Listen now to Dylan Casey introduce these essays.
On 9/3/13 we'll be discussing the first three essays in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
The first essay, "On the Sources of Knowledge and Ignorance," is a historical overview of epistemology, describing Socrates, Bacon, and Descartes as "epistemological optimists," meaning that under normal circumstances--if you're seeing and thinking clearly--your faculties will provide you with truth. While Popper sees this optimism as preferable to the pessimism that says that we're too defective to recognize truth and so need authority to tell us what it is, it still fetishizes certainty. Instead, Popper recommends the doctrine of fallibility: a real respect for objective truth means that we seek it, realizing that more often than not we miss it by a wide margin, and relentlessly try to correct our errors by testing.
The second essay, "Science: Conjectures and Refutations," tells us more about what such "testing" entails. The point is not to look for evidence verifying our theories, but to construct tests that would, if successful, falsify the theory. Popper's problem in this essay is demarcation: which theories are really scientific, and which are pseudo-science (which, he notes, may still be worth discussing; he's not recommending throwing out everything that's not science)? If there's no test that could potentially show that a theory is false, then it's not a scientific theory. He mentions, for instance, Freudian claims about the unconscious. Freudians saw this view as endlessly confirmed by their clinical observations, but Popper saw this as a weakness: any psychological observation of a patient can be interpreted in light of the theory and so seen as a confirming instance. A real scientific theory needs to take risks: it needs to make specific predictions that--if they were not fulfilled--would show that the theory is wrong.
This criterion of falsifiability is Popper's big idea, and he wants to make sure we understand that this is just a matter of determining what statements are scientific, not what statements are meaningful, which was the concern of the Logical Positivists following Wittgenstein, whom Popper considered his philosophical nemesis. Another target of the essay is Hume on the problem of induction. Hume, on Popper's account, saw science (and any perception of causality) as perception of regularities, and claimed that this recurrent seeing of things in conjunction (e.g. every time I hit the ball it moves) was not logically sufficient to guarantee the universality of a natural law; it was more just a matter of habit. Popper thinks this is backwards: we do not see regularities first, and in fact would need some notion of causality to recognize something as a "regularity" at all. Instead, we jump to hypotheses: we see something happen once and, in interpreting what that "something" is (e.g. which two events were linked causally), we then have a criterion for what would count as a future repetition of the event, and we expect it. If our expectation if frustrated, we modify the hypothesis. So science's method of attempted falsification is just adding a self-critical step (actually trying to frustrate the hypothesis) to the method of conjecture already built into ordinary experience.
There are a few essays in the collection relating science to philosophy, including the third one we read, "The Nature of Philosophical Problems and their Roots in Science," where Popper directly takes on this view he attributes to Wittgenstein (both in Wittgenstein's early and late writings) that any statement not ultimately rooted in the empirical is strictly nonsensical in the manner of "the tree is five." Popper does think that philosophy that's gotten away from its roots in live questions in science and mathematics can be just a bunch of hot air, and that our current method of learning philosophy which is just by reading philosophers encourages this sort of academic incest. For instance, he cites Plato's theory of Forms, and says this was motivated by Pythagoras's discovery of irrational numbers: These numbers, that we see right there in nature (look to our discussion of "logos" for more on this), can't even be described in full, and so obviously are not a human invention... hey, what if that's not just how numbers work, but all ideas? But we don't learn about this background, but instead just get Plato's "theory," and by relating this to numerous other similarly unrooted (for us students) "theories" think we're doing something productive but are really just lost in a thicket of ideas.
If you know the extra-philosophical motivation, however, you can see that Plato--and Kant, Hegel, and the rest--were (in many cases, anyway) responding to real problems, and it's this sensitivity to problems that Popper wants to emphasize. Calling these problems part of physics or philosophy or whatever is a matter of convenience after the fact to group similar kinds of work together, but Popper thinks there is no specific method proper to dealing with the problems that philosophers have recognized.
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I greatly look forward to a podcast on Popper. He is an amazing philosopher and incredibly under-appreciated I believe. I would also request that you guys do a few podcasts on Hume! Hume is amazing, his subtle (but incredibly penetrating/profound) insights and brilliant clear writing style that manages this perfect balance between on the one hand sophistication/seriousness and on the other “down to earth”/sarcastic/witty is something very few other philosophers can match.
New citizen here. I am definitely looking forward to this one. That is all.
