An account and a truly humanitarian defence of this position [“The separation between the history of a science, its philosophy and the science itself dissolves into thin air and so does the separation between science and non-science”] can be found in J.S. Mill’s On Liberty. Popper’s philosophy, which some people would like to lay on us as the one and only humanitarian rationalism in existence today, is but a pale reflection of Mill. It is specialized, formalistic and elitist, and devoid of the concern for individual happiness that is such a characteristic feature of Mill. We can understand its peculiarities when we consider (a) the background oflogical positivism, which plays an important role in the Logic of Scientific Discovery, (b) the unrelenting puritanism of its author (and of most of his followers), and when we remember the influence of Harriet Taylor on Mill’s life and on his philosophy. There is no Harriet Taylor in Popper’s life. [34]
Tag: method
Vorläufer des Falsifikationsprinzips
Das Falsifikationsprinzip wurde erstmals von Karl Popper ausgesprochen. Erstmals? Alle philosophischen Ideen haben Vorläufer. In unserem Falle ist der Oxforder Gelehrte Robert Grosseteste (etwa 1168-1253) ein besonders interessantes Beispiel. Nach Losee war er der erste mittelalterliche Denker, der die logischen und methodologischen Probleme von Induktion, Verifikation und Falsifikation systematisch untersuchte. (Bei Popper wird er, soweit ich sehe, nirgends erwähnt. Aber Kopernikus erwähnt seinen wichtigsten Vorgänger, Aristarch, ja auch nicht.) Grosseteste benutzte und empfahl die Methode der Falsifikation, um mit Hilfe des modus tollens von einer Gruppe konkurrierender Hypothesen alle bis auf eine zu eliminieren. Die wesentliche Asymmetrie zwischen Verifizierbarkeit und Falsifizierbarkeit scheint er jedoch nicht erkannt zu haben. [117]
Science: learning from our mistakes
The tension between our knowledge and our ignorance is decisive for the growth of knowledge. It inspires the advance of knowledge, and it determines its ever-moving frontiers.
The word ‘problem’ is only another name for this tension or rather, a name denoting various concrete instances of it.
As I suggested above, a problem arises, grows, and becomes significant through our failures to solve it. Or to put it another way, the only way of getting to know a problem is to learn from our mistakes.
This applies to pre-scientific knowledge and to scientific knowledge.
My view of the method of science is, very simply, that it systematizes the pre-scientific method of learning from our mistakes. It does so by the device called critical discussion.
My whole view of scientific method may be summed up by saying that it consists of these three steps:
1. We stumble over some problem.
2. We try to solve it, for example by proposing some theory.
3. We learn from our mistakes, especially from those brought home to us by the critical discussion of our tentative solutions – a discussion which tends to lead to new problems.
Or in three words: problems – theories – criticism.
I believe that in these three words the whole procedure of rational science may be summed up. [100-1]
Shadows of Baconian induction (2)
The Large Hadron Collider is the most complicated scientific experiment ever built. But it’s still just an experiment like any other. At its heart, there is repeatable process, as with Newton’s prism. There are teams of people dedicated to making detailed measurements, as Cavendish did with his flammable air. And the same rigorous logical thought processes used by Bill Tutte are of course applied here too. These are simple principles, yet they hold great power. [51:15]
Shadows of Baconian induction
There’s table after table of results. But he also describes precisely how he got those results. There’s a beautiful diagram of his apparatus, and this is there so that anyone else reading this paper, if they’re sceptical about the results or even if they just want to check them, can rebuild the apparatus and redo the experiment and check that Tyndall didn’t make any mistakes.
So these results are not a matter of opinion: they’re here, they can be checked by other scientists, they can be verified. So this is how scientific knowledge progresses. Publishing is the reason why science gets to our best view of the way that nature works. [43:28]
Newtonian induction
The common explanation for the appearance of the colours was that they were added by impurities in the prism to the pure white light. Newton thought that the colours were already present in the white sunlight. But what set Newton apart was that he devised and performed an experiment to test his hypothesis. …
Green light into the prism equals green light out. That implies that the colours themselves are pure. The prism is not subtracting or adding anything. That means that Newton’s hypothesis was shown to be correct. …
Newton was one of the first to interrogate Nature using the principles of what we now call the scientific method. In other words, he observed the world, came up with theories to explain what he saw, then tested them with experiments to see if he was right. The power of this approach is that it aims to remove preconceived ideas and, in doing so, deliver a more accurate description of the natural world. [7:40]
The shorter scientific method
British scientists have made, and continue to make, some of the great scientific discoveries. But of equal importance, from a historical perspective, was the development of the means by which we do science. The idea that you build theories, you test them by experiment, and you publish the results: this is known as the scientific method. It is the bedrock of science. [3:38]
Gathering evidence
[G]athering evidence and building arguments from what can be seen and reproduced is at the heart of a modern scientist’s work. [41]
Veiled induction: explanations based on evidence
Darwinian evolution is the most robust of scientific theories, but many people find it easier and more reassuring to believe that something so intricately constructed as life on Earth must have had a designer. It is hard for us to accept that erverything around us, from the beautry of the butterfly to the complexity of the human eye, could have evolved simply through chance and the pressure to survive. But the scientific evidence that evolution by natural selection has occurred is unassailable.
The scientific method, which is today practised in all corners of the globe, builds on explanations based on evidence, and when new evidence emerges that does not fit with the model, the explanation must change. That is how science moves on. [15]
The method of the social sciences
Sechste These (Hauptthese):
a) Die Methode der Sozialwissenschaften wie auch die der Naturwissenschaften besteht darin, Lösungsversuche für ihre Probleme – die Probleme, von denen sie ausgeht – auszuprobieren.
Lösungen werden vorgeschlagen und kritisiert. Wenn ein Lösungsversuch der sachlichen Kritik nicht zugänglich ist, so wird er eben deshalb als unwissenschaftlich ausgeschaltet, wenn auch vielleicht nur vorläufig.
b) Wenn er einer sachlichen Kritik zugänglich ist, dann versuchen wir, ihn zu widerlegen; denn alle Kritkk besteht in Widerlegungsversuchen.
c) Wenn ein Lösungsversuch durch unsere Kritik widerlegt wird, so versuchen wir es mit einem anderen.
d) Wenn er der Kritik standhält, dann akzeptieren wir ihn vorläufig; und zwar akzeptieren wir ihn vor allem als würdig, weiter diskutiert und kritisiert zu werden.
e) Die Methode der Wissenschaft ist also die des tentativen Lösungsversuches (oder Einfalls), der von der schärfsten Kritik kontrolliert wird. Es ist eine kritische Fortbildung der Methode des Versuchs und Irrtums („trial and error“).
f) Die sogenannte Objektivität der Wissenschaft besteht in der Objektivität der kritische Methode; das heißt aber vor allem darin, daß keine Theorie von der Kritik befreit ist, und auch darin, daß die logischen Hilfmittel der Kritik – die Kategorie des logischen Widerspruchs – objektiv sind. [82]
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