This is a question I'm throwing out to the philosophers out there, what is the current thinking in regards to Popper in philosophy of science? My own impression is that Popper is considered passe. I find this interesting, because in my personal experience when workings scientists mouth philospophical platitudes, it is almost purely in a Popperian language. A friend of mine who is a systematist was at a conference, and she recounted to me how a cladist badgered her after her presentation because she had violated "the Popperian method." Another time I read a paper which explored the evolution of molecular genetic systems under the impact of drift and selection where the authors formulated their model in an explicitly Popperian fashion. The emergence of cladistics which allowed for the application hypothetico-deductive model and phylogenetics is and was inspired by the Popperian demand for objective falsification. So what's the story? You tell me, are scientists standing on philosophical ruins?
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There are still people doing Popper scholarship. The general sense, I think, is that Popper was onto something important but mucked it up in the details, wanting science to be cleaner than it actually is. You can find a nice discussion about Popper, written by a very good philosopher of science, here.
I would say that most philosophers of science would accept something closer to Lakatos's model of science than Popper's. And certainly not all scientists are standing on philosophical ruins.
macht,
my contention roughly is that if you hear a ph.d. scientist assert something philosophical to do with science, there is a greater than .95 probability that it will be popperian. i also would assert that the ratio of those who know the name 'popper' to those who know the name 'lakatos' is 50-100:1 within the sciences. what do you think?
There is a tremendous mess in philosophy of science, basically Logical positivism --> Popper --> Kuhn --> Lakatos --> Feyerabend doing different variations of the same stuff. (Feyerabend is the post-modernist). Off to the side is Toulmin, the pragmatist. Toulmin is my man.
My feeling is that it's all somewhat irrelevant, useful primarily to 1.) establish pecking orders among scientists, and 2.) to validate (or not) new proposed sciences, such as economics or sociology. In other words, philosophy of science doesn't tell you much about established sciences like chemistry or physics or biology; it tries to use knowledge about existing sciences to validate new stuff.
Popper's work was very idealized. Science for him was like a panacea and led to democracy, public order, freedom, etc. The others variously tried to make Popper's work more realistic and empirical.
Ernest Gellner (a student of Popper's) said something like "We'll start believing that the social sciences are real sciences when physical science starts borrowing from social science, rather than always the other way around." To a weak degree chaos/complexity might be an example of this: Mandelbrot(fractals) did work in economics before anywhere else. (However, economists did not accept his work).
My own feeling is that the dream of a social science is misguided. Or put otherwise, the most scientific study of society and history possible will be so far different from biology and the other established sciences that it will require a redefinition of "science", much as thermodynamics and evolution did. And this new science won't have the incredible power in its realm that physics has in its realm.
Transhumanists and people in evpsych, HBD / genetics, brain science, and AI will disagree, but even their wildest (as-yet-unfulfilled) claims really don't reach the rigor, precision, and universality of already-existing physics.
Or put otherwise, the most scientific study of society and history possible will be so far different from biology and the other established sciences that it will require a redefinition of "science", much as thermodynamics and evolution did. And this new science won't have the incredible power in its realm that physics has in its realm.
Transhumanists and people in evpsych, HBD / genetics, brain science, and AI will disagree, but even their wildest (as-yet-unfulfilled) claims really don't reach the rigor, precision, and universality of already-existing physics.
be careful with the "catchall" biology. molecular biology blends into biophysics. a lot of ethology is basically social science unconstrained by ethical considerations which would hold if the objects of study were human. that is, you can do controlled experiments. there is a lot of cross-fertilization between economics and evolutionary biology in regards to game theory (though j.m. smith downplayed this himself) and usage of concepts like "optimization."
You're right scientists take Popper most seriously these days. So should we turn to scientists for philosophy of science any more than we turn to birds for ornithology? Perhaps. But in any case, scientists were doing good science long before Popper and he doesn't seem to have held them up much.
Very readable references I like, which lay out the difficulties with Popper:
James Brown, Who won the science wars?
Susan Haack, Defending Science
While I don't think Popper will do too much damage to everyday science, I do think his influence is more malign in broader political debates.
Popper tends to get used to bang home the point that science can never tell us the truth, only what's false. That's true in a technical sense. But it misses the larger point, which is that science does move towards the truth.
Today there is a horrible convergence of Left and Right, where both criticise science for being too Arrogant in pretending that it can assert the truth. The Christian conservative denying evolution and the liberal parent into alternative medicine are much closer than either would like to admit. Also, I would argue, the greenhouse skeptic who tells us climate is too complex to hope to model and the deep green who objects to messing about with natural process that we do not understand.
I think science is not assertive enough today. Part of the popularity of Popper is that the Popperian account of science is much simpler than real science. But a great deal of its popularity is, I think, down to the fact that it is a very modest philosophy. That is a bad thing. It is skepticism not within science, but towards it.
While I don't think Popper will do too much damage to everyday science, I do think his influence is more malign in broader political debates.
in tend to agree in the broad details here. my point in posting this is that i'm a dabbler, so it is funny when i hear scientists appeal to popper as an authority, when my own impression was that he wasn't an authority in his own field of the philosophy of science (obviously, an influence, and important, but that is different from being someone to whom one can appeal as an authority).
