Re: [Critical-Realism] Quick on Popper and falsification

["Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mervyn,

It's tricky about "laws."  People who for one reason or another reject the idea that things have intrinsic dispositional properties but who do think that the world is some regular way tend to think that it is something called "the laws of nature" that account for the order.  Such laws are conceived as being external to the causally inert "matter" upon which they impose.  As RB points out later in RTS, the whole thing amounts in the end to nothing other than a dogmatic assertion of the fact of order.  In terms of knowledge claims, this same group often views "laws" as claims of the form "for all x, y holds."  

"Purchase," then, can mean one or both of two things.  It can mean that in some weird way these things called "the laws of nature" actually do something.  Or it can mean that these things called laws are thought to express, in language, something about the world that is so.

I'm pretty sure that Popper's ontology doesn't include matter being structured by intrinsic dispositional properties.  So that's a kind of ontological constraint: he's neither an essentialist nor a dispositional realist.  At the same time, he doesn't think that EMPIRICAL claims of the form "for all x, y" can be anything other than conjectural, because of induction.  So that's an epistemic limit of sorts.  But he does think, I think, that the purpose of knowledge-claims is to tell us something about the world.  

So, as I read him, he squares this circle by saying first of all that while universal claims can only be thought of as conjectures, refutations - because based on a single instance - by-pass the induction problem and so can be known with more certainty, and - as I vaguely recall - by eventually wanting to talk about probabalistic laws.  These, I suspect, are epistemic things, i.e., statements, rather than causal agents as the mysterious "laws of nature" are. 

Does that make sense?  I'd have to double check, but I think I'm in the ballpark here.

r.
-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Mervyn Hartwig
Sent: Thu 21-Jun-07 1:35 PM
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Quick on Popper and falsification
 
Hi Ruth

Thanks.

If for Popper a law is just a statement with no purchase on the way the
world really is, what you're saying doubtless follows. Is he that much of an
empiricist? (PS: I see that George says he's not). If on the other hand laws
refer in some sense, it doesn't seem to me to follow. (For CR, as you know,
laws are both statements in the TD and real powers in the ID).

Mervyn


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List"
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2007 10:53 AM
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Quick on Popper and falsification


Hi Mervyn,

You wrote:

No.  Popper overlooks that in order to demonstrate just one falsifying
instance of an empirical invariance, some proposition within some
theoretical framework has to be accepted, i.e. be regarded as
non-conjectural ...

I definitely used to think this.  But I'm not so sure now.  I think that
Popper thinks that a plain old observation statement will do it.  No need
for non-conjectural knowledge-claims.  If the law amounts to "All sheep are
white," all that is needed to falsify it is to say "I see a black one."

Of course, once you want to know what makes the black one be a sheep too,
you're on a slippery slope towards scientific essentialism.  But that gets
to what kinds of things laws tell you, I think, not to whether or not single
observation statements, rather than non-conjectural knowledge-claims, are
enough to falsify general statements.

Another way to think of it, it seems to me, is that with Popper the
conjectural part is entirely a response to the induction problem -- it has
to do with whether what you think you know will hold next time too, not
whether you might be wrong this time.  See what I mean?  Sorry if not clear;
I seem to have been up all night for no good reason.

Warmly,
r.



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