Popper’s rules of the game of science

The role of institutions and conventions (rules of the game)

The recognition of the social factor in science is often attributed to Kuhn and the sociologists of knowledge, however Jarvie in The Republic of Science (2001) identified what he called the “social turn” in Popper’s earliest published work. It can be seen in the passages in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of The Logic of Scientific Discovery where Popper explained the function of conventions or rules of the game for scientific practice. Here is the list of rules that he extracted from Popper’s early work, as reported in The Republic of Science pp 51-63.

First the supreme or meta-rule that governs the other rules.

SR. The other rules of scientific procedure must be designed in such a way that they do not protect any statement in science from falsification (LScD, p. 54).

R1. The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day  that scientific statements do no call for further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game (LScD, p. 53).

R2. Once a hypothesis has been proposed and tested, and has proved its mettle, it may not be allowed to drop out without ‘good reason’ (LScD, p. 53-54).

R3. We are not to abandon the search for universal laws and for a coherent theoretical system, nor ever give up our attempts to explain causally any kind of event we can describe (LScD, p. 61).

R4. I shall…adopt a rule not to use undefined concepts as if they were implicitly defined (LScD, p. 75).

R5. Only those auxiliary hypotheses are acceptable whose introduction does not diminish the degree of falsifiability or testability of the system in question but, on the contrary, increases it (LScD, p. 83).

R6. We shall forbid surreptitious alterations of usage (LScD, p. 84).

R7. Inter-subjectively testable experiments are either to be accepted, or to be rejected in the light of counter-experiments (LScD, p 84).

R8. The bare appeal to logical derivations to be discovered in future can be disregarded (LScD, p. 84).

R9. After having produced some criticism of a rival theory, we should always make a serious attempt to apply this criticism to our own theory (LScD, p. 85n).

R10. We should not accept stray basic statements – i.e logically disconnected ones – but…we should accept basic statements in the course of testing theories ; or raising searching questions about these theories, to be answered by the acceptance of basic statements (:ScD, p. 106).

R11. This makes our methodological rule that those theories should be given preference which can be most severely tested…equivalent to a rule favouring  theories with the highest possible empirical content (LScD, p. 121).

R12. I propose that we take the methodological decision never to explain physical effects, i.e. reproducible regularities, as accumulations of accidents (LScD, p. 199).

R13. A rule…which might demand that the agreement between basic statements and the probability estimate should conform to some minimum standard. Thus the rule might draw some arbitrary line and decree that only reasonably representative segments (or reasonably ‘fair samples’) are ‘permitted’, while a-typical or non-representative segments are ‘forbiden’ (LScD, p. 204).

R14. The rule that we should see whether we can simplify or generalize or unify our theories by employing explanatory hypotheses of the type mentioned (that is to say, hypotheses explaining observable effects as summations or integrations of micro events) (LScD, p. 207).

Jarvie noted that these rules are incomplete and they represent a starting point for  an extended process of elaboration, criticism and improvement that has not happened yet. Occasionally they are subjected to criticism but not in a way that acknowledged “the  innovative brilliance of the original idea” (Jarvie, 2001, 63). He suggested that both Popper and his critics suffered from “a myopia about the institutional turn”.

For the benefit of English speakers before Logik der Forschung was translated in 1959, the institutional approach could be found (without elaboration) in the chapter on the sociology of knowledge in The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) and in the final sections of The Poverty of Historicism on situational logic and the institutional theory of progress.