critical rationalism blog

Mostly from the beginning.

Preliminary comments.

Something very strange has happened to the thoughts of Popper. For some time he was mostly described as an eccentric contributor to the Received (positivist) View of the philosophy of science. So Popperian falsificationism was introduced after logical positivism and logical empiricism, some problems were identified – no conclusive falsifications, the Duhem problem, theory-impregnation of observations, scientists don’t do it, history was not really like that, etc. All of these issues were treated by Popper as early as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Then without regard to the counter-arguments, Popper was dismissed and replaced by Kuhn and also by Lakatos, who was desribed as trying to save whatever can be retrived from the ruins of Popper’s falsificationism.

In those days Popper retained a place in the history of the philosophy of science but he was not usually mentioned under the more general heading of epistemology. Surveying a sample of general or introductory philosophy books published afer 2000, it looks as though Popper has almost disappeared completely. And that despite writing one of the great books of political philosophy of the 20th century.

Two things may help to retrieve this situation.

One is to realise that Popper’s position is not adequately summarised under the heading of “falsificationism”. It is necessary to appreciate at least four major developments or “turns” that he introduced, if not all in 1935 at least by the mid 1950s when he formally rehabilitated metaphysical theories.

The other is to actually read and re-read Popper’s own work to apprieciate how much is there, densely packed, with much of the depth only accessible when we return and re-read as our grasp of the issues expands. 

Four of the “turns” introduced by Popper can be described as the conjectural turn, the objective turn, the social turn and the metaphysical turn. These are briefly described here.

As to re-reading Popper, for many people things only exist if they are on line, and also very brief. To meet this situation there is a condensed open society, summary of The Poverty of Historicism, some condensed papers from Conjectures and Refutations and a summary of Colin Simkin’s excellent introduction to Popper’s ideas.

If people are serious they will not be content with these sawn-off versions of the real things, and they will  devour the whole books as soon as they can find them. The chance of getting a positive introduction to Popper in the modern academies appears to be negligible, so this short-cut by way of summaries on line is a desperate attempt to speak directly to students and other, over the heads of the academics.

The LSD extracts.

The 1934 preface, with a section in bold that could be regarded as an anticipation of Kuhn. The 1958 preface with a section in bold on the historical approach (a rejoinder to people who think that Popper ignored history).

And some extracts on demarcation, conventions and methods of criticism. Notice in the section 1.3 on deductive testing, the four ways to approach the criticism of a hypothesis. Bartley later articulated these as: the check on the problem (what is the problem, and does the theory actually solve the problem?), the check of logic (internal consistency), the check of consistency with other well-tested theories and the test of evidence. To which Popper later added (5) the check on the metaphysics.

He emphsised the importance of practical tests.

The purpose of this last kind of test is to find out how far the new consequences of the theory–whatever may be new in what it asserts –stand up to the demands of practice, whether raised by purely scientific experiments, or by practical technological applications.

It is interesting to note how  much has been written about “theory choice” in the philosophy and methodology of economics, but there has been little attention to “policy choice”. All economic policies can be regarded as experiments and the scientific approach would be to treat them as such. Ludwig von Mises wrote a lot to explain how the evidence of interventionist policies demonstrates that they do not work. That is falsificationism applied in economic policy! So we can think of Mises as a practicing falsificationist.

Created by an Australian who recently died in the US. Interesting but somewhat eccentric. A few years ago I tried to make contact but did not suceed.

Popper wrote a 1956 Preface for The Postscript to The Logic of Scientitic Discovery: After Twentyfive Years. This appeared after almost 50 years in Realism and the Aim of Science (1983).

The Preface is the text of a talk titled “On the non-esistence of scientific method”.

“As a rule, I begin my lectures on Scientific Method by telling my students that scientific method does not exist. I add that I ought to know, having been for a time, the one and only professor of this non-existent subject within the British Commonwealth.” 

There are several ways in which the subject does not exist.

More of the story here.

REVIEW OF Thomas A Boylan and Paschal F O’Gorman (eds) “Popper and Economic Methodology: Contemporary Challenges” Routledge, 2008.

In recent decades the philosophy and methodology of economics has become a thriving academic industry. Ten years ago Wade Hands noted that Popper was the most influential philosopher in the movement, although there is mounting concern about the nature of that influence. This collection of papers can be seen as a response to that concern. It is number nine in the Routledge International Network for Economic Methodology (INEM) series.

