Scientific Pluralism as a Branch of Millenial Popperianism?

Of all the positions that have amassed intellectual traction within the philosophy of science in the previous decades, it is scientific pluralism that is most often pitted against Karl Popper’s image of the sciences. In fact, many card-carrying scientific pluralists explicitly distance their philosophies from Popper’s critical rationalism. Particularly, they consider pluralism about scientific theories or explanations to be in opposition to falsificationism. In this paper we shall critically re-examine this claim and the relation of Popper’s philosophy to millennial scientific pluralism. Following Kellert and colleagues, we distinguish two flavours of scientific pluralism: radical and modest. For both flavours, we examine congruities between pluralism and Popper’s work. While we acknowledge crucial differences, we argue that these tend to be overstated, and that there is much room for fruitful exchange. More specifically, we highlight that Popper endorses and embraces plurality with respect to many types of scientifically relevant entities including theories, models, and practices; and we qualify Popper’s purported fixation on truth as the only objective of science.