Alan Chalmers wrote a sensationally successful introductory book on the philosophy of science. What is this thing called science? first appeared in 1976 with revised editions in 1982 and 1999. Translated into fifteen languages it became a bestseller and a standard university text.
Not many academics get to buy a farm on the royalties from a single book but Alan got to sample the life of a country squire with a nice little spread a couple of hours out of Sydney. Despite this distraction he did not give up his day job and he was the supervisor when I wrote a Masters thesis on the Duhem problem at the University of Sydney. He is a fine scholar, a jolly decent person and a wonderful supervisor, comparable to Keith Barley, the man who supervised my first postgraduate work in Soil Science and introduced me to The Open Society.
This is an affectionate memoire of Keith, written for his children because he died young and they did not get to the see him as a teacher and a colleague.
I wrote a very favourable review of the third edition of What is this thing called science? but later I became concerned about the criticism of falsificationism which Alan depicted as a stage on the journey from inductivism to more sophisticated theories like Lakatos on the methodology of scientific research programs. So I revised the review with some mild criticism under the heading What is this thing called falsificationism?
Unfortunately, by a serious error that is perpetuated by Chalmers, Popper’s contribution was labelled “falsificationism” because it was advanced in the 1930s as a rejoinder to the logical positivists who wanted to use factual verification as a criterion of meaning. The label was unfortunate because when perceived difficulties emerged with falsification (for example it could not be decisive due to the Duhem problem and the uncertainties of observation), they were used as the rationale to prematurely eliminate Popper from the main game in the 1970s.
On the account provided by Chalmers, the problems with falsification revealed some limitations of examining theories in isolation because observations, and especially experimental results, involve numerous assumptions, including assumption about the function of the equipment. Chalmers next proceeds to examine the treatment of theories as structures by way of Kuhn’s paradigms and the ‘methodology of scientific research programmes’ proposed by Popper’s junior colleague, Lakatos. It is worthy of note that Popper developed a theory of metaphysical research programmes during the 1950s though it was not published until Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics appeared in 1982. So far very little work has been done to exploit the potential of Popper’s work on programmes…
My conclusion
Even allowing for my concerns about the representation of Popper’s contribution, this book that can be highly recommended for anyone who wants to obtain a firmer grasp of one of the most important yet simultaneously least understood developments of all time. That is, the spectacular successes of scientific research. The writing style is clear, engaging and unpretentious. The book is packed with episodes from the history of science so that there is a great deal to be learned about science itself in addition to the other lessons that Chalmers has to convey.
That was before I became aware of the full extent of the debacle of Popper scholarship that I found in dozens of books which depict Popper as a falsificationist. Then the author points out that naïve falsificationism does not work, all falsification is problematic and then Popper is put aside in favour of subsequent developments associated with Lakatos, Kuhn, Feyerabend, the sociology of science, Bayesian probability or revisions of logical empiricism like “abduction to the best explanation”.
That is the pattern that was established in Alan’s book, more or less following Lakatos. It must be said that in his teaching Alan said that the Popperian approach was the best game in town, but he was probably including Lakatos as a Popperian.
To demonstrate some balance I will credit Alan with a valid criticism (p 79). “It is a mistake to regard the falsification of bold, highly falsifiable conjectures as the occasions of significant advance in science, and Popper needs to be corrected on this point.”
That is a fair point, because the best kind of advance in science occurs when someone invents a better theory, a theory that explains more, stands up to tests better etc. It is progress of a kind to identify new problems, because problems are the potential growing points of science, but everything depends on inventing better theories that make progress with the problems.
In the light of the things that I have written lately about the Popperian “turns” I now think that is seriously misleading to talk about Popper as a falsificationist (without mention of other aspects of his work) and it is wrong to regard Latatos or Kuhn or any or the other contenders as advances on Popper. And so I went back to look really carefully at the chapter on the limitations of falsificationism.
I don’t want to complicate the story by talking about the changes in the second and third editions of the book, apart from noting that the first two editions defined falsificationism as the naïve version, “Theories can be conclusively falsified in the light of suitable evidence…Theory rejection can be decisive. This is the factor that earns falsificationists their title” (Chalmers, 1975, p 57). Popper clearly repudiated that position when he wrote “In point of fact, no conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced”, for various reasons, including the Duhem problem, (Popper, 1959, p 50.)
Because Popper was clearly the target of the criticism in the chapter on the limitations of falsificationism, that association of Popper with naïve falsificationism, which stood for more than two decades, could have done massive damage to the credibility of Popper’s ideas.
That particular misperception is eliminated in the third edition but the criticism of falsification merely consists of recapitulating the kind of problems that Popper identified when you move from the logic of falsifiability to the real-world practice of testing (attempted falsification).
Attempted falsification is simply a part of the critical method, that part concerned with the best way to use evidence. The question has to be asked, who has come up with a better way of using evidence? OK, good scientists did it before Popper, but that was his alternative to the failed programs of logical positivism and logical empiricism. There are other strings to Popper’s bow and these are equally important so a full account of Popper’s contribution will have to explain them as alternatives to other doctrines out of the justificationist and sociology of knowledge stables.
There is a common narrative that tells of Popper’s evolution from a crude falsificationist to a more nuanced and constrained position. However, so far as I can tell, excepting a few minor issues, the only thing that evolved in Popper’s views was the emphasis he placed on problems. Perhaps his rhetoric changed slightly in the process, but on technical matters the developed form of falsificationism, almost in its entirety, can be found in Logic of Scientific discovery. This is especially so on matters relating to the so-called Duhem-Quine problem, which could rightly be called the Duhem-Popper-Quine problem but for the matter that Popper did not believe it a vital issue on which falsificationism would turn.