We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata.net wheels out another of our ‘mercenary independent scholars’ in the Interblog Popper Wars. Alan Forrester!
Karl Popper‘s epistemology is about how to solve problems and find better theories, and as such observations do not have the grossly overrated importance given to them by inductivism. The whole notion of probability in this context is irrelevant, since a theory is either true or false and no number of confirming instances allow us to distinguish between them. On Thursday, Will Wilkinson wrote:
It is daunting indeed to debate a man named “Rafe Champion”, a name that evokes race car-driving secret agents, or dangerous, seething, family-wrecking hunks from a “daytime drama”.
Damn straight he is. He does all that, eats broken glass for breakfast and, most excitingly of all – he’s a critical rationalist!
First, I am keen to know what knowledge is, if not a kind of belief. If I know that water is H2O (a scientific proposition), don’t I also believe it?
Not in the sense you mean, i.e.- the sense that it is definitely or probably correct. We tentatively accept that a theory is better than its rival on the basis of things such as whether they provide good explanations and whether the other theories have been refuted by observations.
Next, I find that I’m able to decisively justify all sorts of beliefs on the basis of experience. For instance, that there is a mug on my desk. I see the mug on my desk, and I thereby know that it is there. Science is rather more complex than looking at mugs on desks, but one surely can derive certain beliefs from the evidence of the senses. It’s not clear to me what bind Popper is getting us out of.
So it’s totally impossible that you are hallucinating the mug? Also, why are you so obsessed about whether there is a mug on your desk or not? It’s not a very interesting question. I would sooner debate about something substantial like a meaty scientific or philosophical problem, which brings us back to the main point. Leaving quibbles like that aside, there are actually two quite different issues here. One is whether one can derive theories from observations, the other is if not what role do observations play?
It is impossible to derive theories for observations. To take but one counterexample, up until the late 19th century every observation was compatible with Newton’s theory of gravity. All these observations are also compatible with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Two quite different theories were compatible with the same set of observations, therefore one cannot derive theories from observations. Next we have to ask why you made those particular observations, rather than observations of, say, the exact weight of all the dust under your bed. Before the theories come along that differ in their predictions about the motion of the planets or whatever, there is no particular reason to watch their motion so theories can hardly be derived from observations. The problem is much worse than this though. Even if one could confirm, say, an equation of motion on the basis of observations, one could not derive the explanation provided by the theory from observations. For example, one could explain the motion of the planets by saying that they are pushed round the Sun by invisible pixies that just happen to obey Einstein’s equations. This explanation is rubbish on a truly epic scale compared to the explanation in terms of curved spacetime, but as the observations do not allow us to distinguish between them, the pixie theory of planetary motion must be criticised on other grounds. The role of observations is to distinguish between rival theories. Each prediction of a theory is either true or false, and each theory is either true or false, no number of confirming instances can change that, and hence they cannot prove it to be true, but if we see a refuting instance, then the theory is false.
Last, I said nothing about limiting science to collecting confirming instances. All I was saying is that Popper is wrong that positive instances don’t raise the probability of a hypothesis. According to Popper and Champion, the probability of Newton’s theory being true, even after all its success, was the same as the probability of cats giving birth to elephants.
Newton’s theory was false, so as it turns out the probability was indeed the same :-). However, all this talk of probability ignores the real issue of why, before it was refuted, it was reasonable to hold Newton’s theory, but not the theory that cats give birth to elephants, or why it is reasonable to prefer General Relativity or whatever to such a theory now. It is a good idea to prefer General Relativity to its rival because its rivals are poorer at solving problems.
It is reasonable to prefer the theory that elephants give birth to elephants rather than cats because the former solves problems and the latter does not, indeed it raises new ones. To be a bit more explicit, the theory of evolution, which is better than its rivals (although I don’t think there are any really serious rivals at the moment), gives us reason to think that elephants give birth to more elephants as a way of spreading elephant genes. The theory that cats give birth to elephants not only fails to solve any problems, it ruins theories that do solve problems. It makes absolutely no sense from an evolutionary perspective why would cat genes want to propagate elephants genes? Where did the cat get the elephant genes in the first place? Furthermore, no matter how you try to solve these problems, you just raise more and worse problems, so we can reject the theory that cats give birth to elephants out of hand. To summarize, good theories solve problems better than their rivals, but raise problems themselves, which will be solved by their successors and so we don’t consider that observations and so on confirm a theory.
