1. RunningHead:THE RESEARCHER’SSTRUGGLE 1
The Researcher’s Struggle to Create Valid Theories
Robert Kohl
Long Island University
EDU 1000
Professor Hammond
08/25/14

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Abstract
At the root of mankind’s existence is a desire to explain what is true versus what is not true. At
first glance, defining something as true might seem like a simple task. Truth, however, can be an
elusive concept to define. Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn explain the complexities of truth,
validity, and perception in their respective works. Popper deconstructs our simplest definitions of
things in the opening of his work and Kuhn explains that the things we believe are true are the
result of many other factors including, but not limited to, the time period into which we are born
and the popular beliefs of our times. Both men recognize the seemingly unfathomable
complexity of the universe, and both men provide models for us to follow as we attempt to
define, explain, and explore the events and phenomena of the human experience and the universe
we inhabit. Popper provides the concept of falsification to make discovery and thought valid,
while Kuhn wants us to think in terms of a constantly shifting landscape in which the ideas that
seem true become untrue over time and with discovery, giving rise to new truths (until those are
refuted). Both of these men understand that the researcher constantly struggles to create valid
theories and both men are interested in providing a method of research to help in this struggle.

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The need to explain is innate in man. As we have grown in complexity over the course of
time, so too has the way in which we explain ourselves and the world around us. As we make
new discoveries, we are sometimes forced to question and then abandon the old ideas these new
discoveries seem to contradict. A major problem facing researchers lies in the struggle to create
valid theories and then to defend those theories. Thomas Kuhn, in his work, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, and Karl Popper, in his work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, attempt
to provide frameworks for the researcher to use to make science and scientific discovery valid. In
order to understand the problems the researcher faces in establishing validity, we must consider
the problem of validity in three ways. First, Popper’s concept of falsification will be analyzed.
Second, Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts leading toward validity must be explored. Finally,
consideration must be given to the modern researcher in the field of education in the context of
both Kuhn’s and Popper’s vastly different and oddly similar conceptions about how research
should be conducted. After exploring these ideas, it will be clear that the researcher must be very
thorough in proving his theory and that he should always be concerned with the validity of his
process and of the theory itself.
In the opening of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper begins to lay the
framework for the complex problems the scientist or researcher faces in establishing and
defending a theory. He begins by explaining the problem of truth when he wrote, “I never
assume that by force of ‘verified’ conclusions, theories can be established as ‘true’, or even as
merely ‘probable’” (p. 10). In this, he is questioning the very idea of being able to verify a
conclusion. Truth, then, is not something to be striven for, rather, Popper suggests, the best that
can be hoped for is validity. But there are myriad issues preventing, or, at the very least,

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obstructing validity. Popper wrote, “…a subjective experience, or a feeling of conviction, can
never justify a scientific statement, and that within science it can play no part except that of an
object of an empirical (a psychological) inquiry. No matter how intense a feeling of conviction
may be, it can never justify a statement” (p. 24). In this, Popper is pointing out the danger of our
beliefs and warns against leaning too heavily on what we think we know. To be scientific and
separate from non-science, or the “metaphysical”, the scientist must be sure that his data is
accurate and not tainted by his own thoughts, feelings, or beliefs. He is leading to the theory of
falsification as a test for validity. In order for an experiment or a theory to be valid, it must be
able to be argued against. A simple explanation of falsification can be summed up with the
overly obvious argument that there is a God, or, the opposite, that there is no God. According to
falsification, this is not a scientific question, because there is no way to prove the
belief/theory/conviction false. Popper wrote, “We say that a theory is falsified only if we have
accepted basic statements which contradict it” and goes on to explain that, “we shall take it as
falsified only if we discover a reproducible effect which refutes the theory. In other words, we
only accept the falsification of a low-level empirical hypothesis which describes such an effect is
proposed and corroborated” (p. 66). As he expands the idea into actual scientific practice, we
begin to see the complexity of any theory or thesis. We must question the language we use, we
must question our conceptions while forming the theory, we must question our beliefs, and we
must accept that the theory has a contradiction. The benefit of this is that it takes the ego out of
the equation and forces us to strive for a purely scientific approach to discovery and to the testing
of theories. However, this also seems to suggest that nothing is ever absolutely true in the world
of scientific discovery and that we can only make our theories as valid as possible against the
theories working against them. It seems counterintuitive to work in the way Popper suggested,

