Weekend reflections

This open thread last weekend started off with a whimper, but turned into an interesting discussion about why nothing was happening on the thread! How’s that for naval gazing!   Anyway, a long time ago when I put on a sketch as an undergraduate at Burgmann College Robin Bell the Staff Tutor said to me “That was good Nick.   Surprisingly good!”

Likewise the open thread turned out to be surprisingly good.   Here’s another one.   Actually I might just whip into the comments section right now and get it going.

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Gaby
Gaby
17 years ago

Well a few of us are worried the Jesuits amy turn up over on the papal cant thread…

But then again given the Pope’s seeming interest in revising the methodology and philosophy of scince It may bob up here with all of its “main weapons”…

Good questions Nicholas for weekend reflection. But hard.

For clarity, you may want to expand a little on what you think are the salient aspects of positivism.

For expample, I don’t think that Popper subscribed to a verificationist criterion of meaning. And his demarcation principle cannot be reasonably interpreted as such.

I don’t know what Popper said abut economics but I think it would provide an interesting test of his philosphy given the nature of “observation” in economics and its status and use in the “basic statements” of his theoory of falsification.

Chris Lloyd
Chris Lloyd
17 years ago

Nick: You and Rafe are no doubt in the loop on this discussion. But I would find a two paragraph background of use. To whit: why is Popper a significant figures for right wingers? I encountered him briefly 20 years ago in a philosophy of science course but his ideas were presented completely apolitically.

Jason Soon
17 years ago

Chris –

Popper himself was a social democrat though he was involved in the foundation meeting of the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society which was founded by Hayek. But in those days of the Cold War, classical liberals were happy to have anti-communist leftists in their circles and that was basically where Popper stood. His work The Open Society and its Enemies is regarded as a critique and expose of what was regarded as the totalitarian tendencies of Marx and Plato and therefore a sort of standard bearer for arguments against the concept of Social Engineering which was in those days regarded as a tenet of the Left. But I stress Popper himself I think never strayed from Social Democracy, though he did dedicate one of his books to Hayek, who ended up being a close friend (this was mainly because it was Hayek who helped get Popper out of the kiling fields of those days and into the UK.

Tony Harris
17 years ago

Nicholas, a partial reply to your questions.

I am not aware that he took any notice of their views and his attitude to economics has been rather interesting and hard to fathom. He attended the Karl Menger (son of) and Richard Mises (brother of) seminars in Vienna which were mostly on mathematics and probability. He was so impressed by a paper on mathematical economics (possiblyl by Morgenstern) that he thought the social sciences might have reached the Galileo stage and he encouraged Colin Simkin to persist with his maths (as did John Hicks who was also a close long-term friend of Simkin). I think that turned out to be a bum steer. After Simkin died (we meet most weeks for over a decade) his colleague Warren Hogen said Colin had a grand long-term project on econometrics that never worked. Colin never mentioned it to me.

Popper was so obsessed with topics that interested him that other issues hardly existed and as far as I can make out he never paid serious attention to economics apart from advice that he took from Simkin for The Open Society and inconclusive discussions with Hayek where he held back from non-interventionism. His 1963 Harvard lecture on explanation in the social sciences is a mess, with the rationality principle variously described as indispensable, tautologous, empty and quite often false.

I will contact some of his research assistants from the 1950s to the 1970s and see if they can shed any light on your questions.

Gaby
Gaby
17 years ago

Chris, I think some of the reasons must involve Popper’s critique of Hegel and Marx in “The Open Society and its Enemies” as well as of totalitarianism in general, his attack on “historicism”, and his advocacy of piecemeal against holistic social engineering.

Gaby
Gaby
17 years ago

Sorry should have checked the thread.

Gummo Trotsky
Gummo Trotsky
17 years ago

But first and foremost, it was Popper’s mastery of flaming – and flame-baiting. Those footnotes to OSE really belong in an on-line forum or on a blog comments thread.

Gaby
Gaby
17 years ago

Ah yes of course Gummo. Forgot about those “footnotes”. Some of them are mini-essays! Contain a mass of learning and argument.