The book is a product of an International Symposium at the University of Galway, convened in 2002 to mark the centenary of Popper’s birth. It can be placed alongside the proceedings from Centenary Conferences that were held in Vienna and in Christchurch, New Zealand, where Popper wrote “The Open Society and its Enemies” and “The Poverty of Historicism” during World War 2. Another volume for the set is the published papers from the 2007 Prague conference on the theme Rethinking Popper.

The editors explain that the conference was designed to explore some of the major themes in Popper’s work, and to illuminate some aspects that are not generally recognised.

“Among the principal themes addressed in this volume are a number of major tensions in Popper’s contribution to economic methodology. More specifically these tensions result from two divergent trends in Popper’s thought. One trend emerges from his demarcation criterion as contained in his doctrine of falsifiability. The alternative trend is contained in Popper’s situational analysis [and] his rationality principle.” (xi)

“The second major issue explored is based on a critical reading of Popper’s later work [where] the universe is perceived as an open system, untainted by determinism. Under the shadow of this Popperian thesis, orthodox economics is the only social science to have attained the maturity of Newtonian physics. The implications of Popperian open systems for economic methodology have been ignored to-date in the literature on economic methodology. This challenge is addressed…” (xii)

Before looking at the papers, a word of caution. There is a question mark hanging over the whole field. What have working economists gained from this academic growth area? That can be regarded as an “external” critique. On the inside, what progress has been made since, say, 1980 when Blaug’s landmark work in the field was published? More on these questions later. 

The whole review can be seen here.

A strange story, claiming that Kuhn threw an ashtray at a grad student, then threw him out of the course.

I call Kuhn’s reply “The Ashtray Argument.” If someone says something you don’t like, you throw something at him. Preferably something large, heavy, and with sharp edges. Perhaps we were engaged in a debate on the nature of language, meaning and truth. But maybe we just wanted to kill each other.

The end result was that Kuhn threw me out of Princeton. He had the power to do it, and he did it. God only knows what I might have said in my second or third year. At the time, I felt that he had destroyed my life. Now, I feel that he saved me from a career that I was probably not suited for.

In Bryan Magee’s book Confessions of a Philosopher there is a helpful account of the rise and fall of Logical Positivism, explaining how the positivists and after them the logical empiricists managed to think that Popper was playing their game of “meaning”. “So the knee-jerk reaction to the name ‘Popper’ became ‘falsifiability’.” That is one of the reasons why I am not entirely happy for Popper’s epistemology to be called “falsificationism”.

Go to this link for the full story, covering Magee’s experience at Oxford, Yale and then as a reporter and commentator, politician and public intellectual par exellence when returned to philosophy in a more serious way.

Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Readings eds Yuri Balachov and Alex Rosenberg Routledge 2002

This 520 page book has 29 chapters grouped under Part I, Science and Philosophy (2 chapters), Part II Explanation, Causation and Laws (6 chapters), Part III Scientific Theories and Conceptual Change (3 chapters), Part IV Scientific Realism (4 chapters), Part V Testing and Confirmation of Theories (9 chapters), Part VI Science in Context: The Challenge of History and Sociology (5 chapters).

Surprisingly the bibliography only occupies four pages, suggesting that for all the ground covered, the pool of “essential” reading is not very large.

From the Popperians there is the Lakatos and Musgrave (eds) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, and Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery (as though he produced nothing new after 1934!).

Continue reading →

A book by Paul  Moser Philosophy after Objectivity: Making Sense in Perspective London Uni Press, 1993.

From the Preface

Philosophers, among other theorists, have long sought objective knowledge: roughly, knowledge of things whose existence does not depend on one’s conceiving of them. Skeptics can effectively demand non-questionbegging evidence for claims to objective knowledge or truth, even if they typically despair of achieving such evidence. This book examines questions about objective knowledge in order to characterize the kinds of reasons available to philosophers and other theorists.

Continue reading →

I’ve written a paper that uses evolutionary epistemology to solve a problem in the foundations of physics: explaining the second law of thermodynamics.

It is time to update the list of CR Resources. Let me know about any books, papers or items of interest that you think should be on the list. Don’t bother to tell me about the CR blog!

Here is another interesting resource, a climate change skeptic in Western Australia. She has broader interests than climate change but under the circumstances, that is where her energies are focussed at present. She is a great admirer of von Mises and expressed surprise that there is ground for synergy between the ideas of Popper and von Mises!