Episode 120: Popper on Trial

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:00]  Peter: Hello out there. This week on The Theory of Anything podcast, Bruce puts Popper on trial. Specifically, through the lens of Michael Strevens book The Knowledge Machine, which argues that science works because it follows the iron law of explanation. So to Strevens, scientists must put aside philosophy, politics, and theology, and only follow empirical evidence. Bruce asks, how compatible is this view with the epistemology of Karl Popper? I enjoyed listening to Bruce here, and I hope you do too.

[00:00:45]  Bruce: Welcome back to The Theory of Anything podcast.

[00:00:47]  Unidentified speaker: Hey, Peter.

[00:00:48]  Peter: Hey, Bruce. How are you doing on this beautiful day?

[00:00:51]  Bruce: Doing pretty well.

[00:00:53]  Peter: I assume it's beautiful in Utah.

[00:00:55]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, it's always beautiful in Utah, right?

[00:00:58]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:00:58]  Bruce: Yes, we're a desert. We get no rain or snow or, you know, it's just beautiful all the time. That's absolutely how deserts work.

[00:01:05]  Peter: As long as that's how you define beauty.

[00:01:07]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:01:08]  Unidentified speaker: That's great.

[00:01:10]  Peter: Well, it's a beautiful day in Seattle, so.

[00:01:13]  Bruce: I don't know what order we're going to be releasing these podcast episodes in, because we've got like interviews coming up and such. But at least in terms of the order that we recorded them on the last podcast, we talked about Michael Strevens' epistemology from his book, The Knowledge Machine, How Irrationality Created Modern Science. So we're going to do a further discussion, not just in this episode, like there's a lot to cover. So I'm going to break it up a little, and we'll do several different episodes. And what I want to do is I want to sort of quote his criticisms of Popper, and I want to assess them, if that makes any sense. I tried to summarize his view in the previous episode that we recorded with many of his own examples. And then I gave some commentary, maybe not minimal commentary. I gave some commentary as I saw necessary to show that there was some alignment between Strevens' epistemology and Popper's epistemology. And the reason why I felt like I needed to do that is because he words things very strongly in an inductivist, Bayesian sort of way, which I think will be a turnoff to most critical rationalists, because most critical rationalists engage with critical rationalism in terms of what I've called the Popperi or the CritRat war on words, where what words you use matters a lot to most CritRats. And if you use the wrong set of words, they just can't hear you.

[00:02:49]  Bruce: So part of what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to see past the words he uses, and I'm trying to grasp the concepts he's after, and to show that there may be some overlap there, even though he chooses terms that would be a turnoff to CritRats.

[00:03:05]  Peter: Well, it seems to be one of the themes of this show is that Popperians just aren't thinking enough about what Popper was actually saying about refutation and induction and all this stuff, and that these ideas are even more far-reaching than they think.

[00:03:23]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:03:23]  Peter: Is that fair?

[00:03:24]  Bruce: That is fair. That is one of my themes of the show, for sure.

[00:03:28]  Peter: You're kind of an uber Popperian then.

[00:03:31]  Bruce: Yeah, that's exactly. I'm an uber Popperian, that's okay, great. Let me give a quick summary of Strevens' epistemology as taken from the previous episode. Strevens' book has several big ideas that I'll summarize just briefly so that anyone who didn't listen to the previous episode at least can follow along with what we're talking about. Modern science's power, according to the book, stems from its iron rule of explanation, i.e. that science is unreasonably close-minded about a code of argument that dictates that all arguments must be carried out with reference to empirical evidence. Now, Strevens sees that as irrational and close-minded because it refuses to consider many other sources of explanation and criticism that are non-empirical, such as philosophy, theology, and aesthetics. But he also believes this irrationality was what led to unbounded rapid progress because it forced explanation into areas that wouldn't have happened had this constraint not existed. And anytime I use the word irrationality, that's him, not me. I just like totally don't agree with him on that, but that I'm trying to present his viewpoint here. So, Strevens believes the iron rule involves four methodological innovations. A shallow notion of explanatory power, which is basically a culturally agreed upon by all scientists that they focus on causal derivations from observable phenomena, regardless of the underlying philosophical or metaphysical nature, which Strevens believes science isn't that interested in. Second, a distinction between public scientific argument and private scientific argument.

[00:05:21]  Bruce: Public argument follows the iron rule. Private reason does not need to. Remember, the iron rule means that you put things in terms of empirical evidence. Third, a requirement for objectivity in scientific argument, achieved through sterilization, his term, not mine, which excises subjectivity as much as possible, even if it makes arguments incomplete or blunted. And fourth, a prohibition on non-empirical considerations, philosophical, religious, aesthetic, etc., in official scientific argument, insisting that only empirical testing counts, even if other considerations, philosophical or aesthetic, went into the development of the theory. So Strevens argues that this methodology leads to two things that are of note. The first is what he calls Baconian Convergence, yes, named after Francis Bacon's induction, a term bound to make CritRats see red, but it's the idea related to the idea that observations eliminate the competing theories, narrowing what is actually possible, and convergence takes place because of this narrowing. So that's an idea that isn't really, even though it's worded inductivistically, it's not that far from what CritRats state they believe in, namely, falsificationism. The second is what Strevens calls the Tychonic Principle, the idea that the above methodology creates an irrational, his term, drive towards increasingly small observable empirical details, testing theories via eking out another few decimal points, so to speak.

[00:07:05]  Bruce: An idea that I, in the previous episode, I quoted Deutsch agreeing with, so it's not necessarily at odds with, say, David Deutsch's view. However, Strevens does not see his epistemology, even though there, I think, there's some overlap with Popper's epistemology, he does not himself see his epistemology as a form of critical rationalism. He is deeply critical of Popper overall, and he sees Popper's epistemology as problematic and as his own epistemology as a necessary corrective to Popper's.

[00:07:37]  Unidentified speaker: So is this the case?

[00:07:38]  Bruce: Is he actually improving upon Popper and maybe doing away with some of Popper's mistakes? Or is he just misreading Popper, which is very common, okay?

