The twentieth-century and its reasons

Carl Sagan, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend and their distincts visions about scientific knowledge.

Abstract

This article aims to map some of the conceptions about science supported by the American astrophysicist, Carl Sagan (1934-1996). The proposal is to analyze some excerpts from popular scientific works that highlight the author's view of what constitutes science, its function and objectives. For this, Sagan's positions will be compared with the ideas exposed in the pamphlet The Scientific Conception of the World, published by the group of intellectuals called the Vienna Circle, due to the influence this text had on the debates about science in the first half of the twentieth century. In this sense, the contributions of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, two of the leading theorists of the second half of this century, appear both as a basis for thinking about the relationship between history and scientific practices, and as a counterpoint to the image of science spread by the Vienna Circle which certainly impacted the generation of scientists of which Carl Sagan is part.