I am always flabbergasted at the fact that all these philosophers never think of the concept of "area of applicability" which can modify any interesting theory in infinitely many ways. This means that any falsification would usually not disqualify a complete theory, but in stead give information about the boundaries of this area of applicability. Newtonian mechanics is fine for any cases that don't involve high speeds near to that of light, or strong gravitational fields. Einstein's theory of relativity had to agree with Newtonian mechanics within its checked area of applicability. This is why experiments need to attempt observations of extreme situations, with a chance of exiting the area of applicability of the current best theory. Theoretical scientists are perfectly allowed to imagine new theories predicting surprising things. This way they may help point experimentalists toward interesting areas of research. The one big assumption that science must make, is that some kind of objectively real world does exist. There is a truth. The job of science is to get a grip on ever larger parts of that objective reality.
I get flabbergasted as well. Could one say that its the most profitable theories that tend to stick around? Of course they must have a wide range of applicability and an ability to impress upon us a sense of wonder. And on some level it must also resonate with our most basic intuitions about how the universe works. Marshall McLuhan observed the only true revolutions in human society are technological; everything else is propaganda. Newtonian mechanics is based on Euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry only came about in Greece because of the introduction of the phonetic alphabet. It’s all very down-to-earth, nuts and bolts stuff. Our new instruments and instant electrical communication have allowed a glimpse into new world, a world Newtonian thinking regards as spooky, or magic. The future is all about plasma and its resulting force, electromagnetism.
I heard that Kuhn once said, ‘I am not a Kuhnian’, meaning that he did not support the idea that all world views are equally valid. He was definitely pro-science.
I suppose it's natural to suppose that abstract ideas are not bounded unless the bounds are stated as part of the idea. This is very much the case in axiomatic formalisms. So as a purely conceptual exercise in philosophy there should be no "area of applicability" to consider. We do have to consider it in applications involving reality, fair enough there. Science is the investigation of reality, so of course it begins with the premise that there is a reality to investigate. Not only that, but also there is a practical requirement for reality to have some degree of consistency so that we can extract information from our observations. If all we ever got was noise, then even a provably objective reality having provable existence would be uninteresting. This is really the stronger consideration of the two, and it is the basis of Methodological Naturalism. We don't have to commit to the premise that there necessarily exists an objective reality independent of our observations. It might in fact be a dream or a simulation. But we're still warranted in investigating it AS IF it really exists, insofar as there is a signal to investigate. There's one further consideration, that we pragmatically gain something by doing this investigation. Whether or not it's all an illusion, we feel the sensations of hunger and thirst and so on. We're not disinterested observers, not in this reality anyway. This isn't a philosophical consideration, and I find that itself to be significant, because here we're not grounding science in philosophy, or taking some philosophical position as axiomatic. We're taking the ground to be ourselves as INTERESTED observers.
You're roughy explaining some parts of Kuhn's theory, and showing why Popper's has some serious flaws. If every single theory we've ever used was thrown out completely the first time it was falsified, we would barely make any progress. But if we go fully into Kuhn's camp, then we have to accept that scientific theories are necessarily subjective, at least to some degree. That is, we can never really know if any theory *actually* explains the objective world.
Why are you surprised by the fact that people who don't have hands on experience with a field can't make useful statements about it? Do we expect a person who can't play the piano to tell us how to play Chopin piano concertos? So why would we expect a philosopher to get science right?
