Justin Mallone поделился ссылкой в группе «critical rationalism».
The following excerpt argues that explanations are what is absolutely key in Popperian philosophy, and that Popper over-emphasizes the role of testing in science, but that this mistake was corrected by physicist and philosopher David Deutsch (see especially the discussion of the grass cure example). What do people think?
(excerpted from: https://curi.us/1504-the-most-important-improvement-to-popp…)
--------QUOTED MATERIAL STARTS BELOW HERE--------
Most ideas are criticized and rejected for being bad explanations. This is true even in science where they could be tested. Even most proposed scientific ideas are rejected, without testing, for being bad explanations.
Although tests are valuable, Popper's over-emphasis on testing mischaracterizes science and sets it further apart from philosophy than need be. In both science and abstract philosophy, most criticism revolves around good and bad explanations. It's largely the same epistemology. The possibility of empirical testing in science is a nice bonus, not a necessary part of creating knowledge.
In [The Fabric of Reality], David Deutsch gives this example: Consider the theory that eating grass cures colds. He says we can reject this theory without testing it.
He's right, isn't he? Should we hire a bunch of sick college students to eat grass? That would be silly. There is no explanation of how grass cures colds, so nothing worth testing. (Non-explanation is a common type of bad explanation!)
Narrow focus on testing -- especially as a substitute for support/justification -- is one of the major ways of misunderstanding Popperian philosophy. Deutsch's improvement shows how its importance is overrated and, besides being true, is better in keeping with the fallibilist spirit of Popper's thought (we don't need something "harder" or "more sciency" or whatever than critical argument!).
Комментарии
'I was, and still am, an empiricist of sorts, though certainly not a naive empiricist, who believes that “all knowledge stems from our perception or sense data”. My empiricism consisted in the view that, though all experience was theory-impregnated, it was experience which in the end could decide the fate of a theory, by knocking it out; and also in the view that only such theories which in principle were capable of being thus refuted merited to be counted among the theories of “empirical science”.'
Karl Popper, 'Replies To My Critics', can be found in 'The Philosophy of Karl Popper', ed. P.A. Schilpp.
I did so because it was a mistake. The quote explains why: in both science and philosophy, explanations are fundamental to criticism. Testing is a useful and important thing, but it's possible to give useful and important things too much emphasis.
Explanation: Statement about what is there, what it does, and how and why.
Good/bad explanation: An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for.
For Popper, good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rulers or policies without violence when they are.
(1) Philosophical or metaphysical theories are analysed in their situation to assess the adequacy of the theory as a solution to a problem. "A theory is comprehensible and reasonable only in its relation to a givenproblem-situation, and it can be rationally discussed only by discussing this relation...if we look upon a theory as a proposed solution to a set of problems, then the theory immediately lends itself to critical discussion - even if it is non-empirical and irrefutable. For we can now ask questions such as, Does it solve the problem? Does it solve it better than other theories? Has it perhaps merely shifted the problem? Is the solution simple? Is it fruitful? Does it perhaps contradict other philosophical theories needed for solving other problems? Questions of this kind show that a critical discussion even of irrefutable theories may well be possible." (see p 199 Conjectures and Refutations)
(2) Logical and mathematical theories are tested by attempted refutation, especially by finding internal contradictions. Decisions in these cases tend to be accepted more often than not as final.
(3) Empirical (scientific) theories, are criticised in a variety of ways but observations (basic statements) are elevated in their role in the critical discussion, hence the notion of falsifiability. The avoidance of scrutiny of over-loved theories can remove the practitioner from the game of science e.g. by adding ad hoc extensions that do not improve the testability. Science, like the other activities, is a rule-governed critical discussion.
My reading of Popper and Deutsch, after Popper, is that how knowledge is created is up for grabs, how it grows is by criticism of which empirical testing is but a very important sub-species.
Tangentially, on another group I encountered a reference to Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry's "Philosophy of Pseudoscience" (2013) which refers to Laudan's 1983 paper "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem". It was implied that Laudan's criticisms make Popper's formulation of the demarcation problem superseded.
David Miller, from "Some Hard Questions for Critical Rationalism" (2011) crisply addresses the point that Popper's demarcation does solve problems, quite specific ones :
"The problem of demarcation is solved much as Popper solved it. This commendation may surprise those who are acquainted with such titles as ‘The Demise of the Demarcation Problem’ (Laudan 1983) and ‘The Degeneration of Popper’s Theory of Demarcation’ (Grunbaum 1989), or the writings of Kuhn (1962) and Lakatos (1973, 1974). But like many others, the authors of these criticisms thoroughly mistake the crucial philosophical task that Popper intended a criterion of demarcation to perform. Its task is not to ‘distinguish scientific and non-scientific matters in a way which exhibits a surer epistemic warrant or evidential ground for science than for non-science’, which Laudan lays down as a minimal condition for ‘a philosophically significant demarcation’, nor is it ‘to explicate the paradigmatic usages of 'scientific'. Questions of sureness, warrant, and grounds, are of interest principally to justificationists who live in mighty dread that they may not be ‘entitled to believe any scientific theories’; questions of usage, classification, and status, are of interest principally to essentialists, to philosophers who prefer to pursue philosophy unphilosophically, and to educational administrators; and inevitably, of course, to lawyers. Contrary to what Grunbaum resolutely supposes, the problem of demarcation is only incidentally concerned to ratify the unscientific status of psychoanalytic theory (whatever psychoanalytic theory is taken to be),and contrary to what Lakatos likewise supposes, it is only incidentally concerned to ratify the scientific status of Newton’s theory (whatever Newton’s theory is taken to be)."