[00:07:48]  Unidentified speaker: Or does he have a point?

[00:07:49]  Bruce: Is he actually making some fair criticisms of Popper? When I first read Strevens' criticisms of Popper, my knee-jerk reaction was to shout, Strawman! But then I would look at it carefully. I'd start to realize that sometimes Popper really did say many things that could have led to the quote-unquote misunderstanding that Strevens had, which then made me wonder, is it really a misunderstanding? Or if it is a misunderstanding, as I'm supposing, might Popper be at fault for the misunderstanding? Yet when I try to then say, okay, I'm going to take the stance that Strevens is correct, I can almost always think of somewhere within Popper where he said something that disproves Strevens' criticism, making me feel like maybe it was just a strawman after all. I feel like this is an ongoing problem with Popper. Popper had a very long career, like it was really long. And he was like in his 30s or something when he wrote his groundbreaking first logic of scientific discovery or whatever it was. And then he lived for a long time afterwards, writing additional articles and books and things like that, kind of growing and building upon that original foundation. And he said a lot of things over that period of time. And he even changes his mind a lot over that period of time. Now, occasionally, he acknowledges that he changes his mind. He says, I used to say this, now I say that. But it seems to me, this is a criticism that Mark Biros brings up all the time of Popper, and that he's kind of sold me on is kind of true. Popper often puts things as a small refinement to his original thinking.

[00:09:38]  Bruce: Even though, if you really stop and think about it carefully, it's maybe not such a small refinement. It might be a big refinement. And I think Popper thought that a lot of these small refinements were just small refinements, when really he had evolved his theory into something very different than where he had started. And I think that the problem with that means that you can read early Popper and late Popper, and it's just not always clear where Popper's coming from or what he means. Because he says things that really do seem quite different in the beginning than compared to the end, and yet he's claiming this is what I said all along. So I've increasingly had to come to grips with the fact that Popper is often his own worst enemy. As an example of this, a few podcasts ago, Popper put his whole epistemology in terms of falsificationism. We did an episode on is falsificationism falsifiable? Falsificationism is a term that was just bound to cause people to think that his epistemology was about quote unquote proving a specific theory wrong, rather than as Popper apparently intended it, an epistemology that was really just about the logical relationship between theories and empirical evidence and not really about refuting a theory and proving it to be wrong. Moreover, Popper never did seem to see how falsification as a term, when taken as a relationship between a theory and a criticism, also related to good philosophical theories. This is one of the things that I've been critical of Popper on.

[00:11:15]  Bruce: Popper goes so far as to insist that there is no relationship between falsificationism and philosophical theories, and I just don't buy it. There's a really obvious analogy there between a good philosophical theory and the fact that you can, in some sense, you can do something very similar to falsification on them, as opposed to a bad philosophical theory where you can't. And though Popper does a handful of times speak of the importance of his no-adhoc rule, in some really strong terms, by the way, he never made it central to his epistemology. Apparently, I think, apparently, seeing his logical falsificationism as equivalent to or tacitly assuming the no-adhoc rule, but he just doesn't call it out. Like, when you think of Popper, you don't think of the no-adhoc rule. You think of falsificationism. And I don't think that's the right emphasis, right? I don't doubt that he probably thought falsificationism and the no-adhoc rule were the same thing.

[00:12:14]  Unidentified speaker: But in most people's minds, they're just not, right?

[00:12:17]  Bruce: So whatever he intended there, I don't think he got it across well. Two podcasts ago, I showed that even when Popper does talk about his own falsificationism, you can, and even when he gets it right in some books, you could almost always show that Popper did state it wrong in some other books somewhere. Where he would, specifically what I have in mind here is that he would make statements that would indicate that with a single basic statement you can once and for all refute a theory. Coming across very much as a naïve falsificationist. And yes, if you go read all of Popper and kind of look at how his thought thinking evolved, maybe you can make the case that in context that wasn't so bad, but if you're just trying to rip that quote out and if you're just reading that quote for what it is, even when the context of that book or chapter, you're going to come across with this idea that Popper really did believe you could definitively refute a theory with an observation, which you can't because of the Duhem–Quine problem. Okay? Elsewhere he does admit this, it's not like Popper just totally missed this fact, right? But you can find these quotes that I really do think are just technically wrong. Even if you can put them into a context where you can say, well, I can see what he meant. I can see it's not, he's on to the right idea. Just the quotes by themselves just really strike me as technically wrong. So, overall, I've come to accept that Popper did blunder. And he's not often as clear as I would have liked him to have been. And I don't think he was as clear as he wanted to be.

[00:13:55]  Bruce: I think that's part of the reason why he ended up fighting with a lot of his students, is that they would sometimes read him a little too literally and not quite get the nuance of what he was trying to go for. And then they would particularly have in mind Lakatos here, where he has a rift with Lakatos over the fact that Lakatos wants to amend falsificationism. And what Lakatos was trying to amend was a lot of Popper's early statements that were really technically wrong about falsificationism. So Lakatos wasn't like in the wrong in that sense. But there was a more nuanced view that Popper had in mind. And I don't think Lakatos ever got that, right? So I feel like there's just kind of good evidence that Popper didn't even successfully communicate his ideas well to his own students at times, right? A lot of times we blame Lakatos for that. We say the guy's an idiot and he went off on his own way and he missed what Popper really had to say.

[00:14:54]  Unidentified speaker: I just don't think it's that simple, right?

[00:14:55]  Bruce: I think Lakatos had a legitimate set of concerns that never really got addressed by Popper in a way that was convincing. I feel it is therefore Popper's fault that CritRats today have branched out in his epistemology off into several different directions. There's a ton of different forms of critical rationalism today, many of which that I personally think undermine some important parts of Popper's original epistemology rather than improve on it. I would have to say, though, I can't think of any form of critical rationalism that I've come across from the children of Popper that don't improve upon Popper in some ways. So, I'm really saying something more nuanced here, that I think if you were to look at Lakatos versus Popper, if you were to look at Deutsch versus Popper, if you were to look at Miller versus Popper, I think or Danny Frederick versus Popper. I don't think any of them, I think all of them improved on Popper in some ways, but also undermined important parts of Popper in some ways. So it wasn't a pure progressive improvement, if that makes sense. And I think if you're really trying to figure this out and get to the best epistemology, you almost have to borrow from everybody simultaneously.

