critical rationalism blog

With the publication of  the guide to Objective Knowledge  overnight the five volumes of the Popular Popper series are now published on Amazon, going head to head with Mills and Boone in the $3.99 price bracket.

The first,  The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1935 in German and 1959 in English, is not a good introductory book although it is the most important book on the philosophy of science in modern times and all educated people need to understand the main lines of Popper’s thought, especially the six “turns” that he promoted. I will do a post on the turns later.

Each book in the series has a set of appendices to sketch Popper’s career, the six “turns”, the misrepresentation of his ideas from the very beginning by the mainstream philosophers, the top ten standard errors that are perpetuated  today and some case studies.

The Poverty of Historicism was written while Popper was on vacation in the south sea islands during WWII. It is the shortest of his books and he thought it was his most worst writing, though I think it is clear enough.

The  Open Society and its Enemies grew out of some notes that he made for Section 10 in The Poverty.

The Open Society was his war effort, aiming to combine the best parts of social democracy and classical liberalism so that there would be less confusion and division among the friends of freedom. The result was a book that was scorned by conservatives and the left alike, so it is practically impossible to find on university reading lists and it is kept in print by a lay readership.

Conjectures and Refutations (1963) is a collection of 40 pieces that were mostly deliverd as speeches and presentations during the 1950s. It provides a comprehensive guide to the range of Popper’s thought, unlike The Poverty (1957) and The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).

Objective  Knowledge  (1973) had the misfortune to appear a decade after the appearance of <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i> by T. S. Kuhn which swept the field in the 1960s. Popper’s stocks were falling under the influence of criticism from Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend. Bartley, arguable his most brilliant and energetic supporter, was no longer on the team after a falling-out with Popper in 1965. In addition Popper retired in 1969 and this meant that he no longer had an institutional base in the London School of Economics.

Imre Lakatos became the new king and “kingmaker” in the LSE. The general perception of his program was that he was trying to save whatever could be retrived from the wreck of “Popperian falsificationism”, supposedly sunk by criticism from Kuhn, Feyerabend and himself. It is probably more realistic to say that the was attempting to effect a Hegelian synthesis of Popper’s theory of programs and Kuhn’s paradigm theory while admitting a whiff of induction to keep on side with the logical empiricists. This involved a great deal of “whatever it takes” academic politics. As a battle-hardened Stalinist operative Lakatos had the political part of the game well in hand as long as he lived but the enterprise did not thrive after his death in 1974 because it had  no intellectual legs to stand on. However he did succeed in killing the momentum of critical rationalism in the form that was taught by Popper and others who had a better understanding of Popper’s ideas.

And so it goes.

After the Popular Popper series there will be a Critical Rationalist Papers series of Amazon ebooks consisting of 30,000 word collections of papers from the Rathouse and other sources.

The third of the Popular Popper series has hit the streets, or at least the Kindles and cognate apps.

Conjectures and Refutations is just about ready to load, then it takes a few hours or maybe a day to appear live.

Objective Knowlege will be close behind.

Brian Gladish has picked up the importance of Barry Smith’s work on “fallibillistic apriorism” (conjectural knowledge) and the way that this has corrects the unhelpful form of dogmatic apriorism that some of the Austrians picked up from von Mises.

With Smith’s introduction of fallibilism into Mises’s system, some of the distance between it and Karl Popper’s concept of conjectural knowledge was reduced.  This reconciliation has been visible in a number of efforts that attempt to bring Mises’s approach into the methodological housing of Popper and other philosophers of science, notably Imre Lakatos.³  More on that in another post; but, at this moment we have another issue to address — Mises’s claim that economics, and its encompassing science, praxeology, are new sciences unconnected with previous knowledge.  This claim did not sit well with those who believe all knowledge to be connected and do not have an anthropocentric view of the universe.

Taking up Brian’s comment, it took me years to see the significance of Smith’s work, I must have scanned his paper in the volume on Menger that Bruce Caldwell edited because years ago I wrote a summary of Jack Birner’s paper in that volume.

On a tangent to this is the way that Talcott Parsons was practically on the same page as Popper and von Mises when he wrote “The Structure of Social Action” in 1937 but then he lost his way. This paper describes the strange trajectory of a very busy and ambitious scholar who started with Parsons and ended up with “deep culture theory” which incorporates just about every school of social thought wtih the exception of CR and Austrian economics.

The format issue is sorted, don’t ask me how – trial and error:)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BX3ATBS#reader_B00BX3ATBS

From the  “jacket”.

On the topic of jackets, don’t you love the covers which have been produced by Barnes, Catmur and Friends? What a shame that they will never be seen on real books on shelves in the bookshops of the world.

Daniel Barnes, like others including Matt Dioguardi, has been  a long-serving and valued colleague in Popper studies. Thanks!

This guide, the first in the Popular Popper series, provides an introduction to “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, a book which changed the direction of the philosophy of science in the 20th century. The guide proposes that Popper’s ideas are best understood as a number of “turns” which he introduced. These include the “hermeneutic” or “conjectural” turn, to acknowledge that even our best scientific theories may be false, and the “conventional” or “rules of the game” turn, to account for the social nature of science and allow for the revival of metaphysics within any scientific research program. It also lists the most common misunderstandings of Popper which have confused students of philosophy and diminished his standing in academic circles.

UPDATE: The format problem in LSD is fixed although in both books the links from the table of contents are not working. OK in a preview but not in the live version.

Actually The Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Poverty of Historicism have launched as  Amazon e books but The Logic has a fault in the format and I am hoping the Amazon support people can fix it, or tell me what to do.

But The Poverty is ok in that respect.

The idea is to provide a clear summary of the main points with a little commentary to clarify some of them.

There is a set of Appendices to provide extra information.

