Popper’s Shifting Appraisal of Evolutionary Theory

First, a brief history is provided of Popper's views on the status of evolutionary biology as a science. The views of some prominent biologists are then canvassed on the matter of falsifiability and its relation to evolutionary biology. Following that, I argue that Popper's programme of falsifiability does indeed exclude evolutionary biology from within the circumference of genuine science, that Popper's programme is fundamentally incoherent, and that the correction of this incoherence results in a greatly expanded and much more realistic concept of what is empirical, resulting in the inclusion of evolutionary biology. Finally, this expanded concept of empirical is applied to two particular problems in evolutionary biology -viz., the species problem and the debate over the theory of punctuated equilibria -and it is argued that both of them are still mainly metaphysical.

Borderless Philosophy 6 (2023): 218-230, 2023

Is humankind worth saving from whatever might threaten it, if not, then why not, and if so, then why and how? To answer these questions, it is necessary to define the philosophical concept of “human being.” Today, there are several approaches: the human being as a person, the human being as any representative of the Homo genus, the human being as a representative of the species classified as Homo sapiens, human beings as all people collectively, human beings as a phenomenon beyond living nature, and so on. At the beginning of our discussion, a brief natural-scientific overview will be required. I then propose to consider the new quality of human existence as a social-cognitive system. After that, I will sequentially discuss the importance of language, time systems in language, and the definition of the absolute problem. I propose an improvement of the scheme suggested by Karl Popper in his important article, “Evolutionary Epistemology” (Popper, 1985). Finally, I offer a hypothesis for an all-encompassing philosophical definition of the term “human being.” By virtue of this hypothesis, I will provide answers to the questions raised at the outset.

Popper is well known for rejecting a logic of discovery, but he is only justified in rejecting the same type of logic of discovery that is denied by consequentialism. His own account of hypothesis generation, based on a natural selection analogy, involves an error-eliminative logic of discovery and the differences he admits between biological and conceptual evolution suggest an error-corrective logic of discovery. These types of logics of discovery are based on principles of plausibility that are used in the generation as opposed to the preliminary evaluation of hypotheses. The normative relevance of these principles is grounded in the distinction between strategic and definitory rules.

Presented at 'Technology, Knowledge, Truth' Conference held by the Melbourne Society for Continental Philosophy, Dec. 13-15th 2017

Karl Popper's falsificationist demarcation of science from non-science rests on a specific ontological commitment to what he calls his 'naive realism'. The self-conscious 'naivete' here lies in the undefined - and for Popper largely undefinable - nature of this reality. All that his falsificationist protocol requires of it is that it be objective - that is to say, that neither our thoughts, nor beliefs or justifications bear on it or its ‘contents’. It is what it is, and nothing we have to say on the matter can alter it one jot. He doesn't, I think, seek to claim that this objective reality exhausts the possibilities of the real - he does not, for example, deny the existence of subjective states. But he does claim an independence of objective reality from those states (though the reverse does not hold true). However, I think it is possible, on the basis of Popper's own arguments, to say more about the character of this objective reality in ways that neither invalidate nor contradict Popper's arguments, but do enrich them in useful ways - philosophically at least. The paper will argue that the terms of what Popper calls his 'evolutionary epistemology' require us to understand the objectivity of this external reality to consist not of actual or material terms', but rather of relations that are external to the terms they relate. More precisely, it consists of relations between relations, which is to say, differential relations. In this light, Popper's external reality, the guarantor of his falisificationist demarcation, appears as not as a realm of actual things, but of virtual problems. What I would like to do, then, is to read Popper in and on his own terms, but 'behind his back' as a philosopher of difference in a Deleuzian mode. In doing so, I seek to follow through on Bergson's (and perhaps Deleuze's) aim of adding to science the metaphysics that it lacks (and does not want) in terms derived from (Popperian) sciences own methodological assumptions in ways that both complicate and shed light on the very demarcation those assumptions seek to defend.