[00:16:12]  Peter: You're just too nuanced, Bruce.

[00:16:16]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:16:16]  Bruce: So let me admit that I find this may be a difficult case, trying to go back to this idea of Strevens' criticisms of Popper. I really want to proclaim a defense of Popper here and put down Strevens, the inductivist. But when I read Strevens carefully, I find it harder to do than I'd have liked.

[00:16:38]  Unidentified speaker: So here's what we're going to do.

[00:16:41]  Bruce: We're going to put Popper on Trial today. With Strevens, his defense attorney, or sorry, prosecuting attorney, is going to put arguments against Popper. And we're going to let him try to put Popper on Trial. And we're going to also, I've got some quotes from Popper himself that his defense attorney is going to raise in defense of Popper to try to show that Strevens is wrong, if that makes sense. And so this is going to probably be done in several parts across several episodes. We're not going to do it all in one episode. After each criticism from Strevens, I'm going to discuss Strevens' criticism with Peter. Okay, so let the record show that Peter, despite his humility on this subject, is a lay expert on Popperian epistemology, as am I, of course, also. And let the record show that Peter is the least dogmatic critical rationalist I've ever met. And by the way, I don't intend that as a compliment necessarily.

[00:17:42]  Peter: I can take it.

[00:17:44]  Bruce: Because both Strevens and Popper both argued, to some degree, in favor of dogmatism. So I'm saying it just as a stated fact that Peter happens to be very, very undogmatic, which in this particular case is going to be very helpful because Peter has no problems saying, yeah, I think maybe Popper had that wrong or saying, you know, no, I think Strevens is up in the night. And I think we can get a, there's no defensiveness on Peter's part. So I actually can really appreciate how in this particular case, his lack of dogmatism is probably exactly what I need.

[00:18:21]  Peter: Well, you know, my, my ad, I'm just, for better or for worse, I don't have an ego in any of this. I, and I just, I'm just interested in ideas and exploring ideas. And I just, that's my attitude towards this whole thing.

[00:18:39]  Bruce: So that's exactly what I'm hoping for.

[00:18:41]  Peter: I guess that is the opposite of dogmatism in a way.

[00:18:45]  Peter: I don't know if it's good or bad,

[00:18:47]  Unidentified speaker: but I don't know either.

[00:18:48]  Bruce: It probably depends on the circumstance, right?

[00:18:51]  Unidentified speaker: That's fair.

[00:18:51]  Bruce: One of the, one of the themes of this show is that dogmatism isn't as bad as people think it is. It can be like, it can be very bad. Like I'm not denying that, right?

[00:19:00]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, sure.

[00:19:00]  Bruce: But, but we shouldn't get too worried about, oh no, dogmatism, right? It's, I get too worried about it and I shouldn't, right? Like, I know I'm in the wrong.

[00:19:11]  Peter: Kind of relates to the faith-based nature of reality. I never, never thought about that, but how we, how we've discussed that, that it's almost like to live in this world. You have to have faith in certain things. And dogmatism is kind of like an unkind word for faith, in a way, if you have...

[00:19:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, good.

[00:19:32]  Unidentified speaker: Well put.

[00:19:33]  Unidentified speaker: Well put.

[00:19:35]  Bruce: And as I've argued, I think science is powered by belief or dogmatism, right? Like, I think that Einstein had to somehow make it through eight years of not having a best theory until he had a best theory. And, right, that was absolutely driven by a dogmatic or faith-based, or I don't care what term you use. You can use more negative or more positive ones here. But somehow something sustained his belief that this was the right direction for eight years of hard work, right? And then the same thing drove him towards a theory of quantum gravity that was totally wrong. So, I mean, he was dogmatic. Dogmatism, I admit, has a negative connotation, and maybe it doesn't deserve it. Like it's the negative version of faith, maybe. Maybe faith has a negative connotation amongst rationalists. Belief, I don't know what we're going to call this, right? But there's something about this idea that it's just not all bad, that it absolutely is part of what powers science, right? I'm not trying to say it's all good either, because clearly that's not true. I think dogmatism can be dangerous, like just absolutely completely dangerous. So, what we're going to do is let's allow the prosecuting attorney to present specific arguments against Popper. Unlike a regular court, the jury, that would be Peter and myself, we're going to deliberate after each piece of evidence. I also have some quotes from Popper that will be his defense attorney are going to raise and then we'll deliberate on those separately. And then I do have several comments ready to go, of course.

[00:21:18]  Bruce: But I am curious how someone like Peter looks at Strevens' charges against Popper and would really like to kind of put them out there, get Peter's reaction, give quotes from both Popper and Strevens maybe, and then come back and look at it again. And we're going to just kind of keep doing that iterating, trying to see if we can get at the truth as best we can by doing this approach. So let's start with the problem of induction. So this is a long passage. I'm going to read a long passage from pages 15 to 18 of Strevens' book. So he goes over the problem of induction, which is that we appear to generalize from specific observations, like fire burns, but there's no justification for why we make that assumption that isn't itself circularly relying on a principle of induction. So let me read his actual approach to the problem of induction.

[00:22:12]  Peter: So the problem of induction in a common sense way is just that it seems to work so well, but there's no real logical or philosophical basis for it that makes sense.

[00:22:23]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:22:24]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:22:24]  Unidentified speaker: Is that how it's going to be?

