Unsatisfactory introductions

I have  been perplexed over the years by the number of times that I have read and heard views attributed to Popper which don’t sound quite the same as the ideas of the man himself,  at least as I understood him.

This prompted some questions about what was being taught to undergraduates and in 1989 I surveyed the undergraduate courses and reading lists in Philosophy, Politics and Sociology in the (then) 21 Australian universities. The objective was to find what they were being told about Popper and Hayek who I regarded as the twin pillars of anti-scientism and classical liberalism. (That was before I discovered Mises. Due to Popper’s favourable references to Hayek I explored the books of  latter but did not find in Hayek the kind of references to Mises that would have prompted me to pursue his books.) Getting back to my survey, the short answer is that you had to be very lucky to get more than a passing reference to Popper and the situation with Hayek was worse.Round about 1998 I wanted to repeat the survey but there were more than 50 universities thanks to the rebadging of a heap of  colleges which used to award diplomas in teaching, arts and crafts, rural studies etc. So instead I searched over 200 websites of philosophy schools, mostly in the US but also a few others like Cambridge. The story was the same, Popper rated a mention in the philosophy of science but only as a preliminary to Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend and the sociology of science. No indication that his contribution was more robust or extended into other fields where he did first order work – evolutionary epistemology, logic and probabililty theory, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, history of ideas, politics and the social sciences.

In recent years some writers have emerged with a strong line of philosophy books for layfolk – the names that come to mind include Grayling, Blackburn and de Botton, with others who have been less prolific. I can’t afford to accumulate many more books (apart from the cost there is no room in the house) so I have mostly checked in the bookshops, not the ideal place to do research, but the impression is that Popper  might get a para and a footnote, or maybe even a couple of pages, half devoted to the failure of falsificationism. This is weird because I never thought that “falsificationist” was an appropriate label for Popperism, that is just the most obvious point of difference from the positivists.

The issue came to a head recently when I was sucked into a prolonged debate with a positivist on an Austrian economcs blog. Only one other person on the site was on my side of the debate, despite the fairly elementary mistakes in Popper exegesis that were put on display, with a liberal amount of sleazy ad hominems about Popper and Popperians.

So again I wondered about the contents of introductory books on philosophy and promptly borrowed ten or a dozen from the local public library for systematic study. Some of these books are written for popular consumption, some are written to support uni courses. They are all written by academics and they are published by reputable presses.

All that I have examined so far present a more or less distorted account of Popper’s ideas. Some of the errors are repeated, almost word for word, suggesting that there is some primary source that they are drawing on  (not yet identified because they don’t tend to quote with citations, they just have reading lists at the end of the book or the chapter).

Starting with the most up  market, written to support the undergrad courses at the University of London.  It is edited by A C Grayling, titled “Philosophy 1: A Guide Through the Subject”, OUP, 1998

Preface  “The essays, although introductory, are not elementary, because they are aimed at those who wish to take a more than superficial look at philosophy. They therefore seek to give the full character of inquiry into its most important questions”.

The volume started as a project to commission material to accompany undergraduate courses in philosophy at the Uni of London.

“London has arguably one of the best single-subject degrees in philosophy offered by any university in the world. When the opportunity arose to put together a collection of essays to serve as a companion to London’s philosophy degree, the missionary possibility immediatey suggested itself of promoting the university’s conception of what is central to philosophical study. This volume is the result”.

The book “…is also a survey: anyone interested to know what is at the centre of each major area of philosophical inquiry will find these essays thoroughly informative”.

The book attracted a number of rave reviews on Amazon.

The articles are largely bereft of Continental mambo-jumbo, and refreshingly competent across the board; therefore, the two volumes may serve as a major reference work on any shelf, as well as an apt introduction and stimulation for serious college students.

“Philosophy 1” is a good introductory survey text. While it is somewhat more technical than what the casual reader may want, my goal was to learn something about “real philosophy, not simplified philosophy.” The book hit the mark on this account.

This thorough introduction to the core areas of philosophy is written by some of the leading figures in their specialisms, and it is remarkable for its lucidity and comprehensiveness, and for the excellent bibliographies attached to each chapter… Both volumes are outstanding pedagogical collections, and their editor, AC Grayling of London University, has ensured that between them they provide what is perhaps the highest quality pacakge of introduction-to-philosophy literature available anywhere in the world today. I found it especially helpful, in my own studies and in guiding students, to have such full material on all the branches of philosophy available together in the two volumes, because it made for ease of cross-reference, and topics that were mentioned in certain of the chapters were fully explored in others. You could say that the two volumes together are a complete introduction to contemporary analytic philosophy, and there is nothing comparable to them for scope, depth, or clarity in the literature for students and teachers of philosophy now available.

