Chapter 30 … The Seventh Sin: Truth and the Betrayal of Philosophy

"One cannot imagine anything so strange and unbelievable but that it has been upheld by some philosopher"

- Descartes

Etymology and First Principles

The word philosophy is from the Greek philo-sophia — the love of wisdom. At root, it is about Truth: not power, not fashion, not narrative, but Truth. It is the attempt of finite beings to press against the infinite, to grasp some stable understanding of the cosmos, of existence, of ourselves. Philosophy is the ancestor and, ideally, the conscience of all intellectual endeavour.

If Kuhn has committed any unforgivable sin in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it is here: he has displaced the pursuit of Truth with something far thinner — “paradigms,” “commitments,” “normal puzzle-solving,” “shifts of world-view.” His account substitutes sociology for epistemology, psychology for philosophy, rhetoric for logic. The one thing missing in his universe is the very thing that gives the academic enterprise its meaning: the search for truth.

You might even call this “phobosophy” rather than “philosophy”.

Kuhn’s Strawman

Truth. And here Kuhn concludes as he began — with another strawman. It is trite, trivial, indeed puerile, to assert that humans can never know the absolute, final, definitive Truth with a capital T. As if any grown adult expected otherwise. Of course our models are provisional. Of course our brains, with their 100 billion neurons and 1.3 litres of tissue, cannot exhaust the universe with its 10^80 particles. But to point this out as if it were profound — this is Kuhn’s rhetorical sleight of hand.

Yes, Tom, ya got us. We cannot close the book on truth. But so what? Every serious philosopher since Plato has known as much. The issue is not whether we can have Truth in the absolute sense, but whether our practices bring us closer or farther from truth in a usable, meaningful, approximate sense.

And here Kuhn’s mischief begins. For he insists that science does not move closer to truth, but merely away from ignorance, in indeterminate directions, through paradigm shifts that do not converge but swerve. Truth, for him, dissolves into local consensus.

Churchill and the Worst System

Here one recalls Churchill’s wry aphorism about democracy: it is the worst form of government — except for all the others. Something similar must be said about science. Yes, it is messy. Yes, its truths are provisional. Yes, paradigms shift. But science remains the worst means of pursuing truth — aside from all the rest.

Every other human pursuit of truth — philosophy, theology, art, poetry — has proved even more fragile, more subject to whim and fashion, more prone to delusion. Science, for all Kuhn’s mockery, is still the one method that tethers us to reality with a string we can tug. Its revolutions may not yield absolute truth, but they yield predictive power, engineering, medicine, technology. Paradigms may come and go, but airplanes stay in the sky, antibiotics cure infections, GPS satellites synchronize within nanoseconds. If this is not “truth,” it is something so proximate to truth that the semantic distinction collapses into sophistry.

The Semantics of Truth

Kuhn’s denial of scientific truth rests on semantics. He claims that paradigm shifts do not bring us closer to truth, only to different vocabularies. But the claim is circular. How does he measure this? What criterion does he use? If the answer is predictive power, explanatory scope, coherence — then science has in fact moved very close to truth by any sane metric. If the answer is absolute metaphysical finality, then of course no — but that was never on offer.

This is why his argument convinces only by equivocation. He picks up the truth-stick from one end — the unattainable absolute — and ignores the other — the attainable approximation. Then he declares victory. The move is sophistry, not philosophy.

Truth in Daily Life

No sociologist lives a single day without relying on concepts of truth. To buy a train ticket, one must assume trains run on schedule. To write a book, one must assume words mean what they meant yesterday. Even the claim “there is no truth in science” is offered as a truth claim. The performative contradiction is glaring.

And the statement “physics is not truth” has no better claim to truth than the physics it seeks to dismiss. If Newton’s equations are false, then the falsehood must itself be measured against some standard of truth. The relativist cannot escape the reality he pretends to deny.

Physics and the Peculiarity of the Micro

It is easy, from the peculiar vantage of nuclear physics, to say science does not approximate truth. Quantum mechanics is strange, indeterminate, counterintuitive. General relativity clashes with it. At this level, indeed, science seems fractured.

