Recently my colleague Masood cited Popper's [in]famous line: "Truth has only to do with beliefs, and as such, science has nothing to do with truth." Masood's intention seems admirable: "In my opinion, Popper (1902-1994) frees science by adding the most important ingredient that any human endeavor must have at its core: a good measure of modesty." However invoking Popper in support of modesty is rather like using Agent Orange to weed the yard: the consequences go far beyond the intent. This is a blog entry, not an article, so I'll restrict my criticism to two areas: Popper's questionable philosophy and his intellectual irresponsibility.
The basic problem with the first part of Popper's credo - "Truth has only to do with beliefs" - is that it is fundamentally anti-realist. In taking this position, Popper is essentially in the same camp as Kuhn and Feyerabend:
According to this view, with each radical theory change goes a change in ontology. As a result, from the perspective of the new theory, the entities of its predecessor do not exist. Suppose this were so. A certain 'meta-induction' [...] would become compelling: the entities of present theories do not exist from the perspective of some theory we shall adopt in the future. So we have no reason to suppose these entities exist. Anti-realism would be more plausible than realism. [Michael Devitt, Realism & Truth]Now you can abandon realism if you like, although you should expect to be misunderstood if you do. (See below.) For those of us that stick with realism, we usually find that this demands some version of correspondence truth, developed to make sense of degrees of truth. Devitt's analysis (op.cit., s7.6) provides a plausible basis for the incremental views of science often expressed as increasing verisimilitude or simple convergence. But correspondence truth is not simply "to do with beliefs".
If Popper's arguments were confined to technical philosophy, I wouldn't have been provoked to respond like this. But the second part of his statement - "science has nothing to do with truth" is simply mischievous. Oh, sure, he said "as such", implying that the statement was to be taken in the context of his narrow definition of "truth", but that's just CYA stuff. From an ideological standpoint, Popper is aligned with the anti-rational, anti-scientific post-modernists such as Feyerabend, Deleuze, Irigaray, Foucault, et al. Back in 1959, Bertrand Russell wrote:
Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.And of course we do so, every time we take a prescription drug or get on an airplane. We are operational realists. (Even those who "trust in a higher power" look both ways when they cross the street.) But the ideology of the relativism of truth has become pervasive since Russell wrote those words 45 years ago. The respectable idea of a "scientific theory" has been dumbed down into "just a theory, no better or worse than any other opinion". Since "science has nothing to do with truth", Feyerabend's claim that "anything goes" has become the norm. (It's worth remembering that his most influential book was Farewell to Reason.) Presidents have astrologers as well as science advisers, "intelligent design" is science, E=mc² is a 'sexed equation', and O. J. Simpson's blood tests are just a matter of opinion. [An enjoyable rant about the fundamental interconnectedness of these ideas can be found in Francis Wheen's excellent How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered The World.] And anyone who knows a little of science should be puzzled by the fact that most people think that the Theory of Relativity is much more likely to be true than the Theory of Evolution.
I recognize that Popper made useful contributions to the philosophy of science. His idea of falsification was important, although like the logical positivism that inspired it, falsification was never quite as fundamental as its adherents believed. For most, it led to a more pragmatic metaphysics; for Popper, it seems to have led to de facto anti-realism. For myself, I believe that science is about truth. Of course it's a contingent, approximate, increasingly accurate truth, rather than the stark dichotomy of formal logic, but (as Russell said) it's rational to accept it, and it's better than the alternative. The computer that I'm typing this on is a product of that science. The bottom line is that for all the varieties of truth that really matter, Popper was simply wrong.
(N.b. The original quotation, "When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun" is due to Hans Johst, and not - as often assumed - Himmler.)
Posted by geoff2 at December 15, 2004 02:56 PM | TrackBackI find it quite interesting how people who discard much of science as a truth are quite willing to make use of it when it suits their needs.
I also find the phrase "I reach for my gun..." a bit strange when used by pacifists.
Posted by: Susan in St. Paul at December 15, 2004 08:22 PMBut both "science" and "truth" are such slippery concepts. Popper certainly thought that he was scientific in his thinking.
And I'm not a pacifist. However I certainly don't - and wouldn't - own a gun. But the quotation is so famous, and seemed so apposite....
Posted by: Geoff Arnold at December 15, 2004 08:27 PM
More on this note later (perhaps on BSC) but for right now . . .
The statement "Truth has only to do with beliefs, and as such, science has nothing to do with truth" is really my own for rhetorical purposes, as the note to it indicates. We should take care not to attribute it to Popper but that's an academic point.