Ken Parish
Admin
17 years ago

In Googling in an attempt to make sense of this discussion (as a non-economist), I came across a paper titled Defence of Absurd Theories in Economics:

Are all economists quite mad? The common and long-standing claim that they believe in the continuing real-world existence of general equilibrium, flawlessly profit-maximising firms and

Gummo Trotsky
Gummo Trotsky
17 years ago

Gaby,

Those footnotes are pretty amazing aren’t they? Gilbert Ryle, in his review of the book particularly admired the apercus on Wittgenstein (Pooper starts those in the Heraclitus section of the Plato Volume, but doesn’t really let rip until well into footnotes to the Aristotle volume).

Tony Harris
17 years ago

It is a great shame that Popper’s Open Society was blacklisted by Platonists and Marxists. It is a scandal to see whole semester courses on Plato’s Republic without vol 1 of the OSE on the supplementary reading list. Democracy the loser.

Likewise the story with Marxism. With the dream unveiled as nightmare, how many of the generation of ’68 now wish they had read Popper instead of Marcuse and Fanon in their youth?

By the way this is the post which preceded the series of OSE posts. It did not come up on the previous list despite the best efforts of helpers behind the scenes to rescue the mess of code that was there in the first place.

“Our corpses are expected to arrive, by the New Zealand Star, on January 8th or thereabouts. Please receive them kindly.”

Chris Lloyd
Chris Lloyd
17 years ago

Thanks Jase and Rafe. I thought that perhaps there was some link between Popper’s epistemology and politics that I had naively missed.

BTW Rafe: The terms right-left still mean as much as they ever did. They are tibral identifiers. Self test: if most of your blog comments refer with contempt to the views and especially the history of the right/left then you are left/right. Circular definition I know – but that is the nature of a tribe.

Amused
Amused
17 years ago

Nicholas,

Why should economists today have to worry about whether or not their formulas or analysis is useful or not in the real world? Any economist who offers a justification, based on ‘scientific axioms’ or anything else, for the curent distribution of power and influence is bound to be taken more seriously than one who questions the status quo. If that seems like a piece of crude political determinism, then so be it. If Popper were alive today, I wonder what connections he would draw between the frenzied attempts to reduce every human interraction into a framework based on the theoretical axiom of ‘frictionless markets’, and the associated social and political campaigns to commodify just about every human activity, and the attempts by stalinist apologetics, to frame everything in terms of the ‘world wide class struggle’ and the inevitable triumph of soviet everything?

Gummo Trotsky
Gummo Trotsky
17 years ago

It is a great shame that Popper’s Open Society was blacklisted by Platonists and Marxists.

Anyone know how to contact the Platonists’ International? Just thought I’d alert them to a little problem with a reading list at Macquarie Uni.

I know it doesn’t lessen the scandal any – it’s only one isolated example, quickly Googled, from an Oz provincial university, well out of the international mainstream of Plato scholarship. No doubt the international Platonist/Marxist conspiracy is flourishing elsewhere, and I shouldn’t worry about this minor failure.

PlatonistGrandwizard
17 years ago

Much obliged, Gummo.

Those damned Macquarians! Agent99 better come up with a good excuse that can cover his ass for this major oversight.

Gaby
Gaby
17 years ago

Gummo, and these were written before Popper’s encounter with Wittgenstein’s “poker”. I’ve read “Wittgenstein’s Poker”. Very entertaining.

But your memory of the detail of the footnotes is far better than mine.

Also, OSE was supplementary reading in my Jurisprudence course way, way back. And both volumes certainly made rivetting reading. Written with an incredible pellcidity.

But then Plato’s Republic was the set text. And it is hard to think of a better test to begin exploring the nature and philosophy of justice. As A.N. Whitehaed could of said, the rest of Western philosophy is a humungours Popperian footnote to Plato.

Nicholas, great riposte to Ken’s “gauntlet”. For me, it’s basically all in that comment. Btw, a Freidman modelling paper was set for a tute somewhere in my Economics defree.

Finally, to return to part of Nicholas’s original post, the major aspects, for me, of Popper that he ahared with the logical positivists or their successors, the logical empiricists.