[00:22:26]  Bruce: In fact, let's even just state up front, Popper's solution to the problem of induction is that induction doesn't exist, that actually we do conjecture and refutation, induction is just a myth, and that there's no need for induction because induction included this idea of justification and there is no need for justification, instead, you just severely test your conjectures and you go with the best one, okay? So in a nutshell, that would be Popper's answer. Let's see how well Strevens presents Popper's answer to the problem of induction, okay? So he says, this is quoting now, But that, as Hume observed, is itself a kind of inductive thinking, generalizing as it does from the past to the future. We are using induction to justify induction. Such circular reasoning cannot stand. The snake in the garden swallows its own tail.

[00:23:14]  Unidentified speaker: Page 17.

[00:23:15]  Bruce: So Hume, this is me now, though skeptical of induction as a form of justificationism, continued to himself believe in induction. So he raised this problem that induction, Hume raised this problem, this idea that induction isn't justified. But Hume was in itself an inductivist, okay? So now quoting Strevens again, but like many skeptics, Hume was also a conservative. He advised us to press on with induction in our everyday lives without asking awkward philosophical questions. The English philosopher Bertrand Russell, writing about Hume 200 years later, could not accept this philosophical quietism. If induction cannot be valid, then quote, there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity.

[00:24:00]  Unidentified speaker: That's quoting Russell, obviously.

[00:24:02]  Bruce: That's also from page 17. Continuing quoting Strevens now. Or as Russell put it, our position won't differ from that of a lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg. For all that, there is still no widely accepted justification for induction. Popper saw no alternative, but to accept Hume's argument. Unlike Hume, however, he, Popper, concluded that we must abandon inductive thinking altogether. Science, if it is to be a rational enterprise, must not regard the fact that, say, fire has been hot enough to burn human skin in the past as a reason to think that it will be hot enough to burn skin in the future. Or, to put it another way, the fact that fire has burned us in the past may not in any way be counted as evidence for the hypothesis that fire will be hot enough to burn us in the years to come. Indeed, science ought not to make any use whatsoever of the notion of evidence for. So, there can be no evidence for the hypothesis that the earth orbits the sun, since that implies that the earth will in the future continue to orbit the sun. No evidence for Newton's theory of gravitation. No evidence for the theory of evolution. No evidence, in fact, for anything that we've called a theory.

[00:25:24]  Unidentified speaker: That's pages 17 to 18.

[00:25:26]  Bruce: This might sound like just the sort of insanity that Russell feared, but Popper was no poached egg. I love that line. Science, he thought, had a powerful replacement for the inductive thinking. There may be no such thing as evidence for a theory, but what there can be, and here Popper recalled his youthful bedazzlement with Einstein in 1919, is evidence against a theory, page 18. Also page 18, To put it another way, a true theory would always make true predictions. False predictions can issue only from falsehood. No assumptions about the uniformity of nature are needed to grasp that. If your theory says that a comet will reappear in 76 years and it doesn't turn up, there is something wrong with the theory. If it says that things can travel faster than the speed of light, and it turns out that certain particles gaily skip along at a far greater speed, there is something wrong with the theory. And indeed, if your theory says that you are a poached egg and you find yourself strolling the London streets on two sturdy legs far from the nearest breakfast establishment, then that theory too is wrong. Russell needn't have worried about finding such an inductive logic. Unlike inductive thinking, this is all just straight forward incontrovertible logic, page 19. Okay, so was that a valid interpretation of Popper's view on induction and his falsificationism? And if not, was Strevens straw manning Popper so far? So, Peter, we're going to now discuss that.

[00:27:08]  Unidentified speaker: What do you think?

[00:27:09]  Bruce: Was that an accurate portrayal of Popper? Or do you think he got anything wrong about Popper in that portrayal?

[00:27:17]  Peter: Well, I guess the word you used, straw man, is what I kept coming to a little bit. But kind of a funny straw man too. I mean, I...

[00:27:34]  Unidentified speaker: His discussion...

[00:27:34]  Unidentified speaker: Let me actually reread this.

[00:27:36]  Bruce: He says Popper was no poached egg. And he says science, he thought, had a powerful placement for inductive thinking. There may be no such thing as evidence for a theory, but there can be, and here Popper recalls his youthful bedazzlement by Einstein in 1919, is evidence against a theory. That surely is what almost every critical rationalist I know says Popper believed.

[00:27:58]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:27:59]  Bruce: And in fact, I do think that is what Popper believed.

[00:28:02]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:28:03]  Bruce: He says, to put it another way, a true theory will always make true predictions. False predictions can only issue from falsehood.

[00:28:09]  Unidentified speaker: I don't think Popper would have any problem with that at all.

[00:28:11]  Peter: So, a true way, I'm trying to get my mind around that. A true theory can only make true predictions?

[00:28:19]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:28:19]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:28:21]  Bruce: So, false predictions can issue only from falsehood.

[00:28:24]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:28:25]  Peter: But what is true and false to a fallible person?

[00:28:31]  Unidentified speaker: I mean.

[00:28:32]  Unidentified speaker: Good question.

[00:28:34]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:28:35]  Bruce: There is a nuance here that is a little difficult, that I do feel Popper talks about, but it is just a little hard to wrap your mind around. Popper believes very strongly. This is me talking as Bruce the juror, where you and I are deliberating. So, I'm not preaching to you here. I'm giving you my opinion of Popper.

[00:28:56]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:28:57]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:28:58]  Bruce: I think Popper does talk about two things. One, that no theory is ever known to be true. And two, that science is searching for true theories.

[00:29:11]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:29:12]  Bruce: Unlike David Deutsch, who argues that no theory is true, Popper actually argues we could theoretically have a true theory.

[00:29:21]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, that's right.

[00:29:23]  Unidentified speaker: I've heard it.

[00:29:23]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:29:24]  Peter: Now I remember he said that.

[00:29:25]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:29:26]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:29:26]  Peter: So we could just happen to stumble on something that is absolutely true for eternity with certainty, but a human mind would never actually know it.

[00:29:39]  Bruce: That's right.