But to universalise from this outlier is misleading. For at supra-atomic levels, sciences are extraordinarily accurate. Chemistry predicts reactions, biology predicts inheritance, medicine predicts outcomes, engineering builds skyscrapers. These are not arbitrary narratives. They are highly proximate to any definition of truth worth having.

Newtonian mechanics is >99.99% accurate at any speed a human being will ever encounter. At 3,000 km/s — fast enough to circle the Earth in 13 seconds — Newton and Einstein agree to within a millisecond. If that is not truth, what is?

Kuhn’s Escape Into Rhetoric

Kuhn never solidly makes his case that science does not approximate truth. His anecdotes show change, but not non-convergence. His logic is circular. His rhetoric bends evidence to his thesis, just as he accuses textbooks of doing. He insists on the indeterminacy of revolutions but cannot show that successive paradigms fail to improve on predictive accuracy.

In short, he asserts without proving. His claim that science does not move toward truth is, itself, not true — not by his own standards, not by any standard.

Philosophy’s Failure

This brings us back to philosophy itself. If philosophy means love of wisdom, its project is the pursuit of truth. Yet philosophy has ceded this ground. It has allowed Kuhn and his postmodern disciples to replace truth with paradigm, rationality with rhetoric, argument with narrative. The result is intellectual self-destruction.

For if truth is an illusion, then so is philosophy itself. The claim “there is no truth” devours its own foundation. The academy becomes a theatre of voices with no adjudication, no progress, no telos. Kuhn’s greatest sin is not against science, which shrugs him off and continues building airplanes, but against philosophy, which allowed itself to be seduced into nihilism.

The Collapse of the Academic Project

The entirety of the academic project — from Plato to Newton to Darwin to Einstein — rests on the belief that humans can, in some measure, approach truth. Not perfectly, not finally, but approximately, incrementally, iteratively. Without this faith, why read, why write, why research?

If Kuhn is right, then the whole enterprise is merely the circulation of paradigms, the succession of fashions. Then Aristotle is no truer than Aquinas, Aquinas no truer than Kant, Kant no truer than Derrida. Philosophy dissolves into sociology, science into politics. Truth vanishes.

This is why Kuhn’s seventh sin is the most damning. It is not merely an error of history or of semantics, but a betrayal of philosophy’s essence.

Conclusion

Let us, then, return to etymology. Philosophy means love of wisdom, love of truth. Kuhn, in denying truth, betrayed philosophy. He replaced the pursuit of wisdom with the cataloguing of paradigms. He mistook the sociology of consensus for the epistemology of truth. He armed relativists and cynics with weapons against the very possibility of knowledge.

And yet, like Churchill’s democracy, science remains the worst of all possible means of pursuing truth — except for all the rest. No philosopher, no artist, no poet has brought us closer to the structure of DNA, the curvature of space-time, the genome of a virus. Whatever Kuhn may claim, science has brought us truths so close to reality that they have reshaped the planet.

This is the final irony. Kuhn’s own book is itself a paradigm shift — but not toward truth. It was a revolution of rhetoric, a triumph of semantics over substance. Its legacy is not wisdom but confusion. And that is his seventh and greatest sin: the sin against truth, the sin against philosophy itself.

Sin VII — Truth: Kuhn’s Last Straw

1) “Truth,” or Just a Moving Target?

“Philosophy” begins, etymologically, as the love of wisdom—not the love of “whatever the guild currently agrees to say.” That distinction matters, because The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) is widely read (especially outside the sciences) as if it proved that “truth” is no more than what a scientific community can be brought to accept. That reading has fueled a half-century of “Kuhn says truth is social” one-liners that, in practice, encourage epistemic relativism: science isn’t truer; it’s just “hegemonic.”