What then is the problem that for Popper demarcation is trying to solve?
"'It was, rather, an urgent practical problem: under what conditions is a critical appeal to experience possible - one that could bear some fruit?' (Popper) Here is a clear philosophical, even logical, problem: under what circumstances is an empirical investigation worth undertaking? The solution is also clear: since the formulation of a hypothesis, its acceptance as a candidate for the truth, must precede its consideration, the task of an empirical investigation cannot be to promote hypotheses, but only to demote them."
Government welfare can't do this part of the optimization problem we're trying to solve (as an attempted explanation of how to optimize efficiency, it seems not to account for the requires-local-knowledge explicanda)
Are there any criticisms that are not of that form or either of the two previously mentioned forms?
Those are DDs 3 criteria for a theory being problematic in The Logic of Experimental Tests
I signed up my email; shouldn't I get emails from the discussion group or something?
this would be easier to discuss if you used a quote instead of "it". i don't know what "it" is. is it the quote i gave? as i said that is not a *form* of an argument (or criticism). if you think it is, then i don't think you know what a "form" is.
So, substituting, you meant: "Criticism is a form of a criticism"
what?
i think you need to use a forum with quoting and then use quotes.
I'll use your discussion forum, but I still don't understand why it's better than Facebook. I can just use > quotes if I want to
Most of the day-to-day business of science consists in making observations or experiments designed to find out whether this imagined world of our hypotheses corresponds to the real one. An act of imagination, a speculative adventure, thus underlies every improvement of natural knowledge.”
Peter Medawar, 'The Limits of Science'.
The following excerpt argues that explanations are what is absolutely key in Popperian philosophy, and that Popper over-emphasizes the role of testing in science, but that this mistake was corrected by physicist and philosopher David Deutsch (see especially the discussion of the grass cure example). What do people think?
(excerpted from: https://curi.us/1504-the-most-important-improvement-to-popp…)
--------QUOTED MATERIAL STARTS BELOW HERE--------
Most ideas are criticized and rejected for being bad explanations. This is true even in science where they could be tested. Even most proposed scientific ideas are rejected, without testing, for being bad explanations.
Although tests are valuable, Popper's over-emphasis on testing mischaracterizes science and sets it further apart from philosophy than need be. In both science and abstract philosophy, most criticism revolves around good and bad explanations. It's largely the same epistemology. The possibility of empirical testing in science is a nice bonus, not a necessary part of creating knowledge.
In [The Fabric of Reality], David Deutsch gives this example: Consider the theory that eating grass cures colds. He says we can reject this theory without testing it.
He's right, isn't he? Should we hire a bunch of sick college students to eat grass? That would be silly. There is no explanation of how grass cures colds, so nothing worth testing. (Non-explanation is a common type of bad explanation!)
Narrow focus on testing -- especially as a substitute for support/justification -- is one of the major ways of misunderstanding Popperian philosophy. Deutsch's improvement shows how its importance is overrated and, besides being true, is better in keeping with the fallibilist spirit of Popper's thought (we don't need something "harder" or "more sciency" or whatever than critical argument!).
While I can't delve for quotes right now, I can say that Popper suggested we try to come up with the best theories we can (these include ones that on the face of it are "highly unlikely"), as opposed to, say, feeding every permutation of possible explanation into a computer and testing (which isn't to say this is possible).
Having said that, it remains true that some of our supposed "best theories" have turned out to be false, and some oddball theories have withstood tests better than established ones. The conclusion, however, isn't that due to our ignorance, all theories are true (for all we know); it's just that we lack the criterion to identify one as true. We may rule theoretical "long-stretches" because there isn't time nor money in the world to dream of testing them, but a few of them may be true after all...
It's not a grammatical error in CR. As you probably know from reading Popper and Miller, a theory isn't really "likely" or not, a "long stretch" or not, they just may appear to us that way. Likelihood is a subjective (and therefore irrelevant) false metric, since something is true or not. Likewise with best theories.
“A scientific theory is not one which explains everything that can possibly happen: on the contrary, it rules out most of what could possibly happen, and is therefore itself ruled out if what it rules out happens. So a genuinely scientific theory places itself permanently at risk. (…) Falsifiability is the criterion of demarcation between science and non-science. The central point is that if all possible states of affairs fit in with a theory then no actual state of affairs, no observations, no experimental results, can be claimed as supporting evidence for it. There is no observable difference between its being true and its being false. So it conveys no scientific information. Only if some imaginable observation would refute it is it testable. And only if it is testable is it scientific.”
Bryan Magee, 'Popper' (the US-version of the booklet has the title 'Philosophy and the Real World: an Introduction to Karl Popper'). The booklet is a masterpiece.
Karl Popper, 'Conjectures and Refutations'.
"what do you think those quotation marks mean?"
I don't have to guess what they mean, as I'm the person using them. They mean only that I'm using them in the more or less standard sense, whereas the quotation marks indicate they're not really relevant (or correct for that matter; as I wrote, it would be strange to call a true theory a "long-shot"...).
I thought the discussion was about whether mental rejection of hypotheses without testing represents an important improvement on Popper's epistemology or not (the affirmative connoting he didn't claim this). Whether or not I correctly used quotation marks (even after explaining why) strikes me as irrelevant to this issue.
From CMoS 15, 7.58:
“Scare quotes.” Quotation marks are often used to alert readers that a term is used in a nonstandard, ironic, or other special sense. Nicknamed “scare quotes,” they imply, “This is not my term” or “This is not how the term is usually applied.”