This is the text of a long paper that Ian Jarvie drafted for a memorial volume of papers for Bill Bartley who died in 1990, aged only 55. The plan did not proceed. Too many people like myself put together drafts but did not complete them.
The paper focusses on the problem-orientation of the Popper school, with special reference to Bartley and others such as Joe Agassi and a historian of ideas called Popkin (no relation!). Continue reading
The Popperian legacy in economics was the theme of a conference in Amsterdam in 1985. The editor of the proceedings, de Marchi, noted that most of the time was spent (without a conclusion) on the need for a better demarcation criterion. Jack Birner described it as a Popper-bashing exercise. Surprisingly, the best equipped Popperian for the task was not invited to participate. That was Larry Boland, properly trained in mathematical economics and a student of Joe Agassi. Boland wrote a review of the book which clarifies a great deal of the confusion.
The tone of the gathering was set in the paper by Dan Hausman when he claimed that he had demolished the twin towers of Popper’s epistemology, namely the demarcation criterion (plus various rules for testing theories) and Poppers response to the problem of induction. Continue reading
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper criticised the idea that political philosophy should be about the question of who should rule. Any person or group is fallible, so the question “Who should rule?” begs for a false answer. So what question should we ask? Rationality consists not of finding the right policy or idea by some complicated argument and sticking to it, but of exposing our policies and ideas to criticism and eliminating bad policies – error correction. So the question to ask is how we can change the political system to make it more open to error correction?
Today in Britain, many people want an alternative to the current first past the post voting system that is more “representative”. That is, their criterion for choosing a voting system is that the people should have the party they like represented in parliament in proportion to the number of people who like that party. This way of looking at voting systems is focused on who should get to decide the mix of politicians. But is this in the spirit of openness to criticism advocated by Popper? And if not, is it even compatible with openness to error correction?
There are some strong arguments that “representative” voting systems are usually bad for error correction, including the proposed Alternative vote system. Some of these focus on the fact that many of them lead to coalition governments. When there is a coalition, each party in the coalition can blame the others for what goes wrong. Then it is very difficult to keep any party out of power if it has some supporters no matter how bad their ideas. It gets worse, these representative voting systems have the property that if you vote for a party, the number of seats it gets can decrease.
The situation gets worse, there are mathematical results indicating that no voting system has all the properties we might want in a voting system. We have to make a choice about what criteria we want our voting system to satisfy and if we want a more open society we cannot choose a system that leads to less accountability.
First past the post tends to put one party in power and so that party cannot blame anyone else for its failures. If you vote under first past the post then the number of seats allotted to the party you vote for increases or stays the same, it does not decrease. In addition, in first past the post politicians are accountable to the voters in their constituency whereas in other voting systems they are not tied to a particular constituency. So first past the post makes political parties more accountable than does any proportional voting system.
I think it is fair to say that people in Britain are unhappy with the current political situation and see MPs as an unaccountable bunch of layabouts whose main skill is spending other people’s money. How can this problem be solved by putting in place a voting system that can decrease the number of seats a party gets when you vote for it and that severs the link between politicians and their constituents?
UPDATE: The mathematically inclined reader who wants to learn more about voting systems might find Donald Saari’s book Decisions and Elections interesting. I should note that Saari may not agree with what I’ve written above.
I think it can safely be said that Popper and Wittgenstein didn’t like each other much and that their dedicated followers have not shown much interest in overcoming this dislike. Peter Munz makes an attempt to heal this breach in “Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker”, claiming that each philosopher needs the other, and he also argues against evolutionary psychology. The Popper-Wittgenstein reconciliation argument seems a bit unconvincing as I shall now explain. Continue reading
Daniel Hausman The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics (1992)
In this book Hausman defends the old-fashioned view that economics proceeds by deducing the consequences of “apriori” axioms in particular situations. (This could be called Situational Analysis). The axioms are “inexact”, and they only permit the prediction of tendencies (propensities?). He suggests that confidence in the implications (predictions and explanations) of economics comes from confidence in the axioms rather than from testing their implications. Continue reading
Michael Scammel’s biography runs to 700 pages and is likely to be the primary source on Koestler for some time. A minor quibble, the writing is competent but no more than that, it is a shame that such a fine writer did not get a more than competent biographer. Continue reading
Wesley Salmon wrote a critique of critical rationalism in which he claimed this it could not explain why it is rational to use the predictions of scientific theories to help us make decisions. First, note that Salmon does not and cannot refute Popper’s criticism of inductivism. There is a very simple reason for that: the criticism is valid.
