> The upshot of all of this, according to Kuhn, is that the criteria for scientific truth are always caught up in certain historical assumptions and that we hav

> The upshot of all of this, according to Kuhn, is that the criteria for scientific truth are always caught up in certain historical assumptions and that we have to take these assumptions into account when assessing the veracity of a given theory. If your historical assumptions are true in a useful way, your science will progress to the point where you have more-useful engineering; if they're wrong in an important way, your science will stall out, or give you the wrong answers. If they're neither, and they don't affect the ultimate utility of your predictions one way or the other, it all becomes a bit academic: Is it even useful to say your theories are wrong if they keep making good predictions and allow scientific progress to be made? Note well that atomism (pre-quantum) and geocentrism eventually stopped making good predictions, stopped being a gateway to more complete theories, or both. (For example, geocentrism is probably impossible to integrate with universal gravitation.) "Truth" is something mathematics has access to, not physics. Truth-With-A-Capital-T is Absolute, Perfect, Incorruptible, and utterly inconsistent with reality as it is outside of the symbol-games we play in our minds, because Platonism is downright insane. Therefore, "scientific truth" is contingent, sure, but it's contingent on more than mere fashions. It's contingent on experimentation and experiments don't care if your histories are contingent one way, the other, or the other way entirely. Nobody's histories were contingent enough to imagine the Earth repelled small rocks. So Kuhn agrees that there is a universe and that there are, at least potentially, facts about that universe humans are capable of discovering. That puts him a few up on some philosophers. However, I don't agree that our criteria for scientific truth is fully entwined with our historical accidents as long as we rely on science to predict what the non-human world is going to do.