I have deleted the old post on Popper as a fallible apriorist because it was a draft of this paper which is very close to final.
One of the things which came up in the paper is the need to take account of various turns that Popper took which need to be understood so that he is not regarded as a kind of eccentric positivist who simply changed verification into falsificationism.
That view does not do justice to the full extent of Popper’s program, starting with the first step which can be described as a full-blooded “conjectural turn”, to claim that even our best theories may be rendered problematic by new evidence, new criticisms and new theories. This anticipated the “hermeneutic turn” when appreciation of the theory-dependence and framework-dependence of observations and arguments became more widespread in the wake of Kuhn and the modern French theorists.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe has a video on praxeology. If you are familiar with the line of argument there is no need to sit through it again as he goes through the routine at a nice slow pace. If you are not familiar with the argument this would be a good introduction.
He made a joke at one point and extracted a titter of laughter from the audience. He said that about thirty years ago he became a kind of expert on Popperism but since then he has forgotten practically all of it. Most amusing!
To summarise his serious points. Continue reading
One of the often-repeated arguments against the theory of conjectural knowledge can be called the argument from technology.
Mises: “The popular prestige that the natural sciences enjoy in our civilization is, of course, not founded upon the merely negative condition that their theorems have not been refuted. There is, apart from the outcome of laboratory experiments, the fact that the machines and all other implements constructed in accordance with the teachings of science run in the way anticipated on the ground of these teachings. The electricity-driven motors and engines provide a confirmation of the theories of electricity upon which their production and operation were founded. Sitting in a room that is lighted by electric bulbs, equipped with a telephone, cooled by an electric fan, and cleaned by a vacuum cleaner, the philosopher as well as the layman cannot help admitting that there may be something more in the theories of electricity than that up to now they have not been refuted by an experiment.”
That line of argument is really not worthy of a serious scholar. To observe the instrumental value of theories does not to refute the theory of conjectural knowledge. The instrumental use of a theory does not represent a confirmation of the theory. The Ptolemaic system could be used for a lot of practical applications. It just means that the theory is near enough for practical purposes.
Interesting exchange on a blog the other day. An economist took exception to a disparaging comment that I passed on the positivists and logical empiricists and he implied that Popper was himself a positivist. He defended Kuhn against my put down, saying he was old enough to have known Kuhn personally and mycritique is not convincing.
I don’t know what to say to a person who can’t tell the differencfe between Popper and the positivists but I suppose the impression comes across that he was somehow in the same boat because he devoted so much effort to debating with them. Anyway this begs the question, again, what are people in North America told about Popper?
Three more books checked out in the Sydney University library this afternoon. Continue reading
A wonderful series of lectures endowed by a remarkable inventor, entrepreneur (and philosopher).
In 1927 in his mother’s basement, Obert Tanner began an industrial enterprise that has become the largest firm of its kind in the United States. The O.C. Tanner Company, manufacturing jewelers specializing in corporate recognition awards, forms the material base for the extensive Tanner philanthropies.
As a university professor, Tanner emphasized moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion. He is widely known in academic circles for his passionate advocacy and defense of intellectual freedom. Tanner’s heroes are Socrates and Jesus. From the one he took the belief that the unexamined life is not worth living; from the other he learned compassion for human suffering and an unyielding hope for an eventual human felicity.
The lecturers are a mix of scientists (of all kinds), writers, commentators and philosophers (again, of all kinds). This is the full list, in alphabetical order. Continue reading
That is the authoritarian structure of western thought. With compliments to David Miller and the late Bill Bartley who have been the most active exponents of non-justificationism.
The immediate purpose of this post is to think aloud about re-writing a paper that was rejected by an on-line libertarian journal. That paper was a revised version of an older paper which was submitted to the Gotto Prize (I think related to the Mont Pelerin Society) competition circa 1985. It did not get out of the Asia Pacific zone to compete in the finals. Ahead of its time you might say:)
The central idea is Bartley’s meditation on metacontexts. This is an idea that has made even less headway than non-justificationism. Continue reading
Anti-essentialism is a Popperian idea that many people are either unaware of or do not understand. Many people are essentialists, particularly people who think they understand philosophy, but essentialism is a bad mistake. There are two separate ideas that Popper criticises. (1) Essentialism is the idea that reality consists of ultimate essences and we ought to try to explain what we see in terms of ultimate essences. (2) There is another closely connected idea: we ought to define our terms before we start a discussion otherwise we might get lost.
Let’s take point (1) first. Suppose that reality does consist of ultimate essences. Whatever they are we don’t have direct access to them and so the idea that we should use them seems to require knowledge we don’t have. What would an explanation in terms of essences look like? We start with terms like “cat” and then define the essence of a cat by listing all the features that all cats have in common: whiskers, weird looking eyes, make meowing noises and so on. We would then take all of the cat features and use them to explain what cats do. The problem is that each time we define an essence we use many undefined terms and so we would have to define the new undefined terms and we would get into an infinite regress without ever explaining anything. Nor can definitions reduce ambiguity, as mentioned in point (2): every definition we introduce uses undefined ambiguous terms.
Popper suggests that a better way of thinking about definitions is that a defined terms should be used as shorthand for a longer description: methodological nominalism. So instead of saying “negatively charged particle with spin-1/2 and about 1/1000 the mass of a proton” we say “electron” as a shorthand.
Furthermore, if we try to explain things in terms of ultimate essences we might be tempted to think the ideas we have tell us what the essences are and that would be bad because we might be wrong. An example of this: I have seen some philosophical discussions in which the participants start the discussion by defining knowledge as justified true belief and discussing that definition. The discussion didn’t go anywhere because there was nowhere for it to go: the problem had been set up in such a way that it was completely unsolvable.
One last comment I should make that I don’t think was made by Popper, although I could be wrong. It seems to me there’s another reason to reject essentialist methods: it takes explanations and breaks them up into pieces that are difficult to understand. Suppose we want to understand electrostatics: the forces between slowly moving charges. We find that sometimes two objects attract one another and sometimes they repel one another. We propose and test the idea that the force with which they do this varies as the inverse square of the distance between them. We also discover that the force between two objects isn’t determined by the distance between them and introduce different charges on the objects to explain this. Imagine trying to learn this by having a dictionary that defines charges, and distances between charges and forces and so on. You would have to try to take all these different definitions and put the information they give together in an order that would actually give you an explanation before you could understand electrostatics. You can’t start with an unexplained heap of definitions and then use them to work out a theory. You have to start with problems and explanations.
The best expositions of Popper’s anti-essentialism that I have been able to find are in The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2, Chapter 11, Section II and Conjectures and Refutations, Chapter 3, Section 3.
Jenny Teichman and Katherine Evans, Philosophy: A Beginner’s Guide, (second edition), Blackwell, Oxford, 1995. First edition 1991.
The book was written for a general readership and university freshers, aiming to present the major topics in self-contained chapters without using technical jargon.
The major topics are metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, logic and philosophy and life. Continue reading
This is the full list of reports on a recent trip to Israel with a group of people from the Australian Council of Christians and Jews. I happen to have a friend on the Council and he showed me the itinerary so I decided to go for the experience., representing the unbelievers. The itinerary is at the end of the post.
My aim was to write daily reports as I did from a trip to Turkey last year but due to some internet problems and the croweded days the reports are not in strict chronological order, so some of the reports are “catch ups” some days ofter the event.
