Karl R. Popper
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
an enjoyable book 4 out of 5 stars.
17 of 20 people found this review helpful.
The book is a collection of articles by Popper. It is easier to understand than his classic Logik der Forshung, and is much richer in content, for Popper embarks in some of these lectures on the history of philosophy and the history of science. There is also a delicious paper on self-reference and meaning in ordinary language.
I especially recommend the paper on "Scientific problems and their roots in metaphysics". Popper's conception of scientific dinamics as a sequence of big problems and answers to them makes him see continuity where experts on some particular philospher usually don't. Thus Popper sees a direct relation between Pythagoras, Plato and Euclid based on some fundamental cosmological problems. Euclid's Elements, Popper claims, were conceived by its author not as an excercise in pure geometry but as an organon of a theory of the world, designed to solve the problems of Plato's cosmology. Plato realized that Pythagoras' "arithmetical" theory of the world was in ruins after the discovery of irrational numbers, and that a new method was needed to understand the world. That is why he initiated the "gemoetrical" programme, which found its culmination in platonic Euclid's work. This way of seeing things is a bit unrealistic, a kind of free "rational reconstruction", but I think it is nevertheless a valuable view.
The fundamental lecture on philosophy of science in this collection is chapter 10, "Truth, rationality & the growth of scientific knowledge", where Popper presents his philosophy of science quite clearly and in detail. There has been a lot of water under the bridge since this paper was first published. His theory of "verisimilitude", for instance, was shown to be unmistakably wrong in the 1970s.
His approach to Tarski's theory of truth in that chapter is rather awkward: he pretends that Tarski's work showed what is meant by correspondence with the facts. To prove this, he appeals to instances of convention (T) and replacement of "is true" by "corresponds to the facts". Thus "snow is white" corresponds to the facts if and only if snow is white. But this might explain what it is for "snow is white" to correspond to the facts, but not what "correspondence with the facts" is. We cannot ascertain what that single property consists of, and surely Tarski's definiens for "truth" (i.e. "satisfaction by every infinite sequence") won't do the job. Also, Popper's answer to the challenge that Duhem's problem posed on his philosophy is disappointing, the answer being something like "there exists a logical method of proving independence from axioms, so we might hopefully see from which axiomS the falied prediction depended; and even so, I admit that this method is usually difficult to apply; therefore holism is an untenable dogma."
The thesis of the book, says Popper, can be put like this: we can learn from our mistakes. This is held together with this other thesis: there is no ground for believeing any empirical statement to be true. The reader might wonder how Popper managed to believe in these two thesis at one and the same time. In Popper's view, science is this: conjecturing a theory to be true; subjecting this theory to criticism (empirical testing); this testing is done after experiment, but experiments are not reliable, we have no warrant that our perceptual apparatus is not deceiving us; if the theory fails the test, we reject it; but "it" is a whole system of related theories, even observational theories (even logic and mathematics, says Quine); and then we have to guess which of these we have to reject. The risk of taking a true theory to be false is certainly very high, as high as that of taking a false theory to be true. So I don't see how Popper can be so confident that we can learn from mistakes. Perhaps if we purged Popper's methodology of things like truth (not to mention verisimilitude), we could get a methodology of science conceived as a canon of critical procedure, with no claims as to what we are achieving when we abide by it.
The article on hegelian Dialectics is amusing. It tries the impossible task of explaining dialectics in a simple language, and then to refute it. The dialectician's typical reply to this kind of criticism is: you used clear language, so that is NOT Hegel's diatectics.
As I said, this is a highly stimulating and clearly written book, which deserves to be read even if many things in it must to be corrected or complemented.
Editorial Review:
This classic remains one of Karl Popper's most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insight into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history.
