critical rationalism blog

Some reasons for talking about Popper’s “turns”.

First, for more effective teaching and criticism of Popper’s ideas. Popper has reformulated some of the traditional questions and people who come to his books after they have started in the mainstream will find that the landscape is unfamiliar. This happened to my father in the real world when he plunged into a dense thicket of bush on his farm and emerged on the same side. He was momentarily “lost” until he realized which way he was looking, then the landscape became familiar again. Readers may find that they are “lost” in Popper’s books until they realize that he has addressed different problems or reformulated versions of the traditional problems. For example he was not trying to justify beliefs, indeed he was not really concerned with beliefs at all. Nor was he trying to explicate terms and concepts.

His work can be seen as a program to explore the results when some old problems are addressed in some new ways. Agassi provided a hint to this process with his paper on the novelty of Popper’s philosophy of science (Agassi, 1968) where he described how major advances can be achieved when a “known but unappreciated solution to a given  problem” is take seriously and the implications of the solution are unpacked.

One way to evaluate Popper’s achievement is to assess the progress that he made, given his own intentions and aspirations. It is essential to understand his program, that is, what he was trying to do,  in order to make a helpful comparison with other programs.

Of course others may choose to continue with their own program rather than take up critical rationalism but in the light of  the “compare and contrast” exercise that will be a rational choice, made after considering the alternatives, with reasons that can be discussed and subjected to criticism.

At present, too many  books and articles on epistemology just address the justification of beliefs and do not acknowledge the existence of the alternative critical rationalist program.

Second, to identify some little-recognized shared concerns with other intellectual traditions and work in progress. Four of these: (1) the fallibillism of C S Peirce and John Dewey, (2) the focus on ignorance (what we do not know) of Firestein and (3) examination of  the social and institutional context of science by Kitcher and (4) the various ways that research programs have been discussed (in advance of paradigm theory), for example Lovejoy’s historical study of  key ideas, Collingwood’s alertness to metaphysical theories and more recently Kitcher’s concept of “scientific practice” including what he called “schemata” which are functionally equivalent to metaphysical research programs. (See the recent post on this topic)

Misreading Popper is the next book on the production line.

Table of contents

Preface or Introduction

The turns and the standard errors introduced very briefly

Popper’s Progress   Appendix I of Readers (improved)

More on the turns Appendix II  of Readers (improved)

Initial reception and problems of positivism (Appendix III of Readers)

More on the standard errors with examples (Appendix IV)

More detailed critique of selected works, some high profile (Grayling, Stanford Encyclopedia), others high circulation (Chalmers)

Annotations on further works to convey a sense of the volume of  misrepresentation.

Final chapter: Conclusion/Going Forward: possible synergies with other lines of thought (especially Firestein and Kitcher).

Most of the writing is done apart from the final chapter, and some additions to the chapter on the turns to take account of other Popperians (see below).

Plans

1. To me more inclusive of other critical rationalists, showing how the likes of Miller and Bartley promoted the conjectural turn, Jarvie took up the objective turn (Concepts and Society), Jarvie and Shearmur took on the social turn, Agassi promoted the metaphysical turn, etc.

2. To show the possibility for collaboration with others such as Firestein on the conjectural turn (how ignorance drives knowledge) and Kitcher on the social turn.

An explanandum is an experience we seek to explain, such as the changing seasons. An explanans is a set of claims which explain the experience, such as that the earth orbits of the sun once every 365 days, that the earth is tilted by 23.5 degrees on its axis, that surfaces orthogonal to light sources absorb more heat, and so on.

An explanans must logically entail its explanandum, but not vice versa. The consequence class of the explanandum must be a proper subset of the explanans. In other words, an explanans is “bigger” than its explanandum. Claims about planetary orbits, axial tilts, heat absorption and so on, together entail our experience of the changing seasons. However, our experience doesn’t entail anything about planetary orbits, axial tilts, or heat absorption, because our experience is consistent with many explanations.

