“Theory and Reality” by Peter Godfrey-Smith

This book was published in 2003 and subtitled “An introduction to the philosophy of science.”  The 22 Amazon reviews to date average 4 stars and not one provides a hint of the extent to which Popperism is sawn off and misrepresented in the book. It is another volume in the “burying Popper” genre and fortunately I happened on a secondhand copy because after some critical discussion on the Curi list it was clearly not worth the full price.  It demonstrates, again, that academic philosophers can spend a career without meeting somone who can provide a straight feed on Popper, or at least a Popperian who the philosopher is prepared to take seriously.

The book begins with a chronological account of the philosophy of science in the 20th century and the second part defends S-G’s own views: (a) the “naturalistic” approach to the philosophy of science, based on what scientists actually do, and (b) saving a form of empiricism. He wants to develop both:

1. A general understanding of how humans gain knowledge of the world and

2. An understanding of what makes the work descended from the Scientific Revolution different from other kinds of investigation of the world.

It is interesting that Popper’s ideas are treated in one chapter from page 57 to 74, then there is no serious consideration of his ideas in the remainder of the 250 pp book. This signals that his ideas are merely of interest as a part of the history of ideas, not as  a part of the living philosophy of science, despite the high regard for his ideas among scientists, which Godfrey-Smith thinks is probably based on a naive or simplistic view of Popper’s ideas.

In a chapter on Logic Plus Empiricism he wrote:

The logical positivists who did make it to the United States were responsible for the great flowering of American philosophy in the years after World War II. These include Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Carl Hempel and Herbert Feigl.

“The great flowering”?! Maybe careers and publications, but what about robust theories? On page 37 he notes that logical empiricism was near to extinct by the 1970s, so what was the point of the “great flowering”?

In the chapter on Induction and Confirmation “we begin looking at a very important and difficult problem, the problem of understanding how observations can confirm a theory.” I think it is fair to say that we do not get to understand how that process  happens.

To be clear, near the start of the chapter on Conjecture and Refutation he writes that “I agree with many of these criticisms [of Popper] and don’t see any way for Popper to escape from their force”. (57)

Popper left Europe upon the rise of the Nazism, and after spending the war years in New Zealand, he moved to the LSE where he remained for the rest of his career [unless  you consider the work that he did in the last three decades of his life]. There he built up a group of loyal allies, whom he often accused of disloyalty. His seminar series at the LSE became famous for its grueling questioning and for the fact that the speakers had a difficult time actually presenting much of their lectures, because of Popper’s interruptions.

Followed by a paragraph on the clash between Popper and Wittgenstein at Cambridge, without any explanation of the point at issue (the existence of real philosophical problems, which was denied by Wittgenstein). He could have mentioned that in NZ Popper wrote one of the great works of political philosophy in the 20 century but the bibliography does not list the OSE, nor The Poverty, Objective Knowledge or The Postscript, or any of the miscellaneous essay collections such as The Myth of the Framework, although G-S refers to Popper on “the myth of the framework” without any citation. He also made some use of the evolutionary development of knowledge without reference to Popper’s work on the topic, decades before. Later in the book he  makes some reference to rules and procedures in science, without noticing that this is a central theme of Popper’s first book and he talks about social and community aspects of science without reference to Popper’s “social turn” that is quite clear in chapter 23 of The Open Society.

Introducing Popper

G-S wrote that Popper’s primary aim was to understand science rather than the “broader topics” of language, meaning and knowledge that concerned the positivists. He especially wanted to separate proper science from pseudoscience and metaphysics. The paradigms of psuedoscientists were supposed to be Freud and Marx. This may be a minor point but G-S more than once mentions Popper’s condemnation of Freudian psychology and Marxism. However it was uncritical followers of Freud and Marx who earned Popper’s ire. He could see some hope for a scientific version of Freud’s ideas and he devoted most of the second volume of OSE to exploring the strengths and weaknesses of Marx. The strengths were his rejection of pyschologism and his rudimentary situational or institutional analysis of social and economic processes. But of course G-S did not read The Open Society, nor The Postscript where he could have found Popper fully engaged with science and the role of philosophical and metaphysical arguments in coming to grips with scientific problems.