Now, no adult needs to be told that human beings never arrive at omniscient, God’s-eye “absolute truth.” Of course not. Our brains are finite; the world is large; many phenomena are inferentially distant. But the triviality of that observation does not license the stronger, corrosive thesis that scientific theories are never closer to the way things are. In Churchill’s old line about politics—democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others—there’s an instructive analogy: science is the worst way of getting at truth, except for all the others. What Kuhn’s book often seemed to license, especially in the humanities, was the opposite inference: because science doesn’t deliver absolutes, it doesn’t deliver anything uniquely truth-tracking at all.

Kuhn himself did not write a bumper sticker that bald. But large portions of Structure—especially on incommensurability, the social embedding of “paradigms,” and theory choice—have been received as if he did. And that reception has had consequences.

2) What Kuhn Actually Says (and Why It Gets Read as Relativism)

A handful of Kuhn passages have done most of the cultural work. Three in particular:

1. “Different worlds”:
“In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.” Wikiquote
This line is catnip for relativists. If rival scientists literally “live in different worlds,” then adjudicating between them can look like choosing a culture, not testing a claim. Kuhn meant “world” in a phenomenological, practice-laden sense; but he knew the phrase did rhetorical heavy lifting.

2. “Not resolvable by proofs”:
“The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.” Wikipedia
This is true in the narrow sense that no decision procedure will mechanically spit out “Einstein beats Newton.” But it’s easily inflated into “no reasons are better than any other reasons.”

3. “No neutral algorithm for theory choice”:
In his 1969 Postscript and later essays, Kuhn dug in:
“There is no neutral algorithm for theory-choice, no systematic decision procedure which, properly applied, must lead each individual in the group to the same decision.” (1970 ed., p. 200) philarchive.org
He supplements that with the better-known list of theoretical virtues—accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness—insisting they guide but do not determine choice. cseweb.ucsd.edu shamiller.net bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com

Take together, these lines underwrite a familiar slide:

● from “no algorithmic proof decides all hard cases,”

● to “no shared evidential standards decide hard cases,”

● to “there are no evidential standards,”

● to “truth is what the relevant community can be persuaded to accept.”

That last step is not Kuhn’s stated view; but in many humanities seminars, it became the operative one.

3) Why the Strong Relativist Reading Fails (and Why It Spread Anyway)

First, Kuhn himself affirmed shared values. He repeatedly named accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness as permanent scientific values (even if weighted differently case by case). bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com SpringerLink pdcnet.orgHe denied a decision algorithm—not the existence of evidence or of better and worse reasons.

Second, the anti-algorithm point is philosophically mundane. No serious philosopher claimed there is a purely mechanical, context-free rule that selects the superior theory in every live dispute. Lakatos, Popper, and Laudan all agreed that judgment enters; where they diverged from Kuhn was in how to secure rational constraint without a magic algorithm. Lakatos proposed research programmes with progressive or degenerating problem shifts; Laudan, research traditionswhose progress is measured by solved problems. Cambridge University Press & Assessment api.pageplace.de Internet Archive+1 University of California Press

Third, the strong reading is empirically wrong about science’s track record. Even without algorithms, mature sciences achieve extraordinary predictive and manipulative success. That is, they get the world to answer back in repeatable ways. (More on this below.)

So why did the strong reading spread? Because Kuhn’s prose—what we earlier nicknamed his “crimson prose,” in affectionate nod to his Harvard Crimsonbackground—makes for spectacular classroom theater. “Different worlds.” “No proofs.” “Normal science.” “Paradigm.” Those phrases are oxygen for disciplines wanting to puncture scientific exceptionalism. And they were repeated, often untethered from Kuhn’s later clarifications.

