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Karl Popper Centennial - 2002-07-28
« on: 2002-07-23 16:46:44 » |
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Giving Karl Popper His Propers
Scholars reflect on the controversial philosopher 100 years after his birth
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education[New Zealand]
Authors: David Cohen
Dated: 2002-07-26
Noticed by: Jonathan Davis
In the soft light of an antipodean afternoon, Graham Macdonald is careful to impress his academic orientation upon a visitor. Mr. Macdonald is, as he says, director of the department of philosophy and religious studies here at the University of Canterbury [Hermit: Christchurch, New Zealand].
"I am not a member of the Karl Popper church," he adds emphatically, during a conversation -- one of many he's had in recent weeks -- on the growing international reputation of the academic trailblazer. Popper popularized the term "open society" in political discourse and pushed scientists in a new direction with theories that would later be hailed as a "philosophical revolution."
Mr. Macdonald has spent much of this past year limbering up his epistemological muscle in preparation for the July 28 centennial of Karl Popper's birth. He and others describe the Austrian-born philosopher as one of the 20th century's most neglected scholars. Yet he does not wish to be mistaken for one of those who gaze at Popper's work as if through a messianic mist. A striking paradox for someone who championed critical thought like few others, in the view of Mr. Macdonald, is that Popper, who died in 1994, has always attracted acolytes who uncritically accept that he was right about pretty much everything. "I've attended academic conferences," the professor says with a sigh, "where criticizing Popper is regarded as a kind of heresy."
Although he admires many aspects of Popper's "intellectually bracing" ideas about politics and science, Mr. Macdonald insists that his own lifelong enthusiasm, which began for him as an undergraduate majoring in philosophy during the 1960s, is tempered with a "healthy dollop of skepticism."
Even so, Mr. Macdonald feels that much of what Popper had to say "could and should be taken on board by scholars around the world."
He may get his wish. As the organizer of one of two major academic conferences honoring Popper this month -- one here at the University of Canterbury, where, during World War II, Popper produced some of his most enduring work, and the other at the University of Vienna, Popper's alma mater -- Mr. Macdonald is pleased to play a part in the renewed wave of interest in the philosopher's ideas, even as those who knew him struggle to get a handle on the man himself. Popper's rise in the canon, he says, is evident not only among scholars in New Zealand but also in Australia, Britain, the Middle East, and North America, and in the wider political culture as well.
"In one way or another I'm reminded of his intellectual contributions every week," says Tom G. Palmer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, where Popper's political writings rate highly on account of their often corrosive critiques of Communism. The end of the cold war and the upsurge of libertarian ideas on both sides of the Atlantic "appears to have been to Popper's benefit," says Mr. Palmer, "since he always positioned himself as antitotalitarian, "even when it wasn't fashionable to do so."
The National Review, a conservative magazine, recently ranked Popper's major political work, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge, 1945), sixth on a list of the 100 most important nonfiction works of the past century. In a different cultural corner, one of America's best-known philanthropists, the Hungarian-born George Soros, was sufficiently moved by the ideas he acquired from Popper while an undergraduate at the London School of Economics and Political Science that he named his Open Society Institute after the book. "What Soros took from Popper, I think, was this notion that we, as humans, are fallible, and along with that, so, too, are all of our institutions, our markets, our systems," says Leonard Benardo, a manager of the institute's main American office, in New York.
"Open society," he says, means that societies need to be as open as possible to new ideas and fresh criticisms, whether at home or abroad, where the Soros institute has a particular interest in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Indeed, the phrase itself is increasingly used in the geopolitical context; late last month, President George W. Bush invoked it in a speech calling for reform in the Palestinian government.
For all that, though, Mr. Macdonald says, "my impression for now is that a lot of American academics probably still find Popper hard to categorize. The professionalization and specialization of academe in the United States is not something he really recognized, since his work touched on many aspects of philosophy and other issues beyond."
