Comradeship // Freechat

Opinion on Popper: it's not good and the number of swear words in my answer depends on the company.

Falsifiability has it's uses but imo only to the extent that it's compatible with dialectical and historical materialism. In Popper's hands it is not.

Popper seems to have been motivated by anti-communism/Marxism as much as anything else. His work should be evaluated in this light. He didn't necessarily start with sound principles and follow the logic or start by asking scientists how they did science and deriving a theory therefrom. He was starting with the question, How can I show that the Marxists are wrong? He doesn't necessarily make this clear. This is… ironic, considering what he's known for.

This doesn't really answer your question as I don't feel overly qualified to give a fuller, direct answer but maybe it will provide some food for thought when hearing other answers or looking him up.

Maurice Cornforth wrote a scathing critique of Popper in The Open Philosophy and the Open Society. If you search on here for Cornforth and put redtea as the user, you'll find some quotes that I previously posted. The quotes focus on formal logic and Popper's misunderstanding of the dialectical materialist conception of contradiction (rather than falsifiability).

The concept of falsification is a really good one, and we should apply it and other scientifically rigorous tests to our materialist analyses of history, and tactics. Marxism is a science, dedicated to uplifting the working class, and we should take inspiration from scientific concepts and methods to acheive that aim.

But hilariously Popper was so completely blinded by western-supremacy and cold-war propaganda, that you can ignore and easily debunk everything he says about socialism and the USSR. Pretty much every major Marxist tenet (class struggle, surplus value, TRPF) is falsifiable, so he has to do some incredible logic-twisting to get around that fact. Goes to show that even very smart people can be blinded by ideology.

Tangentially related, but I also recently watched a documentary about Oppenheimer called "the day after trinity". Oppenheimer, despite being politically literate (he read das Kapital, as well as everything Lenin ever wrote), still thought that the US regime wouldn't use weapons in a nefarious way, and thought he could use his scientific status and brilliance to influence US leaders to change the system from the inside. That also had to take some incredible logic-twisting to reach that conclusion given the US's history, which he wasn't ignorant of.

He got a dose of reality when he learned after the fact that they used the labor of him and hundreds of others to murder a bunch of innocent civilians.

Popper is often celebrated by libs, but he is just a racist western chauvinist (like most of the libs themselves).

Here's a quote from Domenico Losurdo's book, War and Revolution:

An explicit rehabilitation of colonialism is ventured by the theoretician of the 'open society' himself. Popper seems to offer an unequivocally positive assessment of the centuries-long domination of the rest of humanity by the great European and Western powers: 'We freed these states too quickly and too simplistically.'

To look at this issue we have to consider what Popper was trying to do with falsificationism, and the current of thought he was embedded in (logical positivism). The reason of being of a notion like falsificationism is the so-called problem of demarcation: i.e., how can we distinguish science from non-science? And, even more particularly, how can we distinguish science from science-looking or science-claiming things (pseudoscience)?

Falsificationism has the virtue of giving a simple answer to the problem of demarcation. Science happens when theory offers hypotheses that can be subjected to empirical tests, and, upon disconfirming data, the hypotheses are abandoned. The problem is, this is not how science works, but also, this is not how science ought to work.

An example: Newtonian physics. This is an especially good example, because the Vienna Circle were clear that, if there was something worth being called science, it was physics. So, a demarcation criterion that tells us Newtonian mechanics is pseudoscience is very much off.

Welcome to stellar parallax. Parallax is the apparently shift of position of an object (in this case a star) because of the movement of the observer (in this case, Earth). Newtonian mechanics and the heliocentric model predicted stellar parallax, but until the 1830s it had been impossible to detect:

Stellar parallax is so small that it was unobservable until the 19th century, and its apparent absence was used as a scientific argument against heliocentrism during the early modern age. It is clear from Euclid's geometry that the effect would be undetectable if the stars were far enough away, but for various reasons, such gigantic distances involved seemed entirely implausible: it was one of Tycho Brahe's principal objections to Copernican heliocentrism that for it to be compatible with the lack of observable stellar parallax, there would have to be an enormous and unlikely void between the orbit of Saturn and the eighth sphere (the fixed stars).

