Peevish Popperian Philosophy of Science

2002

W.W. Bartley argued that Popper’s original theory of rationality opened itself to a tu quoque argument from the irrationalist and to avoid this Bartley proposed an alternative theory of rationality: pancritical rationalism (PCR). Bartley ‘s PCR leads, however, to a self-referential paradox. David Miller outlaws self-reference (and in this way he avoids PCR’s paradoxical nature) by distinguishing between positions and statements. Miller’s move looks suspiciously like an ad hoc maneuver or a stipulation that has to be accepted dogmatically. Furthermore, Miller’s move seems to be giving up the comprehensive intention of PCR, a comprehensiveness which was PCR’s central claim and aim and which distinguished it from the older non-comprehensive Popperian critical rationalism. Moreover, Miller’s move is inadequate because it is a second world answer (i. e., it involves attitudes or thoughts) to a third world problem, that is, to logical paradox. Key words: Rationality, Critical Rationalism,...

Actual Problems of Mind, 2020

This paper discusses the meaning of non-justificationism as an important part of Karl Popper’s philosophy of critical rationalism and William Bartley’s philosophy of pancritical rationalism. Сonstruals and attempted developments of critical rationalism by David Miller and Alan Musgrave are analysed and critically evaluated. The case is made that Miller’s rejection of the relevance of reasons for rationality runs counter to Popper’s view and is not supported by Popper’s and Bartley’s non-justificationist arguments. Besides, it is untenable because rationality cannot be reduced to the validity of arguments plus truth-value attributing "decisions" but essentially involves weighing up reasons for and against available options. With respect to Musgrave’s construal of non-justificationism and critical rationalism as the view that believing a proposition is rational if the proposition best survives critical scrutiny, it is argued that it is vulnerable to the problem of the infinite regress of criticizers (positions with which the scrutiny is to be carried out). The case is made that Popper’s-Bartley’s non-justificationism is to be understood as the identification of rationality with the openness to critical discussion in the search for truth and the claim that such discussion does not require ultimate unrevisable foundations, although it necessarily involves positions that are accepted for the purposes of the argument at hand without being provided with justification. In the perspective of critical rationalism, such positions play the role similar to that of "immediate knowledge" of classical rationalism and empiricism; however, unlike the latter, they are considered as fallible, open to examination, and revisable.

Journal of The Operational Research Society, 2009

Argumentation and Advocacy, 1984

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, 2nd ed. (Eds.) S. Psillos and M. Curd. London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 70-78

2003

Published in Theory & Science, 2000

Nothing is perfect in an imperfect world-especially science. The postmodern critique of Enlightenment science has driven home that point forcefully. However, despite the harshness of its critique, postmodernism has fallen well short of creating a viable alternative to modern science. In this paper, I argue that the only recourse for postmodernists is to adopt a new orientation to the fundamental pursuit of modernist science: truth.

We live in a time in which we’re dealing with the paradox of reason: the dichotomy between a very powerful “instrumental reason” and the marginality of reason in things that really matter in life, that is in seeking and defining truth (cf the “post-truth”). In this way, a "truth without reason" (the truth of things is found in the world of instincts, etc.) and a "reason without truth" (reason as something irrelevant for concrete life) have been generated. The historical reasons for this process are manifold and the analyses of Benedict XVI in the Regensburg Lecture help us to correctly understand it. Postmodern man has learned to live without reason, and in postmodernism all the non-rational dimensions of life, deeply censored by modernity, have strongly taken up the role denied to them by an almighty reason, the only forma veri according to which only what was rational was true and meaningful in life (cf. M. Maffesoli's lucid analysis of the eternal instant and the primacy of the belly over the head). But a prevalently instrumental reason either defining the age of the technique or configuring "calculating" thought (without the "meditating thought") questions itself about tools but not about aims (cf. Horkeimer-Adorno), and in so doing reason gives up wondering about meaning, that is about the aims, because a purely instrumental reason is interested in how to achieve something, not for what aim. Hence the emergence of the crisis of meaning not as a denial that reality has meaning, but as a proclamation of the nonsense of the quest for meaning. Here we find a singular convergence between Fides et ratio 81 and the analyses of, for example, U. Galimberti. To widen reason, then, means to re-educate it to the truth of meaning, because without meaning humankind can no longer live according to his identity.