I. The Progress of Popper, a summary of life and works.

II. The Popperian “Turns”. The six ways he changed direction, some of which isolated him  from the mainstream of the profession.

III. The reception of Popper’s ideas by the positivists and The Legend, that he was really an eccentric positivist.

IV. The Top Ten standard errors in reading Popper.

V. A case study, the philosophy and methods of economics.

VI. Carl Menger’s problem, how a theory of conjectural knowledge would have helped.

The Viennese Socrates: Karl Popper and the Reconstruction of Progressive Politics.

This book examines Karl Popper’s attempt to develop a political theory that draws upon Socratic fallibilism and commitment to ethical autonomy while preserving progressive sociological insights and commitment to activism. Philip Benesch argues that Popper’s critique of Marxist theory is largely an endeavor to separate its progressive-activist core from its positivist and uncritical-rationalist entanglements. The author defends Popper against the charges of positivism and scientism leveled by the Frankfurt School, among others. Although he is in no sense an apologist for Popper’s commentary on the classical tradition of philosophy, Benesch contends that Popper’s philosophical contribution is of classical breadth and significance and that it continues and advances “the great Conversation” that is the substance of the classical tradition.

Philip Benesch is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lebanon Valley College, Pennsylvania. He has also taught at Bryn Mawr College, West Chester University, and at colleges in London. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Delaware and his MA from the London School of Economics.

In this 166 page volume Dr Carlos E. Garcia (2006) articulates a systematic analysis of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science.

Popper’s core catechism is “I may be wrong and you may be right and by an effort we may get closer to the truth”. This is not a slight expression. For one thing by stating firstly “I may be wrong” rather than “I may be right” he assiduously avoids the trap of infinite regress as no reasons are needed to admit error. It is a non-justificationist assertion. Although the assertion about which we may be wrong could be arrived at by any psychological means, Popper avoids psychologism, the effort he is referring to is an effort of logic. Criticism is applied to the conjecture in an attempt to reduce error rather than attempting to confirm. With luck and effort, we may get closer to reality. For Popper there is a reality, non-relative and impersonal, but the inescapable propensity for error prevents us from ever claiming too close a familiarity with same. The notion of truth is timeless, whereas appraisals of corroboration are always indexed to a point in time and a set of accepted test-statements.

Garcia limits his chapter headings to:
1. Introduction
2. Solution to the Problem of Induction
3. Falsifiability
4. Corroboration
5. Verisimilitude, plus a very helpful and concise
Appendix: List of Definitions

As is apparent from the headings, Garcia’s study deals mainly with these cornerstone topics. I recommend the book to both advanced readers and professional philosophy workers. This study is clearly laid out and integrated. Criticisms of Popper over the years have at times been somewhat psychological, criticising him for intemperance towards criticism. He was probably entitled to be testy towards foolish criticism. e.g. Kuhn on one hand absolves him from certain logical sins and then says he may as well have committed them. What defence would work against that? Garcia concludes that Kuhn’s criticism of falsifiability and falsification is inadequate. I recommend that the interested reader carefully test Garcia’s arguments, I think they are strong. Popper, like Schopenhauer, is a lucid writer with an antagonism towards loose argumentation – if one has the patience to follow his trains of thought one might be convinced his was a great mind indeed. Garcia does him justice and I for one have been introduced to fresh perspectives.

Garcia reminds us that Popper considers the distinction between logical probability and corroboration as one of the most interesting findings in the philosophy of knowledge and notes that the logic of probability cannot solve the problem of induction. For Popper, the logical probability of ‘x’ is the probability of ‘x’ relative to some evidence; that is to say, relative to a singular statement or to a finite conjunction of singular statements. Probability gives us information about the chances that an event will occur but it does not inform at all about the severity of the tests that a hypothesis has passed (or failed). Corroboration and degree of corroboration are not equivalent to confirmation and degree of confirmation, or probability, as per Carnap’s logical empiricism. The “probability of a hypothesis”, in the sense of the degree of its corroboration, does not satisfy the laws of the calculus of probability. A highly testable hypothesis is logically improbable.

In Popper’s view science is concerned with intersubjectively testable explanations, a subjective view of probability is problematic. Popper fears that the theory of the probability of hypotheses confuses psychological and logical questions. Is it a probability measure or a plausibility measure? Any unîversal hypothesis goes beyond the empirical evidence. It can be validly tested by seeking counter instances not by collecting supporting examples as this could go on to infinity.

The appendix is instructive for its list of definitions. In this list, Garcia includes the version that he thinks best supports a reading of Popper’s account of science:

Basic statement (also test-statement): a statement that can serve as premise in an empirical falsification.

Corroboration (degree of): the degree to which a hypothesis has stood up to tests.

Event: a set of occurrences of the same kind.

Empirical content (also informative content): The amount of empirical information conveyed by a statement or a theory. Its degree is determined by the ‘size’ of the class of potential falsifiers.

 Falsifiability (or testability): the logical relation between a theory and its class of potential falsifiers. Falsifiability is a criterion of the empirical character of a system of statements.

Falsification: the conclusive demonstration that a theory has clashed with a falsifier.

Falsity content (of x): the subclass of false consequences of x. It is not a Tarskian consequence class.

Occurrence: a fact described by a singular (basic) statement.

Logical content (of x): the class of (non-tautological) statements entailed by x, where x can be a statement or a theory. A Tarskian consequence class.

 Logical probability (of x): the probability of x relative to some evidence; that is to say, relative to a singular statement or to a finite conjunction of singular statements.

Logical strength: increases with content (or with increasing improbability).

Truth content (of x): the class of (non-tautological) true logical consequences of x. It is a subclass of the logical content.

Verisimilitude (of x): the degree of closeness to the truth of x. It can be measured as the difference of truth content minus falsity content.