Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction

We saw in the previous chapter how the positivist view of science – that it starts from the collection of facts and from these builds theories – was called into question by Popper. The logic of science could never lie in the creation of universal theories from finite facts simply because there was no logical way in which such laws or theories could be derived from facts. Instead, the theory had to come first and the logic of science – its particular claim to rationality – was to be found in the subsequent testing of theories once they had been invented.

Thomas Kuhn (1922–96), whose work is the topic of this chapter, agreed with Popper on a number of important points. Indicating these points of agreement, Kuhn himself stated: “neither Sir Karl nor I is an inductivist. We do not believe that there are rules for inducing correct theories from facts, or even that theories, correct or incorrect, are induced at all. Instead we view them as imaginative posits, invented in one piece for application to nature.” (‘Logic of discovery or psychology of research?’, p. 12)