Karl Popper

[RebelDog]

Aside from the 'open society' and a few other things Popper had a point when he stated that nothing could be verified. I can see how our current understanding leads to such thought, but I fail to understand how falsification is possible; in a universe that has mathematics. Is there not a mathematical reality to everything, if not how do engines work? Am I right in saying Popper was deep down wishing to discard science and not promote it?

[Hegemonicretribution]

Popper did not wish to discard science, merely bring it into check with reality. The problem of induction is fairly large, and Popper's attempt at overcoming this was falsification.

Basically Popper stated that because we can never carru out enough (essentially all conceivable) observations to verify any given hypothesis, we should instead look for instances that falsify a given theory (can be only one).

Of course Popper accepted that science was not there merely to disprove theories...and Popper thought that any non pseudo-science that could not be falsified would potentionally be close to the truth. Of course, despite maintaining a pro-science attitude, accepting the problem of induction would mean accepting the possibility of falsity in any of our thought, Popper was still more pro-"science" than many others, and added important aspects to philosophy of science.

Now I realise you may well be familiar with this, however; it is true that the problem of induction applies even when mathmatics are taken into account. Now it can and will be argued that maths is tautological, or is over and above the problem of induction, but this does not matter. Science itslef may utilise mathmatics, it is not maths itself however. So even if we discuss relationships and observations mathmatically, it is still possible that our observations are not sufficient for formulating a general rule....

Personally I question science in our current situation more in terms of the theory-ladeness of observations than in terms of the more general problem for induction.

[RebelDog]

My brain has just told me falsification must be verifiable!

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Dissenter, you are right to query this, since falsification has never been used in science and existed as a criterion only in Popper's crazed imagination.

This is quite apart from the fact that one can always rescue a 'falsified' theory by adjusting an auxilliary hypothesis.

For example, Copernican theory predicted stellar parallax, which was not observed. So Copernicans merely adjusted the auxilliary hypothesis that the stars were much further away than anyone had thought.

http://sci2.esa.int/interactive/media/flashes/2_1_1.htm

Had Popper (or Lakatos, even) been around in, say, 1600, they'd have rejected this theory/research program.

Too bad for them that stellar parallax was observed by Bessell in 1838.

http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Astronomy2.htm

Science is far too complex a social endeavour to squeeze into such an ideal straight-jacket.

[JimFar]

Rosa wrote:


Dissenter, you are right to query this, since falsification has never been used in science and existed as a criterion only in Popper's crazed imagination.

I don't think that is quite correct since there have a number of scientists over the years who have thought they were using Popper's falsificationism in their own work. One notable example were the proponents of the Steady-State cosmology, back in the 1940s and 1950s (Herman Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle) who drew explicitly upon Popper's philosophy of science in the formulation of the methodology that underlied their investigations. Bondi, in particular, was taken with the idea of formulating a cosmology that could be falsified by empirical data. And indeed, Bondi took great pains to formulate the Steady-State theory so that it would be possible to state explicitly what sorts of observations could falsify it. And indeed, in the mid-1960s, with the discovery of 3° K remnant microwave radiation which suggested that the universe did indeed have a definate origin, the theory was in fact falsified, as Bondi readily admitted.

(See: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article,
"Cosmology: Methodological Debates in the 1930s and 1940s"
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmology-30s/ )

And in addition to the aforementioned cosmologists, a number of other prominent scientists have been great fans of Popper, such as the immunologist, Peter Medawar.

On the other hand Rosa is correct, when she wrote:


This is quite apart from the fact that one can always rescue a 'falsified' theory by adjusting an auxilliary hypothesis

Certainly, the ingenious efforts that Fred Hoyle made over the years, right up to the end of his life to keep some form of Steady-State cosmology afloat, when just about all of his fellow cosmologists had long since rejected it, bears out the truth of Rosa's observation here.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Jim, once again thanks for those thouughts, but you concede too much to Popperianism. First, if Popper's ideas make no sense, then, whatever other scientists think they are doing, they cannot be applying Popper's ideas.

Second, it is not possible to 'falsify' a theory (even in 'theory'), since they are neither (and can neither be) true or false; if so, then Bondi and Medawar sound about as confused as Popper.

Finally, even if it were possible to 'falsify' a theory, that theory can always be saved by altering auxilliary hypotheses -- as you agree -- (an awkward fact that scuppers Popper's own 'theory', unless, too, one alters one of his auxilliary hypotheses to save his 'theory', thereby confirming this criticism of it!).

This is quite apart from the fact that there is a world of difference between scientists reading Popper, and buying his confused ideas, going away trying to apply them to their work.

Without such propaganda, no scientist would ever proceed in the way you suggest.

