Tag: method

The rationality principle

To say that someone did something because he is a madman is to confess that we cannot really explain it at all. This is the fundamental insight, and the methodological point, behind the rationality principle.

The rationality principle is not the empirical hypothesis that each person acts adequately to the situation. That hypothesis is clearly false. It is, on the contrary, a methodological principle that places restrictions on what will and will not count as a rational explanation. It says that if we want to explain a social event rationally, then we must assume that the people in it acted adequately to the situation, or, at the very least, that they acted adequately to the situation as they saw it. [405]

Aping the physical sciences

Some of the things which put me out of step and which I like to criticize are:

(1) Fashions: I do not believe in fashions, trends, tendencies, or schools, either in science or in philosophy. In fact, I think that the history of mankind could well be described as a history of outbreaks of fashionable philosophical and religious maladies. These fashions can have only one serious function—that of evoking criticism. Nonetheless I do believe in the rationalist tradition of a commonwealth of learning, and in the urgent need to preserve this tradition.

(2) The aping of physical science: I dislike the attempt, made in fields outside the physical sciences, to ape the physical sciences by practising their alleged ‘methods’—measurement and ‘induction from observation’. The doctrine that there is as much science in a subject as there is mathematics in it, or as much as there is measurement or ‘precision’ in it, rests upon a complete misunderstanding. On the contrary, the following maxim holds for all sciences: Never aim at more precision than is required by the problem in hand.  [7]

A necessary condition for critical distance

Even if ideas and arguments should be evaluated independently of their origins, we must still first learn about their origins, in order to ensure the evaluation is indeed independent of them. The only thing worse than accepting or reject­ing an idea because we know about its originator is doing so because we know nothing of the originator. Ignorance may appear in two positive guises. Both are due to the surface clarity of relatively contemporary texts, which effectively discourages any probing of their sources: on the one hand, we may read our own assumptions into the textual inter­stices; on the other, we may unwittingly take on board the text’s assumptions. In short, either our minds colonise theirs or theirs ours. In both cases, the distinction between the positions of interpreter and interpreting is dissolved, and hence a necessary condition for critical distance is lost. [71−2]

Never put to a fair test

Of course, like the most enduring monarchies, the scientific establishment continues to enjoy widespread public sup­port on most matters, including the tinge of divine inspiration that has traditionally legitimated royalty. It might therefore be claimed that science already represents ‘the will of the people’, and hence requires no further philosophical schemes for democratisation. Here Popper’s anti-majoritarian approach to democracy – what I would call his ‘civic republican’ sensibility – comes to the fore. Many authoritarian regimes, especially the 20th-century fascist and com­munist ones, could also persuasively claim widespread popular support, at least at the outset and in relation to the available alternatives. For Popper, however, the normative problem posed by these regimes is that their performance is never put to a fair test. Kuhn suffers from the same defect: a paradigm is simply an irrefutable theory that becomes the basis for an irreversible policy. [47−8]

Alternative expressions of the open society

Once Popper’s philosophy of science is read alongside his political philosophy, it becomes clear that scientific inquiry and democratic politics are meant to be alternative expressions of what Popper called ‘the open society’.

… The open society is one whose members, like the citizens of classical Athens, treat openness to criticism and change as a personal ethic and a civic duty. [26]

A world in which nothing ever went wrong

Stapel released a written statement (in Dutch) today to the press, which he also delivered in a 2-minute video recorded by Dutch public television. He does not address the report directly, but says:

I feel deep, deep remorse for the pain I have caused others. I feel a great deal of sadness, shame and self-blame. The truth would have been better off without me.

I have created a world in which almost nothing ever went wrong, and everything was an understandable success. The world was perfect: exactly as expected, predicted, dreamed. In a strange, naive way I thought I was doing everybody a favor with this. That I was helping people.

Nobody knows

Scientists are like architects who build buildings of different sizes and different shapes and who can be judged only after the event, i.e. only after they have finished their structure. It may stand up, it may fall down – nobody knows. [2]

Inference to the Best Explanation

According to the model of Inference to the Best Explanation, our explanatory practices guide our inferences. Beginning with the evidence available to us, we infer what would, if true, provide the best explanation of that evidence. This cannot be the whole story about inference, but many of our inferences, both in science and in ordinary life, appear to follow this pattern. Faced with tracks in the snow of a certain peculiar shape, I infer that a person on snowshoes has recently passed this way. There are other possibilities, but I make this inference because it provides the best explanation of what I see. [1]

Intellectual honesty

Intellectual honesty does not consist in trying to entrench, or establish one’s position by proving (or ‘probabilifying’) it — intellectual honesty consists rather in specifying precisely the conditions under which one is willing to give up one’s position. [92]

The stimulus to further development

As Max Planck once remarked in a lecture,

A living and flourishing theory does not avoid its anomalies but searches them out, for the stimulus to fur­ther development comes from contradiction, not from confirmations.

The point to keep in mind is that although falsifiability, rather than verifiability, is the most important criterion in determin­ing whether a theory is scientifically meaningful, its usefulness for the greater task of building confidence in a theory is limited. A theory is accepted not simply because it has withstood many attempts at falsification, the need for such tests notwithstanding, but because it leads to predictions that are experimentally verified. After all, the purpose of a theory is to be productive and not just to fail to be wrong. [115]