So here we have a hypothesis: stars will appear to shift due to the movement of the Earth. We have an observation, in fact lots of observations through about two centuries: stars appear fixed. And yet neither the Copernican hypothesis nor Newtonian mechanics were abandoned (nor should they have been!).

So does that mean science should be immune to disconfirmation? Don't we learn anything from data? Obviously not. But we need a bit more of a sophisticated view than falsificationism. A clue is given us in Quine's essay, Two dogmas of empiricism. In this essay, Quine points out that when we speak of confirmation (this was earlier than the notion of falsification) we shouldn't so much think of a given predicate or hypothesis, but to the whole system (this is what's usually called, for this reason, confirmation holism).

The point here is, a single datum shouldn't make us throw away an entire theory that is otherwise predicting a lot of other data. In fact, a priori, we don't know necessarily what's going on. The parallax of stars wasn't observed because stars were a lot further away than it was commonly believed, but the instruments, experimental technique and grounding theory were broadly correct.

Both general mechanics and quantum mechanics are just as false as Newtonian mechanics, in a certain sense. QM fails to predict gravitational lensing, and GR fails to predict interference patterns in the double slit experiment.

Yet we don't throw them away, wisely.

Sometimes when we have a very strong theory and a datum that contradicts it, what we should do is throw it away. Example: if we get measurements that suggest speeds greater than light, we're probably having measurement error somewhere.

It's better to look at this issue through the lens of Lakatos' notion of a research programme, that has certain core commitments, and auxiliary or compensatory hypotheses. In Lakatos' terms, a programme is productive if it still makes non-trivial, novel predictions, and becomes degenerate if the auxiliary hypotheses grow too numerous and difficult to sustain, on the face of new data.

All models are (probably) wrong, but some are more useful than others. Science requires us to consider whether our theory generates accurate predictions in advance, without having to create endless numbers of special cases every time we make new observations. If several theories exist, they probably all have holes, and should be judged in terms of whether they are still useful to predict and understand new things.

Marxism is completely falsifiable and it’s why I like it. I don’t know if that’s relevant here.

It would only be non-falsifiable if Marx said that it would be impossible to measure or predict the mechanisms of social change. We can totally measure social habits and most of our measurements tend towards Marx being correct.

Bear with me here :P

In its naive form, i.e. "In light of recalcitrant evidence, a theory is falsified and therefore must be revised or discarded completely", I think falsificationism is quite dogmatic, it doesn't take into account auxiliary hypotheses (e.g. the instruments failed or were not calibrated, background effects, there were implicit assumptions in the experiment that were not considered in the theory, etc.). I don't think any scientist takes this form of falsificationism seriously.

Ever since Kuhn and Lakatos (among others) came around, history of science was introduced into philosophy of science to improve our depiction of the scientific enterprise. It turns out that the kind of critical rationalism Popper hoped to see doesn't model how we do science at all. How so?

Humans and our degrees of belief happen to vary a lot more. Having experienced academia, I would say this is the case. The sigma threshold for a discovery in different fields of physics differ. The use of Bayesian statistical analysis also differs. The absolute "strength" of a justification of a method, theory or model is often judged arbitrarily, even though we do have good intuition on relative strengths between different methods of theory-justification. On another note, theories on rationality using statistics work better and are less controversial than falsificationism.

Perhaps it is an ought/is problem. Popper said we ought to be critical rationalists. But most scientists aren't. So maybe he still has a point. But does it matter? We still make the same predictions at the end of the day. Science isn't maths, science is vastly more social than maths. It's better modelled with ideas that scientists work in groups called paradigms or research programmes; we have some dogmatic beliefs about our theories, we often let politics influence it, or influence politics ourselves. One might want to uphold strong critical rationalist princples, but might find themself deviating from it once they join a PhD programme where they adopt the "culture" there.

So no, I don't think it's a tenable position. I think it's noble what Popper tried to formulate, but it was quite conservative; on the other hand, his contemporaries made important revisions and adjustments to it and their positions are more appealing in my opinion.