There is a new book out about the Greek philosopher Parmenides, the central figure of the Eleatic school. Well, it is listed as a 2025 publication. I, for one, will call that "new" given the antiquity of the subject matter. It is an anthology titled simply, Parmenides: New Perspectives , edited by A.G. Long and Barbara M. Sattler. The Eleatics may have made their greatest impact on subsequent philosophy through Parmenides' disciple Zeno. The simplistic view (my view) is that Parmenides took a position that seemed, simply, nuts. There is no change, no motion, and no division in the word, there is only Being. Zeno provided arguments for that position that made it seem less nutso, by making the common sensical world of change, gaps, and differences itself seem oddly paradoxical. That conventional understanding makes Zeno seem the more interesting figure in that dyad. But the Long/Sattler book offers "new perspectives". One of them is that Parmenid...
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I have mentioned Mayo and her book, STATISTICAL INFERENCE AND SEVERE TESTING before. Here I come back to it to provide you with some fruits of my readings therein. Duhem's problem. Pierre Duhem said that experimental falsification doesn't get us very far in physics because the error that explains the surprising experimental result could invariably have come from any of a number of related postulates. The surprising result only tells us that ONE of them is wrong. "The only thing the experiment teaches us is ... there is at least one error; but, where this error lies is just what it does not tell us." [a 1954 book.] Quine said much the same, though he didn't think the idea restricted to physics. Popper replied, in CONJECTURES AND REFUTATIONS (1962). "We can be reasonably successful in attributing our refutations to definite portions of the theoretical maze. (For we are reasonably successful in this -- a fact which remains inexplicable for one who...
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...
There was a lot going on the Vienna through the whole period from the turn of the century to the German takeover of Austria in 1938. In this connection, we have to discuss (as Edmonds necessarily does) one of the brightest stars streaking across the distinguished intellectual firmament of Vienna in the early 20th century: Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis itself raised the question: is this a science? Freud certainly thought it was. But what has to be true for a certain body of scholarship to be a science, or to be, perhaps more loosely speaking, scientific? The contrary term, for the Circle, was "metaphysics." The VC disdained metaphysics. Their manifesto said that the VC stood for "removing the theological and metaphysical debris of a millennia," and one is to imagine the adjective "metaphysical" pronounced with disdain as one reads that. Indeed, this is their major link with the philosophy of Auguste Comte, who invented the term "positivism"...
I've mentioned before in this blog the book Lost in Math, by Sabine Hossenfelder, a prominent German particle physicist. The idea behind the title of the book is that contemporary physics is too wedded to the beauty and symmetry (even "supersymmetry," like the kind of symmetry that comes from the planet Krypton) and inadequately concerned with the search for data. It may be that physicists have to accept ugly math that does nothing more beautiful than matching the data, in order to move forward. Today I come back to Hossenfelder and her book in order to quote one particular passage, about Karl Popper. It seems plain enough, but in the context of her broader point there is some ambiguity to it. For now, I'll just provide the quote: "What I learn [at a certain conference/workshop she attended] is that Karl Popper's idea that scientific theories should be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it's a philosophy that n...
Karl Popper, renowned as the inventor of falsificationism in the philosophy of science, also popularized the term "the open society," of which George Soros nowadays makes a lot of use. Early in his book THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES, Popper has admiring things to say about the pre-Socratic philosophers. He identifies their views with the open society of which Periclean Athens is a paradigm. He has a particular fondness for Heraclitus. Popper was especially fond of the idea that life is a river into which we cannot step twice. Popper takes this, along with certain other Heraclitean bon mots, as meaning that (in Popper's words now) "all matter, like fire, is a process." This, Popper think, put philosophy off to a promising start. It is this start that was unfortunately shut down by Spartan victory and Plato's codification of that victory in his dialogues. I don't believe this. I believe much that Popper has to say, but he is using Heraclitus as a ...
Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein were two of the giants of mid-century philosophy, especially of the Anglo-centric sort. They could each legitimately claim to the the true heir to Bertrand Russell as Russell receded from the central issues under debate in favor of a role as senior sage for antinuclear activists. There is an oft-today story of a ten minute argument between the two at a meeting hosted by the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club. Popper argued that there are substantive moral issues that philosophy can address, Wittgenstein replied that all Popper's examples of such questions were in fact linguistic confusions. Wittgenstein was standing next to a fireplace and started waving a poke around as the discussion, no pun intended, became heated. By way of winding up the discussion, Popper said that there was at least one moral certitude, that one should not "threaten visiting lecturers with pokers." I bring up this familiar story because a student of ...
Is it integral to the scientific method that key ideas should be subject to falsification? If we answer "yes," what are we to say about string theory, or the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics, etc.? Here is a discussion of a discussion of a discussion. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/falsification-and-its-discontents/ And that's an illustration of a "popper" above. Get it?