Second, Salmon states (p. 11) that Popper once wrote that a realist will think there are regularities in the world. Realism, by Popper’s lights, is a conjecture and should be treated by the standards of any other conjecture: that is, it should be retained if it can withstand criticism. To be an inductivist, Popper would have to hold the opinion that observations imply something about the future, but of course this is not implied by the statement that there are regularities in the real world. Observations plus the laws of physics may imply something about the future, but of course that cannot tell us about the status of our knowledge of those laws.
Finally, critical rationalism does say things about what sort of predictions are rational: those predictions should be made in ways that have so far withstood criticism and should be easy to criticise if they go wrong. Furthermore, we should take steps to make our predictions and practical actions easy to criticise. We should also take steps to respond to the criticisms we receive. So, for example, when planes are built the best available theories of aerodynamics will be used to constrain the design. Why? Because if we didn’t we would have an unexplained discrepancy between our explanation of why we chose a specific plane design and the best available theories about the real world in which that plane will operate. Those aerodynamic theories are in turn retained because they stand up to criticism, solve problems, explain things that other theories don’t explain and so on. Some of the components, or models of those components, may be tested in wind tunnels. The plane carries a black box that collects information about the plane during flight in case something goes wrong so that it will be easier to criticise the performance of the plane’s components. All of this involves only conjecture and critical argument and it is rational by Popper’s lights.
This procedure is not rational by Salmon’s lights because he is a justificationist – he thinks that decisions can and should be proven right or made more probable to work or something like that. However, he doesn’t produce any proposal for how such justification could be had and there is a straightforward logical argument that indicates that this is impossible. That is, any argument uses premises and rules of inference and its conclusions are only proven or probable if those inputs are proven or probable. How are we going to show the inputs are proven or probable: another argument with more premises and rules of inference that have to be proven or shown to be probable? Seems to me that would lead to infinite regress and to no decisions ever being made. This is supposed to be practical?
I have been thinking anew about the problem of induction recently, and wished to explain and contrast two proposed solutions. One of these solutions is Popper’s falsificationism; the other solution is what I believe has been implicitly accepted and taught by other philosophers. It seems to me that both are genuine solutions, and critical rationalists would do well to recognise that, even though we may nonetheless prefer one solution to the other. I also want to briefly comment on how best to discuss and compare these solutions, because they each satisfy the demands of different people.
Let me begin with a brief explanation of the problem of induction as I understand it. The matter will be somewhat simplified for brevity, and I trust the reader to read qualifications and footnotes between the lines. Continue reading
That is the title of a paper by Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons and Barry Smith.
Abstract. Philosophy in the West divides into three parts: Analytic Philosophy (AP), Continental Philosophy (CP), and History of Philosophy (HP). But all three parts are in a bad way.
“AP is sceptical about the claim that philosophy can be a science, and hence is uninterested in the real world. CP is never pursued in a properly theoretical way, and its practice is tailor-made for particular political and ethical conclusions. HP is mostly developed on a regionalist basis: what is studied is determined by the nation or culture to which a philosopher belongs, rather than by the objective value of that philosopher’s work. Progress in philosophy can only be attained by avoiding these pitfalls”. Continue reading
In 1985 Colin Simkin put me in touch with Bill Bartley who was the official biographer for Karl Popper. Simkin became a close friend of Popper in Christchurch in 1937 or 1938 and they kept in touch until Popper died in 1994. Simkin was such a good friend that he was allowed to smoke while he walked with Popper in the garden. Other people, even including Alfred Tarski (like Simkin, a chain smoker) were not allowed to smoke in the same room with Popper, not even a lecture theatre.