Which is, of course, another way of making my earlier point.

[hoopla]

i wrote a shitty essay on popper. pooperianism actually seemed like a fiarly robust theory iirc, but i "daring" sided with the philosopher who was most critical. something about it being predicated on a want for rationalism, but being infact an irrationalism. i forget why tbh: perhaps because he can't give a method to decide which statements are relevent to theory testing. i might dig it up, but i doubt that anyone is intersted... like i say it wasn't marked well.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Hoop, you are right; one of the best 'take downs' of Popper can be found in David Stove's work.

Unfortunately, Stove was a right-wing git; check out his entry at Wiki.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stove

And here:

http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/...per/popper.html (http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Facility/4118/dcs/popper/popper.html)

[His criticisms of Kuhn and Feyerabend, however, are not worth the paper they were written on.]

[Pawn Power]

Popper was, for a time, involved in the Mont Pelerin Society along with such neolibral advocates like Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. :o

[hoopla]

yeah, thats not the name i remember. maybe it was a re-count of that tho.

i used oxford library for that essay. cool, but oppressive :rolleyes:

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Pawn Power, yes he was a big admirer of Hayek.

[JimFar]

Rosa,

There is no doubt that many of the strongest intellectual currents that have prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon world over the past half-century or so, owe much to the Austrians of the period between the two world wars. These include things like psychoanalysis and the "Austrian School" in economics (especially Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises), without which the current vogue of neo-liberalism would be unthinkable.
Anglophone philosophy, as it exists today, would be unthinkable without the influence of Wittgenstein, as well as the Vienna Circle of Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath, amongst others.

Also, it is interesting to note the intellectual, political, and even personal relationships that existed between the leading figures of these various currents. Thus, Popper's critiques of logical positivism were not unrelated to his critiques of Marxism, given that one of his main antagonists in both areas was Otto Neurath, who was both a Marxist and a logical empiricist. Neurath, was among other things, associated with the Austro-Marxists, and indeed often wrote for their journal, Der Kampf, which was edited by by people like Otto Bauer, Max Adler, and Karl Renner. Most of the logical positivists, were politically Social Democrats, with some like Neurath and Carnap, quite far to the left. On the other hand, some members of the Vienna Circle were much more conservative politically, including Schlick and Richard von Mises, who was the brother of the well known economist, Ludwig von Mises. Richard, seems to have shared the political and economic views (but not the epistemological views) of his economist brother.

I have heard that Friedrich Hayek was a cousin of Wittgenstein but I don't think the two men had much in common as far as their political or philosophical views were concerned. Hayek was a friend of Popper's and he did much to secure Popper an academic post at the London School of Economics, when the latter was languishing at a third-rate university in New Zealand. Hayek also seems to have helped Popper to get his The Open Society published. While Popper's political views at the time were well to the left of Hayek's, Hayek recognized that Popper's book could be a useful weapon in the war against Marxism.

Members of the Vienna Circle also had strong connection with leading figures of some the major cultural movements in Austria and Germany at that time. For instance they had a close relationship with the Bauhaus School. This relationship was mediated primarily through Neurath who saw logical empiricism as part of a wider-sweeping movement to overturn conventional ideas in philosophy, science, education, the arts and politics. Also, the architect, Josef Frank who was associated with the Bauhaus was a brother of Philipp Frank, the physicist-philosopher and a member of the Vienna Circle.

Concerning Popper's political views, Malachi Hacohen in his biography Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945 makes the case that the anti-Marxism of The Open Society and Its Enemies was forged originally not within a cold war context but rather was forged within the context of the debates within the Austrian Social Democratic Party to which Popper had belonged, up to 1938,over to how best to meet the fascist threat, and that much of Popper's hostility towards Marxism was motivated by his conviction that the Austrian and German Social Democrats had been crippled in their struggle against the rise of fascism by the Marxism that was dominant within those parties. (Hacohen, himself, BTW considers Popper's assessments of Austro-Marxism to have been unduly harsh, pointing out the contributions that Otto Bauer and the others had made to the analysis of fascism).

Popper it should be noted, leaned towards to the Austrian Social Democrats' anti-Marxist wing, which championed the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein against the dominant Austro-Marxism. And indeed, much of Popper's take on Marxism and the case for reformism which one finds in The Open Society can be seen as being part derived from the arguments that had first been expressed by Bernstein many years earlier.

It turned out to be fortitious for Popper that the critique of Marxism which had originally been forged in the context of the debates of the Austrian Social Democrats turned out to especially useful for the cold warriors in waging ideological warfare against the Soviet Union.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Jim, as usual thankyou for that, but I was aware of most of it.

However, I am sure many of the younger comrades here were not.

