The author seems disturbed that science fact is socially constructed. His solution is an appeal to social construction. He has not moved the ball by doing this.

The author seems disturbed that science fact is socially constructed. His solution is an appeal to social construction. He has not moved the ball by doing this. In fact, he's lost yardage, because now science would have to come together in consensus over his arbitrary 95% rule... which would be yet another social process... just to arrive at an ongoing popularity measurement process. Yuck. Seems like nothing he said really contradicts Kuhn. Kuhn agreed that normal science operates within a particular paradigm; and in that paradigm there are accepted facts. What we can't know is whether a new paradigm might emerge that rearranges sensory phenomena into a different set of facts that "makes more sense" in some way, or allows certain puzzles to be solved that cannot otherwise be solved. If enough of those puzzles can be resolved in the new paradigm compared the old, the stage is set for scientific revolution. There must be a stable reality of some kind, because when we operate as if there is, we are perpetually rewarded. But how we think about that reality is not necessarily stable. Oxygen definitely exists. But remember that the guy who discovered oxygen never called it by that name. The original term was "dephlogisticated air" which is a reference to the completely discredited phlogiston theory.