Popper vs Kuhn: Understanding the Scientific Debate for Researchers

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome to my uh papa debate and its importance to prog graduate researchers presentation. This is the uh director's cut. So it's the slightly extended version. I couldn't present at the at the Preso conference uh today because um because of time restrictions.

[00:00:19]Uh my name is David Pigot. I'm a senior lecturer in the Kane School of Sport at Lee Metropolitan University. Um, and this presentation was inspired by my ongoing work with post-graduate students and the value I think that this debate has to their understanding of of their own research. So, um, yeah, let's get on with it.

[00:00:44]Um, first thing, um, I want to talk about, well, just give a an outline, I suppose, to the, uh, presentation. So I'm going to go through who are Popper and and what their ideas were, the debate between them, uh how the debate is influenced methodology in the social and natural sciences respectively. Um and then I'm going to take a bit of time to talk about why I think it's important and um how it how that uh knowledge of this debate can help you in practice.

[00:01:17]Um, I'll also go into the the notion whole notion of choosing a side, you know, do you choose to be in the proper camp or the camp? And I'll suggest that that's probably a bit of a redundant uh question. Anyway, um before we get into that, just a quick slide to to demonstrate that how important these guys are. Um so uh on the right hand side of the screen you'll see that there are references there to Popper's main works or abbreviations to Popper's main works and also how many uh citations have been made to those works. So you can see there the LSD logical scientific discovery um there are nearly 20,000 citations conjectures and reputations 12,000 objective knowledge open science enemies um and poverty of historicism accumulatively work out to about 51,000 or just over 51,000 citations. Um Coon's main text the structure of scientific revolutions was even more popular. um 70,000 citations. So these guys in the academic literature at least really really important. Um uh on the left hand side you can see I just ran basically a quick graph search for for Popper and through Google um just to compare um the interest in those topics over time. And I guess a couple of things we can see one is that interest is declining which I hope to put that right today. Um and also that popper in the uh popular for popular searches at least is always more popular than You know they fluctuate but um popper seems to be more more popular in in the public domain I suppose. Anyway, that's just a quick demonstration of of interest and popularity.

[00:03:07]Who were these guys? Well, um Carl Pocker on the left um lived across pretty much the whole of the 20th century. He's an Austrian philosopher. Um started out in in Vienna in Austria in the uh 1920s and 30s. Um did his PhD in psychology, child psychology and then quickly moved into philosophy and epistemology. Um and then after the war uh became professor of logical and scientific method at the LSSE where he stayed pretty much for the rest of his career. Uh an American professor history of history of science in this case. Um and note that Poppy was a professor of logic. was a professor of history. That's important and I'll I'll raise that later on when I talk about choosing sides. um and he he did his PhD and and early work at Harvard but then moved to to Berkeley and spent most of his career at Berkeley.

[00:04:07]So this is who they were. Um what were their ideas and what was this debate between them? Well, there's a there's a fair popular literature on on this debate, the Papaun debate, and they're kind of being pitted against each other.

[00:04:20]Um and the subtitle to Steve Fuller's recent text, the struggle for the soul of science, I think kind of captures that. So um they were asking the big questions the big questions you know like what is science what do scientists do um what makes scientific knowledge special um so although they're asking the same questions they they came up with really quite different answers and so what I've tried to do here is pose the main questions and then suggest how I think they may have answered those questions as a way of showing you the basic ideas and the nature of the debate. So if we just take these quickly in turn, uh the first main question they're interested in is is there such a thing as scientific method or scientific attitude? And for POA, I think it was pretty clear that he thought there was he thought there was a sort of ideal type method um and that that was science begins with problems. Um and problems occur when we notice a clash between expectation and reality.

[00:05:17]And when we see a problem, we we very quickly jump to a solution or conjecture or a solution. Um and then the method that scientists follow crucially is that they then take those solutions and they test them. They submit them to criticism. And he kind of called this a process of conjecture and reputation. So for science, this notion of problems, tentative solutions, and then attempted reputations is is basically what the scientific method is. And the attitude that goes along with that is the willingness to test and the willingness to be proved wrong.

[00:05:51]on the other hand thought that scientists um basically had lots of different methods. So there was no single scientific method but that the method which was dictated by the paradigm which the scientist was was socialized into.

[00:06:06]So paradigm is a sort of agreement among a group of scientists about methods and theories and assumptions about the world that they all agree upon and never question. And then what happens then is is normal science which is a kind of much more mundane uh puzzle solving activity where the scientists just try to extend the reach of the paradigm.

[00:06:29]They don't really test it. They don't really question any of the central ideas.

[00:06:33]Um the second question which is probably more of a a question that was was interested in was what do scientists actually do? And again Papa's answer here in the blue is that uh he wasn't really interested in everyday scientists. He was more interested in the best scientists and the the famous scientists. And he said that what they do is they they propound or propose bold theories, bold solutions to problems and then they test them and they give give up their even if their theories are you know pet theories they they're willing to give them up if the tests prove them wrong if they're falsified.

[00:07:07]Um now this was Coon's main point I guess with Papa was that he didn't think that that's what everyday scientists did. He said that everyday science is much more normal. you know it's much more mundane and scientists um you know as students they are um uh socialized into paradigms they seek to extend the range of the paradigm but they never actually question the central theory or central methods whereas in the poparian situation poparian scientists much more heroic uh creatures where where they're proposing bold theories and testing them and giving them up and and moving on quickly and suggested in his studies of physicists that that really wasn't what happened at all.

