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Monday, December 31, 2007
Karl Popper, Who He?
Just this morning I’ve been reading a lecture (PDF) by Karl Popper on his late idea that we inhabit three worlds (the physical, the subjective, and what we might call the cultural, though that’s not what he called it). Does Popper remain an influence or has he passed into history already? And where is he on the analytic-Continental divide? This lecture, for example, has footnotes on the Continental side.
Comments
My impression is that few people take Popper very seriously nowadays—though he does have some devoted followers. (For instance, “a certain fan of Quine” loves him.)
I read the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies in college. I quickly came to feel that it sounded a little too much like (what I regarded as) some crackpot stuff from Eric Voeglin that many of my peers were reading. And so I headed off the cliff of postmodernism and I remain suspended in midair, like a Zizekian cartoon cat—but here’s the thing: I looked down! I don’t know what to make of this. I know that gravity works—but does gravity know that gravity works?!
I came across Popper’s World 1, World 2 and World 3 hypothesis in The Self and its Brain a few years back. I’m not sure this idea was all that influential, in that form, because, as even Popper acknowledges, it is not original to him. He cites Plato as a precursor, and Freud clearly plays a role. Popper may be original in the field of Mind philosophy in seeing the intersubjective sphere (correctly, I think) as an important missing element in understanding mind-body dualism, and Daniel Dennett seems to take up a similar position in his writings.
I think Popper’s work in the philosophy of science is his greatest achievement. Even though it has been superceded in the past several decades, it is still an important touchpoint and foil for new theories about how science works.
The Open Society gets attacked from both the left and the right—but it is also possibly the kind of work that was appropriate at the time it was written. It also, along with John Rawl’s work, opened a door for analytic philosophers to have their say in social philosophy.
The problems around intersubjectivity are raised by Husserl, and since then have been a mainstay of Continental philosophy. Popper’s contribution, with the authority he was able to throw around at the time, may have been to show that it could also be a philosophical problem of interest to Analytic philosophers, also.
But then again, I’m not sure it was ever that influential, anyways, so who knows…
FWIW, the Popper article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says nothing about the three worlds:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
Popper, I think, is taken far more seriously by scientists than by current philosophers of science (Indeed, just plug in the words “Popper” and “Phylogenetics” in Google Scholar and you’ll get several thousand results). I’ve just been reading a new paper by David Stamos (Philosophy, York Univ) in Acta Biotheoretica (doi:10.1007/s10441-007-9025-6):
``The philosopher Karl Popper is enormously popular with natural scientists in general and biologists in particular. But is this popularity warranted? In this paper I argue that it is not, and that biologists should stop citing Popper on what a genuine scientific theory is, or on what good science is. This is not to say, however, that Popper should be entirely forgotten.’’
There is for many scientists an essential rightness in Poppers description of science that working scientists find congenial. But things have moved on: one place to see where is a lovely little book review by Cosma Shalizi, http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/error/ , which besides being a fairly good informal characterization of Popper and Post-Popper philosophy of science, is very funny:
``Karl Popper achieved (fully deserved) eminence by tenacious insistence on the importance of this point, becoming a sort of Lenin of the philosophy of science. Instead of conferring patents of epistemic nobility, lawdoms and theoryhoods, on certain hypotheses, Popper hauled them all before an Anglo-Austrian Tribunal of Revolutionary Empirical Justice.’’
In the philosophy of science, Popper’s the guy you learn in your first part of the course. He’s arguably the father of philosophy of science as a distinct philosophical sub-genre from epistemology, language and logic etc.
I think that, as David points out, his popularity nowadays is much greater among scientists than among philosophers of science who have all, frankly, moved on.
Scientists like him because he’s a stick to beat people with. His demarcation criteria don’t work (they tend to rule out Big Theory stuff like evolution and the Big Bang) and have been thoroughly debunked but it’s a useful tool in the politics of ideas. If you look at the court cases surrounding creationism for example, you’ll see the concept of pseudoscience trotted out.
Besides philosophy of science and “the open society”, Popper had an influence on the idea of “procedural democracy”, which was a way of stripping “democracy” of all populism, and he also rejected predictive determinism and simple minded materialist reductionism.
I think of him as transitional in a slef-defeating way. He played a role in driving the old prophetic metaphysical “big picture” philosophers out of philosophy in favor of exact technical philosophy, but he was a big-picture, multi-interest, non-specilist philoaopher so he got excluded too. I believe that by now he’s little read in philosophy departments, except in order to set up refutations of his work by Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Foucault, and others.
In Britain the studnets of Ernest Gellner soewhat continued Poper’s tradition, mostly in political philosophy but also in anti-relativism. Gellner has an anti-Wittgensteinian and ended up less influential than he wished within the university. I highly recommend his “Language and Solitude”, a sort of summing up—I disagree with it but he certainly makes a nice, thick, interesting case.
And then there is George Soros, who named his foundation after a Popper concept (the Open Society Institute) and put Gellner to work in Central Europe.
