critical rationalism blog

Lakatos and others, notably Dan Hausman, claimed that Popper’s falsificationism would not work because it would mean throwing out a theory immediately if it failed a test. Where did they get that  idea?

Try this rejoinder

The dogmatic attitude of sticking to a theory as long as possible is of considerable significance. Without it we could never find out what is in a theory – we should give the theory up before we had a real opportunity of finding out its strength; and in consequence no theory would ever be able to play its role in bringing order into the world, of preparing us for future events, of drawing our attention to events we should otherwise never observe. 

That is on the first page of the “What is dialectic?”, a paper that Popper delivered to a seminar in New Zealand in 1937. It was published in Mind in 1940 and reprinted as chapter 15 in Conjectures and Refutations.

This is Hausman’s contribution in the Introduction to a collection of papers which he edited, titled The Philosophy of Economics, Cambridge Uni Press.

I’ve been having an ongoing exchange with Ryan Murphy and Gene Callahan about Popper, the problem of induction, and falsifiability. What follows is brief summary of our inconsequential little argument to provide context. If you don’t care about all that and just want the meat of the post, then just skip the next four paragraphs.

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Interesting piece with a sting in the tail!

When Popper suggested that liberal democracies could legislate small changes in the societal structure, evaluate the results and either repeal or retain the changes he was arguing against utopian views and for such a society.  As such it was a significant advancement in thinking about societal changes and a sensible argument against all utopian schemes.  Unfortunately, Popper was naïve about the ability of governments, even those of liberal democracies, to evaluate the results of their actions and to learn from them.

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.

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I never met Bill Bartley and I count this as one of the great disappointments of my life.  We had so many ideas in common, I imagine that we would have communicated effectively in half-sentences.   There were so many thoughts to exchange, so much that I wanted to know about the background of his ideas, so much to say about the implications of Popper’s work,  and of his own.

I first encountered Bartley in 1969, not in person, of course, and not even in his own words.  He turned up in a wry footnote to an amusing paper by Ernest Gellner in a book named The Crisis in the Humanities (Pelican 1962, Ed Plumb). The main theme of Gellner’s contribution was the strange fads and fashions of modern Anglo Saxon philosophy, especially the obsessed with driving metaphysics out of polite society.  As an example of the topsy turvey world of modern philosohy he wrote ‘In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries atheism was taught by rationalists, but now it seems mainly the province of theologians’ with a reference to The Retreat to Commitment.  At the time I described myself as a humanist pamphleteer and I very much wanted to read this book, to find what a theologian might contribute to the cause of secular humanism.  Unfortunately The Retreat was not available in the library of The University of Sydney, arguably the premier university library of the nation.  It is still not there in 1999 but some time after that it appeared, possibly as a result of my suggestion on the “suggestion box” on the Library website.  

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Among other projects I am preparing reading guides for some of my favorite books and authors. Some of the books will get a guide each, some authors such as Jacques Barzun and William H Hutt will have all (or several) their books surveyed in one guide. The idea is to produce these guides as e books to sell cheaply for people to read on their Kindle.

They are not supposed to substitute for reading the books, they provide hints about what to look for and how to get the best out of the books. The idea is to provide some context and also some keys to understanding the originality of Popper’s thinking. For example people coming from logical empiricism and other distant parts who have no idea about the Popperian “turns” may find it difficult to see the patterns and themes that infuse the works and give them life and depth.

There are no links and each will have a companion web page with links for people who want to get serious.

These are drafts of the guides for The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and its Enemies.

Feedback is welcome.

This is a draft of a paper for a forthcoming collection. People who have been around for a while won’t find much new but it is an opportunity to tap a different readership.

William Warren BartleyIII (1935-1990) had three strings to his bow as an original philosopher, a biographer and an editor. This article examines his major philosophical contribution, his work on rationality and the limits of criticism that was inspired by Popper’s critique of the authoritarian structure of western philosophy. Philosophical problems tend to be formulated in ways that demand an answer to the question “What is the authority that justifies this belief?”  Because classical liberalism is a non-authoritarian creed it has been forced to work constantly against the grain of the authoritarian (“justificationist” or “true belief”)  structure. Popper and Bartley provided alternative theories of knowledge, politics and rationality which replace justificationism with the critical approach. This supports classical liberalism in general and Hayek in particular. The central idea in this account of Bartley’s contribution is the liberating effect of providing an alternative to the obsession with the justification of beliefs which persists as a central (but so far unsolved) problem in the theory of knowledge. Two of the major channels of justificationism (and hence obscurantism on the major issues in the theory of knowledge and politics) are academic philosophy and the “true belief” religions.