[00:07:51]Um so this third question that the the demarcation question what's different about scientific knowledge. Um well for papa there was a positive answer there that scientists um are very different or scientific knowledge is different and science crucial is made up of testable theories.

[00:08:08]So uh scientific theories have to be have to make predictions which could be tested so that the theory could be proved wrong. Um whereas what he called pseudocience so other theories that aren't scientific are tend to be immune from criticism. They're protected. Uh whereas was saying exactly the opposite. He was saying that well scientific knowledge is protected from criticism because it's characterized as part of a paradigm and scientists and paradigms never question those central theories or dogmas. So um in in Cooneyian language you know this this movement from uh or giving up one theory would only happen very very rarely very seldom in what he called uh you know revolutionary paradigm shifts um and that means that scientific knowledge is no different to any other kind of knowledge because it's just different you know once you break out of one paradigm into another it's just different it's not better so um for I guess this was what gave gave way to the sort of relativist theory of knowledge and u and why has been most popular in social science. So as we can see their influence you know was really has been really influential in the social sciences where people believe you kind of almost pick a paradigm which incommensurable with other paradigms you can't debate between them. Theories here act as lenses.

[00:09:31]They're not things to be tested or criticized. And the activity then is one of puzzle solving um rather than uh theory testing. In the natural sciences, POPA was perhaps more victorious. Um you know this notion of theories to make predictions.

[00:09:50]Uh testing rejecting null hypothesis has become very popular. That's that's pure Paparian logic.

[00:09:56]Um theories are to be tested and rejected or modified. And the logic is one of conjecture and reputation. So because these each of these guys has been popular in different domains, we have different approaches to science in in the social and natural sciences. I mean that's a gross oversimplification of course, but it's it's um it's probably true to an extent.

[00:10:20]So why is this important to you? Well um I think a basic grasp of this debate would change the way that you answer questions throughout your postgraduate journey. So in in the course of my supervision activities, these four questions and others uh are things that come up all the time. So questions about how can I construct my research? What's the logic that my study or series of studies are going to follow? Um you know an understanding of this this type of material can really help with that. The role of theory in research that's a question all postgraduate students will have to raise an answer at some point.

[00:10:55]you know, is theory something to be tested or is it a lens which you're going to look through? Um, to what extent do you need to be critical and what do you are you going to be critical of? Again, criticality is something that's become very, you know, it's a it's a it's a buzz term. It's always around in postgraduate research, but I don't think many people really understand fundamentally what it means and and what it means for you as a student. But again, you know, poparian approach is is highly critical. It's about criticizing theories. as the coin approach is is less critical maybe more being more about critical of other paradigms.

[00:11:30]Um what do you claim for your research?

[00:11:33]Well again that would change dependent on what kind of approach you you took or what kind of view you took here. You know, a poparian might be much more tentative in what they claim and suggest that they might have falsified a theory or contributed to its falsification or thought of some new way of testing a theory whereas a Cooney might talk about extending the range of a paradigm that type of thing. So again the knowledge of this debate can really help you answer those those kinds of questions. Um so they have to choose a side. Well, basically no. Um you know there's this old notion this old idea that the papa debate is a is like a gestile switch. You know you look at the same thing uh looks at this picture he thinks it's a rabbit papa looks and he thinks it's a duck. Um in reality coming back to my initial point I think it's important to remember that papa was a logician. and he was a philosopher and what he what he's developed here is a is a vision of science which is an ideal type because it's a prescriptive theory of how scientists should conduct themselves um in terms of the method and attitude in their studies. So this is really a positive prescription of of what we ought to be doing whereas is is a is a historian and a sociologist and he's really critiquing the practice of scientists you know this notion of scientist mob psychology um and he's saying well this is what's going on right now so I think we can read coon's critique and we can read popper's prescription and we can accept both views and and this you'll see you know if you want to follow this up Daryl Robotham's paper I've referenced here is is a useful introduction to that way of looking at this thing. Um, so do you have to choose sides? Well, well, no. And I think people who do choose sides, particularly people who choose the coonian sides and say, "Well, I've picked a paradigm and that's it.

[00:13:18]I'm safe here now." Um, are really going the wrong way about things.

[00:13:24]Uh, in practice, well, I just wanted to raise this. This was a a viviveror question that came up in a in a PhD examination from a student of mine. um a really good question, two-parter. In what traditional research do you locate your study and what have you contributed that is new? Um and in this case, the student in question was able to give a really good answer to this question because um while he gave the blue answer, the poparian answer, he could have equally given a red or aunian answer. Uh and it was only because he'd really immersed himself in this debate and understanding of it that he was able to answer the question really well in this way. And I think there were lots of questions in vivvers that come up um that are really tricky and without a knowledge of this type of material.

[00:14:09]Um so it's easy to locate yourself in a tradition of research if you're coming at it from a poparian problem situation and it's easy to say that you contribute something new by saying you've extended the paradigm or by saying that you've tested a theory, you falsified it or you proposed a new one and a new way of testing it.

[00:14:27]So really useful in practice if if you've got a grasp of the basics here.

[00:14:33]So um just to conclude, you know, today's been a really quick introduction to the debate. You know that I've not had time to do anything more than that, but there's some recommended reading here. Um some general overview stuff at the top there. Steve Fuller and Lacatoss and Musgrave are great for getting the understanding of the debate. And then there's some specific reading on Popper and respectively. um if you want to specialize on each. Okay, so enjoy.

[00:15:00]Thank you.