Page 94 - Introducing Cultural Studies

This insight was very powerful for human action in general,
particularly politics, when applied by Popper in his book The Open
Society and its Enemies (1945), and it made him enormously
influential. But when he tried to embody this in the scientific logic of
refutations, he encountered insoluble difficulties.

The real revolution in the philosophy of science - introducing the
postmodern age of relativism - was inaugurated by Thomas Kuhn
(1922-95) in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn
was troubled by the "triumphalist mode of teaching the
history of science, Science was assumed to be
always true and constantly progressing,
a happy picture not challenged by the
ordinary course of science.

Worse, sometimes people who otherwise appear to be real
scientists, deny what is later accepted as scientific truth. Could it be
that even now, science is not protected from error, and some of its
confident assertions could be false? The traditional historians'
response to such a threat was generally to denigrate those
scientists who were on the losing side as intellectually or morally
defective.

93