[00:29:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:29:40]  Bruce: So Popper's epistemology, and we're talking Popper's epistemology here, not Deutsch's adjustments to it, later adjustments, improvements or not improvements, depending on your point of view. Popper's original epistemology was rooted in the idea of truth and the search for truth, whereas Deutsch replaced that with trying to get nearer to reality, right? He doesn't like the word truth so much, and where Popper was definitely focused on, science is trying to seek the truth.

[00:30:12]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:30:14]  Bruce: So, would Popper object to the line from Strevens? To put it another way, a true theory will always make true predictions. False predictions can only issue from falsehood. I don't think he would. I think he would say, yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. I don't think Deutsch would necessarily agree with that statement. And so, therefore, there may be many critical rationalists today that would not agree with that. But I do think that is exactly what Popper had in mind, that we can know a theory to be false, because a false theory will make false predictions, and then we can say, oh, well, that theory must therefore be false. Now, it's true that he didn't necessarily believe, and then you definitively know it to be false. He wasn't a naive falsificationist by any means, right? But that is his underlying epistemology, because remember, Popper is really about the relationship between the theory and the logic of the theory and the logic of the observation.

[00:31:09]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:31:10]  Bruce: So, Popper isn't saying, you can know for sure that the theory is false with a single falsehood. He's saying, you can, there is the potential to know the theory is false, because false theories will make false predictions. And I do think that is the essence of the Popper's thinking on this subject. So, I would actually say, I think at least that statement is a correct understanding of Popper.

[00:31:38]  Bruce: And then, like this sentence, unlike inductive thinking, this is all just straightforward, incontrovertible logic. I think that's exactly what Popper thinks, right? Like, Popper said stuff like that over and over again. We don't need any inductive logic. There's no need for inductive thinking.

[00:31:56]  Unidentified speaker: It's just a myth.

[00:31:58]  Bruce: If it exists, it has no place in science. He says things like this over and over again. That instead, science is really just based on regular deductive logic, so there's no need for a special inductive logic.

[00:32:14]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:32:14]  Bruce: And so I think that part of Strevens is actually a pretty accurate depiction of Popper also. What do you think maybe he straw-mans Popper on here?

[00:32:27]  Peter: Well, okay, to back up a second. So what you would say is that deductive logic kind of like supersedes inductive logic.

[00:32:40]  Peter: So induction has some validity in the world, but it can be described more truthfully in a critical rationalist framework.

[00:32:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:32:57]  Bruce: I think that is exactly what Popper believed, but there's almost nobody agrees with me on that.

[00:33:04]  Peter: I mean, it's kind of a common sense.

[00:33:07]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, it's not so outrageous.

[00:33:10]  Unidentified speaker: I don't think.

[00:33:11]  Bruce: I think Popper's epistemology is 100 percent about absorption, that you have progressive theories that replace the old theory. And can solve all the problems the old one could, plus some additional new problems. So, I think Popper, when he says induction is a myth, what he means is anything that you think is induction, any inductive achievement you ever come across, it's actually critical rationalism. I think that's exactly what Popper was saying. Now, you can then say, well, does that mean induction is wrong?

[00:33:41]  Unidentified speaker: Well, it depends.

[00:33:42]  Bruce: If you think of induction as something distinct from critical rationalism, then yes, I think Popper is saying that's a myth. But if you think of induction in terms of something more general that includes critical rationalism, then yeah, induction is a real thing. Like, it just so happens that all the true examples of induction are always critical rationalism, or at least that was Popper's point of view that I think he was expressing.

[00:34:06]  Peter: And no one agrees with you on that.

[00:34:08]  Bruce: No, I can't think of...

[00:34:09]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, it seems pretty sensible.

[00:34:11]  Bruce: I can't think of anybody who agrees with me on that. I think that there is, like, everyone I've talked to in the CritRat community completely disagrees with me on this. So, we'll discuss that more. I mean, a lot of this comes from, like, Campbell's Evolution of Epistemology, which we did an episode on, and Popper's endorsement of it, Popper's own thoughts on the subject. I don't know if Popper was as clear as he could have been.

[00:34:37]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:34:38]  Bruce: So, there's this... And I'm going to do an episode on this, where I actually show my struggle to try to make sense of what is being said, and all the different alternative readings that the CritRat community has come up with on the exact same passages that I'm reading, and why it is that I think the way I'm reading it's the only one that actually makes sense. And I think that all their readings have been refuted by something else that was said.

[00:35:01]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:35:02]  Bruce: And so, there's a difficulty here, though. Like, I'm not saying, oh, it's just so obvious. It's not obvious, right? I wish Popper had been way more obvious about this. I think that it is a tough thing to try to get at, what was Popper actually saying, and then try to put it succinctly. And I think it's been a huge struggle on my part.

[00:35:25]  Unidentified speaker: And then here's the thing.

[00:35:26]  Bruce: I'm not actually sure I agree with Popper, right? There's what I think Popper said, and then there's whether I think it's right or not as a separate question. And I think I'm almost to the point where I agree with Popper.

[00:35:38]  Unidentified speaker: But like, it's been a struggle.

[00:35:39]  Bruce: Like, I honestly have thought that Popper, maybe there was a form of induction that Popper missed that had nothing to do with critical rationalism. And I've toyed with that idea way back with episode 26, and I've never let go of that as a possibility. And I still haven't entirely given up on it. But like, once I came across Deborah Mayo's theories, I started to realize, I think I've missed something, and I think Popper was probably right. But I say Popper was probably right, and I mean something that nobody agrees with me that Popper actually said. So, I mean, there's these different levels, right? Where there's what I think Popper said, and then there's whether Popper was right or not. Those are two different questions. We have to keep them separate in our minds. So, I think this one's a fairly good account of both the problem of induction and Popper's solution to it. So, I think the one thing that probably needs to be called out is this idea of evidence for. He multiple times says that Popper did not believe in the concept of evidence for a theory. And here's the thing though. I have many, many, many, many, many times seen CritRats jump down somebody's throat over use of the phrase evidence for or some equivalent phrase. Usually, responding to something like, Popper proved there's no such thing as evidence for a theory.