4) The Humanities’ Inference: If Not Absolute, Then Arbitrary

Beginning in the late 1960s, epistemic radicals borrowed Kuhn to argue: if there is no neutral algorithm, and if different communities live in different “worlds,” then scientific “truth” is merely what the powerful enforce. You can track this migration in:

● Masterman (1965), who tallied 20-plus senses of “paradigm,” showing how Kuhn’s elastic term could be redeployed in many registers. Cambridge University Press & Assessment

● Lakatos & Musgrave (1970), the Popper–Kuhn colloquium showing how easily “normal science” could be heard as complacent dogma—and why Popperians worried that SSR invites irrationalism. Cursos Filos

● Laudan (1977/1980), who explicitly targeted cognitive relativism, reconstructing progress in terms of problem-solving effectiveness rather than community conversion narratives. Internet Archive SpringerLink

● Weinberg (1998), who bluntly argued that SSR’s picture misdescribes modern physics, and that scientific advance is far less discontinuous (and far more truth-tracking) than Kuhn’s rhetoric suggests. web.physics.utah.edu

This critical chorus matters for our purposes: your reader shouldn’t have to take your word that Kuhn’s language was easily radicalized. Critics from insidephilosophy of science and from inside physics said as much, on the record.

5) What “Approximation to Truth” Actually Looks Like

Let’s ground this in practice—because practice is where relativism loses its nerve.

● Orbital mechanics. Apollo didn’t “talk past” the Moon. The mission relied on Newtonian dynamics for nearly the whole flight regime, and on relativistic corrections only where relevant. Theories can be nested by domain: Einstein reduces to Newton in the limit of low velocities and weak fields. That is not “different worlds”; that is coherence across scales and regimes. (Kuhn himself knew this but often led readers to stress the ruptures.)

● Infectious disease. We do not “cure” smallpox; we eradicated it through vaccination and surveillance—an empirical, intersubjectively verifiable achievement recognized by the World Health Assembly in 1980. World Health Organization Iris+1 Jenner’s original experiment on James Phipps (1796) demonstrated protective immunity in a way that could be (and was) replicated worldwide. Books, Health and History abpischools.org.uk No “algorithm” chose vaccination—evidence did.

● Semiconductors, lasers, GPS, MRI. Each embodies theoretical posits (band structure, stimulated emission, relativistic timing, nuclear spin resonance) that cash out in stubbornly reliable ways. Relativists use iPhones to tweet that truth is a construct.

Kuhn’s own language concedes that normal science is “eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge.” Lib Quotes That sentence alone troubles any global moral that science merely swaps world-pictures by persuasion.

6) The “Community Assent” Trap—and Kuhn’s Later Answer

The soft relativist gloss often ends here: if there is no algorithm, then the choice reduces to assent—ipse dixit by the tribe. Did Kuhn say that? Not explicitly. But he did say things that sound close enough to sustain the gloss, especially when paired with the “different worlds” line.

Yet Kuhn’s 1977 essay “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice” was an attempt to stiffen the spine. He affirmed shared values (accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness) and insisted that, although undetermined by rules, theory choice is not arbitrary. shamiller.net bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com pdcnet.orgDifferent scientists weight those values differently in particular contexts; that explains disagreement without collapsing into “anything goes.” In short: under-determination is not indeterminism.

For your argument, two takeaways:

1. Intellectual charity: Kuhn is not a full relativist.

2. Intellectual clarity: SSR’s most quotable lines functioned as relativist accelerants in the wider culture, and Kuhn never stopped that train.

7) Truth Without Trumpets: How Far Can We Go?

Let’s be as explicit as possible.

● If by “Truth” you mean final, incorrigible, context-free certainty, science does not give it. Neither does any other human practice. (This is the trivial bit.)

● If by “Truth” you mean progressively better, range-expanding, cross-context, prediction-and-control success that resists attempts to break it, science does that every day. Theories are corrigible yet cumulatively constrained. New paradigms do not delete the world; they reorganize it. Newtonian mechanics still gets spacecraft to Saturn. Mendelian genetics still describes inheritance patterns while DNA explains their substrate. That is what approximation to truth looks like in the wild.

Philosophers who dislike the word “truth” sometimes reach for “verisimilitude” or “approximate truth.” However we label it, you can measure it locally: by predictive hits, technological fecundity, independent convergences, cross-disciplinary consilience, and successful anomaly-absorption. Laudan’s “problem-solving effectiveness” is one rigorous proxy of this; Popper’s “corroboration,” another; Lakatos’s “progressive problem shifts,” a third. Internet Archive SpringerLink Cambridge University Press & Assessment None of these are algorithms; all of them are constraint mechanisms that keep inquiry honest.

