Karl Popper vs. Thomas Kuhn

In conversation with Steve Fuller

In 1935 a former-peasant farmer, Trofim Lysenko, was out to change the face of Soviet agriculture. Decades of clawing his way towards political power were paying off, and there he finally stood delivering a speech to a full session of the Politburo. And he had a theory about how to grow a higher yielding wheat.

The theory originally belonged to French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who believed that the traits acquired by one generation of an organism could be passed-on and inherited by the next. In the hands of Lysenko – as he looked-out from behind that lectern – it was transformed into Marxist Genetics. A theory that not only promised to radically transform the farming landscape, but which had the added benefit of being ideologically attractive to his fellow communists (seen as a way to breakdown peasant opposition by directly engaging them in an “agricultural revolution”).

The years of terror and purges and gulags were building momentum, and Lysenko seized the opportunity. He loudly attacked his critics in the audience, and across the Soviet Union, as being enemies of the revolution and against Marxist-Leninism. As he wound-down a single voice called back at him from the hall, “Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, Bravo.” It was Stalin!

By 1940 Lysenko was the director of the Institute of Genetics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and his detractors were either in prison or dead. The data was increasingly catching-up with Lysenko's extravagant claims, but with his model then being taught as “the only correct theory”, nearly every geneticist and biologist in the country was playing an understandable game of duplicity; falling over themselves to offer public support, while denouncing anyone not doing so with enough vigour.

Through failure after failure, Lysenkoism continued as state policy, with millions dying in famines across the Soviet Union. Even then it was still exported to Maoist China as a success story, where it contributed to the policies of the Great Leap Forward and another forty million deaths.

Just how you see and understand the mistakes here, will also define your sympathies with the greatest ever split in the philosophy of science!

For Thomas Kuhn, Lysenko’s blunder involved believing in an immature theory, one that wasn’t established within an existing paradigm. For Karl Popper, the problem was Lysenko’s inability to acknowledge the errors that were happening all around him, and accept that his theory had been falsified. At first glance it may not seem like that rich of a debate, both men were, after all, in agreement that Lysenko was wrong; they just had different reasons for thinking it. But this was no minor disagreement in the parochial corners of academia. The Popper vs. Kuhn debate shook the ground of epistemology as well as popular imagination and public attention. It was nothing less than “the struggle for the soul of science”.

The two men couldn’t have been more different. Kuhn started his career as a physicist, whose academic transition was forced upon him by colleagues who considered his research “too philosophical”. Despite his reputation as a radical theorist, Kuhn preferred to keep his own counsel, avoiding comments on the nature of contemporary science as well as the political climate unfolding around him. As Steve Fuller notes, ask anyone about Kuhn and “usually the response is positive, even enthusiastic”.

Popper by contrast began his academic life as a child psychologist, and came of age thinking about social progress and the role of science within it. Developing a reputation as a “grumpy autocrat”, he “thundered against virtually every dominant tendency in the physical, biological and social sciences.” A man who “rarely received the recognition he thought he deserved – and never tired of reminding everyone of it”… odd behaviour for someone who received a knighthood long before his retirement years.

Reputations aside, timing was also a factor here. Popper’s seminal work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, was first published in 1934 in German. Never one to avoid the spotlight when offered, Popper spoke and lectured and argued and wrote and published constant addendums and clarifications as the decades went by. So known more by his “reputation than by readership”, when The Logic of Scientific Discovery was finally translated into English in 1959, the public response was muted, even “bemused”. Sure, they might not have already scrolled through its pages… but in another way, they had!

Everything that Popper wished for himself, fell neatly into Kuhn’s lap. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an expanded version of an encyclopaedia entry: sparsely referenced and written in non-technical language, the thirteen short chapters explain in simple detail how science has changed and what its phases are. Ending-up at just a little over 200 pages, it is also uncharacteristically short. And yet, again in the words of Fuller, it “was the most influential book on the nature of science in the second half of the 20th century – and arguably, the entire 20th century.”

For Kuhn science looks a little friendlier and a little less grand than Popper would have it. Everything begins with a paradigm, a slice of research that is considered so outstanding that it is adopted by the broader scientific community. This research provides a blueprint for future research, and this subsequently happens. Most scientists follow the pattern and the prevailing standards, tinkering in the lab to improve the technical details of the paradigm. This behaviour is what Kuhn calls normal science. Not trying to break new ground, not trying to change the world, but simply solving minor puzzles within a larger, unquestioned, theory.

But soon, something else bubbles to the surface. Not all of those puzzles are solved, and over time they accumulate one-upon-the-other, until a point of crisis is reached. It is only here, as a last desperate and unwelcome moment in the life cycle of science, that things fracture, people begin to ask difficult questions about the future direction of their research, and an irreversible revolution occurs. The changeover happens quickly, a new paradigm is agreed upon, and everyone happily moves back to the practice of normal science.

Kuhn’s understanding comes from a deep look into the history of science, and how it truly looks on the ground. Popper thought differently, and lamented as to why on earth someone would talk this way, why someone would try to extract prescriptive lessons from the history of science and encourage young minds to continue like this when, in his view, very few people had ever been any good at actually doing science.

For Popper the “core scientific ethic” was falsifiability – all knowledge, at all times, should be exposed to constant and deliberate criticism. It comes down to the problem of epistemology – that perpetual question of how knowledge forms. What all latter-century philosophers – including Kuhn – owed to Popper was his solution to this problem. Famously it was that of conjecture and refutation: we guess at truth, and then criticise those guesses. The theories that survive this are still never accepted as true, only not rejected as false. And if this is how we make progress, then the same must also fit for science.

So, for Popper, someone is being scientific only when they are aggressively testing the limits of existing science. There is no place in this picture for protective paradigms, and certainly none for the type of work that happens within those paradigms: trying to prove a theory correct (a harmful and impossible exercise) and trying to shield it from falsifiability.

Kuhn’s response was simple: he could see the value in what Popper was saying, but as he scoured the annals of history, he found very little evidence of falsifiability working away as a key ethic in science. Popper’s response to this was also simple: exactly!

But Kuhn did have a point here, he noticed something that many others would later also do. Something that Popper seemed a lot less tuned-in to. “Criticism is productive” writes Steve Fuller, “but only under certain conditions”. It is easy to see why in the very early stages of research that harsh and piercing criticism might not be all that useful. Better to wait, if only a little, until the person in question has a clearer understanding of their own theory, and the predictions that it makes. This is a line that Imre Lakatos tried to splice between both Popper and Kuhn, bridging the difference between them in some ways.

From early disagreements, the fight here gets personal, fast. There were two versions of history according to Popper, one in the legacy of Socrates and the other in the legacy of Plato. The Socratic version imagines progress struggling forward through a dialectic of trial and error and then failure, followed by more trial and error. And hopefully this brings us closer to where we want to be. The Platonic version is indifferent, it says that no matter what we do the outcome will always be the same. Already known for his short temper, this is where Popper starts to get really angry.

To be mistaken is the common state of things, we are always wrong in some way, but for Popper this Platonic vision was much more than that, it was historicism (the idea that history is completely determined by certain laws, and so the future can be accurately predicted by understanding those laws). Refusing to admit error is different to just making errors – it means that we never change course or accept our faults. We continue as we are, because it is all out of our control anyway. Popper saw the analogues of this type of thinking all around him, in the worst crimes and most oppressive tyrannies that the world had to offer.

Historicism was not just wrong, but immoral – and insofar as Popper and his followers saw historicism hugged-tight within the concept of normal science, Kuhn was also immoral.

As philosophical disagreements go, this one was excruciatingly personal. After reading through Kuhn’s arguments for the first time, Paul Feyerabend – then still a key disciple of Popper – called it nothing more than “ideology covered up as history”. Another person deep within Popper’s circle, John Watkins put it like this: “Kuhn sees the scientific community on the analogy of a religious community and sees science as the scientist’s religion.”

It looks the same from different angles, and comes down to a question of emphasis and language. The word Kuhn used to describe that pivotal moment in science, when everything was on the cliff edge of great change, was crisis. And it seemed much more than an aesthetic choice. Kuhn didn’t have the taste for upheaval and insecurity, nor debate and criticism. So when this happened in science, it was also unpleasant – a moment of “confusion and despair… a spiritual catastrophe”. That such catastrophes were also when science jumped forward and when rapid progress happened, was beside the point. It certainly wasn’t enough to make him embrace a Popperian type of permanent revolution. Instead Kuhn made an unimpressive choice, and elevated normal science over extraordinary science.

Life inside a Kuhnian paradigm stretches the religiosity a little further still. Here the community of researchers create science in their own image: setting the standards, recruiting people who will continue with those standards, and then hovering as divine judgement over how well they go about doing this. It is a mini-Vatican, a state unto itself where the only safeguards are those which they create. If you don’t like the religious analogy, then Fuller has a couple of others that fit: a “royal dynasty” or “the Mafia”. It is a horribly circular world, where no-one is ever accountable to anything, or anyone, outside of themselves: “a paradigm is simply an irrefutable theory that becomes the basis for an irreversible policy.”

It plays out in education as well, where perhaps Popper’s hope that students “learn to live with an unrelieved sense of insecurity” might seem a little questionable, but not when compared to Kuhn, who “reduced science education to an indoctrination strategy.” It also shows up in the details of what Kuhn considers to be his trump card: his own scholarship about the history of science. Across those famous pages are a few glaring omissions of fact. Kuhn chooses to end his study of chemistry for example way back in the 1850s, and also stops talking about physics after the 1920s. The reason for this? Fuller has an idea:

Given Kuhn’s exclusive interest in science as pure enquiry, it is reasonable to conclude that he believed that after those dates, those disciplines ceased to be relevant to his model.

There is still a purpose behind the madness here for Kuhn. He wanted something for science, something Popper also wanted: independence. And in a way normal science did this! Isolated within a self-enclosed paradigm, the field was protected from swings in policy and changes of government. Here scientists could get down to perfecting their craft without intrusions from the chaos and whims of the outside world.

This is certainly independence of a kind, but not the kind that Popper thought was important. Those high walls that Kuhn built around science unquestionably cleared a space where it could have autonomy, but it was only autonomy for the larger scientific community. What about the individual scientist? What about his ability to make his own decisions, even if that meant deciding that everyone else is wrong? Popper looked back at his colleague in obvious disbelief over this point, how could he not see the hypocrisy and the breakdown in his own values. Soon Popper would start calling Kuhn’s version of independence a “heads down approach” to science: a pejorative description that Kuhn would have seen as a complement. 

More than just the damage it does to itself, a heads down approach to science comes at an unpleasant social and moral cost. To flesh this out Fuller makes an interesting analogy from the recent history of philosophy. Martin Heidegger was a hugely important figure in the 20th century whose work on phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, and particularly his book Being and Time, is still taught in nearly every half-decent undergraduate philosophy course. He was also an unreformed, and unrepentant, Nazi.

It comes down to a question of social responsibility, and individual integrity. Kuhn’s moment of reckoning was the Cold War, and how his commitment to doing normal science played out over those years. At few prior times in history had the work of science and scientists ever reached such prominence, as well as national recognition. Yet however you might view the nuclear standoff and those terrifying decades, the important standard for most people was, and still is, that you act on, and speak about, what you believe to be true. Courage matters!

They can still be criticised for being wrong, but the people in Popper’s circle did just that – they took risks, they put their careers on the line in order to speak their minds. They upset a lot of people in positions of power: Imre Lakatos against the military industrial complex, Paul Feyerabend against government funding in science, and Popper himself against the Vietnam War.

Happy with his life in the lab, Kuhn did the opposite and kept conspicuously quiet… about nearly everything! He had his paradigm in place, his days were kept busy by normal science, and so he let the world outside float uncritically by. Even as his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was being used to justify the silencing of dissent and the control of science by government and the military. Rather than just letting cowardice overcome him, Kuhn saw this repression as a positive – a stabiliser behind which normal science could continue.

