Category: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

University of Chicago Press: 1970.

Kuhn on falsification

A very different approach to this whole network of problems has been developed by Karl R. Popper who denies the existence of any verification procedures at all. Instead, he emphasizes the importance of falsification, i.e., of the test that, because its outcome is negative, necessitates the rejection of an established theory. Clearly, the role thus attri­buted to falsification is much like the one this essay assigns to anomalous experiences, i.e., to experiences that, by evoking crisis, prepare the way for a new theory. Nevertheless, anomalous experiences may not be identified with falsifying ones. Indeed, I doubt that the latter exist. As has repeatedly been emphasized before, no theory ever solves all the puzzles with which it is confronted at a given time; nor are the solutions already achieved often perfect. On the contrary, it is just the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that, at any time, define many of the puzzles that characterize normal science. If any and every failure to fit were ground for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times. On the other hand, if only severe failures to fit justifies theory rejection, then the Popperians will require some criterion of “improbability” or of “degree of falsification.” In developing one they will almost certainly encounter the same network of difficulties that has haunted the advocates of the various probabilistic verifi­cation theories.

Many of the preceding difficulties [Kuhn is referring to inductive reasoning] can be avoided by recognising that both of these prevalent and opposed views about the underlying logic of scientific enquiry have tried to compress two largely separate processes into one. Popper’s anomalous experience is important to science because it invokes competitors for an existing paradigm. But falsification, though it surely occurs, does not happen with, or simply because of, the emergence of an anomaly or falsifying instance. Instead, it is a subsequent and separate process that might equally well be called verification since it consists in the triumph of a new paradigm over the old one. [146-7]