Although Popper's position is currently unpopular, he wasn't wrong.
2 comments
cantankerous 2626 days ago
The shortcoming with that line of reasoning is that it's still not wholly satisfying. Falsifiability is probably necessary but not sufficient for what most people consider to be science. The problem of induction still stands and falsifiability doesn't have much to say about it. Focusing on falsifiability seems incomplete as a philosophy of science.
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basetop 2626 days ago
Actually what most people consider science is in line with Popper's view. When most people think science, they think the "hard sciences" - physics, biology, chemistry, etc. It's fairly recently that the idea of the "soft sciences" ( sociology, economists, etc ) being real science has become popular.

Richard Feynman called "soft science" a pseudoscience, which I completely agree with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

Humanities departments around the country essentially appropriated the good name of science at add more legitimacy to their "soft science". It's similar to how "christian science" or "scientology" appropriated the good name of science to legitimatize themselves in the eyes of the public. Creationists have even created creationism "science" to make themselves look more legitimate.

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8077628 2626 days ago
It doesn't really matter what you or SciAm think Kuhn believed, I'm telling you that the humanities faculty have used him to cosign the most outrageous anti-realist ideas imaginable. If you don't believe me, just take a class and find out!
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