More than just a means to an end, it all sounds incredibly totalitarian, from top to bottom. And if nothing else, Kuhn surely had a responsibility to address the implications of his theory. Especially as they began to manifest in nuclear conflict. Feyerabend sums it up well:

The recipe [for a successful science], according to [Kuhn and his followers], is to restrict criticism, to reduce the number of comprehensive theories to one, and to create a normal science that has only this one theory as its paradigm. Students must be prevented from speculating along different lines and the more restless colleagues must be made to conform and ‘to do serious work’… Is it his intention to provide a historico-scientific justification for the ever growing need to identify with some group?

Over the years, Kuhn declined countless opportunities to speak publicly – to correct the record, to offer any sort of opinion – as well as opportunities to debate his academic colleagues; bringing Fuller to ask the necessary question: “Is Thomas Kuhn the American Heidegger?” But throughout his silence, there was one request he just couldn’t refuse, one instance that bucked the trend. In July 1965 Kuhn, then aged 43, turned up at Bedford College, University of London, for the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science. He had turned up to debate Karl Popper!

Organised by Imre Lakatos, it was delicately staged: the young vs. the old (Popper was 63 at the time), the authoritarian vs. the libertarian, the shy vs. the fiery. And yet, somehow, the rare importance of what they had before them was lost to the egos of the men involved. It began with Popper refusing to accept “equal billing with the upstart Kuhn.” After too much late night anger, he decided instead to chair the debate and leave the actual fighting to Lakatos and Feyerabend. Lakatos however saw this as an opportunity not to argue by proxy for his mentor, but to argue for himself and his middle-ground philosophy (between the extremes of Popper and Kuhn). And Feyerabend – “Popper’s most radical follower” – continued down that path, deciding to push his own branded philosophy (epistemological anarchism) to an audience that had come to listen to something else.

As it turned out, this came to little anyway, because both men, inexplicably, failed to finish their papers in time for the debate. Again things had to shift, and the hard Popperian lifting was assigned to Jagdish Hattiangadi. At which point it was Kuhn’s turn. His own sensibilities strained too far, and now flaring with white anger, he refused outright to share a stage with the younger man. So in near comic circumstances Hattiangadi’s advisor, John Watkins, literally picked up his student’s notes and delivered them on stage in his stead.

And that was it! The two greatest philosophers of science brought together for the most significant event ever staged – “a landmark in 20th century philosophy” – and it all ended in a soft and ignominious fizzle. In the aftermath you can almost see the figure of Thomas Kuhn on his slow and disappointing boat ride back to America. Staring out over the railings and into the sunset. Thinking aloud and struggling to make sense of what had just happened – the infighting, the childishness, the tardiness, the self-admiration, the lack of substance… And in that moment making a firm promise to himself never, ever, to do it again!

*** The Popperian Podcast #6 – Steve Fuller – ‘Popper vs. Kuhn’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #6 – Steve Fuller – ‘Popper vs. Kuhn’ (libsyn.com)

Diagnosing Pseudoscience: Why the Demarcation Problem Matters

In conversation with Maarten Boudry

Average-sized, middle-income, and in a mundane corner of the world, the fictional country of Turania is unremarkable in nearly every way. The dominant ethnic group – the Turans – have a familiar story that they like to tell about themselves, as well as about their neighbours, the Urartians. It goes like this: from their lowliest citizen all the way up to their king, the Turans are a noble and generous people; kind, but not to a fault. They are also proud. Which is where Urartia comes into the picture… because, as the story goes, they are none of these things.

Instead the Urartians are a treacherous bunch, invading, enslaving and massacring the Turans at every opportunity. It’s in their nature, somewhere deep in their bones. Wars have been fought between the two countries, and at different moments both sides have occupied the territory of the other. Of course, the fighting is always instigated by the Urartians, with the Turanians only ever killing out of self-defence, and struggling at every turn to halt the Urartian natural instinct to commit war crimes.

Inside Turanian territory live a small community of ethnic Urartians. Not too far away, but just across the border is a similar situation: a small minority of ethnic Turans living within Urartia and calling it home. The Turans are tolerant and welcoming of this group, but it’s not easy. Their guests behave poorly, leeching off the benefits of society while refusing to assimilate. Instead they try to undermine the Turanian state, conspiring with their distant government, trying to topple Turania from within. On the other side of the border things are different. The Turan minority live in constant fear, attacked each day simply for who they are; besieged by a state that is trying to ethnically cleanse them.

This story is told and told again. It is taught in Turanian schools, through patriotic events and holidays, and through popular culture. Even the historians are on board, just in slightly different tones. They tend to steer away from certain aspects of the story, largely ignoring the quasi-religious elements and the origin myths of the Turanian kings. Nor do they spend any time speaking about the more outlandish and conspiratorial aspects of the story. They are professionals after all, and so they talk about actual history: the dates of the many wars, the nature of the fighting, and the people involved. They also do something else…

Held tight within the broader culture, the Turanian university system similarly promotes Turanian nationalism. Government and private funding relies upon this being done, and so do academic careers. Anyone showing insufficient zeal is quickly overlooked for promotions and grants. So as these historians write about their country’s history, they do so with an emphasis towards that national story. All the dates are real and all the events actually happened, but it is shaded in one direction. They still talk about the benevolence of the Turanian kings compared to their Urartian counterparts, and the suffering of Turanians at the hands of their neighbours; all the time downplaying the crimes of their side while emphasising those of the other.

It doesn’t take long for life and routine to take over, and soon these historians don’t even realise that they are twisting evidence in this way – the whole country bound together by the embellishment, some people simply entertaining more sophisticated versions of it. Soon everyone considers the story to be not only true, but also completely uncontroversial. So whenever foreign media or foreign diplomats offer a different understanding, it is reflexively dismissed as malicious propaganda, likely funded by the Urartian government. And of course, any Turanian who might dare to express public doubt pays a fast and painful price; not necessarily in violence, but always in ostracism and social outrage.

Then comes along a young Turanian citizen, someone brought-up on a diet of non-fanatical nationalism; but a nationalist nonetheless. She is taught the story by her parents and family and friends, at each level of her schooling her teachers have reinforced it, and every time she turns on the TV or reads a book or opens a newspaper, it’s there. In short, she holds several key beliefs about history which are glaringly false. 

Then one day, in a less-policed part of town, she stumbles into a dissident book store. On the shelves she finds a translated book by a foreign – and internationally reputable – historian. As she reads through the pages she discovers an incredibly convincing counter-narrative to everything that she has been taught. At this point, Maarten Boudry has an important question: what does she do next? What is the rational next step for her? Does she do the Popperian thing and consider her beliefs to be falsified, and so abandon them? Or, perhaps, “Still, is it possible for her to rationally affirm the Standard Story?”

Questions of this kind are old in the history of philosophy, and only slightly less old in the history of the philosophy of science. They burn down into those seemingly perpetual problems of knowledge, truth, and deception. And once started in this way, it is natural to soon rephrase things, and to ask: What is science? How do we distinguish between science and non-science? Otherwise known as the Demarcation Problem. Popper’s famous answer goes like this:

He was not interested, as some people were (such as the logical positivists) in drawing a line between what is meaningful and not meaningful, but only in diagnosing that which makes science special. And what matters is falsifiability! If for example you have a theory in front of you, and you want to know on which side of the demarcation it falls, you should think not about the evidence that supports it, but rather how it might be proven wrong. You need to create a category of refutation: some kind of possible observation that, if witnessed, would cause you to abandon the theory in an instant. If you cannot do this, then what you have is not a science.

Consider two great minds of the era, two men who both emerged at around the same time, and who dominated academic fascination during Popper’s earlier life: Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Freud’s work focused on the individual and the psyche – Einstein’s on his general theory of relativity. And both made clear predictions, the former that childhood experiences have a huge and continuing impact on our adult selves; the latter about how light travels through space. And while most people were caught-up in adulation for both of these promising new sciences, Karl Popper noticed something unsettling about Freudian psychoanalysis, something that his colleagues strangely saw as a positive aspect of the theory:

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest.

Imagine it like this: a young, angry man walks into Freud’s clinic, and explains the personal issues he is having with rage and aggression. Freud naturally explains to the man that all his negative emotions are due to the behaviour of his parents while he was still a child. This might seem reasonable at first, but it is a theory that bends to the facts. If his parents regularly beat him, then he is living out that violence today. The same could be said if they were kind to him but fought with each other. Or if they were distant and unloving – this causing anger within their son due to the lack of attention and affection. If they never fought, always denounced violence, and smothered their son with love, then this too produced feelings of anger because he was never allowed to express violence as a child, and so is now rebelling against his parents’ kindness. Once the psychological theory is there, any and all types of childhood experience will confirm it; or as Popper explains things, psychoanalysis “resembled astrology rather than astronomy.”

Einstein was doing something very different. His general theory of relativity made the clear prediction that light would be gravitationally attracted by large cosmic bodies – such as stars and planets – just as material bodies are. This was hard to test though, because it needed to be done under the perfect alignment of a solar eclipse. But Einstein made the prediction nonetheless. He wasn’t looking backwards for confirming data, but looking forward and predicting his own refutation. Something that most people believed would happen, even Popper himself: “few of us at the time would have said that we believed in the truth of Einstein’s theory of gravitation.”

Einstein was happily exposing himself to risk and failure, because under such an eclipse if light didn’t bend the way his theory predicted, then the theory would be disproven in that moment. He would be wrong, the world would know it, and general relativity would be false. Everybody waited. Until, in 1919, when the conditions were finally appropriate, a solar eclipse occurred, and Einstein’s prediction was witnessed. Rather than walking away from general relativity, as the scientific community (or those who hadn’t already done so) were largely expected to do, they were forced to embrace it, and instead the community walked away from the previous theory, Newtonian gravity; debunked in an instant by a single observation.

The difference in the behaviour was, for Popper, the difference between a pseudoscience (Freud) and a real science (Einstein). If you look hard enough, “it is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory”, but if these confirmations are not “risky predictions” then they aren’t worth very much. Here are some of Popper’s core conclusions from these two historical episodes:

* Every ‘good’ scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is. 

* A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

* Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.

* One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

And for some decades this is where the battle rested. Popper had drawn the demarcation in a way that seemed to make sense, and though the debates still hummed-along, and new solutions would come and go, no one dared to think that perhaps the distinction just wasn’t important: that the Demarcation Problem was either “misguided” or “intractable”. Then slowly they did!

First it was Pierre Duhem and W.V.O. Quine, who pushed back at Popper’s premature declaration of victory. Science as they saw it was much too elastic to sit neatly on one side of the falsifiability line, with all else falling to the other. It just wasn’t as unified of an enterprise as all of that, it was instead a broader and ever-changing landscape of activities, and one that regularly connected with the non-scientific world. Most prominent though, was Larry Laudan, who, in 1983, declared the issue dead on arrival, nothing more than “hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us”: a pseudo-problem! Every attempt to draw a line between science and non-science had, according to Lauden, failed, and so the whole game should be abandoned, with no hope of ever finding a solution.

And there really are some headaches here for Popper. What he is describing involves more than just a particular theory, but rather a relationship: the connection between a theory and its predictions (observation statements). Something that is never straightforward, and always carries the taste of ambiguity. On one hand (and less importantly) it assaults the sensibilities of most scientists, because it implies that any claim – no matter how detached and ridiculous it seems – can be called scientific if it only proposes an observation that would unequivocally prove it false.

On the other hand scientific theories generally are not so friendly to us. They don’t neatly connect with reality in the way that the famous all swans are white example does. In this case the falsifiable observation pretty much writes itself: unless you find a non-white swan, such as the black swans that exist in Australia. Instead most scientific theories have degrees-upon-degrees of complexity to them, connected to reality only through long chains of background theory, boundary conditions, and subordinate assumptions. A scientific theory is always several steps removed from its observations. Or as Imre Lakatos put it: “It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather, we propose a maze of theories, and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT.”