Attempting to derive an explanans from an explanandum is an ill-posed problem. Inverse optics and Gettier problems are examples of the same issue. It’s impossible to determine, from an explanandum alone, a unique solution except by prejudice or caprice. When we seek justification for our explanations, however, we must attempt to solve this ill-posed problem. That is, our experience (the explanandum) is supposed to justify claims about planetary orbits, axial tilts, and heat absorption (the explanans). But this is logically impossible.

Explanation and justification run in opposite directions. When confronted with this opposition, we can either abandon justification or explanation.

Scientific anti-realists abandon explanation. They repudiate the goal of explaining our experiences at all. They normally adopt an instrumentalist attitude toward our explanations. That is, “explanations” are merely useful tools for categorising and predicting experience, but the anti-realist assiduously refrains from claiming they are an attempt to describe anything real, out there, or beyond appearances. Anti-realists assent to no explanation of our experience, because the music cannot be explained by a non-existent orchestra, and they refuse to either affirm or deny the existence of the orchestra.

Scientific realists should abandon justification. Unfortunately, most of them want to have their cake and eat it. They understand that realism is the best explanation of our experiences, because insofar as anti-realism may be construed as an alternative explanation, it’s a bad one. That is, anti-realism says that it’s just as though our best explanation of our experience of the seasons is true (or proximately true), but actually something else altogether is true. This is a quintessentially bad explanation. The problem is not that it conflicts with experience, but rather that it includes a fudge factor. The unspecified ‘something else’ has no function except to deny the truth of our explanation, and it can be adjusted ad hoc to fulfill that purpose. However, realists also tend to crave justification, and so they find themselves arguing from a compromised position.

Writing on Darwin’s achievement in his 2003 book In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology, Philip Kitcher advanced the concept of a scientific practice. This consists of:

a language

a set of statements that are accepted by the specific community of scientists

a set of questions that the scientists in the community accept as important

a set of schemata which specify the form of desirable answers

a set of accepted techniques and methodologies to address the questions.

For his study of Darwin he focussed on the first four – language, accepted statements, questions and schemata.

Clearly there is a great deal of common ground with Popperism, especially the idea of getting clear about important problems and his idea of metaphysical research programs which are all about “schemata”.

This links with Kitcher’s move into the situated social practice of science where he drew upon neoclassical economic theory to get a handle on the socioeconomic aspects of scientific practice. This opens up the prospect of some dialogue with Ian Jarvie and anyone else who is interested in Popper’s social turn. We have to hope that this will work out better than the non-exchange between Parsons, von Mises and Popper that could have happened when they were practically on the same page for the study of economics and sociology in the 1930s.

Interesting!

I like to think of Popper as an argumentative carpenter and moralist!

A complimentary review of  The Myth of the Framework.

And more.

People who  learned their evolutionary theory from the cartoonist Gary Larson will recall pictures of life emerging from the sea to colonise the land. This was a difficult transition and possibly the first life forms that made the journey were amphibious, capable of living on land and in the water. Eventually more developed forms of land-living animals were free from the need to be in or near the water and they could range far and wide, so massive numbers of new species could evolve to occupy the huge range of new ecological niches that were available.

In this story, the “sea” is an intellectual environment where the water consists of  positivism, justificationism, essentialism, subjectivism, plus reductionism and determinism.  On the land the intellectual environment consists of the Popperian turns and people who take the turns do not need to dedicate careers to confirmation theory and the problem of induction, they/we can engage with substantive scientific and practical problems in a critical and imaginative manner without having to wait for the philosophers to solve the problem of  justified beliefs, overcome the paradox of the ravens,  or find a way to attach p values to theories.

I see Philip Kitcher as an amphibian, still concerned with the  justification of beliefs  (in the water) but also moving forward with the social turn to consider the function of conventions and rules of the game in science, epistemology and politics. It will be interesting to see if he can continue to move in the direction of the evolutionary/objective approach/world 3 to knowledge.

I think his attempt to recruit economic theory to mesh with his epistemology will work better with a more “Austrian” approach to economics and less emphasis on justified beliefs on the epistemological side. That means picking up more of the Popperian turns to consolidate the transition to the “land”! It is a pity that we are short of critical rationalists to exploit and consolidate Popper’s pioneering work.

Scanning old posts on the site I came upon a reference to a CR fellow traveller, Justin Cruickshank. Check out his website for publications of interest.

