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Particularly one member of the Vienna Circle, the German philosopher Rudolf
Carnap (1891-1970), who later was a professor in the United States of America,
wrote in 1928
The Logical Structure of the World
[16] For Carnap and many others
theories are sets of propositions and these propositions are built from data via in-
duction. - Popper said: on the contrary! For Critical Rationalists scientific theories
are not built from data by induction! There is no logical way from data to theory!
Theories are hypotheses or conjectures and scientists test these hypotheses in ex-
periments wich intend to refuse them. Even a great number of positive test results
cannot confirm a scientific theory, but if there is only one outcome that is negative,
this one counterexample shows that the theory is falsified. However, we can try to
falsify our hypothesis and if we find one counterexample, then the hypothesis is re-
futed. Thus, in Critical Rationalism the falsifiability is the criterion of demarcation
between what is scientific and what is not.
Another argument against the Logical Empirism is the following: it seems very
clear that we can not reduce all our knowledge to sense experience. Therefore, we
need so-called theoretical elements in addition to the empirical ones. These addi-
tional elements are being understood only in the context of a theory. They are more
abstract, they are more distant from our perceptions than observational terms. To
factor these elements in Logical Empiricism Carnap and the German philosopher
Carl G. Hempel (1905-1997) introduced in the 1950s the so-called “double lan-
guage model”. [19, 32] Whereas observational and therefore non-theoretical terms
are elements of the observation language, theoretical terms are elements of the the-
oretical language. Later, the US-American philosopher Willard van Orman Quine
(1908-2000) joined in criticizing the empiricist differentiation between “analytical”
and “synthetical”. In short, the Logical Empiricism collapsed.
In
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
. Kuhn criticized Popper's view on
theory dynamics in science.
2
As he could show in many cases of his historical
research work, no replacement of a theory by another happened because of falsifi-
cation [38, 38]. He held the view that there is no linear accumulation of new knowl-
edge in the development of scientific theories. Moreover, he claimed that science
undergoes periodic revolutions. He proposed to distinguish three different stages
of science:
Prescience
comes first with its lack of a central paradigm. Later, when
scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by “puzzle-solving” prescience is
followed by
normal science
. Normal science reaches a crisis when anomalous re-
sults build up. At this point a new paradigm can emerge, which subsumes the old
results along with the anomalous results into one framework. This new paradigm
is termed
revolutionary science
[38]. Therefore, there are “paradigm shifts” in his-
tory of science, in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is
transformed.
This new view on science development says that theory change in science is not
a rational process and therefore we need assistance from sociology and psychology
to explain the paths of science through history.
2
Later he exemplified that the idea for this topic went back to 1947 when he was asked as a
graduate student at Harvard University to teach a science class for humanities undergrad-
uates on historical case studies.
