I am just about to address O’Hear’s defence of induction in reply to Popper. But first a check on the problem. What is the point of mounting a defence of Popperism, or CR or whatever? Bearing in mind that the core of Popperism is criticism, so there can be no such thing as an uncritical follower of Popper, why spend so much time and effort giving the appearance of defending Popper’s ideas like a typical follower of Freud or Marx or any other True Belief?
Moreover, if good scientists and practical people proceed in a Popperian manner, that is, problem-solving with a mix of imagination, reason and observation, do they need a deep philosophical defence? Surely the good ideas will win out over the defective ideas by a process that approximates natural selection for the “fittest” and “best”.
I will finish this later but will put up the draft at this point in case people want to comment on these thoughts.
Surely the good ideas will win out over the defective ideas by a process that approximates natural selection for the “fittest” and “best”.
well, that happened in the past, so it will happen in the future. Oh…hang on a minute…
Peter,
Suppose that you ask me “why do you believe that all swans are white?” and I answer “because all the swans I have so far observed are white,” is that induction? I don’t think so.
Conventional philosophy is concerned with both the logical and psychological relations between observation and theory. However, rather than treating each matter separately (as critical rationalists argue they should) conventional philosophy fuses the two issues together.
Conventional philosophy concerns itself with beliefs, degrees thereof, and their psychological (or neurological, physiological, sociological, and even genealogical) causes. The temporal or causal sequences of thoughts and experiences are paramount, because knowledge is a special type of belief that is preceded by particular experiences or formed with a distinct method. In this view, the causal “reason” of a belief must do double duty as the premise of a logical argument with the belief as its conclusion.
Sometimes these matters are treated with mere positive descriptions of how scientists think or scientific institutions operate (e.g. Thomas Kuhn). Other times we get normative prescriptions regarding what one ought to believe or the proper degree of confidence that should be ascribed to a theory (e.g. Bayesianism). But whatever the case, such arguments concern the psychological relations between observation and theory, not the logical relations of coherency, entailment, contradiction, etc.
Critical rationalists generally seperate these matters. Popper made this abundantly clear in Logic of Scientific Discovery (not “Psychology of Scientific Discovery) by rejecting “psychologism.”
Although I may believe that all swans are white because every swan I have so far observed is white, I make no pretense of having derived this logically. Perhaps my belief can be explained as a consequence of the electro-chemical processes in my brain, so that my observations may be said to be the “reason” for my belief, but such a description has no bearing on the logical relations between observation and theory, or the growth of knowledge understood objectively.
Psychological processes aren’t necessarily logical, but they are not necessarily illogical either. Basing one’s epistemology on psychology that seems to work
is pretty reasonable, particularly given the problems of finding non-circular foundations for logic, etc.