Comments on: The cost of positivism in the 20th century http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/10/08/the-cost-of-positivism-in-the-20th-century/ Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:17:45 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: conrad http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/10/08/the-cost-of-positivism-in-the-20th-century/#comment-360663 conrad Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:46:29 +0000 http://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=9465#comment-360663 I think one of the big problems is that if you got a group of people together that didn't know anything about the philosophy of science but were interested in models of things, then the most common default position is what I'll just call a naive positivism -- so you end up with people wandering around trying to find underlying constructs for their data so they can construct a theory from it and then they try and find evidence for those constructs. So they think the way to show their model is better than another (if they've managed to actually make it to two models), is by finding evidence for their model (often just quantitative). I think things like falsification (and more complex ideas like the falsification of parts of a theory and so on), are not the general default position of most people. I think one of the big problems is that if you got a group of people together that didn’t know anything about the philosophy of science but were interested in models of things, then the most common default position is what I’ll just call a naive positivism — so you end up with people wandering around trying to find underlying constructs for their data so they can construct a theory from it and then they try and find evidence for those constructs. So they think the way to show their model is better than another (if they’ve managed to actually make it to two models), is by finding evidence for their model (often just quantitative). I think things like falsification (and more complex ideas like the falsification of parts of a theory and so on), are not the general default position of most people.

]]> By: Rafe Champion http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/10/08/the-cost-of-positivism-in-the-20th-century/#comment-360652 Rafe Champion Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:23:23 +0000 http://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=9465#comment-360652 Part of the problem is to find theories or hypotheses that are really worth testing. As you say, students are mostly just trying to find some effect that reaches the 5% level (which means that 5% are not really effects at all). The two sides of the problem are (1) to get students to a point of understanding rival theories, or even one theory, so they can understand what would count as a critical experiment, or at least a genuine test of a theory [and why you would want to test a theory in the first place]and (2) to understand the role of statistical analysis which is one of the hardest things to get hold of, from my experience in about 20 introductions to the topic in a four year B Ag Sci course. But I really wonder if the philosophy of science is much help, at least in the form that students usually find it. Sometimes I think if people approach their research problems (indeed any problems) in a relentlessly critical and imaginative way then they don't need the philosopohy of science unless they have taken on board some really bad ideas, like positivism. In that case they may need some professional help:) Part of the problem is to find theories or hypotheses that are really worth testing. As you say, students are mostly just trying to find some effect that reaches the 5% level (which means that 5% are not really effects at all).

The two sides of the problem are (1) to get students to a point of understanding rival theories, or even one theory, so they can understand what would count as a critical experiment, or at least a genuine test of a theory [and why you would want to test a theory in the first place]and (2) to understand the role of statistical analysis which is one of the hardest things to get hold of, from my experience in about 20 introductions to the topic in a four year B Ag Sci course.

But I really wonder if the philosophy of science is much help, at least in the form that students usually find it. Sometimes I think if people approach their research problems (indeed any problems) in a relentlessly critical and imaginative way then they don’t need the philosopohy of science unless they have taken on board some really bad ideas, like positivism. In that case they may need some professional help:)