This is going to be epic. Popper and Hume are the guys that make you walk out your house and see things differently. They are so matter of fact and simple it’s refreshing.
I’m hoping you guys can expand upon their ideas and bring out the layers I’m probably missing. Loved the Hume episode in the past — you should do more.
I was hoping you could also do McLuhan; if you’re taking requests. He’s so entertaining, witty and contemporary — with his thoughts on technology. I’m wondering why he was such a star and then vanished?
G.K. Chesterton would be cool too.
To me Popper is greatly overrated. There’s nothing to it Reichenbach didn’t say before him, well except, unlike Popper, taking his own Theory also fallible. A point Popper somehow misses.
Very interesting Tobe. Thanks for the insight. I will definitely read up a bit on Reichenbach!
I’ve never figured out why Reichenbach isn’t talked about much. You don’t even about him in passing, which does happen to Mortiz Schlick and other positivists. I think it is because although he is a major logical positivist, who nowadays get filed under that heading, unless you have a specific idea pegged canonically to your name like Popper does with falsificationism, you just are not going to be studied on your own. So Popper, Wittgenstein, and Russell get studied, but not Reichenbach.
And I guess the reason Schlick gets mentioned is because of the Vienna Circle, which almost has to be mentioned in the same breath as logical positivism. The Berlin Circle, and thus Reichenbach, are more optional.
I’m speculating since I don’t know enough about him really to say.
Tobe.
I think you are greatly mistaken about the second thing you assert. Popper never maintained that any theory was fallible. His position is that humans are fallible, and subsequently that all theories are always tentative, or ‘conjectural’.
George Soros took Popper’s ideas and applied them to the financial markets and became one of the richest people in the world. That’s one example of a “real world” application of Popper’s ideas successfully.
Philosophy can make you a baller… Bling – bling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCaCrWzFPYY
George Soros Lecture Series: General Theory of Reflexivity
Popper does a great service to point out the negatives of both epistemological pessimism and optimism as both false totalitarianism and false authoritarianism: pessimism because there is no pathway to objective discernible truth (tradition vs. chaos), optimism because it privileges the senses or the intellect, both of which become authoritarian. The problem in each case is a false reification of certainty in the name of science.
Popper says that while we cannot establish truth through a process of verification and logical consistency, we can establish falsehood through a process of falsifying predictions with empirical tests and establishing logical inconsistency. The problem with Popper is that he does not engage in the problem of ontology, nor does he clearly engage in the problem of epistemology. He just talks about truth which can only be obtained through the negative process of falsifiability, trial and error, whether the assertion agrees with the facts. He then adds the confusion of tradition, concerns with observation and reason as authority (truth?), finally stating that the “truth is beyond human authority, ” (just what is truth?)
Popper seems to be conflating facts with truth, science with philosophy, and states of affairs/facts with concepts.
Popper’s position seems to be basically a Cartisian dualism. Not the naïve dualism of your average scientist, but the sophisticated dualism of a philosopher. Just what is the purpose of falsification–if not to establish truth (a slippery term which Popper sidesteps adroitly, but obviously intends). He insists that we need to get rid of false theories immediately which are falsifiable. Well that sounds quite pragmatic, but one wrong does not make a wrong. The series of steps (wrong/right) which the Wright Brothers had to work through in order for those two men to fly were enormous. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” –Thomas A. Edison
Popper is very slick at avoiding common fallibilities of metaphysics, but still comes down as an establisher of truth through the notion of falsifiability, while avoiding any actual epistemology, and implying its possibility through just getting rid of the false (there is the foundation of dualism, false implies truth).
Perhaps at this point we should shift to the difference between science (idealized by Popper as truth based on facts) and philosophy (demonized by Popper as falsity based on lack of verifiability).
Alternatively: Science, according to Deleuze, deals with properties of constituted things, the creation of functions (on a plane of reference), while philosophy deals with the constitution of events, the creation of concepts (on a plane of immanence).
Popper establishes the equation which reads: Vs(a)=CTv(a)-CTf(a), where Vs(a) is the verisimilitude of a, CT f(a) is a measure of the content of truth of a, and CT f(a) is a measure of the content of the falsity of a.
