Popper and Maxwell on Scientific Progress

Metapsychology Online Reviews, 2018

Nicholas Maxwell is not afraid of big ideas. As the title suggests, this book covers several sweeping topics: aside from those in the title, Maxwell discusses the methodology of social science, interdisciplinarity, quantum mechanics, and more besides. Given the 325-page word-length, this scope inevitably means that the ideas and arguments are frequently underdeveloped. However, despite this proportion of pages to topics, Maxwell's book is clear, accessible, and (most importantly) thought-provoking. It is hard to place a book with such scope into context, but Maxwell's basic philosophical project is simple. Karl Popper's methodology of falsificationism, which was an attempt to analyse the scientific method as a combination of deductive logic and convention, was once a prominent force, but it is out-of-favour today among philosophers. Maxwell presents a modified version of Popper's methodology and applies it to a tremendous range of issues about science and human knowledge. Chapter 1 is a critical exposition of Popper's overall thought, which is notable for breadth, clarity, and accessibility. I have not encountered a definitely superior brief overview of this topic. Maxwell's own methodology of science is advocated in Chapters 2 and 5. In Chapters 4, 6, and 7, he analyses theoretical simplicity, theoretical beauty, and inductive reasoning. In Chapters 3 and 8, he focuses on some specific issues in the history and philosophy of physics. Chapters 9 and 10 shine most brightly. Firstly, Maxwell offers a fiery defence of what he calls 'universalism'-the view that there are questions of universal importance for all human beings, such as 'How do we fit into the world?' and 'How can we improve the world?' He argues that answering these questions is the basic task of intellectual inquiry (though not the sole task) and criticises 'specialism', which is the view that discipline-specific questions are the only intellectual questions worth pursuing. According to Maxwell, contemporary academia is dominated by specialism, and despite recent moves towards interdisciplinarity, almost all academics demur from the big questions. Maxwell does not comment on one of this position's most refreshing features: the notion that there are questions that transcend the political and social issues of the day; questions that were as relevant in the times and places of Socrates or Confucius as they are today; and questions that are fundamentally about what is true rather than what is expedient. Unfortunately, despite his passion and clarity, Maxwell fails to tackle most of the deeper reasons for specialism's popularity among academics (and, perhaps more significantly, administrators). Pragmatists, post-modernists, Marxists, and many others have persuasive arguments why these 'universal' questions have only ephemeral and local value. The politicisation of universities encourages the minds of academics towards the next election or educating the next generation of decision-makers, rather than the (superficially!) abstract basic questions, and there are arguments for this politicisation. I do not think that the

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2012

Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science IX, Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, 1995

It is generally believed that science is a good thing. (I use the term "science", in this paper, to include not only the natural sciences, but also the social sciences and the humanities.) Many people-and, in particular, most scientists-seem to take it for granted that scientific knowledge is valuable for its own sake. In addition, scientific research has very important social effects, and while some of these are generally held to be bad or neutral, I think the predominant view is that the total impact of science on society is positive rather than negative. After all, we do spend a lot of money on science, and scientists have a lot of prestige in our society. This might be explained by the assumption that most people think that science is valuable. (This ought to be the correct explanation, at least in a democracy.) But is the belief true? Is science, on the whole, good or bad? This is the problem I want to discuss in the present paper. 1 Most people would agree that so far science has had some positive as well as some negative effects. For example, it has given us electricity, which may be used to make our lives more comfortable, but it has also given us terrible weapons, which may one day put an end to our very existence. Einstein once described the situation as follows: Penetrating research and keen scientific work have often had tragic implications for mankind, producing, on the one hand, inventions which liberated man from exhausting physical labor, making his life easier and richer; but on the other hand, introducing a grave restlessness into his life, making him a slave to his technological environment, and-most catastrophic of all-creating the means for his own mass destruction. 2 Most people would accept this statement. However, there may be some disagreement over other alleged effects of science. For example, some people may claim that only certain natural sciences, like physics and chemistry, can have negative effects, and that other sciences (including, in particular, the humanities) have only good effects, in addition to being valuable for 1 This paper partly derives from a talk given in January 1990 to a seminar on "Humanistic Aspects of Scientific and Technological Progress" at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. I am grateful to the participants for many helpful comments. I also wish to thank Hans Mathlein, Torbjörn Tännsjö, and Jan Österberg of Stockholm University for comments on the first written version.

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.

When scientists choose one theory over another, they reject out of hand all those that are not simple, unified or explanatory. Yet the orthodox view of science is that evidence alone should determine what can be accepted. Nicholas Maxwell thinks he has a way out of the dilemma.

2016

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

In this paper, three theories of progress and the aim of science are discussed: (i) the theory of progress as increasing explanatory power, advocated by Popper in The logic of scientific discovery (1935/1959); (ii) the theory of progress as approximation to the truth, introduced by Popper in Conjectures and refutations (1963); (iii) the theory of progress as a steady increase of competing alternatives, which Feyerabend put forward in the essay "Reply to criticism. Comments on Smart, Sellars and Putnam" (1965) and defended as late as the last edition of Against method (1993). It is argued that, contrary to what Feyerabend scholars have predominantly assumed, Feyerabend's changing attitude towards falsificationismdwhich he often advocated at the beginning of his career, and vociferously attacked in the 1970s and 1980sdmust be explained by taking into account not only Feyerabend's very peculiar view of the aim of science, but also Popper's changing account of progress.

Philosophia, 2010