[JimFar]

Rosa wrote:


. . but I was aware of most of it. However, I am sure many of the younger comrades here were not.

Well, I suspect that even many of the older comrades may not be aware of this history either. I didn't know that much about it either, until just a few years ago.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Unfortunately, I had to study much of this for my degree.

[JimFar]

Rosa wrote:


Unfortunately, I had to study much of this for my degree.

I take it that they didn't try forcefeeding you Heidegger? That probably would have violated the UN Convention Against Torture (http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html) or something. :(

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

I quickly grew to dislike Heidegger, even before my degree studies began. So, Heidegger helped immunise me against him.

[IcarusAngel]

As I understand it Falsification has been the "key" to real science, as Lawrence Krauss puts it, for a few centuries now. Scientific theories are falsifiable; a theory is "falsified" if it contradicts the current evidence and especially the scientific laws (simplistic theories that have been tested repeatedly). Science is based on rules, and as such fields that don't meet these rules (philosophy, economics) are thus not science. Which scientists have said that falsification doesn't exist in real science?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Icarus, I think you need to read the rest of this thread, since it answers your query.

Not only has falsification never featured in science, it could not do so.


Which scientists have said that falsification doesn't exist in real science?

Of course, no scientists from the past 'said' this since they never heard the term, they just did not do what Popper 'says' they should have done.

And any these days who 'say' the opposite will be hard-pressed to 'say' what they mean by this obscure term.

But, we do not need scientists to tell us anything in this regard, we just need to focus on the erroneous words of that non-scientist Popper, and expose them for what they are.

[BurnTheOliveTree]

I must admit that I thought that falsification was one test to see whether and idea was counted as scientific.

If it isn't falsifiable, it isn't science, I hear. Like the God hypothesis. And the scientific method was to make a hypothesis and then attempt to falsify it. If it stands up to scrutiny, it gets counted as a theory, and if it's beyond reasonable doubt it's a law or theorem. Right? :o

I suppose it's just another way of saying testable, really.

-Alex

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Well, falsification sounds great until you examine the fine print, and then nothing whatsoever would be scientific.

I think we should leave it to scientists, not philosophers, to decide here.

[Djehuti]

Popper failed because he was a scholastic dinosaur.

Sir Karl Popper never really understood what science was; he believed that science was a logical construction and therefor should be treated as such. It is not.

Even though he did understand that science was tested deductively, he still, strangely enough, believed that science was inductive in its essence: one single factor that did not completly logically correspond with the theory, was enough to immediately and fully discard it. Critics, such as Imre Lakatos pointed out that if that was the case, we would have to discard science as a whole, except for mayhaps pure formal science such as logic and most areas of mathematics... and that is of cource absurd.

Scientific theories are not judged as logical constructions, but after its ability to navigate the scientific ground.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

I think you are largely right Djehuti, but there are countless ways that scientists test their ideas -- there is no one single method, just as there is no single thing called 'science'.

[JimFar]

I think that Popper had at least a germ of a point in emphasizing the falsifiablility of scientific theories. But having said that, one need not buy into Popper's conception of falsifiability, for a number of reasons, some of which have already been discussed in this thread. We should keep in mind that Popper regarded not only Marxism (i.e after Marx's time) and psychoanalysis as being unfalsifiable, but he had also went as far as arguing that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was also unfalsifiable- although instead of branding Darwinism as a pseudoscience, he called it a "metaphysical research program." (He eventually recanted, more or less, this postion in 1978). But this suggests to me that if he could brand Darwinism as unfalsifiable, then perhaps there was something wrong with his conception of falsifiability since working scientists (like JBS Haldane) had no problem in describing how Darwinism could be falsified.

One Marxist school that attempted to deal with, if not answer Popper were the Analytical Marxists. It is interesting to note Popper's influence on the Analytical
Marxist school, both positively and negatively. G.A. Cohen in his Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence makes no mention at all of Popper, and yet his book reads to me as a kind of reply to Popper, since Cohen attempts to reformulate historical materialism (or at least historical materialism as understood by the Second International) as a rigorous empirical theory of history. William Shaw (in Marx's Theory of History) and Dan Little (in The Scientific Marx), on the other hand, do attempt to answer directly Popper's criticisms of Marxism, and they both draw upon Lakatos' critiques of Popper, in doing so.

[JimFar]

I think that I have posted some of this material concerning Popper and Marxism in the past:

In connection with the Analytical Marxian school there is another book that people may wish to look at on this issue, the unjustly neglected book Analyzing Marx by Richard W. Miller. In that book he draws a distinction between the technological interpretation of historical materialism which was articulated and defended by many writers of the Second International (i.e. Kautsky, Plekhanov) and which cast into an especially rigorous form by G.A. Cohen in his Karl Marx's Theory of History, and what he calls the mode of production interpretation which abjures the technological determinism and the economic determinism of the latter.