]]> By: conrad http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/10/08/the-cost-of-positivism-in-the-20th-century/#comment-360637 conrad Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:11:27 +0000 http://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=9465#comment-360637 "Is this too hard on the positivists? Someone suggested that it was a great service to remind people of the importance of logic and evidence. But how many scientists needed to be told that?" . I would think that answer to that, at least in psychology, is probably most. If I remember correctly, Jerry Fodor argues somewhere ("the mind doesn't work that way"?) that despite great philosophical arguments about various topics like models, getting evidence to "prove" models, model falsification, scientifically reasonable ways to identify separable mental processes etc., the majority of people in psychology basically use "abduction" (i.e., say whatever happens to seem right to them without thinking about how they arrived at the conclusion) when trying to understand problems (I think this term comes from Pierce initially, although I'll admit to not having read it). . If I looked at our PhD students, for example, that would probably be 100% of them where this might be important (and they're not unusual compared to anywhere I've worked). That of course isn't in the least bit surprising, since philosophy of science isn't taught in many courses any more, and most of them are very unlikely to read anything about it. This is why many are caught up in trying to prove something they have thought about, and very few realize that falsification is a better way to go. This is made worse in psychology, because the statistics typically used means that people are often searching around for p values less than a certain amount to show some effect or another happens to exist, so the game for many isn't model testing or even model falsification (just getting them to think about models means you've got somewhere), it's trying to prove some effect exists. “Is this too hard on the positivists? Someone suggested that it was a great service to remind people of the importance of logic and evidence. But how many scientists needed to be told that?”
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I would think that answer to that, at least in psychology, is probably most. If I remember correctly, Jerry Fodor argues somewhere (“the mind doesn’t work that way”?) that despite great philosophical arguments about various topics like models, getting evidence to “prove” models, model falsification, scientifically reasonable ways to identify separable mental processes etc., the majority of people in psychology basically use “abduction” (i.e., say whatever happens to seem right to them without thinking about how they arrived at the conclusion) when trying to understand problems (I think this term comes from Pierce initially, although I’ll admit to not having read it).
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If I looked at our PhD students, for example, that would probably be 100% of them where this might be important (and they’re not unusual compared to anywhere I’ve worked). That of course isn’t in the least bit surprising, since philosophy of science isn’t taught in many courses any more, and most of them are very unlikely to read anything about it. This is why many are caught up in trying to prove something they have thought about, and very few realize that falsification is a better way to go. This is made worse in psychology, because the statistics typically used means that people are often searching around for p values less than a certain amount to show some effect or another happens to exist, so the game for many isn’t model testing or even model falsification (just getting them to think about models means you’ve got somewhere), it’s trying to prove some effect exists.

]]> By: Rafe Champion http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/10/08/the-cost-of-positivism-in-the-20th-century/#comment-360636 Rafe Champion Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:54:03 +0000 http://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=9465#comment-360636 The good thing about Popper is that he shafted the positivists in the 1930s and that should have put an end to the nonsense. Peirce was a true champion but the modern pragmatists have lost the plot. Rorty is off with the pixies. I gave up on the Peirce email list when it was taken over by devotees of Deluze who teed off on Peirce's theory of signs. The Dewey list has bogged down on topics like the influence of Hegel on Dewey and whether Dewey's ideas are consistent with a religious sensibility. I don't know what to make of Popper on Hegel because I find Hegel unreadable and not all that helpful even in the translation you provided. I refer people to the Marx chapaters of the OSE which Berlin described as the most scrupulous and formidible criticism of Marxism in the English language, or words to that effect. http://www.the-rathouse.com/OpenSocietyOnLIne/AATheProjectwithIndex.html The good thing about Popper is that he shafted the positivists in the 1930s and that should have put an end to the nonsense.

Peirce was a true champion but the modern pragmatists have lost the plot.

Rorty is off with the pixies.

I gave up on the Peirce email list when it was taken over by devotees of Deluze who teed off on Peirce’s theory of signs.

The Dewey list has bogged down on topics like the influence of Hegel on Dewey and whether Dewey’s ideas are consistent with a religious sensibility.

I don’t know what to make of Popper on Hegel because I find Hegel unreadable and not all that helpful even in the translation you provided. I refer people to the Marx chapaters of the OSE which Berlin described as the most scrupulous and formidible criticism of Marxism in the English language, or words to that effect.