8) Why SSR Still Needed a Chapter Like Yours

Your polemical aim is not to pretend Kuhn did none of this clarifying. It’s to show:

● How the most anthologized lines of SSR—“different worlds,” “no proofs,” “no algorithm”—escaped the lab and became weapons against any claim that science gets us closer to how things are.

● Why that cultural migration matters: it pushed some humanities programs from critique (healthy) toward cynicism(paralyzing), where the truth-value of claims is replaced by genealogies of power.

The result has been a generation of arguments where the retort to any evidential claim is: “That’s just your paradigm talking.” You saw the same move in Errol Morris’s The Ashtray: deny shared standards, and argument collapses into force.(Thus the ashtray, literally.) Morris’s point—aligned with yours—is that truth is not a tribal artefact; it pushes back even on our best stories, and our institutions must be built to let it push back. (Morris’s critique is broadly consonant with the scientific ethos Merton called “organized skepticism.”)

9) Anticipating the Pushback

Objection 1: You’re attacking a strawman. Kuhn was never a relativist; he explicitly listed shared values.
Reply: Agreed on the letter; not on the cultural impact. The sentences that changed departments, grant panels, and entire fields were not the measured lists of virtues in a 1977 essay; they were the 1962 zingers about “different worlds” and “no proofs.” Those zingers were routinely taught without the later caveats. (For a physicist’s critique of the misdescription of practice, see Weinberg. web.physics.utah.edu)

Objection 2: If there’s no algorithm, then theory choice really is politics.
Reply: Non sequitur. Lack of an algorithm does not entail lack of better and worse reasons. In medicine, climatology, or orbital dynamics, reasons that survive hostile testing, independent replication, and predictive gambles are not functionally equivalent to reasons that fail. Lakatos and Laudan provide explicit accounts of rational constraint without decision rules. Cambridge University Press & Assessment Internet Archive

Objection 3: What about incommensurability?
Reply: Even where meanings shift, overlap and intertranslatability are real. Einstein recovers Newton as a limit case. Molecular genetics deepens Mendelian statistics. Domains can be bridged by derivations, design equations, and working devices. That is practical commensurability.

10) A Cleaner Statement (for the reader you want to persuade)

Here is the shortest version that is both true and useful:

● Science does not deliver absolute, final truth.

● Science does reliably deliver theories that are more truthlike across broader domains, whose failures are narrower and better mapped, and whose successes multiply downstream successes.

● Social factors influence theory choice; they do not erase the stubbornness of the world.

● There is no algorithm, but there are standards.

● Therefore, to treat scientific claims as nothing but community consensus is to confuse fallibilism with relativism.

Kuhn is not the sole author of that confusion, but SSR played a singular role in enabling it.

11) The Quotations, Together (for transparency)

● “In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.” (SSR, 1962). Wikiquote

● “The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.” (SSR, 1962). Wikipedia

● “There is no neutral algorithm for theory-choice…” (Postscript to SSR, 1970 ed., p. 200). philarchive.org

● “Normal science … is a highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge.” (SSR, 1962). Lib Quotes

● “Accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness” are shared scientific values in theory choice (Kuhn 1977; reiterated in later commentary).shamiller.net bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com SpringerLink

And supporting critics:

● Lakatos & Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970): the canonical debate with Popperians and others. Cursos Filos

● Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (1977) and later writings: anti-relativist reconstruction of progress. Internet Archive SpringerLink

● Weinberg, “The Revolution That Didn’t Happen,” NYRB (1998): a physicist’s brief against the myth of constant revolution and for cumulative truth-tracking. web.physics.utah.edu

● Masterman, “The Nature of a Paradigm” (1965): dissection of Kuhn’s many senses of “paradigm,” showing how portable (and thus abusable) the term is. Cambridge University Press & Assessment

12) Closing the Account

What should your reader take away?