Alan Forrester
In response to Will Willkinson on the The Fly Bottle taking our esteemed generalissimo Perry de Havilland to task for supporting the conjectural objective epistemology of Karl Popper, the Samizdata Team decided that we should wheel up the big guns for our response. Rafe Champion a noted Australian independent scholar of Popper replies to Will.
Will Wilkinson has invoked a number of weary and worn out arguments against Popper’s theory of inquiry and his theory of knowledge. First of all it is helpful to understand that Popper is concerned with understanding the way the world works, with learning by imaginative problem solving and making the best use of our critical faculties. It is also helpful to understand how Popper has emancipated us from some dead ends in philosophy, and not just the philosophy of science. Many of these dead ends arise from the theory that scientific knowledge is a form of belief, to wit, justified true belief. The source of justification in the empiricist tradition is supposed to be the evidence of our senses. In the Continental rationalist tradition the source of justification is the intuition of clear and distinct ideas. In each case the same fatal flaw arises: there is no way to decisively (certainly) justify the beliefs that are supposed to be true.
Popper has provided an alternative to the failed theories of justified true belief. The alternative is a theory of conjectural objective knowledge. This does not mean giving up on truth, or the search for it. Truth is a regulative standard for statements. A true statement corresponds to the facts. In our search for the truth we form critical preferences for the theory (or the social policy) which best solves its problems and stands up to all kinds of tests (the test of internal consistency, consistency with other well tested theories, and experimental or observational tests). Our preferences can change in a rational and controlled manner in the light of new evidence or new arguments. Our knowledge grows through our creative response to problems, including the problems that are created by effective criticism.
The Popperian scientists is like a free market entrepreneur, seeking opportunities (unsolved problems) in the marketplace. The scientist forms a conjectural solution to the problem (invests or offers a product in the marketplace) and it is then subjected to critical appraisal, including experimental tests (the product is tested by the market). All this goes on in the flux of time and is subject to radical uncertainty due to the inherently open-ended nature of theoretical knowledge (and the dynamic marketplace).
All of this is simple common sense until David Stove and the proponents of justified true beliefs confuse the picture.
Will wrote:
“Popper argues that one can only disconfirm a theory–prove that it is false”.
In logic, that is the simple truth. A general or universal theory, stated in the form “All swans are white” is falsified by a single (true) report of a black swan.
“But then what do you say of a theory that has been subjected to huge numbers of potentially falsifying tests, but has passed with flying colors? Isn’t not being falsified by many tests a lot like being confirmed?”
That was the case with Newton’s theory which passed many tests and explained so many things that many people thought that the final truth had been found. But it was not so, even before Einstein offered a viable alternative there were known to be problems with Newton’s theory. If you want to limit confirmation to repeatable observations, like sunrises and falling apples, then that is scientifically trivial and uninteresting because science is concerned with general explanatory theories, (which apply to both apples and sunrises).
“Pace Popper, induction works just fine, and it works pretty much the way people intuitively think it does (i.e., The more horses you encounter, the surer your knowledge about horses in general.)”
Not really. To learn about horses you need to approach them in a receptive, inquisitive or problem-solving way. If you merely encounter them “in passing” you may learn nothing more than to get out of their way. Learning is an active process of sifting and evaluating ideas and evidence, that is why so many people can go through school and higher education and learn next to nothing (exept about things that they really find interesting, which may be horses and not their academic studies). When you understand where Popper is coming from, David Stove is just a bore, despite his wit and his verbal pyrotechnics. Stove and his fellow inductivists apparently think there is some way to attach a numerical probability to general theories, but it has not yet been done despite being an academic industry for about a hundred years. This renders their position absurd by their own standards.
