2nd year University Bachelor in Business Administration: Humanities Class - Essay Example

In his turn, Karl Popper assumed that science began with a conjecture, on the basis of which scientific data had to be explained and understood. Copernican revolution and the displacement of a Ptolemaic understanding of the universe proved that neither of the two theories was better than the other one. Rather, Copernican revolution exemplified a unique combination of the two philosophic paradigms – a scientific discovery that displaced the existing scientific paradigm and, simultaneously, a scientific method that falsified previous hypotheses, which supported the central position of the Earth in the universe.

In the current state of philosophy, science is often distinguished from other branches of the human activity due to its unstoppable expansion and progress. Put simply, science operates clear criteria for identifying advances and improvements in science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Science is fairly regarded as a multidimensional system, which involves a complex network of scientists that use scientific methods to create, generate, and transfer new knowledge (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

The concept of the scientific progress is clearly different from the philosophic concepts of development and change: the word “progress” is inevitably associated with the meaning of scientific improvement; more importantly, such improvement needs to be measurable against the predetermined set of normative criteria (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Needless to say, the overall philosophic complexity of science always attracted philosophers and thinkers, who tried to explain the nature of scientific discovery and develop effective methods of scientific evaluation and research.

Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper proposed a well-articulated view of scientific discovery. However, it is at least incorrect to say that Kuhn’s philosophic explanation is better than that of Popper or