On the Vienna Circle: Seven of Eight

 

Let us take another look at an issue we discussed both last week and the week before: the unity of science, and the issue of the demarcation of science from non-science. There are three intertwined ideas here we have to look at all at once: induction, causation, science. 

The problem of induction has been a constant in philosophy since David Hume (pictured). I can encounter a thousand white swans without ever having encountered a black swan. This should not necessarily give me confidence in the proposition "swans cannot be black". How, if at all, does the accumulation of examples produce a conclusion?

Consider, too, causation. I hit a pool ball with the off-the-rack stick a thousand times. The ball always moves forward in the direction of my tap.  It never blows up. Should this give me confidence in the proposition that it will never blow up? Relatedly, should this be enough for me to call my tap the cause of the ball's subsequent forward momentum?  

And such inductive attributions of cause-effect are at or near the heart of what common not-so-philosophical folk mean by the term "science". It is science especially that tells me what causes what, and so helps me with matters of prediction and control. 

It was Karl Popper, inspired by but also at odds with the work of Moritz Schick, who shifted the focus of such discussions away from verification, even away from (perhaps a less demanding term) confirmation.  Popper looked at them from the other side: falsifiability. If my theory demands that pool balls blow up when hit by a wooden stick, and they calmly move forward still intact: my theory has been falsified. 

Edmonds, paraphrasing Popper, says: "Science makes predictions, and those predictions may not come to pass, in which case the theory has to be modified or jettisoned altogether. What distinguishes the empirical from the non-empirical, science from non-science, is precisely that science, unlike pseudo-science, is open to falsification." 

Science advances, in a manner expressed in the title of one of Popper's books, by Conjectures and Refutations.  We cannot speak of confirmation, but we can say that past conjectures that are not refuted remain in play. Those that are refuted drop out of play. 

Because of his split with much of the rest of the Vienna Circle over verification-versus-falsification, Popper thought of himself as the "official opposition" to the Circle. Edmonds reveals that that expression came from Neurath.  But Edmonds also plainly thinks Popper loved it, and over-stated his status as "official opposition" in a way consistent with the hypothesis that Popper was a megalomaniac. 

Popper was much more OF the circle in the 1930s than, in the post-war scene, he wanted to let the world remember. His very first academic publication was in a Circle sponsored periodical. His intellectual heroes and villains were those of [the rest of] the Circle -- Bertrand Russell was their great hero and his; Heidegger was their great villain and his. And in 1934, Schlick himself wrote in a letter to Carnap, "Popper is entirely of our persuasion."

Of course, Popper's politics were distinct. The rest of the circle seems to have run on a spectrum from leftward political to apolitical, as I have discussed in earlier posts. But in time Popper would become renowned for a view of politics as a struggle between "the open society and its enemies" in which he defined THAT opposition in a way that deliberately cuts across left/right lines. 

Popper's politics is a huge subject in itself, and Edmonds says relatively little about it here, which is right because it would have unbalanced his overall narrative. I applaud that decisions on grounds of aesthetics and clarity and am seeking to emulate it here. 

I will conclude our discussion of this book by talking tomorrow of two deaths: Schlick's (which gives this book its title) and Godel's (which gives it some unexpected pathos).