critical rationalism blog

Suppose that every problem of induction in the past has been solvable. What, then, justifies our expectation that future problems of induction are solvable? Answering induction merely presupposes that induction doesn’t have any unsolvable problems, because if it does have unsolvable problems, then it can’t justify our expectation that it doesn’t. However, if we can’t justify our expectation that future problems of induction are solvable, then what justifies the use of induction today?

A research scientist in New Zealand got in touch to say he enjoyed the Rathouse and when I told him about the Popular Popper series he wrote a very generous review of the Guide to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. He uses a pen name to write on Amazon.

[NOTE: In the following essay, I attribute views to philosophers without caveats or qualifications. This is mostly for ease of exposition. While I believe philosophers, both professional and amateur, have a tendency toward the views I attribute to them, there are many exceptions.]

Philosophers have a twisted relationship to certainty: they crave it for themselves while deploring it in others. Unfortunately, they’re more proficient at eroding others’ certainties than fortifying their own, and the ensuing dynamic has instigated a downward spiral of doubt.
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Nicholas has been very active (actually hyperactive and prolific) for many years, now running into decades, spreading his unique views on the philosophy of science and the need to address practical problems more effectively. We met in Vienna at the Popper Centennial Conference in 2002. He has always encouraged my efforts and I have reciprocated by putting a small piece of his on line here

Do We Need an Academic Revolution?

Nicholas Maxwell

(Emeritus Reader in Philosophy of Science at University College London)

The crisis of our times is that we have science without wisdom.  This is the crisis behind all the others.  Population growth, the terrifyingly lethal character of modern war and terrorism, immense differences of wealth around the globe, annihilation of indigenous people, cultures and languages, impending depletion of natural resources, destruction of tropical rain forests and other natural habitats, rapid mass extinction of species, pollution of sea, earth and air, thinning of the ozone layer, the aids epidemic, and most serious of all the impending disasters of climate change: all these crises have been made possible by modern science and technology.

Indeed, in a perfectly reasonable sense of “cause”, they have been caused by modern science and technology.  If by the cause of event E we mean that prior change which led to E occurring, then it is the advent of modern science and technology that has caused all these crises.  It is not that people became greedier or more wicked in the 19th and 20th centuries; nor is it that the new economic system of capitalism is responsible, as some historians and economists would have us believe.  The crucial factor is the creation and immense success of modern science and technology.  This has led to modern medicine and hygiene, to population growth, to modern agriculture and industry, to world wide travel (which spreads diseases such as aids), and to the destructive might of the technology of modern war, conventional, chemical, biological, nuclear.

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Presumption — a proposition that must be true if an argument is sound, though not explicitly stated in the premises.

Implication — a proposition that cannot be false if an argument is sound, though not explicitly stated in the premises.

Begging the question (or petitio principii) — an informal fallacy where an argument presumes, implicitly or explicitly, its implied conclusion in the premises.

Colin McGinn is a British-born philosopher now at the Uni of Miami. He has written many books and has some stature as a public intellectual who is capable of debating a wide range of issues. A decade  ago he wrote a long review of a cluster of Popper-related books for the New York Review of Books.

This would have reached a very large pool of people who take ideas seriously, discuss them, use them, and spread them.  What is accepted in this cohort of people would be the conventional wisdom of the educated liberal elite in the US and beyond.

The review contains an  interesting mixture of  praise and misunderstanding.  He wrote that Popper was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, especially due to his admirers outside the profession, such as  Helmut Schmidt of Germany, Medawar and Gombrich.

He noted that his initial philosophical impetus came from the Vienna Circle  and he wrote that Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic  took the ideas of the Circle to  the English-speaking world in 1946. In fact that was the second of many editions, following the first which appeared in 1936. It was also the book that introduced the misleading “Popper Legend” (that Popper was a positivist) to the English-speaking world, a mistake that Ayer did not correct when the book was repeatedly reprinted.

McGinn approved of two central Popperian doctrines: first, that theories are creative products of the human mind, not derived in a mechanical way from observations and , second, that criticism is vitally important in the scientific enterprise. But he claimed that Popper exaggerated those insights and produced a distorted picture of scientific practice.

He insisted that Popper was closer to the positivists than he was prepared to admit.

He defended induction because it is deeply embedded in science and common sense.