Some of the other issues figure in one of this year's unlikeliest best sellers, Wittgenstein's Poker (Ecco), by the British journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow, who describe their quirky investigation into a celebrated tiff between Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1946, which took place in a tutorial room at the University of Cambridge during a meeting of Wittgenstein's normally genteel Moral Science Club. Popper, 13 years younger than the eminent philosopher, had arrived from London that balmy evening, he later wrote in his memoir, Unended Quest, "to provoke Wittgenstein into defending the view that there are no philosophical problems, and to fight him on this issue." He succeeded in provoking him. The Edmonds-Eidinow book turns upon the question of whether an enraged Wittgenstein really did menace Popper with a red-hot poker, in the presence of a third great philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who, as legend has it, was moved to separate the feuding scholars.
The book ponders whether or not Popper, when taunted by Wittgenstein to give an enduring instance of a moral rule, bit back, "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers." The authors figure that he probably did, but that the enduring theme of the incident was the need of both men to enjoy Russell's graces -- and, indeed, those of the scholarly world at large. (As for the poker, it was eventually dropped on the tiles of the hearth "with a little rattle," the book says.)
A More Enduring Legacy?
Peter Munz, who was in the tutorial room that night -- and who now counts himself as the only person alive to have studied under both Popper and Wittgenstein -- agrees with the writers on both counts. But while Wittgenstein's reputation has long since solidified in scholarly circles, the same cannot be said of the man he may, or may not, have waved a poker at. That is a pity, Mr. Munz believes, because Popper's scientific ideas, first set forth in his 1934 Logik der Forschung, later translated as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, were not only among the most cogent to be made against Wittgenstein's position, but also, in some respects, have better stood the test of time.
What, then, were these pre-eminent Austrian-Anglo-Jewish philosophers hectoring each other about -- and why does it still matter? Until Popper, explains Mr. Munz, now an emeritus professor of history at New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington, scientists tended to believe that their task was to find as many examples as they could to confirm their theories, a conclusion that Wittgenstein, author of the Tractatus, appeared happy enough to go along with. Popper, on the other hand, believed that scientists ought to look for examples that are apparently inconsistent with a theory; "falsification," he held, not "induction," is the only credible basis for scientific inquiry. He reduced the precept to a slogan: "No number of sightings of white swans can prove the theory that all swans are white. The sighting of just one black one may disprove it."
Whether or not they admit it, whenever and wherever scientists today find themselves looking for black swans and, seeing none, pronounce themselves reasonably sure of their theory, they are taking a deep bow in Popper's direction, says Mr. Munz. According to Malachi Haim Hacohen, an associate professor of European intellectual history at Duke University and author of Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), the promulgation of this idea marked a philosophical watershed. Even among those who pooh-pooh the notion that Popper somehow managed to resolve the issue of how scientific knowledge can ultimately be validated -- Anthony O'Hear, director of Britain's Royal Institute of Philosophy and author of a number of books on Popper, thinks it "quite absurd" to make the claim -- few dispute the lasting trace that his argument has left on scientific research over the past quarter-century.
The Man vs. His Ideas
In 1945, Popper applied much the same principle to the realm of political philosophy, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, an exegesis on the ideas of Plato, Hegel, and Marx, all of whom Popper excoriates for their claims to "certain knowledge" about how societies ought to be organized. The late Isaiah Berlin, a biographer of Marx and a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, counted himself among the book's admirers, calling it perhaps "the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer."
Still, as Mr. Macdonald's disclaimer about the Popper "church" suggests, this month's centennial raises anew the problem that many have in disentangling the ornery reputation of Popper the man from the validity of his ideas. That appears to be the case regardless of whether the reference is to his formative years as a peripheral member of the Vienna Circle, in Europe, his early career as an associate professor of philosophy at Canterbury, or the bulk of his teaching life, which he spent at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he remained until around the time of his death.
Mr. Munz, who will give papers at both of this month's conferences, got to see Popper through most of those phases. He well understands, he says, the frustration that readers coming to the philosopher only recently would have in properly assessing his legacy. A diehard Platonist in his undergraduate years, Mr. Munz first met the older man at the university library at Canterbury. Popper, who would become a lifelong friend, beckoned to him from near the stacks "and asked me if I would like for him to explain why I was wrong about Plato." Mr. Munz chuckles at the memory. "He didn't offer to argue the point, or for us to exchange views -- just to tell me why I was wrong. I later learned that that was his style."
