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

["Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi George,

There may well be others who know Popper better than I do, but here's what I'd say.

You wrote:

(1) What does Bhaskar offer in the realm of scientific (rather than social scientific) philosophy that isn't incorporated into Popper's thought.


In my view:

(a) the ontology is completely different.  In RTS, RB affirms the existence of dispositional properties, i.e., powers that things have.  He also seems to hold, there, that things fall into natural kinds, on the basis of powers that they hold essentially (i.e., powers in virtue of which they are what they are).  I have always thought of Popper as holding to a modern mechanistic ontology, one in which matter is not thought to have internal dispositional properties, essential or otherwise.

(b) the epistemology is completely different.  In RTS, RB argues that laws don't have anything to do with regularity -- they are not statements of regularity but rather statements about what things have the potential to do, under certain circumstances, given what they are.  The saying of this, note, follows from an ontology in which things are seen to have essential dispositional properties.  Popper, meanwhile, is not saying that laws don't have anything to do with regularities.  Instead, he is saying that, because of the problem with induction, regularities cannot be known with certainty to hold over time, and so laws must be thought of as provisional conjectures, rather than as certain knowledge.

There's more that you could say, but these basic differences are different enough that I'll stop with them.


You wrote:
(2)  What does a Bhaskarian resolution offer on the grounds of research design that might be missing from a Popperian approach?

(a) Resolution of what?

(b) There have GOT to be people better able to speak to this than I am.

(c) As a very, very, very minimum, I'd say that while both support experimentation in the natural sciences, for Popper advance is via falsification of provisional general statements about regularities whereas for RB advance is via the artificial isolation and identification of ever-deeper levels of causal process.

You wrote:
However, I don't think Popper goes so far as to "the idea that things have intrinsic dispositional properties."  

Right.  He would reject intrinsic dispositional properties, whereas RB would not.


You wrote:
(3)  In the most radical sense do Bhaskar's ontological theories move outside the realm of a faith claim in which (excuse the biblical reference, which I believe here is relevant, at least rhetorically) "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things [only partially] seen?"

As I said, I'm pretty sure that I think that RB's strongest argument for dispositional realism is his immanent critigue of the conditions of possibility of the intelligibility of experimentation.  I don't think that this argument rests on "faith" in the intelligibility of experiemntation, because I think that such intelligibility is something that one can argue for, on good (though not absolute) grounds.  That there are external things with powers is the "philosophical" ontology, as RB puts it, that he proposes.  "Scientific" ontology - that is, claims about what the powers are of this or that thing - RB leaves to scientists.  But I don't think that he thinks that they are a matter of faith either, but rather of argument to the best possible explanation, so far as we (or they) can tell.

Hope this is helpful!

I really like reading Popper, I should say for the record.  I think he gets a bum rap.

Warmly,
Ruth

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