Popper, Ignorance, and the Emptiness of Fallibilism

2017

Karl Popper is famous for having proposed that science advances by a process of conjecture and refutation. He is also famous for defending the open society against what he saw as its arch enemies – Plato and Marx. Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings are, how it needs to be improved to overcome these failings, and what implications emerge as a result. The book dramatically develops Karl Popper’s views about natural and social science, and how we should go about trying to solve social problems. Criticism of Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of natural science leads to a new philosophy of science, which I call aim-oriented empiricism. This makes explicit metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe that are an implicit part of scientific knowledge – implicit in the way science excludes all theories that are not explanatory, even those that are more successful empirically than accepted theories. Aim-oriented empiricism has major implications, not just for the academic discipline of philosophy of science, but for science itself. Popper generalized his philosophy of science of falsificationism to arrive at a new conception of rationality – critical rationalism – the key methodological idea of Popper’s profound critical exploration of political and social issues in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism. This path of Popper, from scientific method to rationality and social and political issues is followed here, but the starting point is aim-oriented empiricism rather than falsificationism. Aim-oriented empiricism is generalized to form a new conception of rationality – aim-oriented rationalism – which has far-reaching implications for political and social issues, for the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and indeed for academic inquiry as a whole. The strategies for tackling social problems that arise from aim-oriented rationalism improve on Popper’s recommended strategies of piecemeal social engineering and critical rationalism, associated with Popper’s conception of the open society. This book thus sets out to develop Popper’s philosophy in new and fruitful directions. The theme of the book, in short, is to discover what can be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress towards a better world. That there is indeed much to be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress was the big idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. This was immensely influential. But the philosophes of the Enlightenment made mistakes, and these mistakes, inherited from the Enlightenment, are built into the institutional and intellectual structure of academic inquiry today. In his two great works, The Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper corrected some of the mistakes of the Enlightenment – mistakes about the nature of scientific method and rationality. But Popper left other mistakes undetected and uncorrected. The present book seeks to push the Popperian research programme further, and correct what Popper left uncorrected. The fundamental idea that emerges is that there is an urgent need to bring about a revolution in academic inquiry so that it takes up its proper task of promoting wisdom and not just acquiring knowledge – wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides.

As the title of this article indicates, its aim is to investigate in the origins of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. In particular, find out the roots of what for him were at the time the two fundamental problems of the theory of knowledge. Thus, the fundamental questions in this work are: 1. What did Popper know of European philosophers of science that he mentions and criticizes? 2. Where does Popper's anti-inductivism and falsificationism come from? 3. Were Popper's basic positions original? 4. To what extent was Popper in his beginnings a realist philosopher? 5. How contributed Popper to the theory of scientific explanation? 6. What does contemporary scientific instrumentalism owe to Popper? Even if reading this article may cast some doubts on the solidity of Popper's basic approaches, what is indubitable is that Popper is an indispensable figure in the contemporary philosophy of science.

Unlike almost all other philosophers of science, Karl Popper sought to contribute to natural philosophy or cosmology – a synthesis of science and philosophy. I consider his contributions to the philosophy of science and quantum theory in this light. There is, however, a paradox. Popper’s most famous contribution – his principle of demarcation – in driving a wedge between science and metaphysics, serves to undermine the very thing he professes to love: natural philosophy or cosmology. I argue that Popper’s philosophy of science is, in this respect, defective. Science cannot proceed without making highly problematic metaphysical assumptions concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe. Precisely because these assumptions are problematic, rigour requires that they be subjected to sustained critical scrutiny, as an integral part of science itself. Popper’s principle of demarcation must be rejected. Metaphysics and philosophy of science become a vital part of science. Natural philosophy is reborn.

CENTRAL ASIAN JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE, 2022

This paper situates us within the context of an internal conflict in the Philosophy of Karl Popper. On the one hand, Popper is an ardent proponent of scientific realism-the view that science seeks to formulate true theories that depict the structure of the universe; and on the other hand, the very Karl Popper propounds Non-Justificationism in science-a negativist methodology which asserts that the logic of science seeks not the justification but the refutation of theories. This non-justificationism seems asymmetric to the realist optimistic ambition of justifying the reliability of scientific knowledge. To resolve this tension between realism and nonjustificationism in Popper's epistemology some philosophers have proceeded by revising his method of falsification (Imre Lakatos,), others have opted for a reinterpretation of his realism (Evandro Agazzi, Mario Alai,) while some have given an instrumentalist status to popper's rationality of science (Peter Godfrey-Smith, Anthony O'Hear). Our argument in this Paper is that to resolve the contradiction within Popper's rationality of science we have to situate the two conflicting theses (Realism and non-justicationism) within the general problem of Popper's epistemology. That is, the problem of the conditions necessary for the growth of scientific knowledge. Thus, after examining the basic tenets of Popper's realism and illustrating the levels of the opposition between realism and non-justificationism, we have gone beyond other solutions to defend the conflation of realism and non-justificationism as the condition for the growth of knowledge. Popper thus emerges out of our analysis as a 'critical realist' who rejects 'dogmatic optimism' and creates 'critical optimism' in his evolutionary epistemology.