1. The use of deductive logic and formal logic in science and the exclusion of induction.
2. The foundational bedrock of observation in the form of for Popper basic statements which are used as premises in arguments to refute or corroborating theories.

derrida derider
derrida derider
17 years ago

In my view the only thing that held him back from something very close to market liberalism was a lack of understanding of the factors that cause unemployment (essentially, ill-advised interference with the labour market by means of minimum wages for example).

Popper, Rafe, had lived through the 20s and 30s in Austria; it is not surprising that he did not subscribe to your crude views on the origins of unemployment. Also Popper, IIRC, became a social democrat because he took the point that distribution of resources amongst people really matters for their welfare.

But more broadly his strong preference for incrementalism made him suspicious of the utopian conservatism of Hayek and the like.

John Quiggin
John Quiggin
17 years ago

Simon Grant and I got a publication much later out of this strategic trade stuff with yet another equilibrium assumption. The underlying point wasn’t to do with strategic trade but to make the point that game theory can’t tell us much unless we have a known strategy space, which is trivially true in relation to actual games like chess and poker, but not generally true in economics.

Ken Parish
Admin
17 years ago

Newtonian physics, we now know, supplies a reasonable approximation of reality on a scale between atomic and planetary. Beyond that it starts to get dodgy. Without knowing diddly squat about economics, I’m prepared to accept that economists understand the outer limits within which general equilibrium and other mainstream theories provide a reliable approximation despite underlying assumptions that are self-evidently absurd. But, as Nicholas observes (at least as I read him), to what extent are economists aware of (or at least willing to make explicit) the limits to the boundaries of reliability of all the other myriad propositions they propound so dogmatically as scientific? I simply don’t know. I’m not being cute or throwing down a “gauntlet” or provocation. I genuinely want to know.

As John Quiggin observes (at least I think he does), game theory might provide one basis for nailing down the boundaries of reliability of some economic theorising involving human behaviour (as just about all economic theorising does), but only if it too is employed carefully and with a clear acknowledgment of the boundaries within which it can be useful.

In this sense, old Pope Benedict’s recent rant potentially does all of us a favour. You can’t turn cant into unchallengeable truth by anointing it with the holy water of “science” unless you understand and freely and honestly acknowledge the boundaries of the knowable. That is especially true of the “low” (soft) sciences where economics most certainly belongs. However law indubitably belongs there as well, despite its pretensions. But nor can Benedict turn religion into self-evident truth merely by dogmatically associating it with “reason”.

Gummo Trotsky
Gummo Trotsky
17 years ago

GrandWiz,

No worries, happy to help out as always. I assume the spotter’s fee will go to the usual account.

Gummo Trotsky
Gummo Trotsky
17 years ago

Gaby,

I think it was in Wittgenstein’s Poker that I read about the Ryle review.

And I’ve just checked out my busy book, and found Popper’s first shot at Ludwig (Spell of Plato, Ch 2):

[Heraclitus] visualized the world not as an edifice, but rather as one colossal process; not as the sum total of all things, but rather as the totality of all events, or changes, or facts. (original emphasis)

Oddly, despite the obvious references to the Tractatus, there’s no footnote to that one, nor any substantive argument to back up Popper’s implied claim that Heraclitus was a proto-Wittgenstein. It’s just a gratuitous, unscholarly, cheap shot at old Ludwig, which misrepresents the philosophy of Heraclitus by way of collateral damage.

Well Wisher
17 years ago

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Gaby
Gaby
17 years ago

Ken wrote,

“But, as Nicholas observes (at least as I read him), to what extent are economists aware of (or at least willing to make explicit) the limits to the boundaries of reliability of all the other myriad propositions they propound so dogmatically as scientific? I simply don’t know. I’m not being cute or throwing down a “gauntlet”

Gummo Trotsky
Gummo Trotsky
17 years ago

“… science is a cultural activity as well as a body of knowledge. As such, the judgement of the scientific community plays a key role in the evolution and advance of science.”

