On the History and Philosophy of Science email list someone wrote:
“I always wonder what scientists are claiming when they say they are Popperians. Very few, if any, I have found, eschew confirmation (and positive evidence) in practice. Mostly they seem taken with what Popper says about bold conjectures, something he was hardly the first to extol. Nor, of course, is the idea that theories are falsified when they conflict with the data an especially novel idea. Philosophers of science from time immemorial have said this.”
Reply:
I think what good scientists like about Popperism is its simplicity and the way it reflects the way they work.
The logical baggage is minimal (the modus tollens), unlike the creaking mechanism of inductivism in its various forms and the protracted but fruitless efforts to extract something of value from the verification principle.
Some may also appreciate the role of metaphysics which was ruled completely out of court by the positivists.
To get a handle on Popper it is helpful to go past the usual focus on “falsificationism” and appreciate the various “turns” that he introduced – the conjectural turn, the objectivist turn, the social/institutional turn and the metaphysical turn.
I think most scientists are well aware that they’re working with conjectures, and that it’s not knowledge in the subjective sense they care about. It’s not like they drop by the philosophy department after work to find out if any of their beliefs constitute justified true belief. In fact, a lot of scientists have contempt for belief philosophers, and I can understand why. The epistemology of justified true belief is nothing if not sterile and utterly irrelevant to the culture. As Gellner said “If the several thousand or more of professional philosophers in America were all assembled in one place, and a small nuclear device were detonated over it, American society would remain totally unaffected.”
Magee in his Confessions of a Philosopher is really good on the problems with professional/academic philosophers, the fundamental one being that they are not driven to philosophy by a need to get to grips with some really genuine problem and so they just go through the motions of being philosophers.
To me the problem with academic philosophy is not the motivation of the people involved but the objective problem situation that it perpetuates. I think it was Plato who shifted the focus of epistemology to justified true belief. And I think this happened because Plato’s philosophy starts with an attempt to expunge personal corruption, especially in politics. The problem of justified true belief has dominated Western epistemology every since, even though Plato himself rejected it at the end of the Theaetetus. At the same time, there has been throughout all that time a counter-tradition of skepticism. In the early modern era, skeptical philosophy gave birth to science, which subsequently dropped any further engagement with the problem of justified true belief. Critical rationalism is an heir to the skeptical counter-tradition which gave birth to science, and thus it is not surprising that scientists often like critical rationalism when they stumble upon it. This has led to a situation in which a majority of intellectuals defend an outlook that bears a general similarity to critical rationalism, but most of them do not identify their outlook with that label or name. They just think of themselves as scientists. Thus the older, dominant tradition in epistemology retains the title of “philosophy” in Western culture, while the modern version of the skeptical counter-tradition is known as science. People who explicitly call themselves critical rationalists are unique because, while they defend the modern counter-tradition of science, they are conversant with both traditions and actually launch an attack on the older, justificationist tradition. This explains why traditional epistemologists are so hostile to critical rationalism. As Bartley says, if Popper was even remotely on the right track, most of these people have simply wasted their lives. What critical rationalism says to the justificationist tradition is this: your day is over; your outlook is obsolete and now largely worthless.
Put it this way: from the point of view of justificationist epistemology, critical rationalism is deadly. The defenders of the justificationist outlook have no answers to the criticisms launched by critical rationalists. That’s why they are invariably so peevish, repetitious, and rhetorical in their reactions to critical rationalism. They’ve got nothing else, and it’s their existence on the line. Consequently, what they do whenever possible is simply to block critical rationalists from their midst. If they don’t do that, they’re finished. This is why, for instance, Bartley was advised that, if he went to study with Popper, his academic career would be over. Fortunately, Bartley was so talented that he was able to triumph over that. But I’ve heard similar stories from others who were warned about ruining their careers if they took up with critical rationalism. The situation today is that justificationists have been mostly herded into philosophy departments, where they continue to become more and more irrelevant to the culture at large.
> I think it was Plato who shifted the focus of epistemology to justified true belief.
Popper blames Aristotle.
Yes, Popper blames Aristotle because, unlike Plato, Aristotle did not reject the notion of justified true belief. Plato at first accepted it in the Meno, then later rejected it in the Theaetetus. In the latter work Plato rejected all attempts to define knowledge as “mere wind eggs”. So I think it’s fair to say that Plato gave birth to the idea, and Aristotle sent it into the world, because Aristotle was inspired by Plato. This is typical of the difference between the two. Plato was more of a poet. He used his dialogues to explore and rhapsodize, often setting forth ideas in one dialogue that he rejected in a later dialogue, after he had evidently thought it through more completely. In the Theaetetus, Plato encountered the problem of the criterion, which plagues the idea of knowledge as justified true belief even to this day. You just can’t get around it without giving up justified true belief, which is what Plato did. Of course, Plato used Socrates as his mouthpiece, his mythic-heroic intellectual. Popper says of Aristotle that he didn’t believe Socrates (read “Plato”) when he said he didn’t know. Aristotle thought it was just a ruse, and that Socrates really did know but pretended not to know. In any event, you may notice that Popper attributes an objective theory of knowledge to the Pre-Socratic philosophers, meaning those philosophers who came before Socrates, i.e., who came before Plato. Hence Plato was the turning point, and Aristotle the great popularizer of Platonic ideas. Aristotle also vulgarized Plato in the process, making some parts of Plato’s philosophy much more prosaic and pendantic. On the other hand, the problem of knowledge as justified true belief is not the whole of Western philosophy. There is also a long development of what we may call methodology, which I think actually deserves more respect than traditional epistemology. Aristotle’s logic was an early step down this road. Aristotle deserves credit on this score as a great philosopher and a founder of the Western tradition.
I think you’re letting Aristotle off lightly. Popper also argues that Aristotle:
1) Thought he Knew (Episteme/JTB)
2) Strongly wanted Episteme
3) Invented induction to support Knowing, b/c he wanted it so much (and part of him realized it was crap, but he went ahead anyway despite a guilty conscience)
4) Hated/trashed Xenophanes
5) One of the major reasons he wanted to Know was to impress people, and say he’s better than them and they should listen to him
Elliot,
You seem to be forgetting that I’m a critical rationalist. I focus on theories and ideas in the abstract sense, not on persons. Thus Aristotle’s personality traits, though perhaps interesting from a historical point of view, are not especially relevant to me in this context. Maybe Aristotle was also a misogynist or a racist. It’s not really my concern.
None of those are personality traits, they are all about how he thought.
They are about Aristotle personally, and you know it. Aristotle did not write: I hate Xenophanes; I want to know because I want to impress people, and I think I’m better than others and they should listen to me.
“you know it” was intended to be about me personally. That is stunningly hypocritical, in context.