Rafe Champion
Recommended reading for insomniacs with enquiring minds
We have received a few e-mails asking what books we would recommend for aspiring (or even perspiring) libertarians:
Dale Amon recommends for essential reading:
David Bergland “Libertarianism in One Lesson”
Frederick Hayek “The Road to Serfdom”
Murray Rothbard “For a New Liberty”
Bob Poole “Defending a Free Society”
Carl Hess “Capitalism for Kids”
Wendy McElroy “Freedom, Feminism and the State”
Thomas Sowell “The Economics and Politics of Race”
Perry de Havilland recommends for essential reading:
Murray Rothbard “The Ethics of Liberty”
Frederick Hayek “The Fatal Conceit”
Karl Popper “Open Society and its Enemies”
Virginia Postrel “The Future and its Enemies”
Also well worth a read:
Ayn Rand “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”
David Deutsch “The Fabric of Reality”
Murray Rothbard “Man, Economy and State”
Edmund Burke “Reflections on the Revolution in France”
Karl Marx “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (know thine enemy)
Jean Monnet “Memoirs” (know thine enemy, part deux)
However if you like tracts on political economy served up as more bite sized morsels, you would be hard pressed to find a more varied body of works than the pamphlets of the Libertarian Alliance. Browse through the huge number of works on the Libertarian Alliance website, all available for free on-line in pdf format pertaining to all manner of topics (html format coming in the not-to-distant future).
The Libertarian Alliance website is undergoing a bit of an overhaul so it might look a bit strange in some platform/browser combinations. Feel free to complain to the Libertarian Alliance webmaster there and urge them to get it fixed 🙂
PC meaning Peikoffian Crap.
Okay, I realise it is actually Boxing Day now, but ‘Merry Christmas’ anyway. That’s Christ-mas… as in Christ. Son of God and all that stuff. It does not matter if you believe in Christ or not, because it does not change what Christmas actually is.
Although I am an extremely secular person, I do not hesitate to extend those sentiments to Samizdata‘s Christian readers in spite of the fact religion does not loom large in my life. Yet I think it is important to remember that Christmas is a Christian festival and thus I shall not hedge my Christian greeting with anything like ‘and you have a nice holiday too for those who are Atheists, Agnostics, Hindus, Satanists…’
Don’t get me wrong, I actually do hope any Atheists, Agnostics, Hindus, Satanists, Druids, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddists, Jews, Druse, Shinto, Pagans, etc. etc. who read the Samizdata have a really great and entirely secular couple days off… but then as that is all Christmas is to them, I do not feel any special need to be ‘inclusive’ if they are just hitching a perfectly reasonable cultural ride on someone else’s wagon. I often partake of bhangra-and-booze excesses during Diwali but I certainly don’t expect special ‘Diwali greetings’ from my Hindu friends because I am not Hindu. To me Diwali is just an excuse to eat good Indian food. Likewise I would hope that many atheist (or whatever) libertarians would have no problem with the idea of Christians (libertarian or otherwise) regarding Christmas as ‘their’ day. Yet some people do indeed seem to disagree.
Although I have been much influenced by objectivism, I do not actually call myself an objectivist as Karl Popper looms just as large in my philosophical views, probably more so in fact. I have nothing against objectivism per se, which I like to describe as a sub-set of libertarian thought because I know it will annoy certain people. However I do regard the ‘organised’ objectivism of Leonard Peikoff, of the Ayn Rand Institute, as essentially irrational and pathologically intolerant. Peikoff’s historical error riddled article about Christmas did nothing to change my views on the fatal justificationist structural flaw in his brand of dogmatic objectivism (yeah, yeah, send hate e-mail pointing out my ‘errors’ to the usual address). Let Peikoff pick any day he likes to celebrate the adulation of St. Leonard, Intellectual Heir to the Blessed Ayn… but to fail to understand that Christmas without a reference to Christianity is just another Disney theme event, is culturally illiterate and needlessly insulting.
However objectivism without Leonard Peikoff…ah, now that would be something worthy of a festival of its own! For precisely that, go to The Objectivist Center for Peikoff-free objectivism that includes tolerance and ideas that survive contact with reality. Go read what they have to say.
As for me, once I have finished reading the lyrical Sufic work ‘The Rose Garden‘, I shall be re-reading Popper‘s ‘Open Society and it’s Enemies‘.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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