Bill Benzon has asked an interesting question. I found Adam Kotsko’s initial dismissal of Popper to be smug and flippant, and was worried that the rest of the thread would have the same tone. Luckily the other posts have been more insightful (thanks especially to David for the article reference). Nevertheless, we seem to have adopted the attitude that only fuddy-duddy natural scientists still like Popper, while everyone who’s in the know has moved on. I wonder if there’s a stronger case to be made for him.
I don’t know myself if scientists (as opposed to philosophers of science) “love” Popper. But if this is generally true, then Popper is still important, by definition. I was particularly struck by Jonathan M’s mention of court cases involving creationism. Somehow I doubt that Thomas Kuhn’s work would be relevant in such a context. When we need to fight off the creationists we’ll probably turn to Popper’s “line of demarcation” between science and pseudoscience--the idea that scientific propositions are falsifiable, and pseudoscientific ones can’t ever be proven wrong. Then the rest of the time, I suppose, humanities people will call Popper old hat. Yet it’s ironic that we do so.
I admit I took an interest in this post because I entered a PhD program in Sociology before turning to the humanities later on. I suspect that Popper is still important in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. Max Weber’s foundational essay “‘Objectivity’ in the Social Sciences” anticipates Popper in constructing a falsifiability model for historical sociology. And I would describe several of my professors as Popperian in their thinking. In particular, my Sociology of Deviance prof emphasized that to be scientific, a sociological theory must be empirical (it must deal with facts that other sociologists can check) and
falsifiable (it must be capable of being proved wrong). Of course his take on theory and methodology was more complex than just this, but it involved a kind of modified Popperianism; no one had simply “moved on” from Popper’s thought. But it’s been years since I was in this program, so it would be interesting to hear from those who are still in the social sciences.
Another example of Popper’s continued relevance would be the debate right here at the Valve over the complete translation of Michel Foucault’s “History of Madness.” I’ll just mention this briefly since the argument led to so much bitterness. But it seemed to me that the debate was between people who were, let’s say, less concerned with “empirical justice,” and people who were more Popperian in their outlook (this would include Andrew Scull, Scott Eric Kaufman and Luther Blissett, who rightly remarked that Foucault is a descendant of Montaigne whose main concern as an essayist is to be interesting, not to search for historical truth).
In sum, my impression is that various academics still consider Popper an important thinker, not just cranks or natural scientists (whom I wouldn’t treat condescendingly in any case). John Emerson writes: “I believe that by now he’s little read in philosophy departments, except in order to set up refutations of his work by Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Foucault, and others.” I’m baffled by this statement. When did Foucault ever “refute” anything that Popper said? It seems to me the reverse: Popper’s thought is a useful tool for refuting the historical hokum that Foucault sometimes produced.
It’s ironic that a comment complaining of my smug flippancy about Popper (incidentally, I will confess to flippancy in my comment, but not smugness) ends with smug flippancy about Foucault! Blog comments are fun.
I never said that Foucault refuted Popper. I said that philosophy departments teach his work only in order to refute it. I suppose I could have thrown in some scare quotes there, but regular Valve readers know that I am not in any respect a friend of the philosophy departments.
The claim that Popper is hardly taught in US philosophy departments came from an infuriated Popperian, but I have no documentation.
I don’t think Popper was taught in the Philosophy Department at Johns Hopkins when I was there, late 60s. I don’t know exactly how I found my way to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, but it wasn’t through course-work anywhere.
I’d like to hear from all of these natural scientists supposedly reading Popper. I’m sure there are some, but most of the ‘hard’ scientists I know get their ideas about science from other scientists, not philosophers of science, whether they’re Popper, Dennett, or Aristotle. My point being I guess that the criterion for relevance should should not come from that direction at all, since by extension we should all also be debating Aristotle’s relevance. Perhaps the analytic/continental question is decisive here…
They don’t read Popper, but that doesn’t stop his ideas colouring the way they see the world just through cultural osmosis.
It’s similar to the way that most physicists tend to be intrumentalists about whether the objects they talk about actually exist as anything other than handy abstractions. They don’t necessarily read Bas van Fraassen but they pick up the ideas simply because those are the ideas that underpin the lectures they attended as undergrads.
Popper really is the court philosopher of physicists. String theory has become a controversial subject in physics lately because people have raised the possibility that it’s not falsifiable, in that there is no clear set of experiments that would allow us to conclude that string theory was wrong. The blog Not Even Wrong has more on this line of argument. The title comes from a quote of Wolfgang Pauli’s, that a theory is “not even wrong.” The blog author argues that string theory is not even wrong, i.e. not falsifiable.
Most economist profess falsificationism. The philosophy behind frequentist statistics is implicitly falsificationism. (Interestingly, analytic philosophers seem to reject frequentist statistics, from what I can tell.)
I’d like to quibble with David’s interpretation of Shalizi. I would say that Shalizi is clearly a Popperian; it’s just that Popper literally applied is too stringent of a criterion. If 99.9% of experiments found an effect predicted by a theory, physicists would conclude that the theory was true, and that the other 0.1% of experiments were screwy, while a strict Popperian would be forced to throw the theory out. Shalizi endorses this form of falsificationism, which has been given a more philosophical form by Deborah Mayo.
