Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Don't have time to read all this thread now - but wanted to comment on this.
That seems like totally wrong reading of Kuhn to me (in fact it sounds if anything more like Popper) - the whole point is that there is no fixed corpus of scientific knowledge, and part of what instigates changes in paradigms is cultural context, the puzzles and questions that culture expects science to answer. He was rejecting both verification and falsification as methods of moving closer towards a scientific "truth".
Your disdain is for relativism - Kuhn is nothing if not a scientific relativist (remember incommensurability?) - and I guess many would place him in the "post-modern" bracket.
I never said the corpus of knowledge was 'fixed', did I - if it were, how could it possibly change?
What I meant was, scientific theories stand and fall by how well they explain empirical data - yes, there will be conflicts between rival theories when there is insufficient data to conclusively support either one (eg., Lamarckian vs. Darwinian evolution) and in these situations people go on hunches or intuition informed by whatever scientific culture they belong to; but eventually one side or the other will win out (or the dichotomy will be transcended completely, as in the case of wave vs. particle nature of light) as new data comes to light.