Lettera Matematica International Edition, 2014

A scientific theory must be falsifiable, and scientific knowledge is always tentative, or conjectural. These are the main ideas of Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery. Since 1960 his writings contain some essential developments of these views and make some steps towards epistemological optimism. Although we cannot justify any claim that a scientific theory is true, the aim of science is the search of truth and we have no reason to be sceptical about the notion of getting nearer to the truth. Our knowledge can grow, and science can progress. Nevertheless, Popper’s theory of approximation to the truth is problematic and is still the subject of studies and discussions.

ABSTRACT: It has been readily observed by many Popper scholars that there was something intensely moral about his thought, which I suggest is a moral metaphysics underpinned by a naturalism, which is in keeping with a German tradition exemplified by Schelling. The notion of freedom played a huge part in this. Any scientific or political argument which seems to challenge the existence of freedom is forcefully combated, whether the discussion concerned the discipline of logic, mathematics, physics, biology or politics. For Popper, freedom was everywhere seen at the structural level of differentiated modes of organization in the universe. It was via this discernment freedom’s embeddedness in the universe that his philosophy most closely resembles Schelling’s naturalism. Despite the advances in scientific knowledge that Popper had access to, key themes in Schelling’s thought are recurrent in Popper’s later philosophy. This suggests that we can look at Popper as someone whose thought trajectory projected his life’s philosophy along a similar path away from Kantianism as Schelling’s. It also adds to the rehabilitation of Schelling as a philosopher of science whose thought remains relevant to the current debates.

Philosophy Research Archives, 1976

E-3 'ordinary-language analysis*. Popper argues against such methods in the English-edition preface to The Logic of Scientific Piscovery.-3 To be fair, he is here explicit in his expressed conc e m not to exclude any method philosophers may find helpful in handling their problems. But he does argue that ordinarylanguage analysis investigates common-sense knowledge. If our interest is in such problems as the growth of knowledge, he suggests, our concern should more properly be a study of the sophisticated form of knowledge of the sciences. The im plication that common-sense knowledge is relatively stagnantthat it would tend, much more so than scientific knowledge, to be seen as the final word-would in Popper's view Incline a study of it toward essentialism, i.e. the doctrine that it is possible to arrive at final explanations. I have little doubt that Popper would in general regard conceptual analysis and its cognate methods as forms of essentialism, and therefore to be avoided. He has emphasized that ordinary language is full of theories.** But when these theories are treated as concepts to be analyzed, he would argue, essentialism is the almost inescapable result. Being in this way at the same time attracted and repelled, I attempted to shift the conflict onto Popper, i.e. to see these opposing tendencies as a reflection of a confusion in Popper's position. This paper is the result of that attempt. It is thus a form of internal criticism, within the bounds set by Popper's thought itself. What is the confusion? It is, broadly speaking, that Popper has a well developed set of assumptions concerning the nature of human agents, when his general methodological approach is that no assumptions with the a priori status he grants these should be allowed. These assumptions are contained in his 3 The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New Yorks Harper, 1968), pp. 15-23. Il e.g. Conjectures and Refutations, p. 130. 486

History of European Ideas, 2011

It is an irony to attack a more sceptical epistemology than one’s own in the name of scepticism and defend, instead, an epistemology that is positively illogical. And yet that is what Martin Gardner has done in his “A Skeptical Look at Karl Popper.”

1972

This paper considers objections to Popper's views on scientific method. It is argued that criticism of Popper's views, developed by Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos, are not too damaging, although they do require that Popper's views be modified some¬what. It is argued that a much more serious criticism is that Popper has failed to provide us with any reason for holding that the methodological rules he advocates give us a better hope of realizing the aims of science than any other set of rules. Con¬sequently, Popper cannot adequately explain why we should value scientific theories more than other sorts of theories ; which in turn means that Popper fails to solve adequately his fundamental problem, namely the problem of demarcation. It is sug¬gested that in order to get around this difficulty we need to take the search for explana¬tions as a fundamental aim of science.