The chapter on Epistemology has an introduction by Grayling which spells out the framework for the topic that pervades the book.

“In the tradition of debate on these matters knowledge is standardly defined as justified true belief, because at the very least it seems that to know something one must believe it, one’s belief must be true, and one’s reason for believing it must be satisfactory in the light of some standard.”

David Papineau wrote Chapter 3 on “Methodology: The elements of the philosophy of science”.

“Logic is the study of deductively valid reasoning…[however]…in both everyday life and in science the arguments we use do not provide conclusive reasons for their conclusions…This discussion of methodology will be concerned with this kind of non-conclusive resoning and with various philosophical issues that arise in trying to understand it. There will be five sections: (1) Induction and its problems; (2) Laws of nature; (3) Realism, instrumentalism and underdetermination; (4) Confirmation and probability; (5) Explanation”.

Moving on to the problem of induction.

“Generally speaking, ‘induction’ refers to any form of inference in which we move from a finite set of observations or experimental results to a conclusion about how things generally behave”. The examples cited are fine weather after a red sky in the evening, and the characteristic colour of sodium when it is heated in a Bunsen flame.

The problem of induction is to determine the reliability of the conclusion (the truth of the law if you like) given (1) the finite set of observations only represents a sample of the whole population of fine days (or red evening skies) and sodium flames and (2) the logical possibility that the law could change.

Papineau noted some of the efforts that have been made to handle the problem; invoking a principle of induction, the inductive argument for induction and introducing probability. He then moved on to Popper.

Popper’s Alternative to Induction

“In Popper’s view, science does not rest on induction in the first place. He denies that scientists start with observations and then infer a general theory. Rather, they put forward a theory…and then compare its predictions with observations to see whether it stands up to test. If such tests prove negative, then the theory is experimentally falsified and the scientists will seek some  new alternative.”

“According to Popper, the inferences which matter to science are refutations…these inferences are not inductive but deductive…The point here is that it is much easier to disprove theories than to prove them. A single contrary example suffices for a conclusive disproof, but no number of supporting examples will constitute a conclusive proof.”

Actually Popper drew a distinction between the logic of testing and the result of testing (falsifiablity vs falsification). In logic a negative is decisive but in practice a failed test is usually not decisive, it just puts a question mark on the theory for further work].

“So according to Popper, science is a sequence of conjectures. Scientific theories are put forward as hypotheses, and they are replaced by new hypotheses when they are falsified. However this view of science raises an obvious question: if scientific theories are always conjectural, then what makes science better than astrology,or spirit worship or any other form of unwarranted superstition? A non-Popperian would answer this question by saying that real science proves its claims on the basis of observational evidence, whereas superstition is nothing but guesswork. But, on Popper’s account, even scientific theories are guesswork – for they cannot be proved by observations, but are themselves  merely undefeated conjectures.”

Some comments before going on to the criticism.

1. Theories are not replaced when they encounter problems, they are usually only replaced by a better theory.

2. Conjectural scientific theories are better than astrology etc because they form systems with wide-ranging explanatory power, articulating with theories in adjacent fields (and in the case of major advances, unifying related fields). They also point the way to further research.

3. Theories may arise as guesses but they need to survive tests to be taken seriously, so the talk of guesswork is a red herring, like David Stove comparing the guesses of scientists with guessing the toss of the coin at the start of a cricket match.

The Failings of Falsificationism 

“The central objection to his account is that it only accounts for negative scientific knowledge, as opposed to positive knowledge..He says nothing about what can show us that a theory is right.”

Popper did say things about selecting the theory that is best, even though he cannot say how to guarantee that it is right (neither can the positivsts!). You favour the theroy that solves the problem (usually explanation and prediction) and stands up to tests as well or better than the others.

“Yet it is positive knowledge of this latter kind that is supposed to follow from inductive inferences. What is more, it is this kind of positive knowledge that makes induction so important.”

How come the inductivists are still working on the problem of induction so they can demonstrate positive knowledge?

“We can cure diseases and send people to the moon because we know that certain causes do always have certain results, not because we know that they don’t. If Popper cannot explain how we sometimes know that ‘All As are Bs”, rather than just ‘It’s false that all As are Bs’, then he has surely failed to deal properly with the problem of induction”.

That comment indicates a move from the logic of induction to the metaphysical theory that there are regularities in the world which enable us to make more or less reliable predictions, using well tested theories inside their zone of application.

“Popper’s usual answer to this objection is that he is concerned with the logic of pure scientific research, not with practical questions about practical applications”.

Popper was equally concerned with practical applications as he indicated in one of his replies to critics in the Shilpp volume (Library of Living Philosophers).

There  is more to be said but that would appear to indicate that the reading of Popper in this potentially very influential book is suspect.