I should probably clarify what I mean by the statement later, but instead, I may just point to a dialog in Plato (Timaeus) or John MacMurray's work, which draw out more of the various aspects of "science" as a cosmology and a human activity among others. In my essay, I wanted to start with that statement and go to Popper and then finish with my own ideas on the importance of the concept of refutability in science as a human activity. I'm only borrowing the concept of refutability from Popper.
In response to Susan, while one can use and live with science, one need not worship it as the truth. Right? Those distinct attitudes towards science, meaning the attitude of "use" and "contemplation" on the one hand and the attitude arising from recognizing its inherent non-truth and refutability, can coexist. Can they not?
Not sure what"worship" has to do with anything. When faced with a claim that "proposition X is true", I want to know in what sense the claim is made. Is X a statement in some formal closed system, so that truth is essentially analytical? Are you claiming correspondence truth to some real world? Etcetera. http://www.iep.utm.edu/t/truth.htm has a good summary of the various alternatives in philosophical usage. I have to say that my sympathies here lie with the logical postivists; even though their program was ultimately a failure, the impulse was good - and so was Popper's. Let's talk about verifiability, of falsifiability. (And yes, I know that this rules out the supernatural and spiritual. I'm an unreconstructed materialist.)
Posted by: Geoff Arnold at December 16, 2004 01:58 PMI wrote a few more lines about this here: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/MortazaviBlog/20041216#more_on_truth. Of course, this promises to be a long dialog, and I'm not sure we'll converge.
Posted by: M. Mortazavi at December 16, 2004 03:06 PM
By the way, Russell didn't say it was better to accept it.
He said "It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically".
This admits of the fact that science, structurally, is merely a hypothesis about how things work, albeit a useful, evolving hypothesis that helps us cope with certain aspects of the world, often having to do with our mechanical control of it, and perhaps less with its full comprehension.
Now, Russell continues that as a rule it has a "better chance of being right." But that's merely a rule adopted by him. We should ask why adopt that rule and not some other one? And "a better chance of being right" about what when compared with the "unscientific"? [His use of the word "unscientific" is quite odd. This is a definition of the other in terms of what one understands, but perhaps not too atypical of Russell's style.]
(1) Russell said "Science [...] has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific." Assuming that all theories can be cateorized as scientific or unscientific (with no exceptions), and that "right" is used to mean "true", his conclusion can be read as meaning that it is rational to accept the theory which has a better chance of being true". The alternative position seems perverse.
(2) Russell's use of the phrase "as a rule" is simply an expression of probability: better than 50%, perhaps much better. It is unidiomatic to treat it as referring to a literal "rule", and your following thread makes no sense.
(3) I take Russell's use of "unscientific" to be simply NOT-scientific. Russell's epistemology was realist; his 1912 book (which I have not read) was a realist attack on the prevailing idealist epistemology. (I don't know enough about his views on perception to further classify him, but my intuition is that he is likely to have been a naive realist.)
Your comment on the "incoherence" argument by the positivists, when addressing the question [Why is there anything at all when there can be absolutely nothing?] has reminded me of a historical anectode and of two other books, one by Al-Ghazali and another by Ibn Rushd.
Your comment on the "incoherence" argument by the positivists, when addressing the question [Why is there anything at all when there can be absolutely nothing?] has reminded me of a historical anectode and of two other books, one by Al-Ghazali and another by Ibn Rushd.
Geoff:
From an ideological standpoint, Popper is aligned with the anti-rational, anti-scientific post-modernists such as Feyerabend, Deleuze, Irigaray, Foucault, et al.
ROFL. Good one, Geoff. I know that it's fashionable to knock Popper, but you are doing so by completely misrepresenting him. When Popper says that science is nothing to do with truth, he is talking about the notion of truth as an absolute, the Platonic absolute that exists outside human intellect. Furthermore, he is talking about absolute truth as something that humans can grasp if they try hard enough, or study for long enough, or simply believe their priests who received the truth from god and are passing it on to humanity.
Popper is simply saying that such truth does not exist in any meaningful way, and at most as a metaphysical concept. And of course, and rightly so, he has no time for a metaphysical concept of truth. Operationally, we can never know that we have been listening to the right priests: should we listen to the Jewish ones, or the Catholic ones, or the Brahmin ones? After all, even Catholic priests fight each other to the death on questions of 'truth'.
But more importantly, perhaps, Popper is saying that science is not interested in claiming that something is 'true', because such a concept is meaningless. We cannot ever know that we have proved something absolutely, therefore by virtue of being human we cannot, by definition, know what the truth is. It's a word without philosophical (and certainly, without scientific) meaning.
In view of his insistence on rigorous scientific testing and only accepting that which is rationally meaningful, I find your assertion that he is 'anti-rational' and 'anti-scientific' hilariously funny.