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Ways of Knowing

Evaluating Scientific Theories

Russell Berg has fifteen criteria for scientificness and he knows how to use them.

The ‘scientific method’ is a group of methods and procedures. But since Thomas Kuhn argued in the 1960s that the concept of ‘falsification’ formulated by Karl Popper is insufficient on its own to determine the scientificness of an idea, there has been no method of distinguishing scientific theories from non-scientific ones. Kuhn himself muddied the waters by rejecting the established rules for determining scientific results, to broaden the conception of science to include economics and psychoanalysis. The problem with this, as Kuhn admitted, was that it makes it extremely difficult to distinguish between science and pseudo-science. Examples of the consequences are that in America creationists are arguing that Creation Science and Darwinian Evolution should be given equal time in school biology lessons.

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