In the event, Popper did convince him that Plato not only was wrong in his claim to certain knowledge about how societies should best be organized, but was a tyrant to boot. It was the beginning of what Mr. Munz describes as his own intellectual dawn, despite their lifelong differences over the subject of history. "Popper thought that people who are honest become scientists but people who are dishonest become historians, sociologists, and so forth, because these were people who could convince others of anything they like" -- especially in the realm of philosophy.
"Since he had already solved the philosophical problems, as he saw them, he didn't really see the point in why there should be another generation of philosophers," says Mr. Munz, laughing.
According to Alan Chalmers, a professor of the philosophy of science at Australia's Flinders University, who attended many of Popper's "spellbinding" seminars in London during the 1960s and still lectures on him, his one-time hero's scholarly practices often clashed with what he preached. Although Popper emphasized the importance of criticism, he found it "very hard" to accept criticism of any sort, says Mr. Chalmers, who eventually became disillusioned with aspects of the philosopher's style.
At the London school, recalls Mr. Munz, "people used to joke about the open society and its one enemy: Karl Popper. When people contradicted him in class, he would tell them that they had obviously not listened to what he'd said, because if they'd listened, they would know that he was right." Each dissenter would be asked to apologize, "and if no apology was forthcoming, he would then ask the student to leave the room."
Another problem was Popper's apparent tendency to caricature his philosophical opponents, says Mr. Chalmers. "That's not novel among academics, of course, but students would go on to discover time and again that the people Popper had talked about -- Wittgenstein and Marx and so forth -- actually held views that were much more sophisticated than what he had given them credit for." Popper also insisted that words are "not that important" in the discussion of aspects of science and philosophy, says Mr. Chalmers, "which was fine, but woe betide those who diverged from Popper's standard usages. He was liable to give the speaker a very hard time."
Mr. Macdonald, who sat in on a number of Popper's lectures in London during the 1970s, agrees. Describing the philosopher as "a powerful, lucid speaker," he was nonetheless struck by the degree of veneration that Popper demanded -- "in the way, for example, he was ushered in and ushered out again at these events, as if he were some kind of god. That atmosphere, particularly around somebody who viewed criticism as the most important value of all, struck me as being rather unhealthy."
Why the need for such control? Insecurity, speculates Mr. Chalmers: "I've come to feel that Popper was extremely good at putting his finger on the pulse of important academic issues but not quite so good at the technical detail of science itself."
Alan Musgrave, a research assistant of Popper's from 1963 to 1965 at the London school, where, with Imre Lakatos, he edited Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1970), an influential collection of essays on the recent philosophy of science, wonders if some of Popper's less appealing attitudes were born of a certain anger at his work's not being sufficiently recognized by his contemporaries. "He was proud of what he achieved, rightly so, I think, but he was also very bitter."
Would Popper have been made any happier by this month's centennial commemorations? Mr. Macdonald glances toward the window overlooking the Canterbury campus, under whose flag the philosopher produced much of his celebrated work. These days, he says, "as I move around the university and the higher-education world, I keep meeting people who have things to say of Popper's influence across many areas of research culture, and how important he's been as a reference point."
So many academics have been influenced "very much for the better" by Karl Popper, he concludes. "Even those who have since departed from the church."
http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Page: A16
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:Karl Popper Centennial - 2002-07-28
« Reply #1 on: 2002-07-23 21:40:20 » |
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The following is from the "Proceedings of the Second International Meeting on Epistemology: Forms of Physical Determinism", September 1984, organized by the "Group of Interdisciplinary Research" of the University of Athens.
Keep in mind that at the time Karl Popper was 82 years old. So, this should not be taken as something by which one can evaluate his work; just something intriguing, showing Popper's provocative spirit.
Realism and Quantum Theory
Karl Popper
--------------------------
I have been asked to open this meeting because I am a realist. Indeed, I am not only a realist but a metaphysical realist, as I want to admit at once. That is, my realism is not based on physics; but physics, I think, is based on realism.
