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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Karl Popper

The middle ground in philosophy of science

24 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Social Science

≈ 6 Comments

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Francis Bacon, Imre Lakatos, Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend, Pierre Duhem, Thomas Kuhn, W.V.O. Quine

Last time I looked to find a middle ground in philosophy of science, between Francis Bacon’s historically untenable inductivism and Paul Feyerabend’s irrationalism. I noted then that I think Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos all attempt to stake out a position somewhere in this ground, with varying degrees of sucess. I turn to them now.

Karl Popper rightly acknowledges the scientific importance of fallibilism and uncertainty: science is powerful not because its conclusions can be proved right, but because it can acknowledge when they are proved wrong. Popper notes that science in practice advances more by falsification than by induction: the role of empirical data is not to ground generalizations, but rather to disconfirm them. One can legitimately formulate a theory in abstraction that says all swans must be white; the important thing is that one reject it when one observes a black swan.

But Popper’s critique of inductivism does not go far enough. Continue reading →

The spectrum of philosophy of science

10 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Social Science

≈ 2 Comments

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Francis Bacon, Imre Lakatos, Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend, pramāṇa, RationalWiki, Thomas Kuhn

I have found myself thinking more and more lately about the philosophy of science, and finding it increasingly important for the rest of philosophy. There are multiple reasons for this. Perhaps the most important is simply the prestige (or normative weight) we attach to scientific knowledge, a prestige I take to be deserved. I would agree that to the extent that it is fair to say that “science has established” that human consciousness is not reborn after death, then it is true that human consciousness is not reborn after death. Science, in that respect, is what classical Indian philosophers would have called a pramāṇa, a reliable means of knowledge.

A second, related, reason is that it turns out that that very nature of something’s being scientifically established turns out on closer glance to be quite complex, itself its own kind of philosophical question – and one with bearing on philosophical questions well outside the natural sciences. Studies of the history of science – what science has actually been in practice, not what it is supposed to be in theory – show us a process much messier than an account in the standard mold of “build your theory by generalizing from the empirical evidence”. Often the theoretical insight comes first and the observations supporting it come only later. So Copernicus built his heliocentric model mathematically and only later would Galileo demonstrate it with a telescope, just as Einstein began with an “intuition” of the theory of relativity that was only later empirically verified. The way actual science – including the science of our greatest scientific heroes – has proceeded, turns out to be considerably messier than the standard account tells us it is supposed to be.

How then might we think about what science and scientific knowledge are? Continue reading →

Philosophical single-mindedness (2)

27 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Place, Politics, Protestantism, Psychology, Salafi, Vedānta

≈ 3 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, Aristotle, Augustine, Communism, conservatism, David Harvey, G.W.F. Hegel, James Doull, Jane Jacobs, Karl Marx, Karl Popper, modernism, Myers-Briggs, Plato, Pol Pot, Śaṅkara

Last week I spoke of a philosophical single-mindedness shared by modernists, evangelical Protestants, Salafi Muslims and St. Augustine, and this week I’d like to reflect on it further. What these various single-minded thinkers hold in common is opposed above all, I think, by literal conservatism. Conservatives in the literal sense seek to preserve much of the world as it is – “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” They are opposed to radical breaks and revolutions, whether those aim to take us forward (as the modernists) or backward (as the Salafis). I noted in my earlier post that Jane Jacobs’s urban criticism, a direct attack on modernist architecture and modernist urban planning, is a quintessential example of literal conservatism; Jacobs would react with the same hostility to the Salafi assault on Mecca. In that respect, for all its urbanity, Jacobs’s work is of a piece with the agrarian rural conservatism of Front Porch Republic and Wendell Berry.

The appeal of such literal conservatism is certainly not limited to aesthetics, but one may perhaps see it most clearly in the aesthetic realm. (Some modernists, like the Marxist geographer David Harvey, see an aesthetic conservatism as opposed to a more ethical modernism.) For it’s hard to imagine elevating a single most important principle, as modernists typically do, as the principle behind beauty: could one ever say “Everything constructed according to principle X will be beautiful,” without making principle X entirely vacuous and devoid of content? Aesthetics seem to require a focus on the details and not merely the big picture.

Now of the various single-minded thinkers I’ve mentioned so far – modernists, evangelicals, Salafis and Augustine – one might note that they all have their historical roots in Western traditions. Continue reading →

Why we should ask what science is

15 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science

≈ 12 Comments

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AAR, academia, APA, Graham Priest, Karl Popper, religion, William Wainwright

Since my post on Pierre Hadot, I’ve come to realize that genuinely philosophical thought today must include elements of the domains usually called “religion” and “science” (and that those two domains must overlap to some degree). Having done a degree in religious studies, I’ve thought through the concept of “religion” a lot – mostly to identify what a misleading category it is, though of course the phenomena it typically points to matter a lot.

But what about science? It’s intriguing to me that for one of the most highly regarded philosophers of science, Karl Popper, the central problem in philosophy of science is demarcation. That is to say, for Popper, the most important thing philosophy of science needs to do is to distinguish science from non-science.

At first this seems an oddly defensive position to take. Compare “philosophy of science” in this regard to “philosophy of religion.” Continue reading →

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