Miller draws a link between these two different interpretations of historical materialism and different philosophies of science. The technological interpretation, Miller links to positivist philosophies of science with their covering law models of scientific explanation and their presuppostion of Humean notions concerning causality. Here, Miller does not draw a very sharp distinction between positivism
and Popperism. While Popper clearly did not see himself as being a positivist, he nevertheless, still had many notions in common with them. In Miller's view Popper's hypothetico-deductivism placed him within the positivist camp. In any case, Miller contends that the technological interpretation of historical materialism does represent the sort of theory that can be regarded as falsifiable from a strictly Popperian standpoint. Hence, it is scientific by Popper's criteria. The only thing that is wrong with it is that history has indeed (as Popper had contended) falsified it, and the other thing that is wrong with it, is that in Miller's view it represents a distorted interpretation of how Marx undertook the study of history and political economy.

The mode of production interpretation in Miller's view offers us a view that is closer to the spirit of Marx's actual methodology. But it is not falsifiable in the strict Popperian sense. One might then think that Miller would propose to throw away falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation between science and non-science but surprisingly enough he does not. Instead, he attempts to reconstruct the notion of
falsifiability, drawing upon the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. He embraces their historicist approach to the philosophy of science and he develops a reconstructed version of the notion of falsifiability. The mode of production interpretation of historical materialism while perhaps not falsifiable in Popper's sense, is nevertheless falsifaible in Miller's sense and that justifies retaining the label of science for it.

Miller also BTW contends that the postivist (and Popperian) analysis of natural science is fundamentally flawed so that while the positivists were quite correct in seeking a unified science which would assimilate the social sciences into the natural sciences , they misunderstood the nature of natural science. For Miller, the antipositivists were correct in attacking positvism for trying to force social science into a narrow mold centering around the covering law model and deductive-nomological models of explanation and Humean causality, but the same flaws also applied to their analysis of natural science. In reality such an analysis, in Miller's view is not properly applicable to either natural science or social science.



_______________________________________________

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for that Jim, but this whole idea trades on the incorrect idea that scientific theories can be true/false.

If they cannot, then Popper's 'critierion' is just confused.

Now, I do not expect you to take my word for the above, but I will be posting an Essay on this in the next year or so (and it is among my most original work, some of which I hope to present for a PhD), one based on an extrapolation from Wittgenstein's idea that scientific theories are 'forms of representation', but also a development of Kuhn, Feyerabend and Hanson's work -- and that of other Wittgensteinians (like Cora Diamond, Rupert Read, Burton Dreben, Juliet Floyd, etc.).

I hope then to use that to show how Historical Materialism is superior to any of its rivals, presenting for the first time in our movement's history a new criterion of scientific truth to that end.

At the same time I intend to develop a new 'form of representation' for language itself (something even Wittgenstein missed), to show how and why ruling-class ideas automatically descend into incoherence (in metaphysics in general -- and this includes 'materialist dialectics'), whereas HM does not. This will tie together all the Essays at my site into a comprehensive re-write of Marxist philosophy, the biggest in its history.

These are also among the most original of my ideas.

At which point Popper will be seen for the ruling-class buffoon that he was (same with Lakatos).

As as Miller is concerned, I could not agree with you more (except Miller is far too kind to Popperianism), but his book 'Fact and Method' is even better (it is indeed, the best Marxist book on the Philosophy of Science to date -- it is just incredibly badly written!).

[Idola Mentis]

My memory is bit confused on this. But I think I heard an opinion once, saying that Popper simply inflated an assumption which is rather central to modern thinking - that of consistency of thought. In the history of knowledge, you can find cultures which just didn't make this assumption. The Romans would be one of the main examples - their mode of thought involves an eclectic assumption; they didn't systematically compare beliefs to see if they were mutually exclusive, ending up accepting beliefs on authority rather than critically.

Popper combined the aristotelian demand for consistency of thought with protestant/burgher idea of "improvement trought restraint and reduction" to make falsification. This construct seems to have fascinated him so much it eclipsed everything else, including critical thought and examination of the sources and consequences of his assumptions. Result - a sleek and elegant theory which missed the point of scientific work completely.

[hoopla]

Yo Rosa. I'd just like to say sorry for the spat, and that it seems that you are putting more of your hatred into your work. Which is good. I may even reference you in my final HPS year, as I somehow i do not have the highest hopes for citical realism.

Best feeling in being a philosophy student: when you look at what you just argued, and it looks Wittgensteinian :D