1. I am a realist in a very simple sense: I conjecture that I shall soon die, as we all shall sooner or later. (I do not wish to say here anything against the possibility of solving the biological problem of ageing one day). And I expect the world to go on after my death. This is a simple way of saying that I am a metaphysical realist. For it is, at least for us, impossible empirically to test our expectation that the world will go on after we are dead.
I am a realist, and I believe in the reality of matter, of energy, of particles, of fields of forces, of wavelike disturbances of these fields, and of propensity fields (de Broglie fields). (These remarks are conjectural, of course.) And I suggest that quantum mechanics is misinterpreted when it is not interpreted realistically. I also suggest that quantum mechanics says nothing whatever about epistemology, about our knowledge and its limits, no more than Newtonian dynamics. And I hold that Heisenberg’s famous indeterminacy or uncertainty relations inform us neither about indeterminacy nor about uncertainty: properly interpreted, they simply inform us about the scatter of physical particles, such as photons or electrons or neutrons, after they have, for example, passed through a narrow slit. Thus the Heisenberg relations are simply scatter relations, and they have no special significance for the theory of knowledge. This is part of my realism.
2. I suppose that most human beings, and certainly most experimental physicists and biologists, share the realistic attitude I have described. And most physicists believe that their own interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is fundamentally realistic, is identical with the "official" interpretation, the so-called Copenhagen interpretation due to Bohr and Heisenberg.
But this is an historical blunder which would not matter much were it not for the fact at least three important doctrines that are still lingering on from the non-realistic ("idealistic" or "positivistic") Copenhagen interpretation. What is -- or rather was -- characteristic for it is the thesis that quantum physics is not so much a theory of micro particles than a theory of our knowledge (of micro particles).
<snip>
Then, in the next 18 pages, Popper went on to argue
(a) against the standard interpretation of the uncertainty principle and in favor of a statistical scattering interpretation
(b) against the principle of wave-particle complementarity and in favor of de Broglie’s pilot waves, and
(c) against the interpretation of the experiments displaying non-locality -- he proposed a modified experiment of his own which would disprove non-locality (apparently not content with David Bohm's version of realism).
Well, the reference to metaphysics and death could be a response to the argument that the statement "All men are mortal" is not falsifiable therefore not scientific.
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Re:Karl Popper Centennial - 2002-07-28
« Reply #2 on: 2003-01-02 13:49:23 » |
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Science: Conjectures and Refutations
Source: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~fotoole/321.1/popper.html
Author: Karl Popper
Mr. Turnbull had predicted evil consequences, . . . and was now doing the best in his power to bring about the verification of his own prophecies.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
When I received the list of participants in this course and realized that I had been asked to speak to philosophical colleagues I thought, after some hesitation and consultation, that you would probably prefer me to speak about those problems which interest me most, and about those developments with which I am most intimately acquainted. I therefore decided to do what I have never done before: to give you a report on my own work in the philosophy of science, since the autumn of1919 when I first began to grapple with the problem, "When should a theory be ranked as scientific?" or "Is there a criterion for the scientific character or status of a theory?"
The problem which troubled me at the time was neither, "When is a theory true?"nor, "When is a theory acceptable?" My problem was different. I wished to distinguish between science and pseudo-science; knowing very well that science often errs, and that pseudo-science may happen to stumble on the truth.
I knew, of course, the most widely accepted answer to my problem: that science is distinguished from pseudo-science_or from "metaphysics"_by its empirical method, which is essentially inductive, proceeding from observation or experiment. But this did not satisfy me. On the contrary, I often formulated my problem as one of distinguishing between a genuinely empirical method and a non-empirical or even a pseudo-empirica1 method-that is to say, amethod which, although it appeals to observation and experiment, nevertheless does not come up to scientific standards. The latter method may be exemplified by astrology with its stupendous mass of empirical evidence based on observation-on horoscopes and on biographies.
But as it was not the example of astrology which led me to my problem I should perhaps briefly describe the atmosphere in which my problem arose and the examples by which it was stimulated. After the collapse of the Austrian Empire there had been a revolution in Austria: the air was full of revolutionary slogans and ideas, and new and often wild theories. Among the theories which interested me Einstein's theory of relativity was no doubt by far the most important. Three others were Marx's theory of history, Freud's psycho-analysis, and Alfred Adler's so-called "individual psychology."