Imagine you have a theory and then you want to do the Popperian thing – you want to ensure that it is scientific – so you create predictions that would falsify it if they happen. And you then watch those predictions transpire before your eyes. What do you do next? Yes, you might scrap the theory, or you might just as reasonably blame one of the countless other conditions, theories and assumptions that led to you making the prediction. You can never know for certain just what is being falsified, only that something is, and so you can always rescue your theory to fight another day. For many people, Popper’s falsifiability criterion is at one-time much too lenient, while conversely being much too strict.

Maarten Boudry agrees that Popper’s demarcation isn’t drawn in the appropriate place, but he also thinks that Lauden is badly mistaken about the impossibility of correcting the error, and of re-drawing it somewhere better. It starts from an observation about us: Despite many modern-day philosophers following Lauden’s thinking, and avoiding the Demarcation Problem altogether as an endless sinkhole of intellectual activity, something odd has also happened… “the rest of society somehow failed to take notice.”

Without understanding all the reference points nor the history behind it, everywhere you turn people are losing sleep and energy trying to revive Popper’s game. Our judicial systems refuse arguments and evidence of certain kinds, our school curricula reject the encroachment of theories such as creationism, public health officials run campaigns warning against alternative therapies… the list goes on. Indeed many countries have made-for-purpose, and government-funded, professional organisations whose job it is to fight these battles wherever they appear. And what they are fighting is pseudoscience!

Step back to look at this phenomena for a moment, and it soon hits you just what is going on. Sure, there is something about pseudoscience most people quickly recognise as harmful, but more importantly there is something about pseudoscience that most people simply recognise. They may not have explicitly solved the Demarcation Problem, but they do seem to intuitively know what a pretender-science is when they see it, what it looks like, what it sounds like, and how it behaves.

Here Boudry plants his flag, and begins disentangling the problem in reverse: “Rather than demarcating science and non-science on first principles, we should start from the common usage of the term ‘pseudoscience’, in particular the real-life doctrines and activities that are most often designated as such.” Starting with a comprehensive explanation of what science is, might just be too much of a leap and too tricky a definition. So instead we begin with all those things that science excludes – phrenology, graphology, creationism, homeopathy, astrology… – and the interesting thought that if most people are recognising these things as non-scientific, then perhaps everyone is, tacitly, also sharing the same demarcation values; it’s just that they haven’t been spoken aloud yet.

And when you deconstruct pseudosciences a few things become clear and common: 1. They recognise, and agree with, the authority that real science holds within society, 2. So they try to mimic science in convincing ways, 3. They build evidence and seek broad support, 4. They avoid counter-evidence and build immunisation mechanisms for this into the details of their theories, 5. There is an asymmetry between how they deal with evidence and counter-evidence, 6. They often appeal to antiquity, and claim that the longevity of their theory implies that it must be true, 7. Their experiments are often unrepeatable, 8. They use hyper-technical and obscurant language, 9. They avoid peer review…

This is not so much a checklist, but an accumulation of evidence. If what you have before you fits a number of these categories, then what you likely have is a pseudoscience. Perhaps we don’t need a clear cut line to still have a line! Popper would have hated all of this, and dismissed it as psychologism (the belief that problems in epistemology can be solved through psychological study). It’s a charge that Boudry welcomes: “psychologism is exactly what allows us to escape from Popper’s logicist straitjacket.”

If we follow this alternative approach to the Demarcation Problem, then there is still a lingering issue that needs some sort of explanation. If Popper was wrong, then why has his falsificationism endured and remained popular amongst working scientists? Boudry puts it like this: despite Popper being wrong, his philosophy of science still got one very important thing correct; a matter of emphasis about how good scientists behave. They take risks! They “stick out their necks”! After all “they can afford to do so”, because they are seeking only truth, and not the validation of their theories. For them, mistakes and errors are things to be found and corrected, as quickly and loudly as possible…

So let’s go back to that mundane corner of the world, and our young Turanian citizen who has just wandered into a dissident book store. Leafing through a convincing and alternative version of her nation’s history, she is in the process of discovering that everything she believes to be true, is actually just a pseudoscience. And her years of uncritical behaviour towards it, making her a pseudoscientist, of a kind. She has that one pressing question before her: what to do next? At what cost?

It wouldn’t be an easy moment. First off, she doesn’t have the expertise to properly judge what she is reading, and acquiring this background knowledge would take an enormous amount of time and energy. But even if she somehow did – returning to the bookstore day after day, reading more and more conflicting accounts of her nation’s story – what then? In patriotic Turania disbelief has negative consequences. Her fellow citizens are hypervigilant, always on the lookout for waning loyalties and the subtle indications of dissent. So to avoid punishment this new found knowledge will have to be kept a secret. She will have to lie, she will have to deceive, and she will have to act, all the time carrying a different kind of burden; unbearably harmful in its own way.  

To lie convincingly is a difficult game. Our young Turanian will need to keep up appearances, simulating the genuine patriotism of those around her; matching their level of enthusiasm, while also being cautious to not overdue things and draw suspicions in that way. And she will need to keep this up forever, never letting her real feelings affect her behaviour. Living with constant fear, anxiety and paranoia, the psychological drain will be tremendous. And then there is the moral burden of what her dishonesty is perpetuating – all those possible friends, colleagues, and family members who might also be having doubts, but are silenced by her loud and proud nationalism. How long before that guilty conscience bubbles-up and exposes her in some way?

We all have these nice thoughts about ourselves as rational beings, seeking truth, trying to better align facts and theories, and valuing cognitive accuracy. What we don’t like to spend much time on, is just what happens when these nice thoughts separate from our real world interests. Maybe sometimes, maybe often, “people are better served by falsehood than by the truth”.

The same can be said for the Turanian state, and their national story. If what they value is loyalty and commitment, then truth just isn’t worth very much. If every citizen could check on the story they are being told, and easily find that it was both accurate and overwhelming, then it wouldn’t help to discriminate between loyal patriots and un-loyal dissidents. For the story to function as a sign of commitment (as opposed to a sign that it is true), the story needs to have falsehoods, it needs to stretch peoples’ credulity. It needs to be a pseudoscience…

She is still there in that bookshop, our young Turanian citizen. Scrolling through the pages of an uncomfortable truth. With terror, the full ramifications of what she is reading are dawning upon her. Until this moment she considered herself unwaveringly rational, always committed to truth. But until this moment rationality has, always, been to her advantage in life. This time however, there will be no praise and encouragement – this time it comes at a huge personal cost. That same question hangs painfully in the air: what does she do next?

*** The Popperian Podcast #5 – Maarten Boudry – ‘Diagnosing Pseudoscience - Why the Demarcation Problem Matters’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #5 – Maarten Boudry – ‘Diagnosing Pseudoscience - Why the Demarcation Problem Matters’ (libsyn.com)

Pre-echoes of Popper: Xenophanes and Parmenides

In conversation with Robin Attfield

A man famous for his enemies as well as his problems, it was a local squirrel that put the most fear into Karl Popper’s later years.

A notorious and paranoid over-editor of his work, Karl Popper would often sit on his finished books, waiting sometimes decades before committing them to publication, correcting ever more slight details in prose and reason. A change of sorts came over Popper as he aged, a new found nostalgia for the classics. His last book was a series of essays and thoughts on pre-Socratic philosophy. And just as with all his other works, The World of Parmenides had to wait for its author’s patience to slowly wear thin.

Placed inside a simple yellow folder on a windowsill above Popper’s writing desk, the manuscript swelled at one point to nearly 1200 pages. Until a lazy day in early spring when the elderly philosopher and his wife returned home and noticed a large squirrel balancing over the open window. In search of nesting materials it had pilfered its way throughout the house, and now was proudly holding the yellow folder in its mouth. Clearly not expecting disaster of this kind, Popper hadn’t made any other copies of the unpublished book.

To the horror of husband and wife, the squirrel quickly backed out of the window and ran across the garden, dragging the heavy folder behind it. And the chase was on: an overburdened squirrel leading a couple of senior citizens (both deep into their retirement years) in a race across the back garden. As luck would have it, all those slight edits and extra thoughts and footnotes and amendments paid off. The folder finally proved too heavy for the squirrel as it tried to carry it up a tree. Picking up the errant pages of his book as they blew across the lawn, Popper finally conceded to himself that it was time to submit the draft to a third party editor, and then to publication.

With it suddenly much easier to persuade Popper to take a step back, Arne Petersen took over the job, and the volume was finally published in 1998. “Which is how we come to have the book, The World of Parmenides” and how Robin Attfield got his hands on it…

When you find something as significant as what Popper did, an uncomfortable – or perhaps pleasant (depending on the nature of your ego) – thought automatically follows: someone else must have discovered this previously! David Deutsch often talks about human history in terms of “mini Enlightenments”. All those moments when our not-too-distant ancestors made rapid progress, and developed new knowledge of the world. These mini Enlightenments all failed for one reason or another, but to achieve what they did – even if only briefly – they must have understood the basics of epistemology and the scientific method… they must have understood what Popper later would!

The European Enlightenment is the one that stuck, and the one that we are all the beneficiaries of today. And here, Popper famously wrote, was his method in action – specifically in the work of Kepler and Galileo. “What is less well known” writes Attfield, “is that already in 1963 Popper claimed to have discovered this method in use… also at the outset of the ancient Greek Enlightenment.”

Born in 570 BCE in the Greek city of Colophon, the Persian invasion of Asia Minor (545 BCE) soon forced him to flee westward across the Mediterranean – at the time a “long and perilous journey”. Here, in Elea on the southern coast of Naples, Xenophanes settled-in to a new life – one that would considerably overlap with the “famous son of Elea, Parmenides”.

Both Plato and Aristotle would later credit Xenophanes as the founder of the Eleatic school, a school whose prize member was Parmenides. Of the surviving fragments of Xenophanes’ work, we know that he wrote in poetic hexameters, something that Parmenides would also choose to do. In fact the number of similarities between the two men often led people to deliberately muddle the differences in their philosophies and arguments, as to better align them with each other.

Despite all of this, while the legacy of Parmenides survived and floated quickly to the ether of philosophical tradition and admiration, Xenophanes was more commonly denigrated as a “‘wandering poet and theologian’ rather than a philosopher”, “a mere rhapsode”, “a minstrel”. Slandered and “lied about” for millennia, it was the unlikely figure of Karl Popper that changed things. Reviving an interest in the pre-Socratics, Popper put on the hat of historical detective and swam back into the depths of those original texts, slowly rehabilitating the image of Xenophanes.

The first, and weakest of the smears against his character came from Heraclitus, who – furious that his theory of logos wasn’t being taken seriously by those around him – built and published a list of the ignorant. Among the prominent names were Hesiod, Pythagoras, Hecataeus, and of course Xenophanes. Rather than hold this against him (as it has been done), Popper explains otherwise: all this shows was that Xenophanes was considered important enough during his lifetime to be mentioned.

A more serious and lasting attack came from Aristotle, who latched-on to a fragment of Xenophanes’ writing, and a single word in particular:

At our feet we can see how the Earth with her uppermost limit borders on air; with her lowest, she reaches down to Apeiron.

The common translation of Apeiron is infinity, and so it was natural for people – after his time – to think that Xenophanes was insisting on a kind of infinite depth to our planet. To back this up, Aristotle also claimed to have found in Xenophanes’ writing – though it has since been lost – the belief that the Sun never actually sets due to the infinite size of the Earth; rather it is created new each day. Popper shoots back at this last point with the observation that as someone who travelled the oceans and watched the sun set – as Xenophanes did – it is unlikely that his constant observations allowed him to think such a thing.