Reminds me of a conversation in my uni days, on Popper and philosophy of science stuff and the trouble I had making of the whole falsification thesis because it didn’t fit the biological sciences very well; you have to do some seriously Procrustean logic chopping to fit activities like sequencing the haemoglobin molecule into Popper’s framework (not that I ever sequenced an entire haemoglobin molecule – just a few small polypeptides that could be dealt with within a day long prac class).

Finally, my friend and interlocutor – a physics student, and therefore closer to the Popperian sort of science – looked at me, and said wryly “maybe science is just what scientists do.”

Why all the fuss over whether economics is a science anyway? That’s largely a hangover from the late Victorians, and their irrepressible desire to cut and dry everything. It might be better to just say sod it all, economics is what economists do and who gives a toss whether it’s a science, as long as it’s a fruitful area of inquiry.

Now that’s it. I’ve completely exhausted my capacity for earnest comment – at least for today.

Amused
Amused
17 years ago

Nicholas,
You misrepresent the point I was trying to make, or perhaps I did not make it well. I am not a ‘conspiracy theorist’ at all. My point was, and still is, a point concerning the social and political usefulness of much of what passes for ‘economic theory as scientific axioms’,and the faily trite observation that those theories/axioms that provide justificaitons/explanations which support existing power relations will be more supported and respected than those that do not.

This does not mean that economic theories that provide explanations or justificaitons supportive of existing institutions are wrong per se, rather that they will receive wider circulation, be held to be more ‘realistic’ and will more likely provide the underpinning for conventional policy, both as it is proposed and as it is analysed.

Since economics is no more ‘scientific’ in the Popperian sense than sociology or history, in my view, its pretensions and evasions, its silences and assumptions are as worthy of analysis as they would be if one was evaluating a sociological work for example. I am completely unpersuaded by the ‘economics as a science’ mob, and as unimpressed by the frequent recourse to abstruse mathematics as a source of predictions about human behaviour, as I am about predictions based on witchcraft or the movement of the planets.

Ken Parish
Admin
17 years ago

“Rationality is a practice and science is a cultural activity as well as a body of knowledge. As such, the judgement of the scientific community plays a key role in the evolution and advance of science.”

Which is precisely why I mentioned Lakatos as well as Popper in my comment. Moreover, for the reasons you advance, I find Lakatos’s approach more satisfying overall than that of Popper in terms of providing a convincing explanation of how bodies of theory (in both hard and soft sciences) gain and lose acceptance.

I agree with you on the potentially benign influence of peer review, both formal and informal, especially when it involves the Quiggins and Gruens of this world, and maybe that’s enough of a corrective for professional hubris, although I have my doubts. I have a general impression, which Nicholas seems to confirm, that too many economists lack an adequate grasp of the boundaries of what they can plausibly claim for their research, especially in relation to the supposedly magical qualities of markets in just about any area. The Howard government’s creation of a “market” for charities to compete with each other in delivering services to the unemployed and otherwise disadvantaged is a classic example of part of what I’m talking about. The other part of my concern is the “overselling” of neoclassical market theories to oppose almost any form of government intervention in the market in the public interest.

I may be perpetrating an injustice on the economics profession, of course. My impression may be one created by the media and politicians and their spin doctors rather than by economists themselves. This is now straying some distance from the point Nicholas was making, but it’s these sorts of concerns about neoclassical economics that generated my comment. I’m well aware that there’s a lot more to this sort of discussion than I could ever cover in a comment box, and that I’m not even aware of quite a lot of the nuances of it all and for that matter quite a bit of the basics. I’m also not suggesting in any sense that complex mathematical models, econometric regression etc are bad things, simply that I reckon lots of economists (or perhaps lots of journalists and politicians who sieze on this work and popularise it) lose sight of the inherent limitations of their work and attempt to claim levels of general validity that can’t be rationally sustained. Nor am I suggesting that the economics profession lacks critical voices well beyond just the Quiggins and Gruens. Herbert Simon’s bounded rationality concept is quite an old idea now, but doesn’t seem to inform at least a lot of popular economics discourse, let alone popular discourse being informed by insights from psychology about the extent to which consumer decisions are rational even in a bounded sense (despite Kahneman’s Nobel prize).