There was a lot of popular nonsense talked about these theories, and especially about relativity (as still happens even today), but I was fortunate in those who introduced me to the study of this theory. We all-the small circle of students to which I belonged-were thrilled with the result of Eddington's eclipse observations which in 1919 brought the first important confirmation of Einstein's theory of gravitation. It was a great experience for us, and one which had a lasting influence on my intellectual development.
The three other theories I have mentioned were also widely discussed among students at that time. I myself happened to come into personal contact with Alfred Adler, and even to co-operate with him in his social work among the children and young people in the working-class districts of Vienna where he had established social guidance clinics.
It was during the summer of 1919 that I began to feel more and more dissatisfied with these three theories-the Marxist theory of history, psychoanalysis, and individual psychology; and I began to feel dubious about their claims to scientific status. My problem perhaps first took the simple form, "What is wrong with Marxism, psycho-analysis, and individual psychology? Why are they so different from physical theories, from Newton's theory, and especially from the theory of relativity?"
To make this contrast clear I should explain that few of us at the time would have said that we believed in the truth of Einstein's theory ofgravitation. This shows that it was not my doubting the truth of those other three theories which bothered me, but something else. Yet neither was it that I merely felt mathematical physics to be more exact than the sociological orpsychological type of theory. Thus what worried me was neither the problem of truth, at that stage at least, nor the problem of exactness or measurability.It was rather that I felt that these other three theories, though posing as sciences, had in fact more in common with primitive myths than with science; that they resembled astrology rather than astronomy.
I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still "un-analysed" and crying aloud for treatment.
The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which "verified" the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasized by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation-which revealed the class bias of the paper-and especially of course in what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their "clinical observations." As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, 1 reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analysing in terms ofhis theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. "Because of my thousandfold experience," he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: "And with this newcase, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold."
What I had in mind was that his previous observations may not have been much sounder than this new one; that each in its turn had been interpreted in the light of"previous experience," and at the same time counted as additional confirmation. What, I asked myself, did it confirm? No more than that a case could be interpreted in the light of the theory. But this meant very little, I reflected, since every conceivable case could be interpreted in the light of Adler's theory, or equally of Freud's. I may illustrate this by two very different examples of human behaviour: that of a man who pushes a child into the water with the intention of drowning it; and that of a man who sacrifices his life in an attempt to save the child. Each of these two cases can be explained with equal ease in Freudian and in Adlerian terms. According to Freud the first man suffered from repression (say, of some component of his Oedipus complex), while the second man had achieved sublimation.According to Adler the first man suffered from feelings of inferiority (producing perhaps the need to prove to himself that he dared to commit some crime), and so did the second man (whose need was to prove to himself that he dared to rescue the child). I could not think of any human behaviour which could not be interpreted in terms of either theory. It was precisely this fact-that they always fitted, that they were always confirmed-which in the eyes of their admirers constituted the strongest argument in favour of these theories. It began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.
With Einstein's theory the situation was strikingly different. Take one typical instance-Einstein's prediction, just then confirmed by the findings of Eddington's expedition. Einstein's gravitational theory had led to the result that light must beattracted by heavy bodies (such as the sun), precisely as material bodies were attracted. As a consequence it could be calculated that light from a distant fixed star whose apparent position was close to the sun would reach the earth from such adirection that the star would seem to be slightly shifted away from the sun; or, in other words, that stars close to the sun would look as if they had moved a little away from the sun, and from one another. This is a thing which cannot normally be observed since such stars are rendered invisible in daytime by the sun's overwhelming brightness; but during an eclipse it is possible to take photographs of them. If the same constellation is photographed at night one can measure the distances on the two photographs, and check the predicted effect.
Now the impressive thing about this case is the risk involved in a prediction of this kind. If observation shows that the predicted effect is definitely absent, then the theory is simply refuted. The theory is incompatible with certain possible results of observation-in fact with results which everybody before Einstein would have expected. This is quite different from the situation I have previously described, when it turned out that the theories in question were compatible with the most divergent human behaviour,so that it was practically impossible to describe any human behaviour that might not be claimed to be a verification of these theories.