[00:36:58]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:36:58]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:36:59]  Peter: That seems like just, I agree with that.

[00:37:00]  Unidentified speaker: That's just like a trick.

[00:37:02]  Peter: It doesn't, you know, like the war on words, as you put it.

[00:37:05]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:37:06]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:37:07]  Bruce: But the fact that so many CritRats, critical rationalists do perceive Popper as saying that, is Strevens wrong to portray Popper as being against the concept of evidence for a theory, or is that an accurate portrayal? And I think, I think there's tons of critical rationalists, legitimate critical rationalists, ones that are like true scholars that know way more about this than I do, that I think would probably agree with Strevens on this, right? That Popper did say, there's no such thing as evidence for a theory. Now, I would personally take issue with that assessment. And thus, I, because of that, I would take some issue with Strevens' wording here. So I think that corroborating evidence is an indispensable part of Popper's epistemology. And thus the phrase evidence for has an intuitive and direct Popperian counterpart in degrees of corroboration. And I take the phrase evidence for to simply mean corroborating evidence, i.e. evidence that came out of a severe test that might have falsified the theory but didn't.

[00:38:15]  Peter: Well, I mean, I just hear that as using somewhat, well, I know what these words mean, but language that's going to be confusing to most people. And most people just know that you hear, oh, there's evidence for this assertion. Most people are just going to, you're not going to convince people that that is not a meaningless statement. I mean, in no universe is the average man on the street going to be like, they would just look at you like you said something completely idiotic if you tell them that. I mean, of course there's evidence for things as we go through this world. And, you know, maybe not in a, you know, of course you can pick that apart too, which has some validity, but, you know, we all go through life believing that we see evidence for all kinds of assertions, even critical rationalists, I'll bet.

[00:39:09]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:39:10]  Bruce: So yeah, okay, so that would probably be the thing that I would take the strongest issue with Strevens over. I have argued that Strevens was straw-manning Popper because there is such a thing in Popperian epistemology as evidence for a theory, by which I really just mean corroborating evidence for a theory.

[00:39:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:39:33]  Bruce: But like I have to acknowledge that nearly every critical rationalist I've talked to disagrees with me on this, right?

[00:39:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:39:41]  Bruce: Except maybe the Increments guys. I have, they have been really comfortable with evidence, language like evidence for a theory. So they might be a really notable exception to most critical rationalists I've talked to, where they will, they will just easily say, oh, this is evidence for this theory or something like that, right? So not everybody disagrees with me on that, but I would definitely have to say that many people reading Strevens might agree with him here that Popper did not believe in the concept of evidence for a theory. Now, let me nuance this just a little bit, though. I'm taking evidence for to mean corroborating evidence, right? Which I think is a super natural way of understanding the term evidence for. And it just maps directly to an important part of Popper's epistemology.

[00:40:29]  Peter: So, and the other way to look at evidence is to say, evidence proves something beyond any reasonable doubt kind of thing.

[00:40:39]  Bruce: Right. Or even just probably verifies the theory. You know, there's ways you could take the term evidence for that just wouldn't be true.

[00:40:49]  Peter: But you can, as a general, as something that supports a theory, the concept of evidence for has validity to you.

[00:40:59]  Unidentified speaker: That's right.

[00:41:00]  Unidentified speaker: It does.

[00:41:01]  Unidentified speaker: And to Popper, you think?

[00:41:02]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:41:02]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, I think so.

[00:41:03]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:41:04]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:41:04]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:41:06]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:41:07]  Bruce: So it's hard for me to argue Strevens has Popper wrong here, at least not without acknowledging that either I'm wrong or nearly everyone gets Popper wrong in the same way that Strevens gets Popper wrong. Even people who are big fans of Popper. So I think that Strevens, I mean, I don't want to say he gets a pass because I don't think he does. I think he's got Popper wrong here. But like, I kind of feel like he deserves a partial pass or something, right? Because he's right to a degree. He's right in a way. Many critical rationalists, most critical rationalists would agree with him that he's actually correctly understanding Popper's theory here.

[00:41:48]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:41:50]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:41:51]  Bruce: So let's talk about falsificationism. So here is Strevens' criticism of Popper's falsificationism. So that last one, I gave him at least a partial pass. We're now out of the easy territory.

[00:42:07]  Unidentified speaker: That was easy?

[00:42:08]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:42:08]  Unidentified speaker: That was the easy one.

[00:42:09]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:42:11]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:42:11]  Bruce: Quote, such is the logic, according to Popper, that drives the scientific method. Science gathers evidence not to validate theories, but to refute them, to rule out, rule them out of the running. The job of scientists is to go through the list of all possible theories and to eliminate as many as possible, or as Popper said, to falsify them. Suppose that you have accumulated much evidence and discarded many theories. Of the theories that remain on the list, it is impossible according to Popper to say that one is more likely to be true than any of the others. Scientific theories, if they are not falsified, forever remain conjectures. That last part was an actual quote from Popper, by the way. No matter how many true predictions a theory has made, you have no more reason to believe it than to believe any of its unfalsified rivals.

[00:43:07]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:43:09]  Bruce: This is a tougher one. Peter, let's deliberate. Is this an accurate summary of Popper's view of falsification? Or to what degree is it or is it not?

[00:43:21]  Peter: What I hear him saying is that when you have a theory, scientific theory or any theory about life, I guess, I don't know exactly. But let's just say any theory that you have a list of explanations for it, for why it's true, and then you falsify these explanations one by one. And if there's some, if there's two or three left, you don't really have any reason to believe in any one. I mean, it seems like a simplified, it doesn't really ring true as how, as the best version of critical rationalism that is worth subscribing to.

[00:44:09]  Bruce: Yeah, I agree with you on that, by the way.

[00:44:12]  Unidentified speaker: Please continue.

[00:44:13]  Unidentified speaker: No, it's okay.

[00:44:14]  Unidentified speaker: I don't want to bias you yet.

[00:44:14]  Unidentified speaker: That's about it.

[00:44:15]  Unidentified speaker: No, no, no.