But the two points are connected, and it is with that word Apeiron and with the “gross departures from common sense” of other scholars that Popper is most animated. The mistake is made by a loss of context, and a lack of understanding of Xenophanes’ fellow Ionian cosmologists, particularly the work of Anaximenes and Anaximander. This is how Popper explains things, and re-shines Xenophanes’ claim as an “intelligent conjecture”:

The standard translation of ‘apeiron’ is ‘infinity’, and this is what gave rise to the belief that Xenophanes held that the Earth has infinite extension, because it supposedly ‘reaches down to infinity’. But another meaning is both possible and appropriate, in view of the fact that Anaximenes’ Ionian predecessor Anaximander held that the origin of all things is ‘the apeiron’, or the unbounded, or, as it is usually translated, ‘the indeterminate’. So Xenophanes’ couplet could well be saying that the lower side of the Earth stretches down to this all-encompassing but unfathomed substance, ‘the apeiron’, the unknown fluid put forward by the predecessor of his predecessor and the teacher of his teacher, Anaximander.

The distinctiveness of the philosophy, and the reason why Popper was so impressed, becomes a little more obvious from here out. This is Popper’s translation of perhaps the most famous surviving section of Xenophanes’ work (written, of course, as a hexameter):

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,

While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw

And could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods  

Like horses, and the cattle like cattle, and each would then shape

Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own.

With different eyes to most people, what Popper saw here was something much more profound than an argument against anthropomorphism (which it was) or an argument against theology (which it was not). This was the first example (extant) in the world of thought and philosophy of Popper himself, and of his epistemology. The error that Xenophanes is drawing attention to here is that of using piecemeal local information, and experience, to create theories that apply beyond it.

It was important – Xenophanes claimed – to reject the notion of Homeric gods, with divinity and heaven as flawed and limited and naive as we are. Rather, if we are to accept the existence of gods, then we must also accept that they don’t have the same problems with knowledge that we do (otherwise they wouldn’t be gods at all, but just our fellow travellers, and so nothing worth revering). Truth is independent of human minds. What Xenophanes is poking at here is the place we find ourselves in, at all times: struggling, and always failing, to get past our perceptions and opinions.

And this struggle, as well as Xenophanes’ account of the gods, says something very important about truth itself: that it does exist! That it should be pursued, that it can be found… it’s just that there is no way of knowing what it is, even if we by chance had it. If you think that this leap, from ruminating about the description of gods to Popper’s critical rationalism, is tangential, then perhaps the next hexameter will ease things:

But as for certain truth, no man has known it,

Nor will he know it; neither of the gods

Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.

And even if by chance he were to utter

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it;

For all is but a woven web of guesses.

Here we have a clearer affirmation of Xenophanes’ realism (that truth exists, and that it is independent of human beings), but we also have something much more – something that must have excited Popper as he stumbled across it during translation: “For all is but a woven web of guesses.”

… A woven web of guesses!

As Robin Attfield goes on to show, from the original ancient Greek, the word δóκοs might just as easily be translated to conjectures as it is to guesses. A term central to Popper’s understanding of knowledge, and also in the title of his famous book Conjectures and Refutations. So within the work of Xenophanes is the important claim that there is a difference between subjective certainty and objective truth, and it is this bridge which can never be fully crossed because, according to Popper “we can never, or hardly ever, be really sure we are not mistaken; our reasons are never fully sufficient”. But there is again, also, something more, something incredibly prescient considering the time in which it was said.

The difficulty of discovering truth has always been a central problem within philosophy, but just how we go about doing so, just how we solve this problem, is a prize held only by Popper. Though considering what we have just read, perhaps not!

The big moment in Popper’s academic life, was his solution to this question of knowledge. Before Popper the world of philosophy was awash with all sorts of wrong ideas about how we can know anything. The best minds went searching for answers in reductionism, seeking a true foundation from which all other knowledge could be constructed. Others believed that the answer could be found with empiricism or inductivism, with knowledge provided to us by our senses. Many people continued to believe that truth was simply revealed to us through authorities. Then came Karl Popper and soon the whole landscape was torn-down – and in its place, those simple sounding words conjecture and refutation. We guess and then we criticise, and then guess again at something better. It may not sound all that elegant, but there is just no other way around it!

It is an answer that upset people… it still often does. But perhaps only because they hadn’t been properly warmed-up to the idea through Xenophanes. Strange then that he is still often regarded as an advocate of philosophical scepticism (those who deny the very possibility of knowledge); an impression that Popper was particularly keen to address. It is one thing to claim that objective truth can never be discovered, it is another to then say that our hopes to improve things are doomed and not worth the effort. It is clear – again from Popper’s translation – that Xenophanes did not think this way, but instead championed the search and the struggle for knowledge:

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,

All things to the mortals; but in the course of time,

Through seeking they may get to know things better.

Later Xenophanes speaks in a way that rounds much of this together, and shines a little more light on that problematic word: truth. Just like so much of language, it is often automatic, used to convey a fast and universal meaning; not an instrument of philosophical accuracy and nuance. Instead of truth, what we should be saying – according to Popper – is something like “approximation to objective truth” or “closeness to truth” or “affinity with truth”. A constant reminder of where we find ourselves in the universe. Or, it can be said like this (Xenophanes):

Let us conjecture that these things are like the truth.

Impressed as he is by the quality of the work and the translation, Attfield has a pressing question, one that many readers will likely have as well: sure, Popper is clearly excited by what he has found here in the pre-Socratic world, but is it true that “Xenophanes was really committed to the methodology of conjectures and refutations”? Or is Popper himself making that earlier error of extrapolating local information to situations where it no longer applies? Is Popper a victim of motivated reasoning, picking through ancient writings, and finding only what he wants to find?

Calling Xenophanes “the founder of epistemology”, Popper sets a high bar here, especially when considering that a lot hangs on very little. Or specifically, a lot hangs on fragments upon fragments of much larger, and now lost, works. There is also the problem of Parmenides, who was certainly a rationalist in the Popperian tradition, and someone who had Xenophanes as a direct teacher and mentor. Again though, that previous error comes back at us. It would be a mistake to attribute the beliefs of a student to those of his teacher.

As Attfield rightly points out from that earlier quote and interpretation, “Much turns on what Xenophanes would have counted as ‘getting to know things better’”. Popper might be right, and Xenophanes was referring to an unending process of conjectures and refutations, but he might just as well have seen this as too restrictive. And so made the Millian or Baconian error of believing “that ‘getting to know things better’ can sometimes be achieved through inductions based on experience”. Indeed Attfield holds up a passage to show that Xenophanes was not averse to thinking that knowledge could be extracted from experience:

If God never had chosen to make the light-yellow honey,

Many a man would think of figs as being much sweeter.

Popper keenly noticed this section of writing as well, and felt the need to address its implications. He does so like this: the phrase “much sweeter” should be understood as “much sweeter than figs appear to him now, because the comparison with honey reduces the impact of the sweetness of figs”. Rather than deriving knowledge from experience, this becomes a process of correcting or criticising knowledge through experience. So maybe it would be more accurate to describe Xenophanes (as Popper later does) as using the method of “critical empiricism”.

Flavour it as you like, or as you can bear, but it is also plausible to find hints of inductivism within the writing of Xenophanes, particularly when it comes to the accumulation of sensory data. Attfield believes that, if only he had been exposed to the idea of abduction (a type of logical inference which seeks likely conclusions from observations) Xenophanes would have eaten it up, and of course disappointed Popper. In fact, “his own reasoning about the gods appears to instantiate such a methodology.”

And so leaving things on the appropriate tone, Attfield asks another important question: “Is Popper's Study of Xenophanes Strictly Popperian?”

Both Xenophanes and Popper died at the age of 92, and it was only the latter’s death that brought an overdue end to the editing process and allowed his last book to be published. And as fortunate as we are to still have access to the writing of Xenophanes, the same should also be said for this final work of Karl Popper. Because of course this might never have happened. Lost in the legality of his will and testament, or in the confusion or the sorrow, The World of Parmenides might never have reached an audience beyond its long-suffering author… that is, had it not been for the curiosity, the persistence, and the burglary of a single squirrel.

*** The Popperian Podcast #4 – Robin Attfield – ‘Pre-echoes of Popper - Xenophanes and Parmenides’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #4 – Robin Attfield – ‘Pre-echoes of Popper - Xenophanes and Parmenides’ (libsyn.com)

More Popperian than Popper

In conversation with Nicholas Maxwell

“Observe!”

The room looks back at him in silence.

“Observe what?” someone eventually asks.

A sly smile grows across Karl Popper’s face. “Exactly!”

As rumour had it, Karl Popper liked to begin his seminars this way – with this cringe worthy, smug, academic stunt that is now a firm part of the folklore and myth surrounding the man.

Paddling upstream against intuition, Popper needed something of his own, something “very simple, very basic, very elementary” that would get his message across. Inductivism, the claim that we acquire knowledge about the world by observing it, was an idea that should have been dead and buried long ago. And its death was central to everything Popper was trying to build and explain.

But everywhere he turned, inductivism was still there, holding firm in the minds of people who should have known better. It just seemed to make sense. Long, careful, abstract arguments weren’t doing it, so instead Popper found something fast and gimmicky, something that was easily understood and which could help to shatter that intuitive barrier.

Those people watching Popper as he commanded them to “observe” knew immediately that something important was missing. With any glance in any direction, there are infinitely many things to see, feel, hear, touch, smell – enough observations in a single lecture hall to fill a lifetime. So a filter of sorts must be there before anything is specifically noticed. You need a problem, something that draws your attention (you need to know what Popper is referring to) but you also need a huge array of background theories to even begin to understand what you are looking at.

To make use of an old, worn, philosophical cliché, even if he were asking you to simply look at a red cup, you would still first need theories about what water is, what drinking is, why a cup is used, what problem it solves for people, what the colour red is, what colours are… Theories always come first, they give us our eyes and our senses. Without theories the world is an incomprehensible mess of light and movement and noise and objects and behaviours – we are newborn babies once again, or worse!

Watching in the audience all those years ago at the London School of Economics (LSE), was a young professor recently hired to run tutorials for Popper’s lectures. But when the news filtered up that Nicholas Maxwell was on the payroll and working in his department, Karl Popper was “furious”.

The two men had clashed previously at another seminar, where Maxwell became quickly besotted with the older philosopher, who it seemed couldn’t open his mouth without saying “really interesting things”, things “at odds with all the usual rubbish”. And yet someone who was also “fairly terrifying”, with it not uncommon for guest presenters to collapse inward, “reduced to tears” by the remorseless criticism that Popper would hurl at nearly every sentence from their mouths – a uniquely “harrowing experience”.

At the head table, sandwiched between Popper and his assistant John Watkins, Maxwell listened as they argued across him, about his ideas. He would manage to get a few words out, and then “Popper would interrupt”, Watkins would then interrupt Popper, and Maxwell would sit silently for the theatre to playout. Soon the two men would turn – breathless and exhausted – back to their guest and ask for some clarity, which would quickly set them off again.

After a few hours of this, Maxwell laid-out a theory of the mind that seemed to hit the limit of Popper’s patience. The older philosopher stood up in anger and – near-yelling – demanded to know how on earth he came up with such a ridiculous idea. Maxwell shrugged and replied in the deepest of Popperian language: it was “a bold conjecture!” Through the laughter of the room, Popper could be heard muttering under his breath: “it’s not so bold as all of that!”

All truth seeking starts with a problem, and Maxwell’s problem has to do with falsifiability. Popper’s great breakthrough with the philosophy of knowledge was to show that our truth-claims about the world can never be verified, never proven correct. Instead what we do is create theories, then burrow into those theories to produce experiments, and then derive predictions about what we will see and what will happen. Here we test and test and test, hoping for error. No amount of positive predictions can ever confirm a theory, but it only needs one incorrect prediction to falsify a theory.

When something is shown to be wrong in this way, it leaves a burden upon us all – we need to create something better. This, for Popper, is how science and knowledge advances, this is how we make progress: through conjectures and refutations.

This is also where Maxwell senses that something is off, that something is missing, something important. It runs like this: let’s say that you have a theory that has just been falsified, and so you are searching for a new theory that better accounts for what you are seeing in reality, well how do you choose? There are infinitely many rival theories that can be thought up, all of which explain our observations.