These considerations led me in the winter of 1919-20 to conclusions which I may now reformulate as follows.
(1) It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory-if we look for confirmations.
(2) Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions;that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory-an event which would have refuted the theory.
(3) Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
(4) A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of theory (as people often think) but a vice.
(5) Every genuine testof a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability; some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
(6) Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of agenuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of"corroborating evidence.")
(7) Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers-for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by re-interpreting theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a "conventionalist twist" or a "conventionaliststratagem. ")
One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.
II
I may perhaps exemplify this with the help of the various theories so far mentioned. Einstein's theory of gravitation clearly satisfied the criterion of falsifiability. Even if our measuring instruments at the time did not allow us to pronounce on the results of the tests with complete assurance, there was clearly a possibility of refuting the theory.
Astrology did not pass the test. Astrologers were greatly impressed, and misled,by what they believed to be confirming evidence_so much so that they were quite unimpressed by any unfavourable evidence. Moreover, by making their interpretations and prophecies sufficiently vague they were able to explain away anything that might have been a refutation of the theory had the theory and the prophecies been more precise. In order to escape falsification they destroyed the testability of their theory. It is a typical soothsayer's trick to predict things so vaguely that the predictions can hardly fail: that they become irrefutable.
The Marxist theory of history, in spite of the serious efforts of some of its founders and followers, ultimately adopted this soothsaying practice. In some of its earlier formulations (for example in Marx's analysis of the character of the "coming social evolution') their predictions were testable, and in fact falsified.2 Yet instead ofaccepting the refutations the followers of Marx reinterpreted both the theory and the evidence in order to make them agree. In this way they rescued the theory from refutation; but they did so at the price of adopting a device which made it irrefutable. They thus gave a "conventionalist twist" to the theory; and by this stratagem they destroyed its much advertised claim to scientific status.
The two psycho-analytic theories were in a different class. They were simply non-testable, irrefutable. There was no conceivable human behaviour which could contradict them. This does not mean that Freud and Adler were not seeing certain things correctly: I personally do not doubt that much of what they say is of considerable importance, and may well play its part one day in a psychological science which is testable. But it does mean that those "clinical observations" which analysts naively believe confirm their theory cannot do this any more than the daily confirmations which astrologers find in their practice.3 And as for Freud's epic ofthe Ego, the Super-ego, and the Id, no substantially stronger claim to scientific status can be made for it than for Homer's collected stories from Olympus. These theories describe some facts, but in the manner of myths. They contain most interesting psychologicalsuggestions, but not in a testable form.
At the same time I realized that such myths may be developed, and become testable; that historically speaking all-or very nearly all-scientific theories originate from myths, and that a myth may contain important anticipations of scientific theories. Examples are Empedocles' theory of evolution by trial and error, or Parmenides' myth of the unchanging block universe in which nothing ever happens and which, if we add another dimension, becomes Einstein's block universe (in which, too, nothing ever happens, since everything is, four dimensionally speaking, determined and laid down from the beginning). I thus felt that if a theory is found to be non-scientific, or "metaphysical" (as we might say), it is not thereby found to be unimportant, or insignificant, or "meaningless," or "nonsensical." it cannot claim to be backed by empirical evidence in the scientific sense-although it may easily be, in some genetic sense, the "result of observation."
(There were a great many other theories of this pre-scientific or pseudoscientific character, some of them, unfortunately, as influential as the Marxist interpretation of history; for example, the racialist interpretation of history-another of those impressive and all-explanatory theories which act upon weak minds like revelations.)
Thus the problem which I tried to solve by proposing the criterion of falsifiability was neither a problem of meaningfulness or significance, nor a problem of truth or acceptability. It was the problem of drawing a line (as well as this can be done) between the statements, or systems of statements, of the empirical sciences, and all other statements-whether they are of a religious or of a metaphysical character, or simply pseudo-scientific. Years later-it must have been in 1928 or 1929-I called this first problem of mine the "problem of demarcation. " The criterion of falsifiability is a solution to this problem of demarcation, for it says that statements or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable, observations....
