Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- dsquared@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Jun 2003 12:05:41 -0700, andie
> nachgeborenen
> wrote:
>
> >[Popper] admitted that, therefore, falsification
> >cannot be atomic, proposition by proposition, and
> can
> >only be tentative and propvision, not conclusive.
> He
> >disputed, however, that this meant that therefore
> >there was no point in talking about falsifiability,
> >or that it could not be the demarcation criterion,
> or
> >that there was no demarcation criterion. I think he
> >was right both in his concession and his
> conclusions
> >about its limited effect. If you think
> > otherwise, explain why.
>
> Three related reasons:
>
> 1) Because Popper honoured this self denying
> ordinance
> as often in the breach as the observance whenever he
> started actually saying things about science,
> pseudoscience and nonscience.

Well, yes, but people say all sorts of thinmgs.
Lakatos invokes Marxism as the example of a decaying
reserach program. Maybe he had in mind the sterile
Stalinist Marxism-Leninism of his youth, but it's more
like he's just being a reflexive Hungarian
anticommunist. Does that mean we chuck out his
sophisticated Popperianism, because he offered a bad
example or applied it in a loaded way? (Popper, in
contrast, is very fair to Marx in The Open Society.)

  I'm sure that
> sufficient
> diligence might dig up some example of him saying
> that,
> for example, there might be constructed some valid
> science of personality based on planetary movements
> and
> that the validity of the Sirius-Nile cycle and lunar
> cycles in things from suicide rates to stock returns
> needed to be explained in some manner, but it was
> hardly representative of the man's work

So he wasn't Feyerabend. I live Feyerabend, but not
being Feyerabend is not a bad thing, necesasrily.

 and by and
> large was discarded completely by his wannabes.
> There
> has to be some sort of product liability for
> academic
> theories, and Popper is as culpable for the
> influence
> of the cruder version of his theory as the producers
> of
> Vicodin.

Extend that to Marx and his less distinguished
epigones? But in fact, although I think Popperians are
rather a bore, I think the caricature you discuss here
is really more a straw man target of anti-Popperians
than a version of vulgar Popperianism held by real
people.

>
> 2)  A lot of the explanation for 1) is that the
> grammer
> of the word "demarcation" makes it very difficult to
> use in contexts where you are talking about
> something
> that admits of degrees and can only be judged
> holistically.

Popper's milieu wasn't one that gave a lot of play to
thsi sort of fuzzy pragmatist thinking. He was groping
in this direction. So were Neurath and Quine. Hempel
and Carnap and Wittgenstein too, all, in their various
ways ended there at the end of the 1940s, but Die
Logik der Forschung is a decade earlier. If P was at
fault here, so was almost everyonse else. By 10 or 15
years later, people began to talk in terms of degrees
and holism. Including Popper, indeed, earlier than
most.

 And language is telling us something
> here; it is specifically telling us that a
> "Criterion"
> which can't be relied upon to give a definitive
> answer,
> isn't much of a criterion at all.

So we wax pragmatic or Wittgensteinian, depending on
one's predelictions. But it's still not a dumb
question to ask, why are certain kinds of statements
("scientific ones") so much more reliable than others,
and which statements are the scientific ones?

 If Popper had
> only
> talked about a "falsificationist approach", a way of
> thinking which set score by attempting to knock down
> null hypotheses, then he'd have been true to this
> interpretation of them, but he'd have been saying
> something more similar to Lakatos.

Also a decade or more later. He got there in his way,
and therea re earlier papers in C&R for which he still
receives insufficient credit.

>
> 3)  And finally, a lot of the force behind 2) above
> comes from the fact that a lot of the *point* of
> falsificationism is that it's meant to give us a
> short
> way with all the problems of holism and
> tentativeness
> which dog theories of science based on confirmation.

Wasn't the original intent. The positivist version of
verification, to which falsification was an
alternative at the time, was atomistic.

> If falsificationism isn't going to definitively rule
> anything out, and if it can't be used to assess the
> scientificity of particular propositions, then
> what's
> the advantage over Bayesianism?

Doesn't involve commitment to a dubious subjectivist
interpretation of probabilities? (Popper was a realist
abour probabilities.)

  Popper was
> originally
> fighting a war on two fronts, and it strikes me that
> in
> making these concessions to one side he's very much
> opening himself up to attack on the other.

Yeah, well, OK. That's life, no?


>
>
> PS: If Ian had been quicker on the draw he might
> have
> pointed out that Quine thought that it *was* a
> problem
> for Popper and demanded that you be the one to
> "explain
> why" you disagreed.  I'm not sure you realise how
> dismissive you're being.

I'm sorry. I apologize.

jks

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