HERE'S A NEW SCIENTIST REVIEW OF:

Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs Popper: The struggle for the soul of science (via SciTech Daily Review)
Reviewed by Ray Percival, who runs the Karl Popper Forums.

Excerpts:

Simply put, Kuhn championed what he called "normal science", which consists of scientists busily engaged in working out the puzzles presented within a set of assumptions - the "paradigm" - which remains unquestioned. Until, that is, the puzzles become overwhelming and the notorious paradigm shift occurs.

On the other hand, Popper championed the heroic conception of science. He associated this with deliberately revolutionary thinkers such as Newton and Einstein, and admonished scientists everywhere continually to question. His famous criterion that a theory is scientific if it can be falsified implies a continuous effort to overthrow theories - including accepted ones.

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For Popper, the ideal of science allowed you to say that the whole of science may be wrong; Kuhn cannot allow this, because he made no distinction between history and normative standards. Yet Kuhn is classed as a radical, and Popper as a grumpy autocrat. Fuller sets out to explain and correct these misleading images.

Sounds about right to me, and it applies (or should apply) to the humanities as well. Kuhn's sociological theory is easy to use to blugeon the consensus without doing much constructive to advance it. (The graybearded conservatives stick to their tired old "paradigm" and refuse to look at the revolutionary new theory that that will "shift" it.) Popper's epistemology provides a much more constructive system for generating new theories and testing them to see if they actually improve on the state of the question. IMHO.

I have some brief comments about Popper and the humanities in my essay "The Perils of Parallels" (criteria 7-8). This is an early draft from some time ago. I have a much longer draft that has been circulated a fair bit in Scotland, but it still needs work. Maybe I'll get around to publishing it someday.

For a good treatment of Popper (and critique of Kuhn), see David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (Pelican, 1997). (His web page appears to be down at present.)