The other thread was almost filled up, so I'm starting Part II on a new thread here. (To catch up, have a look at Part I here:
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1409387).
In Part I, I proposed famous Austrian philosopher Karl Popper as a case study in how smart people can wind up holding insane beliefs. I noted that it was his attempt to solve a famous philosophical problem, David Hume's "Problem of Induction" (which I described in Part I), which led him into trouble. I want to describe that process here in hopes we don't make the same kinds of thinking mistakes. After all, our thinking is no longer guided by senile religious charlatans in diapers, and we must learn to make our own way in the world.
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Popper first encountered David Hume's "Problem of Induction" while studying philosophy at the University of Vienna in the 1920's. He described his response in his book, "Conjectures and Refutations", pages 55-56:
"Hume, I felt, was perfectly right in pointing out that induction cannot be logically justified...(A)n attempt to justify the practice of induction by an appeal to experience must lead to an infinite regress...I found Hume's refutation of inductive inference clear and conclusive."
Popper reiterated his findings in his book "Objective Knowledge", describing Hume's elucidation of this problem as “an almost flawless gem” which “proves that no positive solution” to it is possible (see his "Objective Knowledge", pages 88 and 90).
For Popper, the issue was settled. Induction was incorrigibly irrational. It therefore had to be entirely rejected. By extension, so did every other philosophy of science, since they all allowed for induction. The world needed a new philosophy of science - the one, true philosophy. And Popper would be the one to discover it, and reveal it, to the world.
So, for Popper, what was that one, true philosophy?
Well, given his pre-commitments, it of course had to be one which entirely rejected induction. And because Popper, following Hume, accepted that there are only two main forms of reasoning - induction and deduction - the one, true philosophy of science had to be exclusively deductive.
What is deduction?
Deduction is the form of reasoning which lets us know whether certain conclusions follow from certain premises.
Just one example:
Premise 1: All A's are B's (All pygmies are humans);
Premise 2: All B's are C's (All humans are mammals);
Conclusion: All A's are C's (All pygmies are mammals).
The problem (for Popper) is that deduction *only* tells us about logical relationships between premises and conclusions. It tells us nothing about the real world itself. So how did Popper deal with this problem?
Quite easily, as it turns out: he simply followed the logic. And the logic went like this:
Premise 1: Deduction is the only valid form of reasoning;
Premise 2: Deduction can yield no knowledge about the world;
Conclusion: Therefore, knowledge about the world does not exist.
Allow me to repeat that: Karl Popper, one of the most celebrated philosophers of science ever, concluded that *knowledge about the world does not exist*. Popper flew in airplanes, rode in cars, watched television, and took medication, yet maintained until his death that nothing could be known. (And you thought Mormons had closed minds...)
No doubt, at this very moment, dozens of RFM readers are gearing up to push "reply" in order to announce that I'm "taking Popper out of context" and that I've "misunderstood his philosophy of science", after which they'll quote Popper talking very plainly about "knowledge", "scientific discovery", etc.
Please, friends, give me a few paragraphs to preemptively address those objections, because they are the result of a big misunderstanding.
That misunderstanding arises because of Popper's rampant habit of equivocation. (Equivocation is a fallacy. It is the use of the same word to mean different things). That habit often obscures what Popper really means. (Below, I'll post references to match up with the Q-number, so you can check everything).
Consider Popper's use of the word "knowledge". For Popper, the idea that the word *knowledge* refers to, or implies – well, *knowledge* – is mistaken. Rather, scientific “knowledge” is not a “species of knowledge” at all (Q1). It is actually a species of "guessing" (Q2, Q3, Q4, Q5, Q6) which is often “not true”; for we can never find any positive reasons to believe that any scientific theory is true (Q7, Q8), or even more probable than another (!) (Q9). Thus, not only is actual knowledge about the world impossible (Q10, Q11, Q12, [Q3, Q4]), but *any belief about the world at all is, by definition, irrational* (Q13).
Popper even openly admits that his denial that any belief about the world can be rational “is as unambiguously negative as that of any irrationalist” [RA, 19]). Well, yes. (And I would add that it takes a very special sort of person to acknowledge that his philosophical conclusion is the same as that of any irrationalist, while still denying that he himself is an irrationalist.)
In other words, confusion abounds - even amongst many philosophy professors - about Popper's philosophy because people miss the outrageous extent of his equivocation. Through it, Popper synonymizes “knowledge” with “theory”, “theory” with “hypothesis”, “hypothesis” with “conjecture”, and “conjecture” with “guess”. That is, he synonymizes "knowledge" with "the absence of knowledge". The linguistic chicanery in Popper is literally as bad as anything we used to read in the old FARMS pieces.
In any case, here are just a few quotes in which Popper denies the possibility of knowledge about the world, and in which you can start to get a feel for his rampant equivocation:
(Q1) “...I suggested that the whole trouble was due to the mistaken assumption that scientific knowledge was a species of knowledge - knowledge in the ordinary sense in which if I know that it is raining, it must be true that it is raining, so that knowledge implies truth. But, I said, what we call 'scientific knowledge' was hypothetical, and often not true, let alone certainly or probably true (in the sense of the calculus of probability). Again, the audience took this for a joke, or a paradox, and they laughed and clapped. I wonder whether there was anybody there who suspected that not only did I seriously hold these views, but that, in due course, they would be widely regarded as commonplace”. ("Unended Quest", p. 125-126).
(Q2) “(The scientist) can never know for certain whether his findings are true. One may formulate this 'third view' of scientific theories briefly by saying that they are genuine conjectures - highly informative guesses about the world which although not verifiable (i.e., capable of being shown to be true) can be submitted to severe critical tests” ("Conjectures and Refutations", p. 154).
(Q3) “...Theories themselves are guesswork. We do not know; we only guess. If you ask me, 'How do you know?', my reply would be, 'I don't; I only propose a guess”. (CR, pp. 204-205).
(Q4) “Thus the proper answer to Russell's question is: 'I do not know; and as to guesses, never mind how or why I guess what I guess. I am not trying to prove that my guesses are correct...the moment we replace the idea of knowledge by that of guesswork, the apparently 'essential subjectivity' of the theory of knowledge disappears...Thus Russell's fundamental problem needs to be reformulated in terms of guesses..”. ("Realism and the Aim of Science", p. 86-87).
(Q5) “...We must regard all laws or theories as hypothetical or conjectural; that is, as guesses”. ("Objective Knowledge", p. 9).
(Q6) “...All our theories must remain guesses, conjectures, hypotheses”. ("Objective Knowledge", p. 13)
(Q7) “We can never give positive reasons which justify the belief that a theory is true”. (CR, p. 310).
(Q8) “From a rational point of view, we should not ‘rely’ on any theory, for no theory has been shown to be true, or can be shown to be true”. ("Objective Knowledge", p. 21)
(Q9) “Science has nothing to do with the quest for certainty or “Science has nothing to do with the quest for certainty or probability or reliability. We are not interested in establishing scientific theories as secure, or certain, or probable...”. (CR, p. 310).
(Q10) “Nothing can be proved (outside of mathematics and logic)”. (CR, p. 67).
(Q11) “Since all knowledge is theory-impregnated it is all built on sand”. ("Objective Knowledge", p. 105).
(Q12) “We never know what we are talking about”. (Popper’s summary of his philosophy of science, "Unended Quest", p. 26).
(Q13) “Belief, of course, is never rational: it is rational to suspend belief” ("Unended Quest", page 97);
More to come. Comments most welcome.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/22/2014 05:07AM by Tal Bachman.