Frank has put me under pressure to finish my book, so I have made the concluding chapter very short so I can get done this weekend (more realistically, this week).
The book starts with a run through Popper’s progress, the themes and the common or standard errors, then lists a few dozen prime examples. Then the Conclusion.
CONCLUSION: GOING FORWARD
What can be said about the literature in the philosophy of science and the place of Popper and the Popperians in it? The misreading of Popper indicates that serious readers need to check the primary texts to form their own opinion of contested ideas. No interpretation can be taken on trust. Reading the primary Popper texts is no small task, given the density of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, the cryptic style of The Poverty of Historicism, the sheer bulk of The Open Society and its Enemies, the challenging technical material on probability and physics in the Postscript. My contribution is a series of guides to Popper’s major works but of course I don’t expect my interpretation of Popper to be accepted uncritically.
It remains to be seen how willing the writers will be to revise their ideas about Popper and it also remains to be seen whether their readers and students will go to the primary texts to check. Time will tell!
It looks as though Popper’s reputation has been a victim of fashion rather than effective criticism. This is a serious matter because it is not a healthy indicator of a strong academic and intellectual culture if fashion overwhelms critical thinking. Something is amiss in “the house of intellect”, as Barzun suggested in a book of that name (Barzun, 1957). For Barzun’s running commentary on education in the United States, see Champion (2013).
Moving Forward
Popper’s ideas can be revived if they resonate with other intellectual currents. His theory of conjectural knowledge gains support from Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz and Ignorance: How it Drives Science by Stuart Firestein. There is also a great potential for synergy between Popper’s themes and Philip Kitcher’s mission to revitalize philosophy by drawing on the work of Peirce and Dewey (Kitcher, Prelude to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2012). The synergy is not obvious, as I discovered from participating in the Peirce and Dewey email discussion groups, however I am optimistic about the prospects for the future in view of the trajectory of Kitcher’s work as he moved from the “Legend” of positivism/empiricism to pursue a research program that aligns with Popper’s at most points. There is the potential for critical and creative dialogue.
Retrieving the Creative and Liberating Aspects of Popperism
Popper made his reputation as a critic, which is not surprising in view of his insistence on the critical approach. It might help to point out the creative function of criticism because.
Criticism and testing are not just therapeutic or housecleaning activities because effective criticism (and tests) identify new problems. This is creative because problems can be seen as the growing points of science, or at least they create contexts where science can grow.
In the language of biology, you can think of new problems like new niches in the ecosystem. They can be colonised by competing theories and they provide a challenge for new theories to be invented.
Popper on Discovering(Good) New Ideas
In the literature there are frequent references to the demarcation between the context of discovery and the context of justification (or testing) and it is generally agreed that Popper had nothing much to say about discovery. In fact he had views on the topic but the references are thinly spread in his work. One is in the Preface to Realism and the Aim of Science “On the Non-Existence of Scientific Method”.
“To conclude, I think there is only one way to do science: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it, and to live with it happily, till death do ye part – unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem…(and) even if you obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting though perhaps difficult problem children”.
Another is the third lecture in his course, on Problems.
My advice is to devote your mind to your problem—to think about it, to read about it, and to see what other people have thought about it. Read the history of your subject and see how other people have tried to solve your problem. And then study the solutions they have offered!
But I wouldn’t say that it is a method that will lead to greater success. None of these methods, in my opinion, can be regarded as more promising than any of the others. The real answer, which is hardly a method at all, is to have as many ideas as you possibly can, and to be as critical about your ideas as you possibly can.