The primary purpose of this paper is to argue that biologists should stop citing Karl Popper on what a genuinely scientific theory is. Various ways in which biologists cite Popper on this matter are surveyed, including the use of Popper to settle debates on methodology in phylogenetic systematics. It is then argued that the received view on Popper-namely, that a genuinely scientific theory is an empirically falsifiable one-is seriously mistaken, that Popper's real view was that genuinely scientific theories have the form of statements of laws of nature. It is then argued that biology arguably has no genuine laws of its own. In place of Popperian falsifiability, it is suggested that a cluster class epistemic values approach (which subsumes empirical falsifiability) is the best solution to the demarcation problem between genuine science and pseudo-or non-science.

Philosophy, 1969

Popper Proposed the criterion of falsifiability as a solution to the problem of demarcation i.e. of distinguishing science from pseudo-science and not, as many of his contemporaries in the Vienna Circle mistook it to be, a solution to the quite different problem with which they themselves were preoccupied, viz. of providing a criterion of meaning to distinguish the meaningful from the meaningless. While the positivists were concerned to damn metaphysics and exalt science, by identifying the empirically verifiable with the meaningful, Popper was concerned to separate science from scientism, to damn astrology and to extol astronomy. In other words his preoccupation belongs not to the philosophy of language but to the philosophy of science.

2013

Abstract: The very title of my paper may cause many eyebrows to be raised. For anyone who is familiar with Popper’s philosophy of science knows well that he distinguished clearly between two types of historical processes, namely, the process of conceiving a new scientific theory or idea and the methods of examining it logically, and asserted that the task of the philosophers is not to ponder on these actual thinking processes whereby a new scientific theory comes into being. The logical analysis of scientific knowledge, instead, is restricted to an examination of contents of linguistically formulated scientific theories and of the post-generational evaluative procedures of scientists. One might naturally ask what then the point behind an inquiry like this is since Popper himself was mainly concerned with post-generational justification and bequeathed the detailed study of theory creation to the psychologists and the historians. There are two principal reasons which motivated this ex...

The very title of my paper may cause many eyebrows to be raised. For anyone who is familiar with Popper's philosophy of science knows well that he distinguished clearly between two types of historical processes, namely, the process of conceiving a new scientific theory or idea and the methods of examining it logically, and asserted that the task of the philosophers is not to ponder on these actual thinking processes whereby a new scientific theory comes into being. The logical analysis of scientific knowledge, instead, is restricted to an examination of contents of linguistically formulated scientific theories and of the post-generational evaluative procedures of scientists. One might naturally ask what then the point behind an inquiry like this is since Popper himself was mainly concerned with post-generational justification and bequeathed the detailed study of theory creation to the psychologists and the historians. There are two principal reasons which motivated this examination. Firstly, what is generally found as the Popperian notion of creativity and scientific discovery in the literature of philosophy of science is reasonably different from what closer readings of his earlier and later works reveal. Secondly, an analysis like this can illuminate problems of theory change and scientific progress, which undoubtedly are important to philosophy of science in general and Popper in particular. This implies a crucial point, namely, that progress of scientific knowledge, contrary to what philosophers of science generally used to believe, is not the subject matter of a single discipline. In this paper I attempt to make apparent the shortcomings that the disciplinary splitting of the topic of advancement of knowledge (in science) entails.

Theology and Science

The theory of evolution continues to be a bone of contention among certain groups of theistic believers. This paper aims to bring some light to the debate about it, by introducing a framework for epistemic appraisal which can provide a realistic and sober assessment of the epistemic credentials of the various parts of evolutionary theory. The upshot is a more nuanced epistemic appraisal of the theory of evolution, which shows that there are significant differences in epistemic standing between its various parts. Any serious conversation about the theory of evolution ought to reflect these facts.

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2018

Meno's paradox raises serious challenges against most fundamental epistemological quest regarding the possibility of inquiry and discovery. In his response, Socrates proposes the theory of anamnesis and his ingenious distinction between doxa and episteme. But, he fails in his attempt to solve the paradox and some recent responses have also not succeeded in settling it, satisfactorily. We shall argue that epistemological issues approached in a Darwinian spirit offer a therapeutic resolution without rejecting the basic tenets of Plato's epistemology. Drawing from Popper's evolutionary theory of knowledge, Darwinism is regarded as a metaphysical research program, rather than using it to collapse Plato's metaphysics into biology.