Kuhn–Popper debate

“To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.” A crisis involves a period of extraordinary, rather than normal, research, with a “proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundament

The science writer Jonah Lehrer sometimes reminds his readers of Karl Popper’s distinctions between clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be defined and evaluated using reductive methodologies. You can take apart a clock, measure the pieces, and see how they fit together. Clouds are irregular, dynamic, and idiosyncratic. It’s

come from the Karl Popper/Imre Lakatos school of falsificationism. Like them, I don’t believe there are right answers or wrong answers, just better ones and worse ones. One should always use the best model available, but watch closely to see whether it produces the outcomes that it promised. If it does, keep using it. If it doesn’t, then you should

The fundamental error being made by Lamarck has the same logic as inductivism. Both assume that new knowledge (adaptations and scientific theories respectively) is somehow already present in experience, or can be derived mechanically from experience. But the truth is always that knowledge must be first conjectured and then tested.

a scientist too determined to confirm his hypothesis risks ignoring findings that don’t fit his expectations—dismissing them as noise or error, not a doorway to new discoveries—and so misses what might become more fruitful theories. And the naysayer in the brainstorming session, the guy who always shoots down any new idea, throttles innovative insi