G-S introduces falsificationism as the centrepiece of Popper’s scheme which is a convenient way to introduce Popper after the positivists because falsification can be seen as a substitute for verification and Popper can be depicted as a rather strange and different kind of positivist (which is the way that people like Habermas and Rorty saw him). Popper wrote somewhere that he did not really like his views to be labelled “falsificationism” and of course the words should not matter, but I know from my research on philosophy texts that a list of standard criticisms of “falsificatonism” are routinely adduced to justify shelving Popper and moving on to Lakatos, Kuhn and the sociology of science.

 Popper’s skepticism about induction and confirmation are much more controversial than his demarcation criterion and G-S wrote:

In the opinion of most philosophers [including G-S] Popper’s attempt to defend this radical claim was not successful, and some of his discussions of this topic are rather misleading to readers. As a result, some of the scientists who regard popper as a hero do not realize that Popper believed that it is never possible to confirm a theory, not even slightly, and no matter now many observations the theory predicts correctly. (59)

The problem for G-S is that the various programs to pin down the confirmation of theories or the attachment of numerical probabilities have yet to deliver, but science proceeds anyway. He notes that practically all philosophers have given up on certainty so we are all fallibilists now, but the justificationists keep hoping to find some way to justify higher levels of belief and escape from the conjectural theory of knowledge that consitutes one of the major “Popperian turns“.  (The others are the objective turn,  from subjective beliefs, the social or ‘rules of the game’ turn, and the metaphysical turn).

G-S finds it odd that an exponent of conjectural knowledge should be in search of true theories and he uses a Holy Grail analogy to make fun of Popper’s position. He imagines people in search of the eternally glowing “Holy Grail” and a person may carry a glowing Grail all his life without knowing if it is the real thing (glowing for ever).

This is similar to Popper’s picture of science’s search for truth. All we can do is try out one theory after another. A theory that we have failed to falsify up till now might, in fact, be true. But if so, we will never know this or have reason to increase our confidence.

This leaves out of account the growth of knowledge. We can achieve progress in science and form critical preferences for some theories that are better than others. We can also specify what would count as a better theory then the ones we have at present (in terms of things that it would need to explain, and tests that it would need to pass).

Popper on Scientific Change

He talks about the “appealing simplicity” of Popper’s two stage process of conjecture and refutation to explain scientific progres. If  he had read Objective Knowledge he could have referred to the four-stage scheme that Popper repeatedly used in his later work to explain that we work on problems and make progress by shifting to deeper and more interesting problems.

At this stage G-S starts to talk about the things that scientists actually do, and the things that groups of scientists do. He could have noted the distinction that Popper made between the logic of testing and the conventions and procedures that are required to promote and sustain rigorous testing and criticism (to avoid what is now called confirmation bias, though G-S did not mention this). He did note that the process of conjecture and refutation has “a striking resemblance to another two-step process: Darwin’s explanation of biological evolution in terms of variation and natural selection”. Interesting! That was a point that Popper made (in passing) in The Logic of Scientific Discovery and over and over again in Objective Knowledge and other publications after the  mid 1960s.

Objections to Popper on Falsification

He poses the question – “Is falsifiability a good way to distinguish scientific ideas from non-scientific ideas?” And he follows up with the suggestion “that something fairly similar to Popper’s question about demarcation does make sense: can we describe a distinctive scientific strategy of intestigating the world, a scientific way of handling ideas?” (63)

 At this point G-S could explain that Popper drew a clear distinction between the decisive logic of falsifiability – the capacity of a true observation statement to falsify a universal statement, and falsification in practice which cannot be decisive for several reasons – the theory dependence of observations, the need for ancillary statements to describe the situation, the need to make assumptions about other theories, and finally the capacity of people to simply refuse to accept the apparent results of an experiment.