Adolf Grünbaum died on November 15. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh perhaps best known as an outspoken critic of Freudianism and psychoanalysis more broadly. Grünbaum wrote THE FOUNDATIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS:A PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUE (1984). This book was in its own way as much a criticism of Popper as of Freud. Psychoanalysis was the paradigmatic case of a pseudo-science for Popper. It was unfalsifiable and thus not a science, but rather a structure of ideas falsely marketing itself as a science. Popper, though, did not maintain that it was meaningless, or valueless. Had Freud considered himself an author of creative, imaginative, prose he would have been on the right side of the demarcation Popper sought to enforce. As Grünbaum tells the story, that was misguided. As the Popperian critique itself became conventional, some of Freud's admirers complied with it, on the master's behalf. And so was born the "hermeneutic" scho...
In the comments section of a post I wrote many moons ago, I've been engaging in some back and forth with a reader, Marvin Edwards. Our discussion involved determinism and indeterminism in human action. I'm going to highlight the discussion here, because I think I put an important point quite well and am tired of patting myself on the back in private. "Christopher, if I am alone in a room with a bowl of a pples, and I'm feeling hungry, and I decide to go ahead and eat an apple, then I am the meaningful and relevant cause of the apple being eaten. Do any of the authors you mention suggest that it was 'some thing' other than me that caused the apple to be eaten?" Each of the four authors I had mentioned [James, Popper, Berlin, Kane] would agree with the following observations about eating apples. First, self-preservation is the deepest instinct, so of course we aren't free to get hungry or not to get hungry. In that sense, the matter is determin...
Back in 2005 a British climate scientist, James Annan, made a bet for US$10,000 with two Russian physicists who were skeptics about global warming. The Russians, Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtseva, took the position that the years 1998-2003 had been as warm or warmer than the years 2012-2017 would be. The three scientists involved in the bet agreed that win/lose would be determined by temperature data from the US National Climatic Data Center as it was then known. (It has changed its name to the National Centers for Environmental Information.) Now we near the end of the latter of the two periods covered by the bet. The Russians will be the payors. Congrats to Annan, and actually to all three for conducting science according to the Popperian rule. Popper didn't say you actually have to risk money on falsification, but still ... My final comment on this point will be that the outcome of the bet wasn't even remotely close. In the graph above, which was compile...
A 2013 anthology, PHILOSOPHY OF PSEUDOSCIENCE, contends that Karl Popper was in essence right on his crucial contentions over falsifiability and science. Here's a link. Specifically, Popper contended first that it is important (as a task within the broad domain of epistemology) for philosophers to distinguish between what is science and what isn't; second that what is science must be in principle falsifiable; third that the falsifiability is linked to the good reasons why sciences are prestigious activities -- the reasons why the word 'science' is worth co-opting. Those views have gone out of fashion, for a lot of reasons. Susan Haack, for example, argues that the "demarcation problem" is of little significance. Philosophers should stop arguing over what deserves the label "science," in part because she believes falsifiability is also good as a rough guide to valuable thought in a lot of fields of scholarship one wouldn't want to put on ...
Happy New Year! On Christmas Eve Day, I mentioned a recent book, Why String Theory? by Joseph Conlon. I said I'd discuss its philosophical significance this week. Here we are, at the start of a new year, and we can start 2017 off with something weighty. String theory is often presented as a "theory of everything" or ToE. This is both its charm and (in many minds) its downfall. These fundamental strings winding through X dimensions might allow for a geometrical description of all the particles, and the forces, enumerated in modern physics courses. The bestiary of different subatomic particles has become confusing and crowded -- the strong demand of human minds for conceptual order requires some clean-up work there. As to forces, the "force left out" is always gravity. The other forces -- strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, have all made their peace with one another through the magic of quantum mechanics. Gravity remains aloof. One big goal of ...
I used to believe there was an enduring 30 year cycle in the history of the US which became especially evident in presidential politics. Four years ago I abandoned that belief in the face of what seemed clear Popperian falsification. Now I'm wondering if I have to go home again, in a conceptual sense. The 30 year idea included the view that there is a general drift of reform in our history in which each train of reform runs out of steam as its central figures age, get tired, and fall out into competing factions. When that train has lost forward momentum, there is a strong counter-reform move. I don't remember what the term for this is. Let's call it the Rightward Shove for now. The second election of Grover Cleveland to the Presidency, in 1892, was such a shove. Never mind now just in what respects. The next Rightward Shove after that came in 1920 , bringing in Harding and bringing an end to the Progressive Era. The next Shove after that ... 1952 , Eisenhow...
Koksvik is especially concerned with the argument that interactionist dualism can't work because for it to do so would violation the law of the conservation of energy (supplemented perhaps by the law of the conservation of angular momentum). The idea behind this argument is that IF my thoughts cause me to do something I wouldn't otherwise do, then they must do so by exerting energy. Energy after all is that which does work, that which which moves matter around. Thus, if interactionism is true, energy is leaking into the phenomenal world from some trans-phenomenal source. Surely this would violate that law. If we're going to say, "so much the worse for the law then!" we can do so. Laws sometimes have to be modified and sometimes abandoned. Still, these leaks of energy into the phenomenal world should be in principle detectable, and anyone arguing for interaction should be able to make a case that they exist, that the law is violated, before arguing for ...