Cosmic ReligionKuhn’s alternative model of science is the one most widely
accepted by those who reject the accumulative one. His
normal science looks very much like the industrial processes
under which science is carried out in commerce and univer-
sities. However, Kuhn’s model also entails that social forces
play a part in the determination of scientifi c truth too, when
science is undergoing a paradigm shift. Which is to say that
science is not wholly ‘scientifi c’. In questioning the traditional
model of science, an ambiguity as to the veracity of science
has crept in. Science is neither seamlessly cumulative nor can
it wholly account for the processes through which its results
are derived.
A different model of science was proposed by Karl Popper. He
rejected the method of induction, following David Hume who
argued that it was no more reliable than a belief: thinking of
the rising sun again, Hume pointed out that just because it rose
yesterday and today is no proof that it will rise tomorrow, for
all that it seems very likely. Popper thought that induction was
more like a process of informed guesswork. The way science
works, he argued, is that scientists come up with hypotheses
based on their intuition. They then test them by observation.
These tests do not verify the hypothesis, as the traditional view
of science would have them do. Rather, all they can do is show
that the hypothesis is not false. So, the best scientifi c theories
are the ones that are most easily falsifi able for, if they stand up,
they are more likely to be right.
However, in offering this model of science, Popper also
implied that science is never quite true, though it may come
asymptotically close. (In practice, because the best falsifi able
theories depend on the quality of the method used to test them,
which is also hard to get right, scientifi c theories will routinely
be overthrown by other ones.)
Kuhn and Popper are both philosophical heirs of Immanuel
Kant. He famously pointed out that our image of the world
around us could not be a mirror image of things as they are in
themselves because the human mind imposes its own structures