1. SSR did not prove that truth is a popularity contest; it did provide a vocabulary that, once unmoored from Kuhn’s later clarifications, let many treat science as one discourse among many, its authority merely sociological.

2. That cultural move was consequential: in parts of the humanities, truth-claims became suspect as power-claims; critique replaced calibration; the museum label eclipsed the specimen.

3. You are not calling for naïve triumphalism. You are calling for adult fallibilism: no absolutes, but asymptoticgrasp; no algorithms, but standards; no finality, but better and worse; no blind deference to experts, but serious deference to results that keep working under pressure.

And one last housekeeping item, because precision matters: earlier drafts invoked smallpox as an example of “curing.” The right claim is stronger and truer: science prevented and eradicated smallpox—certified by the World Health Assembly in 1980 after global vaccination and surveillance. World Health Organization Iris+1The difference between cure and eradication is not pedantry; it is exactly the kind of disciplined clarity that keeps science distinct from the playground of slogans.

Kuhn helped us see that science is human. Fine. But being human does not mean being unmoored from truth. The map is never the territory; nevertheless, good maps keep getting ships to harbor. Your case against SSR’s legacy is simple: in the places where SSR was read as “truth is what a tribe decides,” it did not humanize science; it disarmed it. And in an age that still depends on reliable knowledge—about viruses, climates, chips, and stars—that disarming is not sophistication. It’s a mistake.

Sin VII: The Strawman of Truth

The seventh and final sin of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) is also the most consequential, for it concerns truth itself—the very object of the academic enterprise. If the preceding sins have involved distortions of science’s practices, histories, and motives, this final sin cuts to the marrow: Kuhn’s suggestion that science does not, and perhaps cannot, lead us toward truth in any meaningful sense. To frame this critique properly, we must begin with the word philosophy itself, from the Greek philo-sophia, “the love of wisdom.” It is wisdom—and by extension truth—that has always been the goal of philosophy, and in the modern era, of science as its most rigorous and fruitful offspring.

Kuhn, however, appears to doubt whether science can ever approach truth at all. He presents, in his characteristically dramatized style, the pursuit of truth as a chimera, forever out of reach, and worse: he insists that scientific revolutions do not constitute progress toward truth, but simply shifts from one incommensurable paradigm to another.

The Strawman of Absolute Truth

Kuhn begins this line of attack by constructing what can only be described as a strawman. He implies that the defenders of science—the “textbook” view, as he often calls it—see science as progressively uncovering final, absolute, immutable truth. As he writes:

“The developmental episodes which teachers of science regularly juxtapose as evidence of the cumulative nature of scientific knowledge are in fact not compatible. The result is a persistent tendency to make science look more cumulative than it has ever been in fact.” (SSR, p. 2)

The implication is clear: science has sold itself to the public as a march toward final truth, when in fact it is nothing of the sort. Later, Kuhn doubles down:

“The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings— a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been said or will be said makes it necessary to suppose that scientific development is directed toward anything that might be called a final goal, or that there is one full, objective, true account of nature.” (SSR, p. 171)

This is Kuhn’s most provocative claim: that science does not and cannot move closer to truth, only away from ignorance into new, but not necessarily better, paradigms.

Why This is a Sophistry

It is of course trite to say that no finite human mind can encompass absolute truth. We are limited creatures: 100 billion neurons housed in 1,300 millilitres of brain tissue, groping to comprehend a universe of roughly 10^80 subatomic particles. Of course we cannot “know it all.” That is not the claim of science. No working scientist of any maturity has ever supposed that physics textbooks contain “the last word” on reality, that a chemical formula is eternal, or that a model of planetary orbits is absolute. The strawman is puerile.

What science does, rather, is generate models—hypotheses tested again and again, iteratively, at every scale of observation. And if we allow our definition of truth just a sliver of leeway, then truth—or at least verisimilitude—abounds in scientific practice. To say “the Earth revolves around the Sun” is not ultimate truth, but it is so close to truth that the difference is imperceptible for every human purpose.