http://www.the-rathouse.com/OpenSocietyOnLIne/AATheProjectwithIndex.html

]]> By: Nicholas Gruen http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/10/08/the-cost-of-positivism-in-the-20th-century/#comment-360619 Nicholas Gruen Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:12:29 +0000 http://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=9465#comment-360619 Thanks for a lovely post Rafe. Makes me wonder why you're such a one trick pony when it comes to concrete political doctrines ;) I always think of Logical Positivism as the philosophical equivalent of the Titanic. It was launched with great fanfare as unsinkable and promptly sank on its maiden voyage. Although you are right that in a doctrinal sense LP is a souped up version of Hume's fork, I think Hume was on the side of the angels whereas LP was simply a regression. Hume was fighting the forces of religious obscurantism and forging a genuinely post Christian world. Of course LPers saw themselves as doing the same thing against foes like Freudianism and Marxism, but that's a very different kettle of fish. You can say that those ideas were like a religion and had a sense of revealed truth about them. They certainly had defences against their enemies that were like that - repression and false consciousness. But any school of thinking with aspirations on the scale of those schools will have such things - the free market and socialist mindsets have the same "they would say that" mechanisms and they're used with irresponsible abandon by fellow travellers. But Freudianism and Marxisim were clearly offered in some sense in a scientific spirit - as orientations and bodies of thinking that were an emanation of reason not of revelation and offered themselves as in principle capable of being developed, refined, critiqued and reformed by the ongoing application of reason. LP represented an attempt to pull philosophical rank on these systems and was in that sense misguided from the start. It wasn't misguided of Hume as he was on a constructive quest. And he was pre-Hegelian. LPers were post-Hegelian and dealt with their Hegelian inheritance with petulance towards Hegel and their foes, rather than to try to understand what he was on about and what he'd shown (principally in this context the inevitability of metaphysics). I include Popper in this criticism. Even though in a strictly doctrinal sense he was an anti-positivist and much more meticulous in addressing the problems of bringing off the demarcation project (which of course he failed to do), he was what I'd call a temperamental positivist - he was trying to do what the LPers were trying to do only with a few more builkheads in the hold to stop the ship going down on striking its first iceberg. You might even be prepared to accept that, considering Popper's ridiculous chapter on Hegel the bad guy in the Open Society and its Enemies. As someone who doesn't maintain a close reading of the area, I've never really understood what all the fuss about Popper's epistemology and philosophy of science was all about given that the pragmatists had got there via a sounder route by the time Charles Sanders Pierce started writing up his own philosophy of science - when was it around the 1870s? It was certainly before Popper was born. Thanks for a lovely post Rafe. Makes me wonder why you’re such a one trick pony when it comes to concrete political doctrines ;)

I always think of Logical Positivism as the philosophical equivalent of the Titanic. It was launched with great fanfare as unsinkable and promptly sank on its maiden voyage.

Although you are right that in a doctrinal sense LP is a souped up version of Hume’s fork, I think Hume was on the side of the angels whereas LP was simply a regression. Hume was fighting the forces of religious obscurantism and forging a genuinely post Christian world.

Of course LPers saw themselves as doing the same thing against foes like Freudianism and Marxism, but that’s a very different kettle of fish. You can say that those ideas were like a religion and had a sense of revealed truth about them. They certainly had defences against their enemies that were like that – repression and false consciousness. But any school of thinking with aspirations on the scale of those schools will have such things – the free market and socialist mindsets have the same “they would say that” mechanisms and they’re used with irresponsible abandon by fellow travellers.

But Freudianism and Marxisim were clearly offered in some sense in a scientific spirit – as orientations and bodies of thinking that were an emanation of reason not of revelation and offered themselves as in principle capable of being developed, refined, critiqued and reformed by the ongoing application of reason.

LP represented an attempt to pull philosophical rank on these systems and was in that sense misguided from the start. It wasn’t misguided of Hume as he was on a constructive quest. And he was pre-Hegelian. LPers were post-Hegelian and dealt with their Hegelian inheritance with petulance towards Hegel and their foes, rather than to try to understand what he was on about and what he’d shown (principally in this context the inevitability of metaphysics).

I include Popper in this criticism. Even though in a strictly doctrinal sense he was an anti-positivist and much more meticulous in addressing the problems of bringing off the demarcation project (which of course he failed to do), he was what I’d call a temperamental positivist – he was trying to do what the LPers were trying to do only with a few more builkheads in the hold to stop the ship going down on striking its first iceberg. You might even be prepared to accept that, considering Popper’s ridiculous chapter on Hegel the bad guy in the Open Society and its Enemies.

As someone who doesn’t maintain a close reading of the area, I’ve never really understood what all the fuss about Popper’s epistemology and philosophy of science was all about given that the pragmatists had got there via a sounder route by the time Charles Sanders Pierce started writing up his own philosophy of science – when was it around the 1870s? It was certainly before Popper was born.

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