I would really like authors to get in touch and tell me when they produce a book or a paper, or anything else of interest, for the CR Resources page.

Phillip Kitcher is one of the stars in the philosophical firmament. Born in London in 1947, he took a degree in maths and the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge and a doctorate in HPS at Princeton where he worked closely with Karl Hempel and Thomas Kuhn. In the 1990s he was Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Coordinator for Science Studies at San Diego and since then he has been the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia, with a spell as the Chair of Contemporary Civilization. His cv signals a stellar career.

His publication program demonstrates a very interesting move that mirrors some of the  Popperian “turns”, especially the evolutionary approach and more significantly the social turn to examine the rules of the scientific game and the reciprocal relationship between science and political and social institutions.

1982 – Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism.

1983 – The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge.

1985 – Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature.

1989 – Scientific Explanation, edited with Wesley Salmon.

1993 – The Advancement of Science.

1997 – The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities.

2001 – Science, Truth and Democracy.

2003 – In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology.

2005 –  Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s Ring.

2007 – Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design and the Future of Faith.

2007 – Joyce’s Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake.

2011 – The Ethical Project.

2011 – Science in a Democratic Society.

He moved on from early work on epistemology with the focus on the justification of beliefs to look closer at the way that beliefs are generated and the way that science functions as a social institution among other social and political institutions, notably democracy. In The Advancement of Science he made a serious effort to marry epistemology and economic theory. I think that work suffered from a sub-optimal theory of  epistemology (belief theory) and also a sub-optimal economic theory, but the work has some potential by way of Popperism (critical rationalism)  and Austrian economics.

Ancient texts in unreadable languages have been cracked by picking up a handful of key words so that a pattern can be found. Much the same can happen in solving a murder mystery.

Remember the puzzle books with complex line drawings, like a tree that contains 15 children or a  bird. The children or the bird are invisible in a mass of lines in the picture, until you adjust your eyes to find them, or someone points them out.

Maybe the four, five or six Popperian “turns” can provide the key to the pattern in critical rationalism, the pattern that ensures that most professional philosophers can’t find anything that they find agreeable or that they can even “see”.

That idea occurred while re-reading Stephen Thornton’s piece on Popper in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Incidentally it was revised again in February 2013 but the Critical Appraisal is still unsatisfactory, it looks like a collection of non-sequiturs, based on (1) the failure to see the distinction between the logic of falsifiability and the practical problems of falsification and (2) how Popper addressed the problem by way of “rules of the game” or the “social turn” described by Ian Jarvie. http://www.the-rathouse.com/rev_jarvie.html

See below for an update on Thornton.

Of course people who have a personal or professional commitment to the pre-Popperian approach, against the turns, may see them without finding them acceptable, but for others it may help to provide the “keys” that unlock the code of critical rationalism.

The turns are briefly described in an appendix to the Guides in the Popular Popper series and in due course I will write a few thousand words on each and produce an ebook in the order of 25 to 30,000 words devoted to them.

Thornton revisited

In fairness to Thornton, in the body of the text the distinction between logic and practice is clearly defined.

Popper has always drawn a clear distinction between the logic of falsifiability and its applied methodology. The logic of his theory is utterly simple: if a single ferrous metal is unaffected by a magnetic field it cannot be the case that all ferrous metals are affected by magnetic fields. Logically speaking, a scientific law is conclusively falsifiable although it is not conclusively verifiable. Methodologically, however, the situation is much more complex: no observation is free from the possibility of error—consequently we may question whether our experimental result was what it appeared to be.

Thus, while advocating falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation for science, Popper explicitly allows for the fact that in practice a single conflicting or counter-instance is never sufficient methodologically to falsify a theory, and that scientific theories are often retained even though much of the available evidence conflicts with them, or is anomalous with respect to them.

Now I recall that one of the problems with the previous version was a disconnect between the body of the text which was quite sound for the most part and the criticisms at the end which were not. My concern was (and remains) that practically everyone will either read the negative conclusion alone, and those who  do make the effort to read the whole lot will quite likely take away the negative conclusion. At the very least they will be confused.

A very odd situation.