[00:44:16]  Unidentified speaker: Bias me, please.

[00:44:18]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:44:19]  Bruce: So, one point of contention might be here. He says, you have no more reason to believe it than to believe any of its unfalsified rivals. Note that it is explicitly stated in terms of belief, okay? No more reason to believe it than to believe any of its unfalsified rivals. So, the context here is A, belief, your personal subjective belief, and B, we're only talking about unfalsified rivals, not the falsified ones. So, Popper does argue, here's a quote from Popper from Conjecture and Refutation, page 74, we search for truth even though we can never be sure we have found it. And because the falsified theories are known or believed to be false, while the non-falsified theories may still be true. Now that does, I have to admit, sound remarkably close to what Strevens just said. Okay, so here's a case where you can, if you search through Popper, find quotes that seem at least like they're in the same ballpark as what Strevens was saying. Okay, however, the defense attorney for Popper is going to ask us to consider the following quotes from Popper. Okay, so I'm going to now read some quotes from Popper. Now that the prosecuting attorney has given their evidence, let's give the defense attorney a chance. So, Conjecture Refutations, page 74. We do not prefer every non-falsified theory, only one which, in the light of criticism, appears to be better than its competitors, which solves our problems, which is well tested, and which we think or rather conjecture or hope, considering our provisional accepted theories, that it will stand up to further tests.

[00:46:08]  Peter: So we go with our gut feeling. I knew I had something right.

[00:46:13]  Bruce: You know, okay, you know what, you're joking, but you know what? What is Popper saying here? Like, first of all, let's acknowledge something. The defense attorney is correct. So let me read what Strevens said, and let's read what Popper said. There's a clear contradiction, okay? He says, it is impossible according to Popper to say that one unfalsified theory is more likely to be true than any of the other unfalsified theories. But Popper says, we do not prefer every non-falsified theory. Right there, Popper has literally said the opposite of what Strevens claims he was saying, okay? So we can at this point say, oh, Strevens is straw manning Popper and we can be done.

[00:46:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:46:55]  Bruce: But your joke that you just made isn't really a joke. What is Popper actually saying? Like, let me reread the quote from Popper. Try to put it to me what Popper is saying in some concise, explicit way. We do not prefer every non-falsified theory, only one which, in the light of criticism, appears to be better than its competitors, which solves our problems, which is well tested, and of which we think or rather conjecture or hope, considering other provisionally accepted theories, that it will stand up to further tests.

[00:47:28]  Peter: Well, I mean, it is kind of like trust in your gut. You just look, I mean, what is trust in your gut? You look at the whole array of evidence you have available to you and go with the theory that seems seems right. I mean, that has some validity in this world, I think.

[00:47:46]  Bruce: So, there we go, then, is this this is possibly a case of Popper saying, trust your gut and go with your quote unquote plausibility rankings, just like Strevens is arguing for.

[00:47:57]  Unidentified speaker: Or maybe not.

[00:47:58]  Bruce: It's a little hard to tell, right? It's it's not stated in such a way that we can definitively tell what he said.

[00:48:05]  Peter: That's the Strevens version of trusting your gut is a plausibility ranking.

[00:48:09]  Bruce: That's right. Okay, so he, Strevens claims. So let me be clear about what I think Strevens position is. That scientists have plausibility rankings, which is a term that is very Bayesian and very inductivist. Okay, that scientists make their choices based on those plausibility rankings, that they all have their gut feeling as to which theory is true and which theory is false amongst the group of non falsified theories they work on and defend. And they're not trying to falsify the theory they believe in. They're trying to falsify the other theory, right? Because they really believe their theory is right. There may be even dogmatic about it, right? And they go after trying to destroy the other theory and trying to come up with ways to bolster their theory. And we could talk about what it means to bolster a theory. There is actually a Popperian version of that. But as Strevens put it, their belief in their theories runs far ahead of falsification.

[00:49:10]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:49:10]  Unidentified speaker: Well, you know what?

[00:49:11]  Peter: My gut is telling me that that's actually, it doesn't seem like that different than what Popper is saying, you know, in big picture or just big picture. I mean, when he says I may be wrong and you may be right, but together through an effort, we get nearer to the truth. I mean, what are we doing in a conversation where like making different assertions and trying to work out the truth of something together? I mean, in some ways, that's a way of making a plausibility ranking.

[00:49:44]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:49:44]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:49:46]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:49:47]  Bruce: Let me point out something else here. So here's the things that Popper says can differentiate between non-falsified theories. He says, in light of criticism, okay, he says appears to be better than its competitors, which solves our problems, solves problems better, which is well tested, better, better corroborated, better tested, okay? And of which we think or rather conjecture or hope, when considering other accepted theories, that it will stand up to further tests.

[00:50:20]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:50:21]  Bruce: So he believes that that's a description of what, how he thinks scientists decide which of several unfalsified theories is the better one.

[00:50:31]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:50:32]  Bruce: So one thing I want to put here is that one might argue that what Popper just said there, at least in part, was precisely Popper's degrees of corroboration was meant to be. A rough measure of how well tested a non-falsified theory is compared to its non-falsified competitors. Popper has certainly never claimed that a group of non-falsified theories, if you have three non-falsified theories, that they may all be equally strong. Like, Popper has always claimed that one of those might have a much higher degree of corroboration than the other, right? It's been more severely tested, essentially, okay? Which would then be a legitimate concept of evidence for a theory in the Popperian sense, right?

[00:51:17]  Unidentified speaker: And he does mention that.

[00:51:18]  Bruce: He says, which is well tested? So he does mention this idea of corroboration as one of the ways in which you can tell a difference between non-falsified theories. So, my initial impression here is that Strevens may be misinterpreting Popper here.

[00:51:34]  Unidentified speaker: But here's the thing.

[00:51:37]  Bruce: We just talked about how critical rationalists today don't in general believe in the concept of evidence for. And I said, well, but there is this concept in Popper of corroborating evidence, okay? And that I think that's the same as evidence for.