Gaby
Gaby
17 years ago

Gummo, agree but what economists actually do is only part of it. The output is important too, “fruitful” as you indicate. And the nub is to identify the good and bad economics.

The aim of any science must be to describe, explain and enable us to understand the nature or operation of an objective and independent reality. So I suppose a philosphy of science tries to characterize what science is, and in so doing gives and account of sound practices for rationality and science and for the evolution of bodies of knowledge.

Ken, I don’t dissent from what you say. But for the evolution of economic knowledge one wouldn’t go to the media or a spin doctor.The arbiters would have to be members of the profession. Isn’t the difference between listening to say Krugman on international trade as opposed to Thomas Friedman or Robert Reich?

And economics is evolving. I don’t know any of the “bounded rationality” work you refer to, but it sounds relevant to the sort of “behavioural economics” that Schiller is working on.

But I have to say it is blogs like these, for a layman like me, that make it much, much easier to have access to, and to try and gain some understanding of, current academic thinking and the Groves of Academe. Hence my earlier allusion to the Glass Bead Game.

Jc
Jc
17 years ago

Ken
What you are missing in your thoughts is the the need the make mistakes. Markets “allow” people to make mistakes. In fact human progress is a junk yard full of mistakes. Markets allow participants to try and find the best solutions possible.

Tony Harris
17 years ago

Markets are just what happens when people start trading and exchanging things. They don’t actually do, allow, or decide anything, it is the people who do all those things.

One of the things that economists investigate is the way that these activities are influenced by things like (a) the prevailing mores of the society and (b) the institutional framework that is in place.

Amused
Amused
17 years ago

So Rafe,
Is it the institutional and cultural framework in place or the thing, ‘market’ in and of itself? The ‘market’ is an abstraction chock full of assumptions, silences and ideological claptrap. On the other hand, an actually exisitng market for ‘something or other’ is a far better object of analysis, since we can actually incorporate the relationships between a wide range of people, things and institutions, that enable a number of questions to be asked, even if we may not be able to provide all the answers. An good example would be to analyse the framewoerks, relationships and politics underlying the differences between the market for shelter that exists oin Australia compared to say, France.

On the issue that ‘markets’ allow mistakes to be made-the point is? “Markets’as such, don’t do anything. People engaging in various forms of exchange, involving various kinds of relationships do, or don’t do, things that might be described as mistakes. In my view much economic analysis and writing is nothing more than high level fetishization, worthy of some medieval theologist of old. The introduction of elegant mathematical formulas certainly ups the stakes when it comes to who can play the game of describing and analysing, but it no more improves our understanding of the real world and the relations that constitute it, than parsing verbs can tell you anything about the use and purpose that people make of literature and language for example.

Gummo Trotsky
Gummo Trotsky
17 years ago

Ken,

I can see that Lakatos will have to go on my to read list. Might overcome my Popper inspired cynicism about the usefulness of philosophy of science.

While I was off-line last night, thinking over Gaby’s response to my last comment, Monk’s account of Wittgenstein’s time at Guy’s Hospital during WWII came to mind. I’d recommend a quick squiz to anyone who might be interested in what can happen when a philosopher who isn’t particularly bent on telling scientists what science should be gets involved with a group of scientists.

Rafe
17 years ago

You will be wasting your time Gummo. People who approach their problem-solving in science and elsewhere with a combination of ingenuity and relentless imaginative criticsm have no use for the philosophy of science, except to get rid of dud ideas that they have picked up from the positivists or Kuhn. Or Lakatos.

Lakatos actually attempted to make a Hegelian synthesis out of Popper and Kuhn.

Gummo Trotsky
Gummo Trotsky
17 years ago

Well Rafe, I could always give him a quick skim down the library before I dive in the deep end and shell out any . If he turns out to be as much of a time-waster as Hutt, I’ll doubtless forego buying any of his books for myself. Since I have much less money than time to waste.

Rafe
17 years ago

On Lakatos (and Kuhn), it could be helpful to read Chalmers (third edition) where he worked through the major modern schools of the philosophy of science.

Gaby
Gaby
17 years ago

Gummo, ignore Rafe, but only after reading the brief paper he has linked to in his penultimate comment. Chalmers is good for a little mental orienteering, if you think you need it.

