Explaining Karl Popper
by JS
My wife is one of those ferociously intelligent people who asks questions until she fully understands something. That really minimizes my opportunities for bullshit around the apartment. On the plus side, I end up understanding what I claim to understand just by virtue of being forced to think clearly enough to explain it. This is, as you might imagine, sometimes a stressful process. I consider it a rule that if you are not walking a tightrope right at the edge of your own understanding (and hence in real risk of falling off, should you meet a true skeptic along the way), you aren’t really doing your job as an intellectual or academic (if that is your job).
If you understand everything you are doing, you are a clerk. Nothing wrong with that. Clerks run most things.
[ Aside: I should note that I'm not protectionist with regards to titles like "intellectual." You can clerk by day and intellectualize by night, or on weekends, or when fishing. It's not the kind of club that has membership dues. If you struggle to understand new things, even old things that are new to you, than you are in. If you don't you're not. ]
Anyway, I was pressed into service to explain the meaning behind quotes from the other day.
[ Aside: Here I should pause to mention that my wife sometimes forces me to explain things she already understands, or that she doesn't have time to read herself. ]
I thought I did an okay job of it, so I thought I’d share with you what I understand so far of Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The first thing you should know about this book is that it basically is the foundation of our modern understanding of science. If you ever hear about falsifiability as a criterion for scientific theory, you have Popper to thank. The ideas of TLSD are so pervasive in how scientists now view their own work, that one wonders if Popper hasn’t done the unthinkable and settled a philosophical question for good. Since I’m not plugged into the larger philosophy of science community I don’t really know if that is a correct characterization of TLSD or not, but it certainly is an influential text.
So what was Karl Popper’s project? His goal was to characterize science. To do this he tried to identify the formal logic (or rules) that govern the scientific process. Anything that follows the logic of science can rightly be called science, and anything that does not cannot. The logic of science, once identified, characterizes science. This probably seems like a daunting task, but TLSD is written in a way that when read it is at once both obvious and airtight. Part of the trick on Popper’s part is to conveniently avoid some of the harder questions, like where scientific theories come from (e.g. creativity?). In doing so, he is able to assume that there are things called scientific theories, and explore what properties we expect them to have.
One of the first schools of thought that Popper has to deal with when exploring the logic of science, is the idea that science, rather than being entirely logical, contains a psychological or interpretive component (beyond those that Popper has already conceded). If this is true it is problematic for the project, because then any logic of science would also have to include a logic of psychology, thus enlarging the original problem and removing all hope of tractability. Popper sidesteps this problem by noting, as in the first quote, that while observations and perceptions are psychological, observability is not. Observability is a property of the world. The trick here, is that when describing the logic of science, and just the logic, observability is enough. Observability is one (conveniently non-psychological) property of basic statements about the world needed to falsify theories.
[ Aside: I'm being somewhat vague about basic statements. Popper is very careful defining the concept, and to do so with any rigour requires the many pages Popper spends on the topic. For our purposes, you can think of basic statements as things that are observable, and that if observed, may falsify a theory. Interestingly, there is a kind of dual relationship between basic statements and theories, since theories have to be constructed in order to have falsifying basic statements. There's no circularity in Popper's definition, however, since basic statements exist independent of theories. Theories just partition an already existing set of basic statements into falsifying and non-falsifying ones. ]
By setting up this framework of basic statements and the partitioning power of theories, Popper is then able to argue that theories are an essential part of science, and in particular, just collecting facts about the world is not enough. That is the meaning I draw from the second quote. It is here, however, where I think Popper gets away with too much. He ignores the interesting question of where theories come from. They certainly don’t spring fully formed from the mind. It seems entirely plausible that theories form through some process running in our heads as we are “collecting and arranging our experiences.” But once we have a theory, we are definitely able to explore the world with a purpose.