“This is a problem not  just for Popper’s solution to the demarcation problem, but for his whole theory of science as well”. (64) Incidentally it is a problem for any philosophy of science.

Popper’s response is what I call the “social or rules of the game” turn, fully articulated by Ian Jarvie in a book that may have appeared just too late for G-S to have access to it for this book. Still, he would have found it in chapter 23 of The Open Society and he should have found it in The Logic of Scientific Discovery in the section where Popper explained the essential requirement for conventions (rules of the game) of scientific method. G-S appeared to regard this as “in some ways a retraction of his initial aim, which was to describe something about scientific theories which makes them special” (65).  But the falsifiability criterion has to be seen as Popper’s logical rejoinder to the positivists who pinned their program to verification. His point was that verification will never and cannot possibly ever work, a point which if it had been taken on board would have saved the positivists and logical empiricists some decades of wasted efforts.

His response was to empasise the function of empirical testing (in the framework of the critical approach in general) backed up  by conventions and protocols to keep scientists usefully engaged even though the results of experiments cannot be logically decisive (though  many experimental results can be seen that way, for practical purposes).

But in making this move, Popper has badly damaged his original picture of science. This was a picture in which observations, once accepted, have the power to decisively refute theoretical hypotheses. That is a matter of deductive logic, as Popper endlessly stressed” (67).

He also stressed the difference between the logic of falsifiability and the practical problems of falsification. In defiance of this distinction which is clearly drawn in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, G-S is apparently committed to the idea that there was a “naive falsificationism” about Popper (which Lakatos exploited in such a damaging manner, playing on the capacity of readers like G-S to misread Popper).  The myth lives on in a very recent anthology   where the editor concluded that in light of Duhem etc  “There can, therefore, be no such decisive refutation of a theory as Popper suggests“. However in The Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper wrote “In point of fact, no conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced; for it is always possible to say that the experimental results are not reliable, or that the discrepancies which are asserted to exist between the experimental results and the theory are only apparent and that they will disappear with the advance of our understanding.”

Objections to Popper on Confirmation

In the previous section I discussed problems with Popper’s views about falsification. But let us leave those problems aside now, and assume in this section that we can use Popperian falsification as a method for decisively rejecting theories. (67)

What is going on here? Popper advised that we cannot use falsification as a method for decisively rejecting theories, so why assume that we can? He goes on “If we make this assumption, is Popper’s attempt to describe rational theory choice successful? No, it is not.”

“Here is a simple problem that Popper has a very difficult time with. Suppose we are trying to build a bridge…”.  We use a lot of theories, presumably theories that the scientists and engineers regard as well tested “tried and true” methods. Empiricists say that this is a rational way to go, but why this this so? “Let us focus on Popper, who wants to avoid the need for a theory of confirmation. How does Popper’s philosophy treat the bridge building situation”. (67)

He poses a strange situation where Popper  has to choose between a theory that has been tested (and passed) many times and a theory which has just been conjectured and has never been tested. Neither has been falsified. Which to choose? The usual thing would be to pick the well tested theory. “But what can Popper say about this choice?

Of course Popper has said that for practical purposes it is rational to use the best tested theory that is available. What is the point that S-G is making? He wants to suggest that Popper would have some difficulty in explaining why a well tested (and unrefuted theory) should be selected ahead of a new theory that has not been tested but has also not been refuted. The answer is that Popper is not betting on the truth of the tried and unrefuted theory, he is betting on the same results, unless the circumstances change.

The bridge-building example is not relevant to scientific research because the bridge is an instrument and the theories that are used in its design could be known to be false, but good enough for the purpose (given the testing and safety factors that are built into bridged and other structures).  The analogy is fundamentally muddle-headed in failing to make the distinction between testing theories in the intersts of scientific research and building structures that are safe and secure for human use.

Conclusion

There is more but that is enough to convey the flavour. The publication of this book (after scrutiny by independent reviewers) and the glowing reviews from readers raises some question about the prevalence of people in the academic world and the publishing industry who have read Popper thoroughly and appreciate what he was on about?