From: "Rafe Champion" <rchamp-AT-bigpond.net.au>
To: <HOPOS-L-AT-listserv.nd.edu>
Date: Sat, 9 Apr 2005 07:45:00 +1000
Cc: Feyerabend Group <feyerabend-AT-driftline.org>
Subject: [PKF] Book notice: Proceedings of the NZ Popper conference


"Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals" edited by Philip Catton and Graham
Macdonald, Routledge, 2004.

Most of the eleven papers in this collection were delivered at the Popper
Centenary conference in New Zealand in July 2002. Some of the contributors
were fresh (actually a little jet-lagged) from the Vienna Conference a few
days before. The editors of this volume have been able to publish ahead of
the Vienna proceedings  because over 200 papers were delivered there.

Some people consider that Popper's social philosophy expounded in The Open
Society and its Enemies (1945) is just as important as his philosophy of
science. With this possibility in mind, one of the contributors, Jeremy
Waldron, reported on a search of the citation indices of  some major
journals in politics and political philosophy. In  40 years from 1960 there
are just 23 citations for the open society and its enemies in the major
journals and most of them are perfunctory. Only three offer more than a
paragraph.  It seems that  a non-academic readership is keeping OSE in print
so eventually the academics may find it.

Alan Musgrave describes how Popper (might have) solved the problem of
induction, though what he actually achieved was not a solution but an
explanation that the problem is rather like the problem of building a
perpetual motion machine, insoluble and not a barrier to progress.

Semiha Akini explained how Popper's conventionalism is different from that
of  Duhem and Pioncare because it points to the indispensable role of
conventions in the methods of science and it does not underwrite decisions
about the content or truth of theories. A reference to Jarvie's latest book
on the role of conventions or rules of  the game of science would have
supported her case. This book was published just before July 2002 and would
not have been available while Akini's paper was being written but a
reference could have been added before going to press with the proceedings.
A summary of Jarvie's book can be found here:
http://www.the-rathouse.com/files/Jarvie_on_P_s_social_turn.doc

Phillip Catton undertook some really interesting historical studies and used
these to find fault with Popper's "conjecture and refutation" methodology.
The studies were Harvey's work on the role of the heart, Wegener on
Continental Drift, Newton and the Einstein's early work. The gist of his
argument is that these developments were "rational in ways that Popper ill
equips us to fathom".  I suspect that this criticism may not be as telling
as he believes, for example finding out that Newton was a fallibilist hardly
unsettles Popper's theory of conjectural knowledge, though it may correct
some ideas that Popper and others had about Newton. There appears to be a
persisting belief that Popper was trying to explain the history of science
rather than solve problems in methodology and epistemology. Of course his
theories have implications for scientific practice  but they are not
necessarily refuted by the things that scientists do, or think they are
doing. The implications of  Popper's ideas are mostly negative, in
eliminating error rather then ensuring that the truth will be found, but
that is important enough when people realise how much time has been wasted
in collecting data without adequate planning, running tests to back up
theories rather than testing them etc. The point here is that Popper's ideas
have little to help scientists who are trained or otherwise prepared to
attack the most important and difficult problems they can find, by having as
many ideas as possible and subjecting them to every kind of criticism. But
not enough
scientists operate in that mode.

Catton wrote "A science that is flourishing is like an agent who is
together. Popper's anti-inductivism makes it impossible to understand how an
agent could count as rationally well sorted out, in acting one way rather
than another way towards future contingencies based on past experience. Thus
Popper is at a loss to say what it would be for an agent to be together."

Ths is wishful thinking because Popper has explained quite clearly how it is
possible to form a critical preference for one theory rather than others on
the basis of its problem-solving capacity and its ability to survive various
tests, including experimental or observational testing. I like to think that
I would welcome some new, fundamental and effective criticism of Popper's
ideas but I don't think this hits the target.

Wenceslao J Gonzalez discussed the many faces of Popper's methodological
approach to prediction, with some reference to economics. There is an
unfortunate reference to Popper's well "known methodology of
falsificationism" which is precisely the error that negated some decades of
work by the likes of  Latsis, Blaug and Hands. This waste of effort could
have been avoided if Larry Boland's account of Popper's ideas had been
better understood. Amazingly, Boland is not mentioned here and this gives
the impression that Gonzalez is a member of the "philosophy of economics"
club that has systematically excluded Boland, most dramatically from a
fairly recent conference on Friedman's classic paper on methodology, a topic
where Boland wrote the definitive exegesis.  This is a scandalous state of
affairs and it is most unfortunate that this process of exclusion has
proceeded in a Popper conference, given that Boland is the outstanding
Popperian contributor in this field. Still, Gonzalez rehearsed Popper's
explanation that  prediction under specified conditions and historical
prophecies are very different things. It  helps to appreciate that when
natural scientists make predictions outside well-controlled models they use
what Hayek called 'pattern predictions' in economics; in each case these
predictions are based on assumption about the tendency for certain things to
happen, other things being equal.
Larry Boland's online papers can be found here http://www.sfu.ca/~boland/

Jeremy Shearmur noted that Popper is not regarded as either a  Continental
philosopher or a proper analytical philosopher. He threw out a challenge to
the bulk of the philosophical profession to see if  they might have
something to learn from Popper, at least from his habit of addressing
problems that have both intellectual and practical import, and writing in
language that is accessible to interested members of the public.  Peter Munz
was entertaining and especially challenging with his thesis that Popper and
Wittgenstein should have gone into partnership to provide elements that are
missing from each other's schemes.

Alan Ryan is a veteran commentator on these issues and he addressed the
relationship between science and politics with three questions in mind. One,
is democracy good for science? Two, can or should scientists seek consensus
in their own fields in the same way that citizens seek consensus on public
policy? Three, is science good for democracy? It seems that democracy is
good for science. On the matter of  scientific rationality as a model for
rationality in the political domain, the answer is a muted yes, with some
help from Dewey and a cryptic reference to Habermas. On the benefits of
science for democracy, Ryan is not encouraging, noting the way that Big
Science has generated demands for big money and that is the root of a great
deal of political evil.

Anthony O'Hear contributed an interesting and challenging criticism of the
notion of the open society as a utopia.  His main criticism is that social
institutions are not just problem-solving instruments that can be designed
by social engineers and put in place  on order (football clubs to solve the
problem of people who want to play football), they function in many ways
that give meaning and purpose to people's lives. This is a fascinating paper
although I think if the open society is regarded as an ideal type (in
contrast with an equally idealised closed society) rather than a utopian
aim, then we can get the benefit of  Popper's ideas without collapsing into
that form of  constructivist rationalism that Hayek has identified as the
great and destructive superstition of modern times.

Jeremy Waldron wrote on tribalism and the myth of the framework with special
attention to the politics of cultural recognition. This is an intricate
defence of the idea of expanding the scope of critical rationalism to
address problems of culture clash in  multicultural and multiracial
societies. One of his targets, following Popper, was the idea that people
need to share a whole framework of beliefs before they can get on together
or discuss anything usefully. The example of trade would appear to be a
major counter-example, where goods can be traded across all manner of social
divisions just provided that both parties want to do business. I think there
is a rather significant lesson to be learned there.

In case it is helpful, almost 50 of the Vienna papers are on line in the
Forum of the Rathouse. http://www.the-rathouse.com/forum.html.

Rafe Champion
Sydney






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