Mostly from the beginning.
Preliminary comments.
Something very strange has happened to the thoughts of Popper. For some time he was mostly described as an eccentric contributor to the Received (positivist) View of the philosophy of science. So Popperian falsificationism was introduced after logical positivism and logical empiricism, some problems were identified – no conclusive falsifications, the Duhem problem, theory-impregnation of observations, scientists don’t do it, history was not really like that, etc. All of these issues were treated by Popper as early as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Then without regard to the counter-arguments, Popper was dismissed and replaced by Kuhn and also by Lakatos, who was desribed as trying to save whatever can be retrived from the ruins of Popper’s falsificationism.
In those days Popper retained a place in the history of the philosophy of science but he was not usually mentioned under the more general heading of epistemology. Surveying a sample of general or introductory philosophy books published afer 2000, it looks as though Popper has almost disappeared completely. And that despite writing one of the great books of political philosophy of the 20th century.
Two things may help to retrieve this situation.
One is to realise that Popper’s position is not adequately summarised under the heading of “falsificationism”. It is necessary to appreciate at least four major developments or “turns” that he introduced, if not all in 1935 at least by the mid 1950s when he formally rehabilitated metaphysical theories.
The other is to actually read and re-read Popper’s own work to apprieciate how much is there, densely packed, with much of the depth only accessible when we return and re-read as our grasp of the issues expands.
Four of the “turns” introduced by Popper can be described as the conjectural turn, the objective turn, the social turn and the metaphysical turn. These are briefly described here.
As to re-reading Popper, for many people things only exist if they are on line, and also very brief. To meet this situation there is a condensed open society, summary of The Poverty of Historicism, some condensed papers from Conjectures and Refutations and a summary of Colin Simkin’s excellent introduction to Popper’s ideas.
If people are serious they will not be content with these sawn-off versions of the real things, and they will devour the whole books as soon as they can find them. The chance of getting a positive introduction to Popper in the modern academies appears to be negligible, so this short-cut by way of summaries on line is a desperate attempt to speak directly to students and other, over the heads of the academics.
The LSD extracts.
The 1934 preface, with a section in bold that could be regarded as an anticipation of Kuhn. The 1958 preface with a section in bold on the historical approach (a rejoinder to people who think that Popper ignored history).
And some extracts on demarcation, conventions and methods of criticism. Notice in the section 1.3 on deductive testing, the four ways to approach the criticism of a hypothesis. Bartley later articulated these as: the check on the problem (what is the problem, and does the theory actually solve the problem?), the check of logic (internal consistency), the check of consistency with other well-tested theories and the test of evidence. To which Popper later added (5) the check on the metaphysics.
He emphsised the importance of practical tests.
The purpose of this last kind of test is to find out how far the new consequences of the theory–whatever may be new in what it asserts –stand up to the demands of practice, whether raised by purely scientific experiments, or by practical technological applications.
It is interesting to note how much has been written about “theory choice” in the philosophy and methodology of economics, but there has been little attention to “policy choice”. All economic policies can be regarded as experiments and the scientific approach would be to treat them as such. Ludwig von Mises wrote a lot to explain how the evidence of interventionist policies demonstrates that they do not work. That is falsificationism applied in economic policy! So we can think of Mises as a practicing falsificationist.
