What is the nature and beauty of science as seen through the philosophies of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn?

This article explores the nature of science, starting with why you chose this subject in high school. It explains Popper’s disproversialism and Kuhn’s paradigm theory, and discusses the progress and beauty of science.

 

It was a long time ago. I was a high school freshman, and for the first time in my life, I had to make a decision for myself. It was a matter of choosing between science and literature. My parents left the choice entirely up to me, telling me to choose what I liked and not to regret it. Despite the unspoken rule among people that “if you don’t like maths, go for the sciences” and the fact that all my close friends went for the sciences, I eventually chose the sciences, because for me, natural sciences are the most beautiful discipline.
More than the fact that it has contributed to the development of human civilisation and changed our lives, I found it beautiful that the planets move gracefully in a circular motion due to universal gravity alone (though not actually due to universal gravity alone), that a stone thrown into the air follows the trajectory of a quadratic function graph in mathematics, and that molecules in a chemical reaction are transformed into products by random effective collisions.
As you can see, I am arguing for beauty as one of the properties of the natural sciences. However, science is very different from the traditional beautiful disciplines-art, music, literature, etc. These latter disciplines may have pursued beauty from their inception. The natural sciences, which describe nature, have a character that distinguishes them from other disciplines.
The question “What is science?” was fiercely debated by philosophers of science in the 20th century. The Bean school, which dominated the philosophy of science in the early 20th century, proposed a logical positivist view of science in which scientific knowledge is generated and justified by induction, a process that involves three steps: first, unbiased data collection; second, generalising from the facts collected to form hypotheses; and finally, testing the hypotheses with new observations and experiments. This was a very plausible theory because it fit well with the image of research as the discovery of natural laws from objective facts. However, since inductive reasoning is always expanding, there is a major problem that the conclusion is not guaranteed to be true just because the premises are true, and the feasibility of collecting unbiased data is highly controversial.
At this point, Karl Popper (1902-1994) advocated disprovability instead of proof, arguing that the principles of natural science can never be fully proved, but only disproved. In other words, Popper defined scientific activity as

1. propose a hypothesis that seems to explain a given problem.
2. if empirical examples are found that refute the hypothesis, discard it immediately. Otherwise, retain the hypothesis. Don’t claim that your hypothesis is proven; you can only say that it has stood up well to the rigours of empirical testing.

In other words, the nature of science is that it is disprovable, so if it cannot be refuted, it is not science. Astrology, creationism, etc. can all be classified as pseudoscience, and we can conclude that mathematics, with its perfect premises and deductive reasoning, is also not science. However, disprovism, which pursues perfect logic and describes the development of science in an extremely rational way, has also encountered difficulties. First of all, there are scientific theories that cannot be disproved. For example, claims that state the existence of something, such as “black holes exist” or “genes exist,” are impossible to disprove. Worst of all, disproving them is harder than it sounds. For example, suppose we actually saw a grey crow when judging the truth or falsity of the proposition “All crows are black”. Can we immediately conclude that not all crows are black? No. To do so, we would need to add at least the following premises: “Our colour vision is accurate enough to distinguish between colours”, “We have the ability to distinguish between crows and other birds”, etc. In the case of scientific theories, the hypotheses required to disprove them are more numerous and complex, so it is harder to say that a theory is wrong because it has been disproved.
This gap between the ideals of scientific theory and reality gave rise to Thomas Kuhn (1922-1994), who emphasised historical facts. He divided the development of science into two processes, “normal science” and “scientific revolution”, and defined normal science as the expansion of the application of science within the existing paradigm, while scientific revolution is the replacement of the paradigm itself. It is worth noting that in a scientific revolution, the paradigm shift is different from Popper’s methodology of claim, conjecture, and refutation, which is based on trial and error and leads to a more objective and rational direction. Kuhn argues that a paradigm shift not only changes our way of looking at the world, it changes the world. The truth of nature, like rubber clay, does not exist in its original form, but is subject to the interpretation of the observer – the scientist. Ultimately, this leads to the theory of non-commutativity. The existence of a common factor is a prerequisite for two numbers or polynomials to be comparable, and incommensurability literally means that theories belonging to different paradigms are not comparable. This breaks with Popper’s theory that scientific theories are cumulative and evolve into more fundamental and better theories, and argues that paradigms cannot be distinguished.
The biggest gap between Popper and Kuhn is the difference between the ideal and the real. Popper was not interested in the actual history of the development of science, but presented an ideal of science as to which science is more desirable. He proposed a rational, objective code of science that would be subjected to the baptism of disproof and gradually approach the truth through constant trial and error. Kuhn, on the other hand, presents the reality of scientific development, arguing that it is difficult to find a more idealised methodology than the one that has worked so far, however irrational it may seem. Perhaps these two theories are also incommensurable. In terms of suggesting the nature of science, these theories are unequivocal.
Where is the uniqueness of natural science among these theories? Is it in the methodology of scientific development, or is it in the existence of paradigms as Kuhn argues? I think both of these claims are correct. The use of “scientific” methodologies that are different from other disciplines, or the existence of such paradigms, are all due to the fact that science is backed by nature. Science is dealing directly with nature and attempting to understand it, sometimes in different guises, but the existence of a universal and consistent nature is perhaps the most important thing that makes science special.
I think the beauty of science comes from the very nature of science discussed above. Nature’s characteristics of generality, unity, and simplicity constitute the basic aesthetic qualities of natural science, or, according to Kuhn’s theory, these aesthetic qualities are values that are universally accepted by scientists. He argued that paradigms are formed because contemporary scientists share these values, and that paradigm shifts occur as the weighting of these values changes. Aesthetic qualities have not only made science attractive, but have also contributed to its development. In fact, scientific theories are formulated and hypotheses are formulated with a methodology that takes into account such generalities, unity, simplicity, and accuracy. A prime example is Dirac’s combination of classical electromagnetism and quantum mechanics to establish quantum electromagnetism. He wrote “Mathematical Beauty” as a guide to mathematically complete the esoteric science of quantum mechanics. In doing so, Dirac emphasised the beauty of nature and the value of unity as a methodology. Simplicity was also a key guide in the evolution from Aristotelian mechanics to Newtonian mechanics.
Thus, beauty is not only a property of science, but also a methodology for scientific development. Just as Popper considers disprovability as the methodology of science, I believe that the methodology of pursuing beauty has actually led the development of science.