Popper’s answer was empirical content: pick the theory which predicts more than the others, and which explains more phenomena. But this still doesn’t fix our problem. We can increase the empirical content of a theory simply by asserting “ugly”, “hodge podge”, “bizarre” add-ons. Instead of Newton’s theory of gravity, we could create Newton’s theory of gravity plus the claim that in the year 2050 it will change from being an attractive force to a repulsive one, and we will all “fly off the earth”.

It is an absurd theory, so absurd that it will never even be tested, but it does predict more, and it does have more empirical content, “exactly the criteria according to Popper that should lead us to accept this theory”. So what makes us reject this type of ad hoc theory? Unity! Or rather disunity! We want our theories to apply to all things, universally. This, for Maxwell, is what Popper (and so many other philosophers) missed or ignored. An underlying metaphysical assumption within science that values unified theories over dis-unified ones, regardless of how empirically successful they are.

Popper’s demarcation doesn’t allow a place for metaphysics within science (“for Popper the basic aim of science is truth, nothing being presupposed about the truth”), but he does recognise a problem of sorts here. His answer this time is simplicity. Across his work, two such versions emerge (one from his earlier work and a later, more ambiguous one from Conjectures and Refutations), but essentially they amount to either the unsatisfying and counterintuitive claim that the more empirical content that a theory has – “what it says about the world” – the simpler it is, or that we “should leave it to scientists to fight for their theories”. As Maxwell notes, these are notions of simplicity that seem to create complexity, horribly so.

Rather Maxwell wants to start where we know we are already, with what “actually operates in physics” and with “what physicists seek”. Instead of pretending that this preference for unity isn’t there, we need to make it explicit – thereby making it into something that we can improve along with the rest of science. 

In this enterprise the basic aim of science shifts as well, from Popper’s notion of truth without presupposition to instead “discover[ing] the underlying unity in nature that we presuppose, and we have to presuppose in order to proceed, exists”. And so a map of sorts begins to develop, a way to not only understand which theories are likely false, but also which ones we should be pursuing into the future. Something that Maxwell develops into a methodological hierarchy, or aim-orientated empiricism.

It runs from the claim that the universe is at least partly knowable – “if that is false we have more or less had it whatever we assume” – down to evidence and our currently accepted, fundamental, theories such as Einsteinian relativity and the Standard Model. 

Those assumptions near the bottom of Maxwell’s ladder are much more substantial, and also much easier to revise once new knowledge is developed. While higher-level assumptions are less substantial but also more likely to be true. It also becomes a two way progression up and down the ladder, as the latest breakthroughs in knowledge also improve our means of finding knowledge itself, as we see with the creation of instruments such as microscopes or telescopes.

And it isn’t always the case that evidence influences theories – sometimes it is the theories that influence evidence (most obvious when experiments have been mishandled). This is an important aspect of aim-orientated empiricism because it accounts for the possibility of new theories changing our metaphysical assumptions. As Maxwell accepts, we don’t actually know that the universe is unified, or that a theory of everything is on its way, it’s all a “massive assumption”.

But by making our metaphysical assumptions explicit, and then stretching criticism all the way up to their door, Maxwell is trying to increase the size and the quality of possible refutations, and so with them possible improvements. He is, in his own words, being “more Popperian than Popper”.

Thomas Kuhn was another contemporary philosopher who had a talent for angering Popper. The change that Kuhn wanted to make in this whole picture of scientific discovery involved a deeper look at the history of science, and a firmer understanding of the behaviour of scientists. He presented it like this: sure, occasionally science looks very Popperian with everyone working to prove existing theories wrong and with grand shifts in the landscape of thought (“revolutionary science”), but most of the time something very different is happening. Day-in day-out your average scientist is not trying to disprove the current paradigm or consensus, but is actually working to strengthen it (“normal science”).

It is an emphasis that Kuhn thought was fundamental, and which Popper dismissed as both trivial and dangerous at the same time. Seeing it as a risk not only to science but also civilization, Popper was horrified that someone would want to encourage others into the mundane grunt-work of normal science; into a life without critical thought and hard questions. He also didn’t see much originality in the idea, flippantly saying that it was something “I discovered anyway long before Kuhn did”.

In this argument between the two most influential philosophers of science, Maxwell’s sympathies are firmly with Popper. Everything should, at all times, be open for criticism. In fact aim-orientated empiricism tries to show that unquestioned paradigms do exist, none more pressing than the assumption of unity which is built deeply into the whole enterprise of science. But it also explains the need for revolutions… more revolutions… more times and in more ways. Again, Maxwell in his own words is trying to be “more Kuhnian than Kuhn”.

The man who hired Maxwell at the LSE without consulting Popper, Imre Lakatos, tried to blend the ground between Kuhn and Popper by talking about the place for “provisional” refutations between research programs. It is appropriate to always question our theories and try to prove them wrong, and we should never accept paradigms (or the “hard core” in his own terminology) but neither should we expect rapid shifts in scientific direction. People need time to change their minds, and to judge the errors within theories, it just cannot be as absolute and as sudden as Popper hoped for.

Lakatos’ framework is still profoundly Popperian, and so different from Maxwell’s, but by imagining that a hard core for the whole of science was possible, there is a pre-echo of aim-orientated empiricism within his work. So perhaps also more Lakatosian than Lakatos?

With something this lavish, the criticism also – necessarily – comes thick and heavy. And it tends to look like either:

1.       There isn’t in fact a unity underlying all of science, just the appearance of it; or that unity is only a novel aspect of physics, and not of science in general.

2.       That the unity we see is a result of science, not an a priori aspect of it. Science only reveals a unity in nature, not the other way around.

3.       That by imagining all un-rejected theories (“infinitely many ad hoc theories”) to be still reasonable possibilities of science – even when they appear absurd and are not taken seriously – Maxwell is looking for a principle that allows for them to be excluded (unity), and so he is making the mistake of justificationism. He wants a reason for the ridiculous to be rejected, rather than just allowing that they are ridiculous.

This last criticism is the weightiest and most often repeated. It is also the one that Maxwell admits “does baffle me”. A former student of Popper’s, and a firm defender of critical rationalism, David Miller, picks up on a single phrase from Maxwell’s writing to show this justificationist element: “in effect”.

In persistently excluding infinitely many . . . empirically successful but grotesquely ad hoc theories, science in effect makes a big assumption about the nature of the universe, to the effect that it is such that no grotesquely ad hoc theory is true, however empirically successful it may appear to be for a time. Without some such big assumption as this, the empirical method of science collapses. Science is drowned in an infinite ocean of empirically successful ad hoc theories.

Miller remarks:

The words ‘in effect’ here are tendentious. Since scientific hypotheses in modern times never mention God, it might be said that science ‘in effect’ makes ‘a big assumption’ of atheism. But it does not make this assumption, and many scientists privately assume the opposite. Hypotheses that bring in God are simply excluded, rightly or wrongly, from empirical consideration. That does not mean that they might be discussed non-empirically, as indeed they are being discussed in this paragraph.

There is an old joke that Miller uses to better explain this. A guy a walks into a bar in a busy part of town and orders a beer. Soon he starts to snap his fingers, over and over. Eventually the bartender asks him “why are you snapping your fingers?” “Because it keeps the elephants away”, the guy answers. The bartender looks around the crowded bar bemused, “but there aren’t any elephants here”. The guy smiles back at him, “See, it works.”

Where Maxwell wants some sort of interdictive behaviour to explain why there aren’t any elephants near the bar, Miller thinks that even if snapping ones fingers did indeed keep elephants away, it wouldn’t be needed to keep them away from that bar, nor bars in general. It is enough to simply say that elephants rarely enter towns and rarely, if ever, go near noisy bars. No more explanation is needed. In Miller’s view, despite us seeing unity and tidiness in our theories, we should still hold that science “assumes neither that the world is tidy nor that it is untidy”…“I shall change my mind about ‘the true unified theory of everything’ when it is discovered.”

Whatever the truth of this, Maxwell did enough all those years ago to shake Popper’s resolve. Two weeks after their clash, something completely unheard of happened. A public event was created, and a lecture announced: Popper had authored a response! It was scathing of course, but as Maxwell sat listening to the onslaught, Lakatos leaned over to him in near disbelief and whispered in his ear “this is a great honour to you, Nick.”

It was an indication that Popper took Maxwell seriously. Structured, thought-out criticism takes time – you only do it, if you first consider it important or worthwhile. It is a sign of intellectual respect. And it was also reciprocal: in his early days as a student, first touching on the world of academic philosophy, a younger Maxwell remembers sitting alone in his tiny apartment reading The Open Society And Its Enemies, and crying a flood of tears. At last there was a philosopher who was “actually doing something”, someone who revolutionised epistemology and what it means to be rational, but also someone who extended that logic into other fields.

Through all of this, despite contradicting the older philosopher, Maxwell still considers his work to be highly Popperian. Particularly considering the tradition of criticism that Popper glorified so much. Maxwell’s only gripe is that “I think he should follow suit. If there is an argument that shows that scientific practice straightforwardly refutes his methodology it is something that he should take seriously and not try to push aside with bluster, which is in effect what he does”.

It leads Maxwell to speculate – slightly tongue-in-cheek – that by being so hostile to, and dealing so poorly with, personal criticism, Popper might also, rightly, be considered as an enemy of the Open Society.

Appropriately the whole affair ends on a personal note: “Popper never really liked me…”

*** The Popperian Podcast #3 – Nicholas Maxwell – ‘More Popperian than Popper’ https://popperian-podcast.libsyn.com/the-popperian-podcast-3-nicholas-maxwell-more-popperian-than-popper-0

Karl Popper vs. Paul Feyerabend

In conversation with Matteo Collodel

At some point in the mid-1960’s he turned, sudden, angry and defensive. Once a disciple of Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend was out to do the most Popperian thing imaginable: prove Popper wrong! But it was also more than this. An intellectual disagreement that was always personal and emotion-driven. Storming out of the front door, rejecting the critical rationalism that he had once adored, Feyerabend began burning his old home to the ground; behind him a mess of intrigue, infighting, animosity, battle scars and broken relationships.

The Department of Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics (LSE) began with one member of staff. It was waiting for him. Sitting patiently until the title of Professor was awarded in 1949. The new school quickly changed from a teaching department – focussed on a small cohort of honours students – to a research academy. And before long a remarkable – and strikingly famous – set of names began passing through the halls: William Bartley, John Watkins, Imre Lakatos, Joseph Agassi, Ian Jarvie, Alan Musgrave, Jerzy Giedymin, David Miller…

The man who created this lively academic world – who had attracted all that international talent – seemed a little less impressed by it all. Pulling himself from the cottage armchair and village life in Penn, Karl Popper only travelled down to his London office once a week, on Tuesdays. But it was still, unmistakably, an education in Popper’s own image:

A school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations

It would also soon collapse inward under poor management. Popper was just not cut out for the job, preferring to work from home, and not appreciating his role as administrator. Matteo Collodel describes it like this: “his figure should have looked more like that of a workshop foreman or of the father of an intellectual family, than that of a school director.” There was a huge measure of healthy collaboration and research, but with so little time for his students a battle for Popper’s attention also formed. Political machinations walked hand-in-hand with the philosophy.

Favoured by the master, and so a regular guest at Fallowfield (Popper’s home in Penn), Paul Feyerabend spent a large amount of time beyond this battlefield. Long, exhaustive, happy days of philosophical discussion in the English countryside seemed to only break when Feyerabend would occasionally idle over to the corner of the living room, where he played with and “talked to his [Popper’s] cat”. Whatever the treatment of (and the reasonable complaints) the LSE students, Feyerabend was largely immune, with Popper taking such an interest in him as to pester him with “often unrequested advices on personal matters.”

Then it all changed. Feyerabend would soon write to one of the few people lucky enough to join him on those Fallowfield excursions, Joseph Agassi, in tones bordering on mental breakdown: “But seriously, I just cannot take academic philosophy seriously any longer – including Popperianism.” He began calling himself a “philosophical bum” someone “loitering in the halls of wisdom and knowledge” and explained that “I have started publishing on aesthetics […]. My next step will be into the philosophy of religion. Philosophy of science be damned”.