He claimed that Popper was himself committed to inductive verification.

He disputed the notion of conjectural knowledge, because “some of science is as solid as the plainest statement of fact, such as that London is the capital of England.”

Etc.  A frustrating piece!

It is a great pleasure to announce that Hans Albert is the latest addition to the list of CR Scholars.  Albert, with the late Gerard Radnitzky, looked after the German branch of critical rationalism and conducted a long-running debate witih the Frankfurt School.

He has been a prolific contributor to the literature of critical rationalism, with most of his work in German, and those of us in the Anglosphere who struggle on with only the English language at our command have missed out on many treats.

It is believed that Hermann Hesse began serious writing of what was to become “The Glass Bead Game” in 1931. It took Hesse until 1942 to complete it, during this time the world was eclipsed by the horrors of Fascism, Stalinism and war. It was published in 1943 and by then Hesse’s books were prohibited in Nazi Germany. The dedication was to The Journeyers to the East. “The Journey to the East” had been written in 1930. The Glass Bead Game explores the world of reason in a time when reason was in peril. There are parallels with problems that Popper was working on at the same time, both were in exile.

“Alphabets” is a poem attributed to Joseph Knecht, The Glass Bead Game master and hero, an extract of which is:

“From time to time we take our pen in hand

And scribble symbols on a blank white sheet.

Their meaning is at everyone’s command”

This can be compared with a much later quote from P.J.B. Slater’s “An Introduction to Ethology” 1985:

“The form of signals: The message is what an animal encodes in a signal it sends; the meaning is what another makes of it. The signal is the physical form in which the transmission from one to the other takes place.”

A salient point of Popper’s thought is that he rejected meaning as a criterion of demarcation of science and metaphysics. Both of the above quotations make it clear why. It is not that  meaning is not an important problem for individuals or societies but that it belongs to Popper’s World 2 (mental) rather than World 1 (physical/natural world) or World 3 (the stated or expressed world of knowledge). Without living beings or their computers to create or interpret the messages encoded in the signals scribbled on blank white sheets they have no meaning.

“Alphabets” continues:

“It is a game whose rules are nice and neat.

But if a savage or a moon-man came

And found a page, a furrowed runic field,

And curiously studied lines and frame:

How strange would be the world that they revealed,

A magic gallery of oddities,.

He would see A or B as man and beast,

As moving tongues or arms and legs or eyes,

Now slow, now rushing, all constraint released,

Like prints of ravens’ feet upon the snow.”

We do have plenty of conjectural knowledge as in the Glass Bead Game. Objectivity arises in inter-subjective testability, which  means  through  dialogue. Objectivity is not secured by trying to hold on to justifications or dogmatic grounds.

“A Compromise

The men of principled simplicity

Will have no traffic with our subtle doubt.

The world is flat, they tell us, and they shout:

The myth of depth is an absurdity!

For if there were additional dimensions

Beside the good old pair we’ll always cherish,

How could a man live safely without tensions?

How could he live and not expect to perish?

In order peacefully to coexist

Let us strike one dimension off our list.

If they are right, those men of principle,

And life in depth is so inimical,

The third dimension is dispensable.”

Before a brief crit of Brendan Larvor’s book on Lakatos, a reminder to check out Joe Agassi’s brief but comprehensive account of Popper’s career, in case people have not read the recent comments on the site.  This is a really helpful overview and a  nice complement or supplement to my series of guides in the Popular Popper series.

Larvor’s book Lakatos: An Introduction appeared in 1998 and it is supposed to provide “a thorough overview of both Lakatos’ thought and his place in twentieth century philosophy. It is an essential and insightful read for students and anyone interested in the philosophy of science.”

For those who are interested in the relationship between Popper and Lakatos which is clearly central to his development as a philosopher (after his career as a Stalanist revolutionary in Hungary) it is surprising to find that The Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1982, 1983) is not listed in the bibliography and “metaphysical research programs” do not score an entry in the index.

In the text Popper’s philosophy of science is described as “ahistorical”. This has covered up the truth about Popper’s approach which is historical through and through, and also the source of Lakatos’ ideas about research programs.  Agassi is missing from the index and the bibliography as well, never mind all the historical work that he did on metaphysical programs.

Published by Routledge, this is a very poor reflection on the author, his colleagues and also the publisher’s readers and editors.