III
Let us now turn from our logical criticism of the psychology of experience to our real problem-the problem of the logic of science. Although some of the things Ihave said may help us here, in so far as they may have eliminated certain psychological prejudices in favour of induction, my treatment of the logical problem of induction is completely independent of this criticism, and of all psychological considerations. Provided you do not dogmatically believe in the alleged psychological fact that we make inductions, you may now forget my whole story with the exception of two logical points: my logical remarks on testability or falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation; and Hume's logical criticism of induction.
From what I have said it is obvious that there was a close link between the two problems which interested me at that time: demarcation, and induction orscientific method. It was easy to see that the method of science is criticism, i.e.attempted falsifications. Yet it took me a few years to notice that the two problems-of demarcation and of induction-were in a sense one....
I recently came across an interesting formulation of this belief in a remarkable philosophical book by a great physicist-Max Born's Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance.5 He writes: "Induction allows us to generalize a number of observations into a general rule: that night follows day and day follows night . . .But while everyday life has no definite criterion for the validity of an induction, . . .science has worked out a code, or rule of craft, for its application." Born nowhere reveals the contents of this inductive code (which, as his wording shows, contains a "definite criterion for the validity of an induction"); but he stresses that "there is no logical argument" for its acceptance: "it is a question of faith"; and he is therefore "willing to call induction a metaphysical principle." But why does he believe that such a code of valid inductive rules must exist? This becomes clear when he speaks of the "vast communities of people ignorant of, or rejecting, the ruleof science, among them the members of anti-vaccination societies and believers in astrology. It is useless to argue with them; I cannot compel them to accept the same criteria of valid induction in which I believe: the code of scientific rules." This makes it quite clear that "valid induction" was here meant to serve as a criterion of demarcation between science and pseudo-science.
But it is obvious that this rule or craft of "valid induction" is not even metaphysical: it simply does not exist. No rule can ever guarantee that a generalization inferred from true observations, however often repeated, is true.(Born himself does not believe in the truth of Newtonian physics, in spite of its success, although he believes that it is based on induction.) And the success of science is not based upon rules of induction, but depends upon luck, ingenuity,and the purely deductive rules of critical argument.
I may summarize some of my conclusions as follows:
(1) Induction, i.e. inference based on many observations, is a myth. It is neither a psychological fact, nor a fact of ordinary life, nor one of scientific procedure.
(2) The actual procedure of science is to operate with conjectures: to jump to conclusions-often after one single observation (as noticed for example by Hume and Born).
(3) Repeated observations and experiments function in science as tests of our conjectures or hypotheses, i.e. as attempted refutations.
(4) The mistaken belief in induction is fortified by the need for a criterion of demarcation which, it is traditionally but wrongly believed, only the inductive method can provide.
(5) The conception of such an inductive method, like the criterion of verifiability, implies a faulty demarcation.
(6) None of this is altered in the least if we say that induction makes theories only probable rather than certain.
If, as I have suggested, the problem of induction is only an instance or facet of the problem of demarcation, then the solution to the problem of demarcation must provide us with a solution to the problem of induction. This is indeed the case, I believe, although it is perhaps not immediately obvious.
For a brief formulation of the problem of induction we can turn again to Born, who writes: ". . . no observation or experiment, however extended can give more than a finite number of repetitions"; therefore, "the statement of a law-B depends on A-always transcends experience. Yet this kind of statement is made everywhere and all the time, and sometimes from scanty material.'
In other words, the logical problem of induction arises from (a) Hume's discovery (so well expressed by Born) that it is impossible to justify a law by observation or experiment, since it "transcends experience"; (b) the fact that science proposes and uses laws "everywhere and all the time." (Like Hume, Born is struck by the "scanty material," i.e. the few observed instances upon which the law may be based.) To this we have to add (c) the principle of empiricism which asserts that in science,only observation and experiment may decide upon the acceptance or rejectionof scientific statements, including laws and theories.
These three principles, (a), (b), and (c), appear at first sight to clash; and this apparent clash constitutes the logical problem of induction.
Faced with this clash, Born gives up (c), the principle of empiricism (as Kant and may others, including Bertrand Russell, have done before him), in favour of what he calls a "metaphysical principle"; a metaphysical principle which he does not even attempt to formulate; which he vaguely describes as a "code or rule of craft"; and ofwhich I have never seen any formulation which even looked promising and was not clearly untenable.