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and nearly eliminates the possibility of social sciences, like educational research, where
measurements cannot be precisely controlled or measured, something Popper warns strongly
against.
Thomas Kuhn, like Popper, was interested in providing a model for scientific discovery.
His approach involves the idea that, over time, new experiments and discoveries will force us to
question theories we had previously accepted as fact. At one point, humans believed the earth
was flat and it took a great deal of time and evidence to convince them otherwise. Kuhn builds
on Popper’s idea of falsification when he warned against shared paradigms. He wrote, “Men
whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for
scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for
normal science, i.e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition” (p. 11).
The problem stems from the idea that, “…men who learned the bases of their field from the same
concrete models, his subsequent practice will seldom evoke overt disagreement over
fundamentals” (p. 11). Therefore, according to Kuhn, science and human progress are hindered
by the beliefs we have because we do not, as human beings, enjoy change. The problem here is
that we all learn from concrete models. Discovery will be a very slow process indeed because of
what we already know, or, at least of what we already think we know. Kuhn believed in the
necessity of a scientific historian and that “the historian must compare the community’s
paradigms with each other and with its current research reports. In doing so, his object is to
discover what isolatable elements, explicit or implicit, the members of that community may have
abstracted from their more global paradigms and deployed as rules in their research” (p. 44). In
order to solve this problem, Kuhn suggested that constant experimentation and questioning of the
accepted things we think we know is necessary. Ultimately, this questioning and experimentation

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will cause us to question a theory enough that a new theory will have to be created to take the
place of the one refuted by experimentation. This is essentially what he means by “revolution”.
It is human nature to question ideas, but it is hard to accept that there might not be any such thing
as truth, at least when it comes to theory. He illustrated the problematic nature of our conceptions
of truth when he wrote, “An investigator…asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent
chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without
hesitation, but their answers were not the same” (p. 51). They came to different conclusions,
Kuhn explained, because “…they were viewing it through their own research training and
practice” (p. 51). In essence, both were correct, illustrating the power of the paradigms we
believe in. We are forced then, to allow for the possibility that what we think we know is wrong
and constantly question through experimentation our theories. This presents a problem because
we need to learn a paradigm in order to contradict that paradigm; a counter-intuitive task.
In terms of educational research, Popper’s theory is problematic. In Popper’s eyes,
educational theory and experimentation is precariously close to a pseudoscience. A researcher
could propose a theory, and that theory could even be falsified. However, any idea about how
students learn best can be falsified; infinitely so. This is because the very subjects being studied
are infinitely complex. Within even one class in one school year there exist too many potential
outcomes to accurately predict anything. If a theory worked for one group, one year, there is no
way to say that it will work in the same way in another group. This researcher, who saw success
in the first group, might attempt to explain why it was not successful in the next group through
any number of justifications. Popper’s definitions seem too rigid for the field of educational
research and lead to an infinitude of problems in order to conduct valid experimentation in a
classroom, rendering educational theory un-falsifiable, and therefore, unscientific. Thomas

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Kuhn’s approach seems a better fit for educational research. The idea that we should always
question what we think we know is especially beneficial for an educational world in constant
flux. Education needs this type of questioning and experimentation because of the world we
inhabit. With the increasing role of technology in our lives, we need to question the old ways of
delivering information even if this is uncomfortable. Ultimately, keeping Popper’s belief in the
scientist’s need to separate himself from the outcomes he wants and expects and Kuhn’s belief in
questioning what we think we know can aid the educational researcher in his or her struggle to
create valid theories.

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References
Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (4th ed.). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Popper, K. R. (2009). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Routledge Classics.