Then go to Lakatos’s “Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (ed. Lakatos and Musgrave) as a start.

John Quiggin
John Quiggin
17 years ago

Nick, my paper with Simon showed that, in the strategic trade models that were all the rage a while back, either fixed or ad valorem tariffs could be optimal depending on the strategy space for the duopolists. This same question was the subject of a talk by Chuck Blackorby at the Economists Conference.

But as I said, the main point I wanted to make was the fragility of deductions from game-theoretic models with arbitrary choices of strategy space.

Rafe
17 years ago

Yes, ignore me, what would I know about these things!

But Gaby, you were surely joking when you wrote this #20

“the major aspects, for me, of Popper that he shared with the logical positivists or their successors, the logical empiricists.

1. The use of deductive logic and formal logic in science and the exclusion of induction.
2. The foundational bedrock of observation in the form of for Popper basic statements which are used as premises in arguments to refute or corroborating theories.”

The positivists and empiricists did not exclude in induction, they were obsessed with it, and the quest for the elusive inductive probability for theories. In fact they ran themselves into the ground and made themselves so boring and irrelevant that students turned to POMO which at first sight looked more interesting.

Observation is not the bedrock for Popper, the test of observation and evidence is merely the reality check that needs to be applied to theories. As he pointed out, observations are theory-dependent, which does not have the relativistic consequences that some people claim, but it does mean that observations can be problematic.

Incidentally, I think Popper and most of his interpreters, including myself, really made a meal of demarcation, it is not about drawing lines between subjects or disciplines it is about whether you are prepared to take evidence seriously. So Marxism and psychoanalysis are not inherently non-scientific, it was just doctrinaire Marxists and analysts who regarded everything that happened as proof of their theories. Popper accepted that there was probably a deal of truth in Freudianism, he was just pissed off with Freudian ideologues.

Ken Parish
Admin
17 years ago

Hi John (Quiggin)

I’ve tried to use this thread to begin developing my own rudimentary understanding of some of the economics issues raised. I’ve done that in part by attempting to restate what I understand you and others to be saying in my own words. I’m hoping you’ll either tell me that I’m vaguely on the right track or have completely misunderstood (and I won’t be offended either way). Thus, where you say:

“But as I said, the main point I wanted to make was the fragility of deductions from game-theoretic models with arbitrary choices of strategy space …”

I attempted to restate my understanding of your point as:

“As John Quiggin observes (at least I think he does), game theory might provide one basis for nailing down the boundaries of reliability of some economic theorising involving human behaviour (as just about all economic theorising does), but only if it too is employed carefully and with a clear acknowledgment of the boundaries within which it can be useful.”

Right track or complete lack of understanding?

Gaby
Gaby
17 years ago

Rafe, disparagement is not argument.

And please don’t be obtuse. You know I was referring to the type of argument that the confirmation or falsification (as the case may be) of theories or laws is couched in by positivists or Popper respectively.

Your para on observation is too opaque for me to understand in the context of Popper’s system.

Also your paper that you link to doesn’t seem to make any claim that Lakatos attmempted an Hegelian synthesis out of Popper and Kuhn. I know, however, that Ian Hacking has propounded such a view.

Tony Harris
17 years ago

Not wanting to be obtuse Gaby, but did you mean to say that the logical positivists excluded induction from their system?

The function and status of inductive logic was the major bone of contention between the positivists/empiricists and Popper.

To clarify the function of observation in the context of Popper’s system, it is one of the various forms of criticism or appraisal that can be applied to theories.

On Lakatos and his Hegelian synthesis, this is the relevent para from the link.

Lakatos formed a parasitic relationship with both Popper and Kuhn. From Popper he took the idea of research programmes. From Kuhn he took the idea that the central part of the program should be protected from criticism. He used some exciting new terms; his program has a ‘hard core’ of theories. A ‘protective belt’ of lesser theories that can be modified or discarded surrounds it. But beneath the verbal froth and bubble this is a recipe for conservatism. It prohibits the most important and fruitful criticisms which are directed at the framework assumptions of the program.