The first section of the paper notes the damaging effect of moral relativism that is aggravated by the failure to resolve the problem of justification of beliefs. The second section examines the failure in the market of ideas which creates problems for classical liberalism which depends on free trade in ideas, critical thinking and robust debate. It also introduces the dilemma of the infinite regress versus dogmatism which is core problem of rationality and criticism, and indicates the possibility of a solution. The third section sketches the various responses to the dilemma and the way that the classical liberalism has suffered from the “justified belief” assumption. The fourth section shows how the non-justificationist approach resolves some tensions in the treatment of rationality and criticism in the work of Popper and Hayek. The fifth section notes the use of this approach by Jan Lester in his libertarian political philosophy and the final section applies the principle to provide a rejoinder to the deconstructionists in literary theory.

Great News! Ray Scott Percival is still at work, writing and updating the Popper Web.

Interesting to see the  lack of communication among the Critical Rationalists of the world:)

Update on progress with a proposal for a book on Popper and the other Austrians. If all else fails this can be done as an Amazon e book which Amazon would promote to all their customers who look at  books on similar or related topics. For books priced under $10 the author receives about 70%. Presumably this is because no homo sapiens in Amazon actually has to do anything much apart from installing a robot that puts up the ebook and makes the  necessary connections. So Amazon gets $3 per sale by re-directing a lot of electrons – no editorial input, no printing and distribution of solid objects. Wow! And $7 for the author who has complete control over the content but has to do the formatting which will require some facility with html. If the book is priced over $10 the royalty is much less so you have to do some entrepreneurial speculation about how much readership you will lose at the higher price.

Target:  Graduate students and researchers with an interest in the philosophy and methods of economics and the other social sciences.

Size: Modest, 200 pp or 80,000 words maximum.

Theme/Synopsis: Must avoid dispersing efforts over too many themes.  Starting with four problems:

1. The divorce between economics and sociology, over-specialization and fragmentation generally.

2. The dominance of positivism (scientism) in economics.

3. The problems of historicism and essentialism in sociology and the soft social sciences and humanities.

4. Limited real-world and policy-relevance in much of economics and sociology (like who saw the GFC coming?)

Peter Klein has pointed out that historicism is not really on the radar these days, the issue in the current socical sciences is POMO.

There are two subtexts that need to be woven in without causing distactions.

1. The debacle of philosophy in both the analytical and “Continental” strands after Wittgenstein derailed the analytial strand (which in turn branched into positivism/logical empiricism and language games) and Heidegger did the same for the Continental tradition.

2. The window of opportunity in the 1930s/40s when Talcott Parsons in sociology, von Mises in economics and Popper were all promoting a very similar framework for investigation in the social sciences. Parsons after 1937 went the wrong way and Popper did not maintain a serious interest but there was the possibility of an alliance across the disciplines of sociology, economics and philosopohy of science to resist the disastrous fads and fashions that captured both economics and sociology after WW2.

In short, potential solutions to the problems can be pursued with a revitalized form of Austrian economics or the distinctive contribution that the Austrians contribute to good economics.

The revitalizing principles are a cluster of  philosophical ideas in metaphyiscs and epistemology, with methodological implications.

These ideas support current best practice (indeed all-time best practice), that is to say, the work of “Mr Jourdains” who have been speaking in prose all their lives.

Ane the best statements of these ideas can be found in the work of Barry Smith and Karl Popper.

Jeffrey C Alexander is a leading sociologist in theUS, an ambitious and industrious scholar who set out to make a serious mark in the business. He wrote a four-volume opus early in his career to lay the foundations for more philosophically and methodologically sophisticated work in sociology.

The title of the whole work is Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1980) and Volume One is Positivism, Presuppositions and Current Controversies.

He realised the need to operate across the full range of components of theoretical development, from what he called the Metaphysical Environment to the Empirical Environment, passing through General presuppositions, Models, Concepts, Definitions, Classifications, Laws, Complex and simple propositions, Correlations, Methodological assumptions to Observations.

One of his first lines of argument aimed to establish that the old form of empiricism or positivism was out of date due to developments in the philosophy of science. Some will appreciate that by 1980 when this work was published, Popperian critical rationalism had rendered positivism “old hat” in 1935 with the publication of Logik der Forschung. Much of this work was done at Berkeleyand Alexander took the opportunity to pass the manuscript to Ian Jarvie who was working there at the same time. It seems that many mistakes remain in the book which Jarvie would have identified in the manuscript.

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