But in fact the principles (a) to (c) do not clash. We can see this the moment we realize that the acceptance by science of a law or of a theory is tentative only;which is to say that all laws and theories are conjectures, or tentative hypotheses(a position which I have sometimes called "hypotheticism") and that we may reject a law or theory on the basis of new evidence, without necessarily discarding the old evidence which originally led us to accept it.7
The principles of empiricism (c) can be fully preserved, since the fate of a theory, its acceptance or rejection, is decided by observation and experiment_ by the resultof tests. So long as a theory stands up to the severest tests we can design, it is accepted; if it does not, it is rejected. But it is never inferred, in any sense, from the empirical evidence. There is neither a psychological nor a logical induction. Onlythe falsity of the theory can be inferred from empirical evidence, and this inference is a purely deductive one.
Hume showed that it is not possible to infer a theory from observation statements; but this does not affect the possibility of refuting a theory by observation statements. The full appreciation of the possibility makes the relation between theories and observations perfectly clear. This solves the problem of the alleged clash between the principles (a), (b), and(c), and with it Hume's problem of induction....
NOTES
1. This is a slight oversimplification, for about half of the Einstein effect may be derived from the classical theory, provided we assume a ballistic theory of light.
2. See for example, my Open Society and Its Enemies, ch. 15, section iii, and notes 13-14.
3. "Clinical observations," like all other observations, are interpretations in the light of theories;and for this reason alone they are apt to seem to support those theories in the light of which they were interpreted. But real support can be obtained only from observations undertaken as tests (by"attempted refutations"); and for this purpose criteria of refutation have to be laid down beforehand;it must be agreed which observable situations, if actually observed, mean that the theory is refuted. But what kind of clinical responses would refute to the satisfaction of the analyst not merely a particular analytic diagnosis but psycho-analysis itself? And have such criteria ever been discussed or agreed upon by analysts? Is there not, on the contrary, a whole family of analytic concepts, such as"ambivalence" (l do not suggest that there is no such thing as ambivalence), which would make it difficult, if not impossible, to agree upon such criteria? Moreover, how much headway has been made in investigating the question of the extent to which the (conscious or unconscious) expectations and theories held by the analyst influence the "clinical responses" of the patient? To say nothing about the conscious attempts to influence the patient by proposing interpretations to him, etc.) Years ago Iintroduced the term "Oedipus effect" to describe the influence of a theory or expectation or prediction upon the event which it predicts or describes: it will be remembered that the causal chain leading to Oedpus' parricide was started by the oracle's prediction of this event. This is a characteristic and recurrent theme of such myths, but one which seems to have failed to attract the interest of the analysts, perhaps not accidentally. (The problem of confirmatory dreams suggested by the analyst is discussed by Freud, for example in Gesammelte Schriften,i 111, 1925, where he says on p. 314: "If anybody asserts that most of the dreams which can be utilized in an analysis . . . owe their origin to [the analyst's] suggestion, then no objection can be made from the point of view of analytic theory. Yet there is nothing in this fact,"he surprisingly adds, "which would detract from the reliability of our results.']
4. The case of astrology, nowadays a typical pseudo-science, may illustrate this point. It was attacked, by Aristotelians and other rationalists, down to Newton's day, for the wrong reason-for its now an accepted assertion that the planets had an "influence" upon terrestrial ("sublunar")events. In fact Newton's theory of gravity, and especially the lunar theory of the tides, was historically speaking an offpsring of astrological lore. Newton, it seems, was most reluctant to adopt a theory which came from the same stable as for example the theory that "influenza"epidemics are due to an astral "influence." And Galileo, no doubt for the same reason, actually rejected the lunar theory of the tides; and his misgivings about Kepler may easily be explained by his misgivings about astrology.
5. Max Born, Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance, Oxford, 1949, p. 7.
6. Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance, p. 6.
7. I do not doubt that Born and many others would agree that theories are accepted only tentatively. But the widespread belief in induction shows that the far-reaching implications of this view are rarely seen.
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