Evidence for Jonathan M’s thesis. An economist once said to me that something was “like finding a black swan.” I asked him if he got that from Popper. He had no idea who I was talking about.
It seems to me that, in general, the philosophy of science has taken physics as its prototypical science. And that’s probably where falsification makes most sense, even if it’s a bit too stringent to apply in reality.
Given that biologists, as David has said, are fond of Popper, I find that a bit odd. I’m thinking in particular of the empirical base on which Darwin’s work was founded, 300 years or so of descriptive naturalist observation of flora and fauna. Without those descriptions he’d have had very little to work from. I suppose you can talk of falsifiability in the case of descriptions: You take the description, find an example, and compare the description and the example. I suspect, however, that some subtlety is involved in deciding whether or not they match acceptably.
Walt said :
“Interestingly, analytic philosophers seem to reject frequentist statistics, from what I can tell.”
That’s a scientific literacy issue as well as being down to the fact that you don’t NEED to know anything about stats to do research in philosophy :-)
Within a generation I think it won’t be an issue. The analytical philosophy departments I still have contact with are science-ing up. A lot of current PhD’s have a strong scientific background and more and more of analytical philosophy exists on the margins of science.
The analytical philosophy departments I still have contact with are science-ing up.
Does this mean they’ll no longer be doing philosophy? Will philosophy disappear, in the fashion of a snake the finally succeeds in swallowing its own tail, and all that implies?
It’s more that the chicken that was analytical philosophy is coming home to roost and a lot of the questions that analytical philosophers were asking can now be settled empirically and, conversely, a lot of the findings scientists are making solve philosophical problems.
Whether or not analytical philosophy will continue as an academic discipline will be down to who can accomodate the grad students quickest : will psychology and linguistic departments build up their purely theoretical aspects or will philosophy departments become more closely linked to the empirical data.
Honestly, it’s not a battle I can see analytical philosophy winning. Continental philosophy should flourish though.
I think actual philosophers who understand probability tend to reject frequentist statistics. Even the idea that probabilities are long-run averages is somewhat suspect I think. (I assume they would accept that characterization for quantum mechanics, but accepting for games of chance is somewhat iffier.) Subjective probability and Bayesian statistics are easier to defend philosophically, and I think are more aesthetic to the analytic mind.
This is based on casual observation, however, so could be completely wrong.
“When we need to fight off the creationists we’ll probably turn to Popper’s “line of demarcation” between science and pseudoscience--the idea that scientific propositions are falsifiable, and pseudoscientific ones can’t ever be proven wrong. Then the rest of the time, I suppose, humanities people will call Popper old hat."
Yes, but. Kuhn made the somewhat obvious (and even somewhat Humean) observation, did he not, that Popper’s falsifiability was another species of verificationism (and one might say induction as a whole). Theories are not an all or nothing affair (as SJ Gould also noted in his updating of Darwin, and his battles against fundies). Theories are modified as more facts arrive. Probability, contingency always remain issues (again Hume said as much in the Treatise, and Popper more or less follows from Hume, though a bit more authoritative). As with, say, psychoanalysis: as researchers discover more about neurology and cognitive processes, the more odorous are the brain-farts of most Lacanians (especially ones who think psychoanalysis has something to do with Church bidness).
At the same time, Popper’s system (like Hume’s more severe skeptical points) does allow for a certain subjectivity which some more deterministic-oriented scientists --like Bricmont---have objected to. The “third world” Weltanschauung-mongering itself not really so kosher, in analytical terms (didn’t Carnap specifically reject those sorts of absolute categories--whether platonism, empiricism , realism, etc.???). Bricmont’s writing, thankfully free of the Weltanschauung-mongering (but boo-coo integral-mongering), will smoke the cogito-ghosts out of a Pomo in a matter of nanoseconds.
Well, Quine-Duhem would suggest that theories are an all or nothing affair and that kind of thinking leads you towards verisimilitude which was mined for ages by a generation of philosophers of science with no real traction ever gained.
Partly because the idea that one theory can be “more true” than another never set that well with people whose philosophical studies generally start with a class on formal logic with loads of binary truth tables.
This also brings up the entirely tangential but nonetheless interesting question of analytical philosophy’s hostility to metaphilosophical navel gazing. Whereas continental philosophers love to talk about the limits of philosophy and what philosophy can or can’t do, analytical philosophers see matters of metaphilosophy as something one usually writes about after a fruitful career as a proper philosopher.
This is why the concept of verisimilitude as applied to philosophical theories never took off and, partly because of Ayer, nobody likes taking stuff from the philosophy of science about explanation and ideas about the nature of truth and applying them to fields like metaphysics.
To a scientifically-minded type like me, it always struck me as fundamentally weird that you have philosophers arguing about whether there are universals or tropes out there in the world without a shred of empirical evidence in either direction while next door physicists ask and answer questions about the unseen stuff in the universe… and it’s the philosophers who talk about how fragile induction is and how difficult it is to claim that we know anything.