Gummo Trotsky
Gummo Trotsky
17 years ago

Rafe,

… People who approach their problem-solving in science and elsewhere with a combination of ingenuity and relentless imaginative criticsm have no use for the philosophy of science, except to get rid of dud ideas …

That very nicely summarises the opinion I developed of Popper, once I realised that he’d never had to stroll causally down the corridor from the lavvy to the lab with a plastic jug of his own urine, rock up to student health for a tetanus booster after the annual laboratory mouse bite or prepare serial dilutions of a sample of salmonella typhii without giving himself gastro. As for the rest of that sentence it’s obvious that you’re playing favourites – why leave Pooper out of the list of philosophers the genuinely inquiring might disdain?

Gummo Trotsky
Gummo Trotsky
17 years ago

Damn – another bloody parapractic typo!

Tony Harris
17 years ago

Gummo, your masochism is showing, (do you really enjoy being whipped?) as a matter of fact Popper did work in a psychology laboratory when he was studying for his teachers quals and his doctorate with Karl Buhler, of Buhler and Buhler, psychologists extraordinary.

Later he became a close friend of many scientists, especially John Eccles and they exchanged many letters while Eccles was in Otago (down the road from Christchurch) doing the work that won his Nobel Prize. The letters included detailed discussions of the experimental work.

Medawar, Einstein, Monod and Eccles all enthused about his ideas and many lesser lights in New Zealand spent time with him and gained benefits, including better understanding of the role of research in universities. He was great shot in the arm for higher education in New Zealand.

Gummo Trotsky
Gummo Trotsky
17 years ago

Rafe,

First a correction – it was Salmonella typhimurium, not typhii. You wouldn’t go near a typhii culture without a glove box.

Second, that last comment was a bit of a nostalgia trip about why Popper’s theories didn’t appeal then – when I got round to Kuhn, I decided he had a much better handle on what went on in science, having been through the science pedagogy mill himself.

Popper’s ideas might have more appeal if:

1) His devoted disciples toned it down a bit and recognised that some of his ideas – such as the idea that Darwinism/evolutionary theory is a “metaphysical research project” are pretty dumb;

2) They actually stopped dissing and dismissing the contributions of other philosophers in the field;

3) They recognised that Popper’s ideas on science ain’t scientific if they ain’t falsifiable. At least according to Popper.

When it comes to a philosopher I don’t judge him (too much) by who he hangs around with, but what he writes. Popper’s description of Aristotle in OSE could equally be applied to Popper himself in my view.

And finally, he wasn’t the only 20th Century philosopher to hang around with scientists – check out the Monk bio of Wittgenstein I referred to in an earlier comment. It’s an interesting story of, among other things, a philosopher applying imagination and ingenuity to the solving of a problem.

Rafe
17 years ago

Gummo I don’t know if anyone else is interested in our exchange but I suppose I will just have to keep on as long as you confuse the issues.

On Kuhn, please advise what he offers to guide or instruct scientists to be more effective and productive. Or alternatively, what time-wasting and confusing errors of method did he expose?\

On the other points:
1. Popper retracted his initial description of Darwinism as a MRP. He is a great fan of Darwin and evolutionary theory, and his theory of knowledge can be described as evolutionary epistemology. So what is your beef there?

He also retracted his numerical theory of verisimilitude when various people including his student David Miller pointed out it was flawed. Also he canned an ambitious project on the fundamental basis of logic.

It is ok to make mistakes as long as you learn from them and get out if there is no way to go forward.

2. Would you like to nominate some examples where his criticism of other philosophers – like the inductivists who believe in attaching p values to theories – has been effectively rebutted. Again, what is your beef? He is an exponent of the elimination of error by critical discussion and observational tests. It is hardly a criticism that he practiced what he preaches, you need to take up points of detail to sustain that line of attack.

3. You have missed the point (again). Proposals about methods are not supposed to be falsifiable in the way that a descriptive theory may be. They have to be tested either by their coherence or by their utility in helping scientists. Again, do you have any specific criticisms about his advice to scientists?

Your last point is wasted space because I am not aware that I ever suggested that he was the only philosopher to hang around with scientists.