The intellectual content of this abrupt decision was likely the influence of Thomas Kuhn. Feyerabend left the University of Bristol in 1955 (a position that Popper had helped him secure) and moved to the University of California, Berkeley. He arrived in America still pushing critical rationalism to anyone that would hear him: handing out newly translated copies of Popper’s books as gifts and aggressively trying to get his old mentor a visiting professorship.

The course that Feyerabend decided to teach at Berkeley was on the scientific method, and it had only one core textbook: The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Details then get a little foggy, but at some point Feyerabend discovered an interesting neighbour in Southern California. The closer in contact he got with Thomas Kuhn and particularly Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the more that Feyerabend seemed to leave behind his older influences and undergo a personal and intellectual mutiny.

He would eventually land on “epistemological anarchism”. It was a title that fit the man as much as his philosophy. Popper’s scientific method was famously that of conjecture and refutation: we can never hope to prove our scientific theories (conjectures) correct, so instead we should try to falsify them (refutations). What doesn’t get disproven isn’t accepted as truth, but just not discarded as false. A fairly minimalistic approach to science and knowledge, but still not enough for Feyerabend.

The answer was – just as it would be with Kuhn – buried within the history of science, with paradigm shifts and incommensurability. If you look at what the great scientists actually did and how the important breakthroughs occurred, it was by abandoning method altogether. Philosophers make rules, the rules don’t work, and so the scientists ignore them. No matter what method you can think of, the history of science shows that at some point progress was only possible, and was only achieved, by forsaking it for another. There is no formula for science, and as far as one does exist, it is, in Feyerabend’s words, “anything goes!”

The example that he uses is art, where our instincts are better tuned to the message, and where he is most comfortable having strongly considered (more than once) giving away the academic life for a musical career. The next great artistic movement – be it in music, painting, sculpture, cinema... – whatever it may be, has only one criteria that we know it must meet: it must defy everything that came before it. It must do violence to previous methods. Break the existing paradigm. Be incommensurable.

To build-out his new creative – artistic – science, Feyerabend lionised both Galileo and Einstein, but also, explicitly, gave credit to astrology, religious solutions, and all manner of superstition. He particularly liked folk medicine. In the 1950’s the Chinese communists began forcing hospitals to use traditional rather than Western medicine on their patients. According to Feyerabend – in his book Against Method – what happened next wasn’t the failure and falsification of Chinese medicine, but rather that: “Acupuncture, moxibustion, pulse diagnosis have led to new insights, new methods of treatment, new problems both for the Western and for the Chinese physician.” 

Any attempt to draw a line between what is science and what is not – as Popper had done with his demarcation criteria (science requires testable theories) – was a standard that, if followed, would have forbidden knowledge of this kind. And so rules of science become only dogma, only harmful; too narrow and too stifling of what science actually needs: pluralism and unbridled creativity.

In light of this, Feyerabend’s acrimonious exit from Karl Popper and critical rationalism begins to make more sense. Feyerabend was a rhetorician. He wanted to provoke, shock and anger people towards the intellectual anarchy he admired. What he loved so much about those great scientists was not so much their theories, but their revolutionary spirit. And so it is likely no coincidence that Feyerabend got cold feet at just the moment when Popper’s fame was reaching the general public, and when people began talking of the LSE’s Department of Logic and Scientific Method as The Popperian School.

Watching his old friend using the “odd slogan” anything goes, Joseph Agassi went a step beyond a simple contrarian explanation. Agassi noted that “things changed” with Feyerabend after he witnessed “the student revolution” – a change that was “political, not intellectual”. In short, he believed that Feyerabend had been “converted to Trotskyism, from which he was never freed”. Whether or not this is true, the instinct to resist joining a formal school is something completely understandable for even the most mildly rebellious spirit.

It was something that Popper understood all too well. When the socialist leader Mario Soares came to power in Portugal in the 1970’s, he invited a small group of people that he not only admired but who had influenced his thinking, to Lisbon. Popper was on the list, and the first item on the tour guide was an excursion around the presidential palace. Popper collected his things and headed out by himself to see the grounds, only to be stopped by his official minders and told that they had to go in a group, everyone together. At which point Popper slammed his fist down on the table, and declared loudly: “I will not go in a collective!”

So perhaps abandoning the Popperian School at just the moment that it was becoming mainstream (as more and more international scholars flew-in to join the ranks) was in fact the Popperian thing to do. What came next though, was a little harder to explain. Its starts like this, with Feyerabend trying to scrub history a different colour:

Popper was my supervisor: working with him was a condition of my being paid by the British Council. I had not chosen Popper for this job, I had chosen Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein had accepted. But Wittgenstein died and Popper was the next candidate on my list. […] at the end of the year Agassi is speaking of (1953), Popper asked me to become his assistant; I said no despite the fact that I had no money and had begun selling my furniture and my books.

Matteo Collodel digs out the details here, behind both of these claims – about Wittgenstein and the rejection of Popper’s assistantship – and they are not just troublesome, but completely “implausible”. Feyerabend only met with Wittgenstein on one occasion in early 1950, a matter of weeks after Wittgenstein had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and a full two years after he resigned from his last academic position at the University of Cambridge. Just how the dying and retired Wittgenstein was going to supervise Feyerabend’s post-doctoral studies remains unanswered. It gets murkier still. By the time that Feyerabend had finished his doctoral dissertation in 1951 and was ready to begin considering post-doctoral options, Wittgenstein was long dead!

When Feyerabend submitted his application for the British Council scholarship, the name listed as his first choice for supervisor, out of all available academics in the country, was Karl Popper. So not a “condition” of his scholarship (as he claims), but a personal choice and preference. This type of loose language and revisionism of personal histories soon became the archetype for all of Feyerabend’s interactions and disputes. Including the second episode, where Feyerabend “said no” to Popper’s offer of an assistantship in 1953.

When the offer was made, the young Feyerabend was keenly engaged translating Popper’s The Open Society And Its Enemies into German for the first time. And we now know from official records – and the work of Collodel – that he quickly accepted the position, at some personal cost. Feyerabend had already taken-up an assistantship with Arthur Pap at the University of Vienna, so by accepting Popper he would have to cancel – quite unprofessionally – on Pap. Which he did! Only to then change his mind, again.  

Throughout this “Feyerabend’s correspondence with Popper reads quite confused”, only handing-back Popper’s offer a few days before he was due to arrive in London, with longwinded thoughts about how he was, again, leaving it all behind to become an opera singer. What he doesn’t say is the most revealing. Feyerabend’s wife was still finishing her studies in Vienna at the time and was in obvious need of “her husband’s support”. This is almost certainly the actual reason for the rejection, because a little over a year later – once his wife was finished with her work – Feyerabend moved quickly back into Popper’s orbit at the University of Bristol.

It was Popper’s influence that got him the position, but in his autobiography – and still at war with his own history and relationship with Popper – Feyerabend instead only credits Erwin Schrodinger for the appointment. A poor or selective memory might be an excuse, but it was the least of the problems that formed between Feyerabend, Popper and other members of the School. This is Popper – at his wits end – writing to Hans Albert, asking for help dealing with his former student and friend:

Unfortunately our personal relation has been somewhat clouded by the fact that [Feyerabend] is neurotic and that his neurosis partly lies (at least that is how I would explain it) in the fact that for many years he has stolen my ideas like a raven. Usually he proceeds in the same way as many others do: he mentions me somewhere in the articles in question, sometimes even quite frequently; but not when he comes to his “own” contribution, which is then usually stolen from me. However, this “own” contribution of his is often defended against me, or I am sharply criticized for my inadequacy, which is illuminated/revealed by this contribution.

Well, I am used to it. I do not take it all too seriously. After all I have enough ideas and I can leave some of them cheaply to my students (though without being asked), even if it goes perhaps a bit too far if my own ideas are (a) stolen from me, and (b) used to attack me. […] poor Paul knows he is stealing: I often called his attention to this in a friendly way. The last time (in March in Berkeley, in 1962) he answered: “Your ideas are so original that it takes a great effort to assimilate them; and by the time one has assimilated them one thinks they are one’s own.”

It wasn’t just Popper though, the spectre of plagiarism in Feyerabend’s work was increasingly raising alarms throughout the Popperian school. Other than Albert, at various points Bartley, Agassi, Watkins and Lakatos would reach out to Feyerabend with such concerns. It was the softness and friendly outreach of Lakatos (who on Feyerabend’s suggestion addressed each other “as one Popperian to another”) that made the difference and brought forward a muddled confession: “I for one am not aware of having produced a single idea that is not already contained in the realistic tradition and especially in Professor Popper’s account of it.” This is not as hyperbolic as it seems – the language and emphasis might be different, but at all turns Feyerabend’s work continued to be, and to sound, very Popperian.

But there was something in the nature of Feyerabend that liked the role of castaway and the life of excommunication. No sooner had he admitted to the impact of Popperianism and his countless undisclosed reference points, than he was back on the offensive, talking of the Popperian School as a church or political party. Also throwing fire on his new friendship with Lakatos by constantly referring to him as “the party secretary of Popperianism”. Strangely though, he always seemed genuinely shocked by the animosity that such comments garnered.

Feyerabend’s wasn’t the only acrimonious fracture from within the Popperian School. And much of this was the fault of Popper who had developed an idea of interpersonal conduct that failed his students badly. Due to their working relationships, he thought that criticism should be a private, not public, event. He felt hurt when people didn’t follow this standard, but worse it meant that Popper would often move forward with his philosophy without ever making public acknowledgement of the research of those around him. By not criticising his students in open air, their ideas were left to suffocate in darkness. Couple this with Popper’s “absent-mindedness in organizational matters”, his “workaholism”, his “idiosyncrasy”, and what Agassi called his “famous immense sense of persecution”, and it is possible to see that their broken relationship had more to it than just Feyerabend’s strange behaviour.

The nastiness of Feyerabend’s increasing attacks on Popper was something he self-excused as due to my writing style, and a part of the infuriating tactic whereby he would constantly insist not to be taken seriously. Just how an audience is supposed to understand and filter his words, and discover what he actually is serious about, is never offered. Here Feyerabend is a pre-echo of the relativist movement that he would later entertain.

John Watkins, perhaps the most loyal of all Popper’s students, offers this reflection on those messy years: “there ought to have been a Popperian critical tradition and not a Popperian School”. Always the bridge builder, Watkins kept in touch with Feyerabend throughout it all, and at some point towards the end of the 1960’s he recommended that Feyerabend read John Stuart Mill, particularly On Liberty. It took two years before he got around to it, but he would eventually write back to Watkins in a hot flush, saying that he was “more enthousiastic [sic!] than [he] ha[d] been about anything for a long time. […] Mill is really quite something”.

Feyerabend, the man in love with scientific genius, and the exploits of great minds, had a new hero… and a new bible!

*** The Popperian Podcast #2 – Matteo Collodel – ‘Karl Popper vs. Paul Feyerabend’ (The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #2 – Matteo Collodel – ‘Karl Popper vs. Paul Feyerabend’ (libsyn.com)).

Karl Popper and the Beginning of Infinity

In conversation with David Deutsch

When one of your firm scholarly influences is Jacob Bronowski, it is hard to avoid seeing the world in large, encompassing strokes.

So David Deutsch starts early… with Us! All the way back to the beginning of our species in the Great Rift Valley. It is a history of pain, suffering and death – sheer horror in every waking and sleeping moment. These people were family. They birthed us through generations. We remain genetically alike in every way, and yet completely different in the only way that actually matters. That we escaped their horror, that we survived and can now look back upon them in disbelief from our high-water mark of progress and comfort, is something only explainable by reference to Karl Popper.

The problem was always knowledge. Through all that terror and pain, those ancestors of ours all wanted the same thing: to know! They wanted to know how to avoid large predators, how to avoid illness, how to hunt more efficiently, how to build better shelters and stay warm and dry. In every aspect they wanted to improve their lives – they were desperate to know! And yet despite this life-or-death motivation, they failed – almost universally – to do so.