Oops. That James Brown reference should be:
Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Science Wars
I tend to agree with you. The funny thing is that Lakatos's main criticism of Popper was an historical argument, based on what scientists have actually done in the past. It could be said that Popper was telling us how science should rationally be done rather than how it actually is done, but then his model would make many of the best examples of good science the result of irrational methods.
Joe wrote: Today there is a horrible convergence of Left and Right, where both criticise science for being too Arrogant in pretending that it can assert the truth.
I think this is a valid concern. Zarquon help us when we live in a society where thinking, reasoning, experimenting, and learning are considered to be offensively arrogant.
Alan Sokal has written some clear and thought-provoking things on this matter. The impression one gets from Intellectual Impostures, which he co-authored with Jean Bricmont, is that the things in Popper with which basically all scientists agree were set out before Popper and can't really be called Popperian. Unfortunately, I'm procrastinating at the office and not at my home, so I can't pull the book off the shelf and find the specific relevant passages.
I recommend his paper "Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?" (2004). Quoting pages 5--6:
Sokal's footnotes point to critiques along these general lines in Newton-Smith's The Rationality of Science (1981) and Laudan's Beyond Positivism and Relativism (1996), among other places.
The idea of hypothesis-test has been around for a long time. The best scientists (biologists) I have known practice this method regularly, and those who are less clear thinking write their papers as if they had an hypothesis before doing the procedure that they present as an experiment.
John Platt wrote clearly about this, and the long history from Bacon, in his article "Strong Inference", in Science Magazine in 1964. For the text see http://256.com/gray/docs/strong_inference.html
There is also a more layperson accessible treatment in chapter 9 of Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
In general, working scientists that I know are not interested in Popper or Kuhn on a regular basis; they want to figure things out (or more cynically, figure out enough of something cool to get published in a flashy journal and get more funding). Even with careerism and everything else, the scientists I know are excited about figuring stuff out, not debating philosophy of science.
I have a vague sense that Popper abstracted his philosophy of science from how Einstein presented his General Theory of Relativity, complete with experiments that could falsify it, such as Einstein's prediction that starlight could be seen to be bending around the sun during a solar eclipse.
Is there anything to this surmise of mine?
Steve, yes -- that was indeed one of Popper's favourite examples of the way science ought to be done wherever possible.
I think Popper deserves a lot of points right out of the gate for dismantling a lot of pernicious nonsense like logical positivism, and for giving methodological pointers for smoking out charlatanry -- I think it would be hard to argue that Popper's emphasis on strong attempts at refutation as the strongest measure of a theory hasn't been a good influence on science in general.
A lot of people hack straw-Poppers by saying things like "it doesn't describe how scientists go about forming theories", etc -- when this was never Popper's concern. Quite explicitly, he didn't particularly care how people came up with theories -- the irrelevance of origins is central to his epistemology in fact. What he cared about was "quality control": how do we sort good theories from bad ones? I've never seen anyone propose anything better that wasn't basically Popper with some minor tweaks. He's severe when it comes to quality control, but this is exactly what we ought to want.
I'm a little perplexed by Joe's assertion that modesty is a bad thing, in light of the fact that most man-made disasters of the past century can be traced back largely to epistemic overconfidence. I'll take fallibilism over hubris any day.
I don't know about 'current thinking', but even in his lifetime Popper was more popular among scientists than among other philosophers, who thought he tended to be arrogant and superficial ("hey guys, I've just solved Hume's Problem of Induction!" - "Yeah, right").
And I think his popularity among scientists was partly because he flattered them, giving the impression that scientists were tough-minded seekers after truth, determined to expose their theories to refutation and drop them if they failed the test - which is *not* the typical behaviour of scientists in reality.
Personally I favour a blend of Popper, Lakatos, and a dose of good old-fashioned inductivism.
One problem Popper had was that hardly anyone noticed his early work. When someone did, he replied extensively, overjoyed at the chance for dialogue. But as he grew older, he began to get annoyed at the lack of response to what, he thought, were among the most important questions facing true science. And so he began to praise his own work, sounding like a huckster. The amount of self-congratulation and self-praise infecting his essays, lectures, and other writings, turned many people off. It made Popper sound like a supreme egotist; in fact he was very humble.
In short, his own efforts at self-acclaimation, though justified, probably account for his relative shunning today.
Popper's ideas are both robust and practical, when you get over the obsession with demarcation and some problems with his methods of exposition. Early in life he was too longwinded and later he was too concerned with vindicating his earlier work.
The really important achievements of Popper were:
1. Getting the philosophy of science out the rut where it was stuck with positivism and inductivism.
2. Retrieving the role of metaphysics with his theory of metaphysical research programs.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/popmeta.html
3. Reviving evolutionary epistemology.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/revmunzpop.html
4. Providing a framework for tradition, evidence, logic, metaphysics and imagination to work in synergy.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/introrandi.html
5. Making an equally significant contribution to the philosophy of politics and the social sciences.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/poppurpose.html