Popper’s position seems to be basically a Cartisian dualism. Not the naïve dualism of your average scientist, but the sophisticated dualism of a philosopher. Just what is the purpose of falsification–if not to establish truth (a slippery term which Popper sidesteps adroitly, but obviously intends). He insists that we need to get rid of false theories immediately which are falsifiable. Well that sounds quite pragmatic, but one wrong does not make a wrong. The series of steps (wrong/right) which the Wright Brothers had to work through in order for those two men to fly were enormous. ” I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Thomas A. Edison
He is very slick at avoiding common fallibilities of metaphysics, but still comes down as an establisher of truth through the notion of falsifiability, while avoiding any actual epistemology, and implying its possibility through just getting rid of the false (there is the foundation of dualism, false implies truth).
As an indication of his self-inflated-founder-of-truth position, he denied the existence of the scientific method: “(1) There is no method of discovering a scientific theory; (2) There is no method for ascertaining the truth of a scientific hypothesis, i.e., no method of verification; (3) There is no method for ascertaining whether a hypothesis is ‘probable’, or probably true”. His position seems like that of the instantiator and author of truth arbitrarily defined by himself. Rather than acknowledge the well-worn scientific method which includes the concepts of probability, constructing theories/hypotheses, use of statistics to predict the null hypothesis based on probability, he declares false.
Hopefully these concerns will be dealt with in the upcoming PEL podcast.
I was out mountain biking and scared up a Turkey Vulture off it’s perch, and it flew overhead with a massive and surprising wing span, then it just appeared in the distance as one of those black birds winging for its prey. The vulture made me think of Popper, whose purpose of falsifiability is to clean up false and dead concepts, resulting in his version of verisimilitude.
As Thomas Kuhn said in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” “if only severe failure to fit justifies theory rejection, then the Popperians will require some criterion of ‘improbability’ or of ‘degree of falsification.'” This just seems to be an infinite regress.
I think Popper over- vulture-izes living things, truths, by not only feeding on the dead and falsifiable (do not get me wrong–Popper certainly helps focus on the need to get rid of the dead and the false), but also on the truth that is living, such as the the scientific method, because he does not actually deal with the underlying epistemological and ontological issues as a philosopher, and gets caught as a scientist getting distracted on issues such as pokers (see below) as a cover-up for his lack of understanding.
Wayne,
With the discovery of the Higgs boson does that mean the Deleuzean concept of virtual is an empirical fact? Here’s a visual: http://ec2-184-73-194-74.compute-1.amazonaws.com/wgbh/nova/physics/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Morley.jpg.
Hi Tammy.
Interesting visual. Actually the discovery of the Higgs is not really any different than discovery of any particle, as they are all current actualities which arise as temporary solutions to the problem of the virtual which gives rise to the actual, the empirical. For Deleuze, reality is both the virtual (sources of becoming) and the actual (being).
I just lost my entire reply after I posted because “The website is too busy to show the webpage.”
Science gives consistent descriptions of the actual world, such as things we observe as ‘facts’ or ‘states of affairs’ or Higgs Bosons, but philosophy has the power to understand the virtual world, the world beyond any specific observation or experience: the possibility of becoming as represented in difference.
Hi Wayne,
Hopefully this evening I can compose a similar reply as the one I lost, which oddly you somewhat addressed. I want to make sure I’ve understood Deleuze’s (many) concepts introduced in “Difference and Repetition,” after another view of Manuel De Landa’s lecture. I quote: “After being introduced to the work of Gilles Deleuze, he saw new creative potential in philosophical texts, becoming one of the representatives of the ‘new materialism’.”
Thanks, again.
So did you guys talk about the Popper poker incident with Wittgenstein? It’s one of the classic funny stories in philosophy.
No, why don’t you share it with us?
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/21/guardianfirstbookaward2001.gurardianfirstbookaward
Thanks dmf:
“Popper recalled that Wittgenstein ‘had been nervously playing with the poker’, which he used ‘like a conductor’s baton to emphasize his assertions’, and when a question came up about the status of ethics, Wittgenstein challenged him to give an example of a moral rule. ‘I replied: “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.” Whereupon Wittgenstein, in a rage, threw the poker down and stormed out of the room, banging the door behind him.”
Quotes from the Great Philosophers in the face of the poker incident:
Popper (was his theory of the poker falsifiable?):
“Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we can correct them.” Popper, K. R. 1992. In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years.
Wittgenstein (was his intelligence bewitched by language?):
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Russell (was he right?):
“The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.” Bertrand Russell,”An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” in Unpopular Essays, 1950