From the anthropological record we can now see that change happened so rarely, that the vast majority of people died in societies that were technologically the same as those that they were born into. The world never changed. They lived lives of complete stagnation and stasis – nothing got any better, in any way: “For thousands of years at a time, the rhythm, the content of human life was unchanging”.

But it didn’t have to be this way. How hospitable any given environment is, is simply a matter of knowledge. Our ancestors had the same ability to make progress as we do today, they just didn’t know how to. So there is a mystery of sorts here that needs answering: why did this capacity to create new knowledge sit largely unused for so long, at such horrific cost? Why are we the only survivors and why did all of our cousin species die out?

That answer was cultural, it was carved into their traditions. What they inherited and lived within involved a very common idea about knowledge: that it comes from authorities such as tribal leaders, community elders, from religion or superstition. These were societies finely tuned to avoid change, and therefore also finely tuned to embrace error.

To the rescue came empiricism – the idea that knowledge instead comes from the senses and from observation. It wasn’t true, but it was incredibly helpful. By thinking about knowledge in this way it became possible for people to reject those traditional authorities that had held back progress for so long.

The next problem was predictable. The rejection of authority was a hugely important development, but it also wasn’t an altogether new thing. It was actually quite common for authorities to be challenged and removed, the trouble is they were then replaced by new, different authorities, continuing the mistakes of the previous ones. Deutsch quotes from a poem by William Butler Yeats:

A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

Something else was needed, a revolution that would put knowledge at the centre of things and not people. Empiricism wasn’t going to do it, but it did have instinct on its side. It seemed to make sense. Somehow, in our bones, it feels like knowledge comes to us directly from the world we see, touch, feel and experience. To learn about something, you only need to look at it long enough, and through that observation comes knowledge. But this needs an explanation – something that describes how truth radiates outwards from objects and then into people.

And in searching for this, it doesn’t help that, as Deutsch tells us, “the vast majority of things that you see from when you open your eyes in the morning, to when you fall asleep at night, you have never seen before”. Sure, there is often familiarities about them, but that’s all there is. You may see the same sun rise each day, but it is never exactly the same.

To the salvation of empiricism came induction – the theory that the unseen resembles the seen, and that the future resembles the past. But David Hume was quick to shoot this down. Just like with empiricism, our instincts fill-out the details. It feels correct. Hume’s objection was simple: why should a sequence of propositions inform us in anyway about the next proposition? Why should the next premise be deduced from the former?

David Deutsch has a problem with the software in his phone. His voice-command program – SIRI – comes to life when you say its name (as it is intended to). Appropriate to the nature of his work, Deutsch says the word theory a lot. And perhaps due to his accent, his intonation, or errors in the design, SIRI is constantly mistaking theory for its name; then springing into action and asking David what he would like it to do. The more that SIRI makes this mistake, the more SIRI thinks that it isn’t – that when David says theory he is really saying SIRI. The program keeps confirming its error.

This is why induction doesn’t work. Just like SIRI, the only reason that we think that we are seeing or hearing the same things is because we already have a theory within our minds about what those things look like and sound like. A filter of importance that focuses on regularities to the detriment of the vast majority of other possibilities. Induction is self-confirming, and therefore also wrong.

What Karl Popper showed, was that in all cases what actually comes first is the theory, not the observation. Still people had – and often still hold – a strange attachment to empiricism and induction. Both were wrong and invalid, but scientists and philosophers continued to entertain the idea that perhaps we do them anyway, and perhaps they work regardless. So Popper would have to stretch-out toward a fairly unreasonable standard of proof. He would have to show that not only do such theories not work, but that we are not actually doing them at all; we only think that we are.

So how do we get started? How do we begin finding truth and knowledge? With two theories that conflict with each other, or with something that we want to improve (a factual theory conflicting with a moral theory). In short, we start with a problem – unjustified knowledge and a problem. What we do next is a little uncomfortable to say out loud, because it feels deeply unscientific: we guess! We hope for a solution, or in Popper’s words, a conjecture. It is only then that observation has its place, through testing our conjecture against reality.

Why does it have to be this way? “Well”, Deutsch calmly explains, “there is nothing else.”

These conjectures need explanations to go with them. It is the quality of the explanation that makes a conjecture more or less likely to be true, or even worth testing. Then occasionally, we hit epistemological gold. We produce certain conjectures that have generality – that reach into other aspects of knowledge. And it is from this that we leap forward and make rapid progress.

So much of philosophy and reason has involved the search for epistemological bedrock. That one solid foundation from which all other knowledge can be built. Again our instincts are the problem here. It feels like knowledge builds upward upon itself, and so must also start from certain key first principles – a place that constitutes the groundwork, something unchanging and true. This is a continuing mistake. It depends of course on that foundation being true (and beyond criticism), but also on it containing all other possible knowledge. It is a retrograde mindset that seeks to drag us back to religion, to tradition and to holy books. And as Deutsch explains, every existing claim to a foundation has so far proven to be false, all the way down to mathematics.

It is at this point in the process that postmodernism leaps onto the stage and declares that objective truth therefore cannot exist, that there is no way of judging one’s theory to be any more correct than any other. And they do have a very slight point. What the postmodernists call truth – “justified true belief” – really doesn’t exist. It is language again causing us problems. Knowledge is never justified by anything. We are always likely to be wrong, and “there is no limit to how misled we can be”.

But to do away with absolute truth, isn’t to do away with truth itself. Deutsch uses the example of wanting to visit a shop but being told that it is unfortunately closed. This is a claim that is capable of being true or false, the shop might be closed as you are told, or it might be open. Perhaps you then go and see for yourself and it does in fact look open. Then you get to the door and it is locked. Perhaps it is actually closed? But wait, you can see people inside. Are they customers, or perhaps just employees doing maintenance? It is easy to be misled, and you may be confused, but that doesn’t mean that there is no truth to the matter. The shop really is either open or closed.

This is where Popper made all the difference. Seeking truth boils down to correcting errors and solving problems – and there will always be new errors and new problems.

And this is one of those generality-rich conjectures, a conjecture that has reach. If someone is claiming to have authority about knowledge, then they are inevitably also claiming authority about politics. It might sound like an overstatement at first, but once it sinks-in it becomes unavoidable that “the doctrine that the truth is manifest, is the source of all tyranny”. All assertions of infallibilism lead to violence because “if you are obviously right, then someone who contradicts you is obviously wrong”. This false surety licenses the use of force – why bother to argue, debate and convince someone when you already know beyond any doubt that they are not correct?

As he did for epistemology, Karl Popper shifted everything that people thought they knew about politics and democracy. Just as we cannot predict the future growth of knowledge, we also cannot know who makes a good leader, or what makes a good policy, in advance of it happening.

In science, Popper changed the question that everyone was asking from how do we get to theories from observations? To instead how can we improve on the theories we have? In politics he changed it from who should rule? To how do we remove bad leaders and bad policies without violence? And so he starts again in the only place that we can: with a problem. And democracy – through consent of the voting public – is the best way to solve this problem.

Just as with epistemology, the way that our democratic systems work just seems to pass most people by, even those of us lucky enough to live and vote within them. Our language gets in the way again. To counter this, Deutsch thinks it would be helpful with science and philosophy to replace our common use of the word theory with misconception: the misconception of evolution, the big bang misconception… Perhaps if we did this for the official titles of our politicians we wouldn’t slip into error as much as we do: Presidential Mistake Joe Biden, the Misconceived Senatorial Candidate for New Hampshire, Congressional Blunder Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Error-prone Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. And newly minted policies would read as constant reminders of their fallibility: The Faulty Stimulus Package, The Miscalculated Climate Policy, The Flawed Defence Bill, or The Delusional Health Care Plan.

If it is all about error correction, then the best systems of government are those that error-correct the fastest and most efficiently. But with this comes an odd truism: systems that are good at correcting mistakes also make more mistakes. More small mistakes that is! They methodically seek out missteps, they loudly challenge and criticise everything, and so they also might seem a little messy, complicated and unpleasant. This is what democracy is, our best attempt – so far – at political error-correction.

Perhaps it is because most people still don’t understand this, or perhaps because they simply lack the stomach for it, that a strange adoration for authoritarianism exists within democratic populations today. It is a fad of our age and a luxury of progress. By suppressing criticism and resisting change, oppressive regimes can often appear a lot cleaner and more harmonious, with everyone pulling in the same direction. But they also entrench error. And so sooner or later a problem will arise that requires criticism to find and creativity to solve, a problem whereby everyone turns out to be pulling in the wrong direction, and then – with criticism and creativity suppressed – the whole thing falls over. As you would expect, most authoritarian regimes are incredibly short lived.

For all of this to work, however, we need something more from democracy than just its name. We need a system that makes a sharp movement from elections to governance, with the only meaningful restraint being the next election. Popular ideas like compromise and consensus belong in the dust bin. A compromise is by definition something that nobody really wants, and a consensus means that no one is ever proven wrong. Once elected our leaders need to be able to actually govern and implement the policies that they campaigned on. It is only then that we can judge their success and choose to vote them out at the next election if we deem them to have failed.

Of course on the other side of this, politicians tend to love compromise, consensus and proportional representation. It means that they can avoid being held responsible for their mistakes and evade accountability by saying, in all honesty, that “not only does the buck not stop here, but it doesn’t stop anywhere, because there was nobody who advocated that in the first place.”

It is worth taking a deep breath at this point, and avoiding the popular worry that modern democracy is – somehow – at risk. That under a wash of fake news, disinformation and polarisation, our systems of government are witnessing a unique type of stress, or otherwise completely failing. For Deutsch, this is not a crisis of democracy, but a crisis of hyperbole where fairly trivial concerns are being elevated as threats to civilization:

People seem to like the idea that they are living in a time of momentous challenge, where the stakes are exactly like, or analogous to, what the stakes were in the Second World War, where it was good against evil, where if evil wins it is the end of civilization. And therefore, fighting against that is glorious and it is worthwhile, it gives meaning to life. And so the more you can talk in terms of these hyperboles, the more life seems worthwhile. It’s as if making rapid, quiet, peaceful progress, which is what’s actually going on all the time right now, is not exciting enough for people when they are in political mode.

All of our failure, including this one, is due to lack of knowledge. And so it is only here that our species is confronted by existential crises. There is no limit (other than the laws of physics) to what we can solve, shape and create – in fact our very survival relies upon this. Enemies of civilisation really do exist, and they are out there hoping to bring everything we have to a sudden end; but they also have one important thing in common: they are wrong! They seek to supress knowledge, not to cultivate it – they try to avoid problems, rather than to solve them.

There is nothing inevitable about our continued existence. If we want to avoid the fate of our cousin species we will have to work at it, and we will have to move fast. This means making our mistakes as quickly as possible, because it is the only way to stay ahead of those bad actors, as well as new – unforeseen – problems. Rapid open-ended progress is not only possible, but necessary.

What we need is a novel type of cultural heritage, one that values only the creation of new knowledge: what Karl Popper called a tradition of criticism.

*** The Popperian Podcast #1 – David Deutsch – ‘Karl Popper and the Beginning of Infinity’ (The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #1 – David Deutsch – ‘Karl Popper and the Beginning of Infinity’ (libsyn.com)).

My Misconceptions (Introduction)

Karl Popper makes me feel like a lapsed alcoholic – someone clinging, slipping, painfully from sobriety. Always uncomfortable and always angry at myself. Critical rationalism – or Popper’s method of conjecture and refutation – bends back and circles inward, it loudly demands on being attacked. The tougher and more rigorous the beating, the more bloodied and broken, the better! Behind the theory is a smiling, smug kind of masochism. It doesn’t just concede that it might be wrong, but insists upon it! And welcomes the fight.