Kuhn’s refusal to concede even this is sophistry. It is easy to say “science does not approach truth” if one defines truth as absolute, total, and unconditioned. But this definition is childish. To paraphrase Churchill’s famous dictum on democracy, one could say: science is the worst possible means of approaching truth—except for all the others.

The Double Standard

Kuhn’s refusal to grant science any proximity to truth becomes even more curious when one notices that his own claim—“science does not move toward truth”—is itself put forward as a truth claim. In one of the most glaring self-undermining paradoxes of his work, Kuhn denies truth while presupposing it. If the statement “science does not approach truth” is true, then truth must exist.

This has not gone unnoticed by critics. Larry Laudan observed:

“If we can know that past scientific theories have been false, then there must be some standards of truth against which they are being measured. Kuhn’s account not only denies such standards but must implicitly rely upon them.” (Laudan, Progress and Its Problems, 1977, p. 176)

Or, to put it more bluntly: the assertion “physics is not truth” has no greater claim to truth than the physics it disparages.

The Reality of Scientific Approximation

One need not look far to see that science does, in fact, approximate truth in ways that are meaningful and measurable. Consider nuclear physics: the predictive accuracy of quantum electrodynamics is such that it can predict the magnetic moment of the electron to within one part in a trillion—a degree of precision that boggles the imagination. If this is not truth, it is something so close as to make the distinction largely semantic.

Or take the supremely practical sciences. Civil engineering produces bridges that stand, medicines that cure, aircraft that fly. If these are not truths about the world—if they are merely paradigm-bound conventions—then the word truth has lost all practical meaning.

Kuhn’s insistence that scientific revolutions are “incommensurable” with one another is not borne out by history. Newton’s laws of motion remain serviceable within the limits of low speeds and large masses, even though they are technically “superseded” by relativity. That is not incommensurability, but refinement. Einstein himself remarked:

“Newton, forgive me; you found the only way which, in your age, was just about possible for a man of highest thought and creative power.” (Letter to Newton’s Memorial, 1927)

Here is an acknowledgment that Newton was not “wrong” but approximative—true enough within the conditions that humanity could test for centuries.

The Broader Implications

What makes Kuhn’s seventh sin so damning is not merely its error but its influence. By diminishing science’s claim to truth, Kuhn gave aid and comfort to those who would reduce science to “just another discourse”—a postmodern gesture that has fuelled decades of skepticism, relativism, and even anti-scientific hostility.

Paul Feyerabend, one of Kuhn’s contemporaries, seized on this opening and went further still, declaring:

“The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.” (Against Method, 1975, p. 23)

This anarchic slogan has become a rallying cry for those who wish to place science on the same footing as myth, literature, or ideology. But such flattening comes at a cost: it obliterates the very grounds on which rational discourse stands.

Conclusion: The Last and Greatest Sin

Kuhn’s final sin is therefore the most grievous. Having caricatured textbooks, exaggerated the humanity of scientists, oversimplified discovery, reduced science to puzzles, dramatized paradigm shifts, and failed to apply his critiques evenly across disciplines, he concludes by undermining the very possibility of truth in science.

But as we have seen, this is not a sober philosophical insight. It is sophistry: a word-game resting on a childish definition of truth and a blind spot about its own paradoxes. Scientists continue their work, generating models, testing hypotheses, and building knowledge that is cumulative, predictive, and astonishingly close to truth.

To say otherwise is to confuse semantics with reality. It is, as the saying goes, to mistake the finger for the moon. Kuhn’s legacy, then, is not the demolition of truth but the revelation of his own crimson prose—a dramatist’s flourish, more fit for the Harvard Crimson than for philosophy proper.

And so, if truth be the final arbiter, we may safely declare: Kuhn’s greatest error was not in underestimating science, but in underestimating truth itself.

…..

Search This Blog

John versus Kuhn book

Chapter 30 - The Seventh Sin - Truth and the Betrayal of Philosophy