Popper says “I don’t know whether God exists or not.” and ” I do think that all men, including myself, are religious.”
Also “I would be glad if God were to exist, to be able to concentrate my feeling of gratitude on some sort of person to whom one would be grateful. This is a wonderful world in spite of the mess that bad philosophers and bad theologians have made of it. They are to be blamed for many wars and for much cruelty.”
I have read some philosophy of mind over the past couple of weeks and have come across some odd justificationist arguments. You know the ones I mean: ‘I can be certain that I think X’, or ‘When I am having a subjective sensation of seeing green my sensation cannot be doubted’, or ‘I can be certain that I am conscious.’ We might misremember a sensation or a thought or misinterpret it, but we had some sensation or thought and at the time there was no way we could doubt having it.
To be fair many justificationist philosophers of mind don’t endorse this sort of thing, but some do1 and I have occasionally heard them in other contexts so I think it’s worth my while to debunk them. One reply goes something like this: suppose there is a thermometer hanging up on the wall and the mercury is at the 23 degrees centigrade. Even if the room is not at that temperature, there is some fact of the matter about where the mercury is and the thermometer can’t doubt where the mercury is. I think this a weird way of putting things. For a start knowledge has to be knowledge of something other than the thing that supposedly instantiates the knowledge. Otherwise absolutely everything has indubitable knowledge and that’s a wrong headed idea. We attribute knowledge to something to explain its actions. Why does the mercury rise in the thermometer in a predictable when the room gets hotter? Moreover, there are lots of thermometers in the world and their readings will agree with one another to within some standard of accuracy if they are placed in the same situation. Things that are not thermometers will indicate temperature very inaccurately if they indicate it at all. The explanation of why thermometers act this way and other things don’t is that people designed the thermometers by a process of conjectures and criticisms. This feature makes them both useful and fallible: there are circumstances in which the knowledge instantiated in the thermometers will give the wrong result.
Also, this idea seems to involve drawing a sharp line between experiencing something and having an interpretation of it and that theory doesn’t seem tenable. How can we draw the line between seeing green and judging that we saw green and so on in any principled way? Or to put it another way, let’s suppose that there are miraculously infallible sensations or whatever. How can we tell them apart from our fallible judgements about them? And if we can’t what use are they?
Also, it seems to me there’s more than a touch of essentialism here. We define the ‘real sensations’ or the ‘real thoughts’ by a sort of verbal trick and this gives us knowledge. This sort of scholasticism is one reason why a lot of people dislike philosophy and it is due in large part to the pointless quest for justification. For what’s the point in doing this if you’re not desperate to find something you can justify? What problem does it solve?
1 See for example Tyler Burge’s paper ‘Individualism and Self-Knowledge’ in Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 85, pp. 649-663.
When we corroborate a theory (i.e., it passes tests), the theory is better in some way. This is a dangerous statement because being better sounds like it’s more supported.
The way it’s better is this: it is now harder to invent rival theories which are not already refuted by existing knowledge. The scope for rival theories is reduced because they have more evidence they have to be consistent with.
Better tests are the ones which will more greatly reduce the scope for possible rival theories. Corroboration increases our stock of known criticism. More severe tests increase it more.
In this way, we can clearly see that corroboration is distinct from confirmation, and is not a type of confirmation, and does not play a related role to confirmation. It’s role is exclusively criticism oriented, and not support oriented.
This is the only valid way to “support” theories: by building up a stock of known criticisms of potential rivals.
In 1995 the Australian journal Metascience had an interview with Alan Musgrave, a professsor of philosophy at at the University of Otago. Musgrave was a working class lad from Manchester when he arrived at the LSE in 1958. Continue reading
On Amazon US my score for helpful reviews has hit 666, the Devil’s Number.
Will someone please go in and register a helpful vote to get me off the dreaded number 666! Continue reading
From Hoppe’s commentary on a paper by Radnitzky in Values and the Social Order: Vol 1 Values and Society Eds Radnitzky and Bouillon, Averbury 1995.
Unfortunately, in line with his Popperian – falsificationist – methodology, Radnitzky weakens, or even defeats, his own case for a free society when he states, ‘There is no way of ultimately justifying any moral precept;…moral arguments can never be “compelling”;…there is no way of ultimately justifying truth claims with respect to concrete statements.’ Continue reading
This is the blog of Tony Lloyd. One of my very helpful email friends picked up a paper on CR that he wrote in a journal and now we are in touch. He did philosophy years ago but pursued a different career until he found the time to get back on the job.
More CR resources!
Check out the paper on the reasons why we can all be critical rationalists now! (can’t cut and paste an extract, sorry).
The bottom line of this argument (yet to be composed) is that the problems with Popper’s RP in the context of his Situational Analysis (SA) can be resolved quite easily, if:
1. We accept that plans and intentions count as causes of human action.
2. We think we can find general laws (or at least laws of tendency or propensity) in the human sciences. Continue reading
A heads up for a wonderful CR-related site. Congratulations Joe!
Some parts of Bryan Magee’s memoire, Confessions of a Philosopher, reviewed here.
Magee read history and philosophy at Oxford and Yale, then in 1956 he moved to London and into radio and TV. He became the anchor of the leading British weekly current affairs program on TV which advanced his political education because he travelled the world and discovered the reality of life under communist and socialist regimes. To his dismay, back home even his conservative friends could not credit the full extent of the brutality and squalor that he encountered under the Marxist regimes of the world. Continue reading