As far as philosophy goes, as far as philosophy can be popular, Popper isn’t (perhaps only Friedrich Nietzsche can still claim such a thing)! But a large number of people do pay a misconnected lip service to his work; as if they know they should utter his name in certain moments, and nod along knowingly when they hear it back at them. Most people with even the slightest finger on the pulse of philosophy and science fall into this category: they understand that Popper has done something important, but are often at a complete loss to explain what that is!

Everyone else (a much smaller group) seems to have wonderful stories of personal enlightenment – stories of how they discovered Popper’s philosophy in a haze of opening light; something profound, life changing and positive. It was not this way for me. I found him frozen in time, still deep in the trenches – a veteran, scarred and embittered and fighting a war that by all accounts should have been over long ago:

I have solved a major philosophical problem: the problem of induction. (I must have reached the solution in 1927 or thereabouts.) This solution has been extremely fruitful, and it has enabled me to solve a good number of other philosophical problems. However, few philosophers would support the thesis that I have solved the problem of induction. Few philosophers have taken the trouble to study-or even to criticize-my views on this problem, or have taken notice of the fact that I have done some work on it. Many books have been published quite recently on the subject which do not refer to any of my work, although most of them show signs of having been influenced by some very indirect echoes of my ideas; and those works which take notice of my ideas usually ascribe views to me which I have never held, or criticize me on the basis of straightforward misunderstandings or misreadings, or with invalid arguments.

This unconcealed grievance is not the tone that you would ordinarily expect from a philosophical book – in fact it is the type of tone that causes professors around the world to routinely reject undergraduate essays at a glance, or hush-away the arguments of students around tutorial tables. It reveals a painful amount of personal investment and emotion, and seems to say a lot more about the person than the problem.

Objective Knowledge was first published in English in 1972, and it was certainly not Popper’s best book. But many years later these were the first words of his that I would read, and so I saw the man and his frustration before I saw, or understood, his work. But I also knew of the “major philosophical problem” that he claimed to have solved in such simple, matter of fact, language. Deep in the pages of Jean-Paul Sartre at the time, the consolation that I found from this clear, unphilosophical tone, cannot be understated. Moving a little higher in my chair, I read on…

The problem of induction (or David Hume’s problem) sat at the pointy end of the most important – and most troublesome – question in the history of philosophy and reason: how is it that we can know anything to be true? The implications of such an answer were – and still are – obvious. The sheer size of intellectual energy that was thrown at finding a solution is hard to comprehend – almost as much as the combined impact, and despair, caused by the constant failure to do so.

So here was Popper, living and breathing within the academic circles that prized this epistemological answer so highly, and yet 45 years after delivering it he was again putting pen to paper in the desperate hope that someone, anyone, would listen. He continued: “This chapter is an attempt to explain my views afresh, and in a way which contains a full answer to my critics.” And so that anger and impatience begins to make a little more sense.  

The unusual fizz about Karl Popper sits somewhere between what he did and how he was treated. Popper clearly expected more of a celebration, or at the bare minimum a type of noisy recognition – after all the most important question in all of philosophy now had an answer. That he couldn’t see how badly his solution would be received is a little hard to understand. It was as if Popper were a doctor treating a young and excited woman. She walks into his clinic, affectionately rubbing her swollen belly, and tells him that she is five months pregnant and would like to know the sex of her unborn baby. Popper runs a few tests and tells her that she is not pregnant at all, just fat! She storms out, and Popper is left bemused, thinking that she would have been happy to learn the truth.

Before Karl Popper came along the world of philosophy had a monstrous hole in it, after Popper the world of philosophy was left wishing it still had the hole. People weren’t just expecting an answer, they were expecting a certain kind of answer. Something a little more beautiful.

And it is here where things become uncomfortable for me. Unlike most Popperians I can see and sympathise with this – I was also very slow to recognise my mistake and to grasp the richer beauty within Popper’s theory. It is a mistake that I continue to make… and one that I don’t always catch. I hinge on other people and their good sense to kick me back into shape. As much as this troubles me, I feel that I am in good company: Karl Popper himself was, it seems, a bad Popperian.

From those lucky enough to have met Popper, there are no shortage of stories that start something like this: I confronted Popper about…, I challenged Popper on…, I criticised Popper for… And invariably such stories end with: not only did he ignore my ideas, but he did so in the petulant tone of a parent annoyed with their child for speaking out of turn.

Central to critical rationalism is a happy embrace of error correction – a desire to be proven wrong and to then change one’s mind. This, and only this, is how progress happens and how we can edge closer to truth. Popper of course was riddled with the failures that his theory lacked – he was human, and he didn’t seem to like criticism very much. Strangely perhaps, this makes me happy – I prefer him flawed and fallible, down in the mud with the rest of us, and with knowledge itself. It also depersonalises the man from the theory, which can’t be a bad thing.

There are a few ways for a philosopher to become immortal, to live on after their death. They could have historical importance like Plato or Aristotle, they could shake imaginations through bombast and excitement like Friedrich Nietzsche or Karl Marx, or they could be right! And what they said could be true!

The mathematician and astronomer, Sir Hermann Bondi, once proudly looked upon the place that all his effort, toil, creativity, success and reputation had come from and described it like this: “There is no more to science than its method, and there is no more to its method than Popper has said”. Here all that discomfort rushes back at me again. The philosophy of Karl Popper has reach… real-world reach. From critical rationalism and the answer to how knowledge is created, we naturally shift into a theory of science; then it is on to art, to morality, to economics, to society, to policy and politics (bad science and bad systems of government have exactly the same thing in common).

Popper will survive because what he said works, and it works in every realm of life where truth matters. And yet anything this big, with such a nerve-rackingly large scope onto the world, and with such success, also, quite unavoidably, has the ring of a fraud to it. Trained through experience the mind unpleasantly jumps to the back-woods footprints and late night crop circles of conspiracy theory.

The line that matters here is between science and pseudo-science; with Popper’s anger now steeled onto Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Sigmund Freud. The demarcation that Popper cut between these two types of knowledge-seeking is most easily understood in terms of behaviour: how do theories deal with the prospect of being proven wrong. Everything that has ever come from Popper not only opens itself to criticism and dissolution, but also in new, hearty, and enterprising ways that were made possible only by Popper himself. Popper may not have been very good at dealing with criticism, but his theory is!

To learn that you are wrong should be a very liberating experience, because to learn that you are wrong is to also learn how and where you can improve. It stops you from continuing in error. It also means that objective truth – whether or not we can ever get to it – must exist, because if it is possible to be wrong then it is also possible to be right. And the bigger our mistakes, the bigger the possible leap forward.

By turning around the science of Francis Bacon in this way, and forcing people to abandon their long-trained instincts (criticism is often a deeply unpleasant and resented experience for most people, regardless of how mild it is) Popper was never likely to win many quick friends. He would have to wait, much too long perhaps, for people to slowly recognise the wealth of his philosophy within their individual lives.

Most troubling for many though, is likely the problem of what happens next. No matter how much effort and criticism and destruction of false theories we move through, there can never be a point of revelation and light where finally the words: this I know is certainly true, can ever be said. Every truth about the world that we hold dear, and seems unshakably solid, is always just delicately balanced on the precipice of refutation and collapse. It means that no matter where we step-to after discovering and correcting a mistake, that new place, that new strong-hold, not only might be a blunder of some kind as well, but almost definitely is. The only hope we have, is that this new mistake turns out to be also a slightly better mistake than the last one; and that we discover this new error as quickly as possible, so that we can move on to the next one after that.

Popper demands something painful from us – he demands that we become careful and well-suffering adults. Here is where things become most uncomfortable for me. I don’t match-up well to this standard. I am persuaded, the ideas sink-in and capture me, but each day and with most of my language, I fail! The automatic vocabulary of our societies and our everyday instincts fall well short of Popper, and it drags me back-under and into error. Words like certainty, authority, validity and surety have no place when it comes to objective truth, and yet I use them all the time!

All this despite the fact that Popper writes so clearly and with such straightforward prose.

It is hard to think of truth as something out there to be found, something that we can get closer to, and yet also something that we can never actually grasp (even if it were discovered, we would have no way of recognising it as such). Especially while also accepting that the quest for truth – through Popperian conjecture and refutation – isn’t wasted, in fact it is the complete opposite. This endless struggle is how we improve things, how we make progress, how we survive and make life increasingly rich.

This is a lived-in philosophy, a philosophy of big questions and real world problems; it is a rejection of Ludwig Wittgenstein and a return to what matters. But philosophy, science, reason, truth, are only possible as a social activity – it cannot be done well by oneself. You need to be imposed upon by new directions and perspectives, to be poked at and punched with all the things that you hadn’t thought of by yourself. It all needs to be adversarial.

You need the voices of other people.

Here they are…

Karl Popper’s Epistemological Swamp (Prologue)

Groggy and bruised, you wake up somewhere in the depths of a dark swamp. You have no memory, no sense of who you are or how you got there, and no indication or clues for how to get out. To make matters worse, as you are pulling yourself together you discover that you are also, now, blind.

Through the darkness and the fear, you wait, scared to move and hoping for some elegant form of rescue. And as you wait, things begin to get worse. The horrible smell catches your nose, mud slides further and further up your shins, leeches start to burrow into your skin, the waist deep water feels sharp and cold, and you begin to sense the close movement of large predators.

Everything that you touch is painful and life threatening. Standing up as tall as you can, you are sure of only one thing: you want to improve your situation, you want to get out. And so you must do something, no matter what it is. To stay where you are is to suffer and soon die.

Not knowing where to go is one thing, but you also don’t know where you are, where it is that you are starting from. There are no landmarks, no map, no compass bearing, no possible foundation that could work as a guide or a starting point. You could be anywhere in this swamp – close to an edge, in the absolute middle, or somewhere in-between.

Scared of what you don’t know, you take a tentative step forward, and stop. You try to feel around for changes in the consistency of the mud, the objects under foot, the temperature of the water, the amount of unsettling animal activity – anything by which you might judge whether that step was an improvement or a mistake; anything to judge whether you are going in the right direction.

You take another step. And another.

You never know whether you are taking the correct path to freedom, but you always know when you aren’t (you tread on something sharp, the mud feels thicker, something blocks your way, an animal bites you…).

In such moments your first instinct is to turn around and retrace your steps. But soon you learn to apply a little more nuance. Where you started from was also uncomfortable, also unsafe, so going back doesn’t get you any closer to escaping from, nor surviving, this wetland. Increasingly you respond to obstacles and dangers by changing direction altogether and plotting new courses.

It is painstaking, frustrating and slow. But with each new mistake and misstep you learn a little more about your environment. A map of where you have been begins to build in your mind, but more importantly you begin to develop a feel for your new home, new ways to judge the things you encounter, new ways to understand the swamp and its challenges.

Every time you solve a problem you seem to discover a new one. But with this bank of knowledge behind you, each new problem also feels a little better than the last: how you treated your last illness helps you treat the next one, insights from difficult landscapes helps you to traverse future terrain, and encounters with old predators helps you to understand and avoid new ones.

Soon you are thriving, crisscrossing your way through the swamp with evermore speed and evermore comfort. With so many mistakes behind you and so many problems solved, everything you are now doing feels like progress, like you are finally going in the right direction.

The ground under your feet is more solid, the mud less and less thick, the mosquitoes less aggressive, and large animals see you more and more as a threat and not as a food source. You are sure of it, you are winning. You are walking your way up an incline and out of the marsh once and for all, saying to yourself in dumb amazement, “of course this is the way, it is obvious. How could I have ever thought otherwise?”

Then with your next step the ground disappears under your feet, and you plunge below the water. That steady incline that you thought was the way out, was in fact just a sandbar in an otherwise deeper and more inhospitable part of the swamp. And you have just gone over its edge.

Up to your neck, cold, struggling to breathe, and swimming just to stay above the sludge, you desperately start feeling around in the darkness for something, anything that might be an improvement. Again, as before, and as always, to stay where you are is to suffer and soon die…

But you are lucky! You have made another mistake! And so despite how bad things might feel right now, you are better off than you were before you made it. Because you now also know more than you did before.