[00:51:54]  Unidentified speaker: But here's the trick.

[00:51:56]  Bruce: Brett Hall once told me he thought Popper's concept of corroboration was unnecessary and did not follow from Popper's overall theory, and that it was too much like the concept of evidence for and that he rejected the whole concept of degrees of corroboration. And I know that's not Brett Hall alone. In fact, I think that Brett's just expressing a majority of critical rationalist opinion that Popper's views on corroboration, in and of themselves, his degrees of corroboration, that most critical rationalists today find it somewhat questionable. And so, here we have critical rationalists challenging the very, something that Popper himself saw as very important in terms of determining which theory was the best theory to go with, which was his degrees of corroboration. And many critical rationalists today reject that whole, it's not just that the words evidence form means something different to them, they're rejecting the very concept of degrees of corroboration.

[00:52:56]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:52:57]  Peter: And when you, when you, I'm sorry, did Popper use this term, degrees of corroboration?

[00:53:03]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, he did.

[00:53:04]  Peter: And so, when you bring this up with them, what do they say?

[00:53:07]  Bruce: I did bring it up and I was having discussion with Brett Hall on your Facebook page. And he said, I do not think Popper was correct to have degrees of corroboration. I think that was an old school thinking on the subject.

[00:53:19]  Peter: Okay, so they do at least recognize that they're disagreeing with Popper.

[00:53:22]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:53:22]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:53:24]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:53:26]  Bruce: Okay, so Strevens also might raise an objection. So let's imagine Strevens is prosecuting attorney. He's going to raise an objection here. He's going to say, okay, guys, yes, you're right. Technically, that statement from Popper does say that you can prefer one non-falsified theory over another. But it's not like every scientist agrees on which theory is in light of criticism the best one. In fact, there is overwhelming evidence that scientists do not agree on which of several non-falsified theories is the best one. So doesn't that mean Popper is wrong? Okay, yeah, okay, maybe Strevens is going a little too far when he says that Popper says there's no reason to believe one non-falsified theory over another non-falsified theory. But what we have here is, this is the prosecuting attorney talking, not Bruce here, but Strevens I can imagine objecting. But wait, the problem here is, is that you're acting like there's, you can just simply decide, oh, this theory in light of criticism, or in light of how well tested the theory is, or in light of other provisionally accepted theories, that we can then tell which is the best theory. And Strevens is actually saying, that's just not how science works. Science works on scientists having gut feelings, beliefs, and irrational moments, where they run way ahead of the evidence, and they go, this is the right theory, dogmatically so.

[00:55:09]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:55:10]  Bruce: And then it's got nothing to do with some, you know, sterilized form of which theory was the best criticized, which solved the problem the best, that, yeah, sure, you can ask those questions, but that just isn't how science actually works. That's Strevens' point.

[00:55:26]  Peter: But your big picture assertion is that Popper would actually agree with that.

[00:55:32]  Bruce: I think maybe Popper would agree with that, yeah. But I don't think people, I don't know. I mean, I think part of what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to figure that out, right? We've got quotes where Popper seems to agree with it, and you've got quotes where Popper seems to not agree with it. And so it's a little tough, right? So I have tended to read Popper closer to Strevens' epistemology than Strevens does. That is why we're doing this, right? But I'm questioning whether I'm reading Popper right. I'm questioning whether I do have the correct read of Popper here.

[00:56:02]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:56:05]  Bruce: So why not just call it, so Strevens would argue, why not just call it what it is? Every scientist has different plausibility rankings, or in other words, different beliefs about which theory is the best one. And it's just based on their subjective probabilities in their mind, maybe if we're using the Bayesian approach, as to which is the best theory. So, based on this, does that change your thoughts any, or are you going to go with your original thoughts on this?

[00:56:31]  Peter: Well, I mean, as, how did you describe me, an informed layman or something, an expert layman or something, okay? As a layman, who does not have strong dogmatic feelings about it, I just, my interpretation of critical rationalism is that, you know, largely influenced by you, is that it's more interesting and more nuanced than probably, than the critics certainly suggest, and that many of the proponents of it suggest as well. I mean, you can see a lot inside this, this thing called critical rationalism, and it absorbs a lot of different kinds of ideas, and the, it seems to me just, just a correct, a fallibly correct interpretation of how humans actually move closer to truth in this universe. But it's a really mysterious thing with lots of nuances and lots of unknowns. And from that perspective, I think he is Steel Manning Popper a little bit, but.

[00:58:10]  Unidentified speaker: Straw manning, you mean?

[00:58:11]  Peter: Straw Manning Popper a little bit, but it's, you know, I mean, it's not like. What he's saying is totally crazy either.

[00:58:22]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:58:23]  Bruce: You know, I guess I kind of agree with you. So I definitely think that Popper, I think strictly speaking, he is Straw Manning Popper here, at least insofar as Popper does claim that there can be reasons to prefer one, let's say, prefer instead of believe. I need to address the word belief here still. To prefer one theory over another, even if you have a group of non-falsified theories. Like I just gave you the quote. There's just no doubt that Popper did not say that there was no reason to prefer one over the other. But I do think that it's a little unclear how, if at all, Popper's view differs from Strevens. Would Popper have a problem with the idea of a plausibility ranking? He definitely would have a problem, I think, with the idea of a probability ranking.

[00:59:15]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:59:16]  Peter: But plausibility is different than probability.

[00:59:19]  Unidentified speaker: Are they?

[00:59:20]  Bruce: I'm not even sure that's true.

[00:59:22]  Peter: I mean, probability makes it sound like you're putting a number on it.

[00:59:27]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, it does.

[00:59:28]  Peter: That makes me bristle a little bit.

[00:59:30]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:59:31]  Peter: The number thing. But plausibility, you're like, that's really what you're doing. Like I was saying, in a conversation is that you're trying to move certain things you think up in the plausibility ranking and other things down. I think personally, Popper would agree with that.

[00:59:48]  Unidentified speaker: I'm going to say that.

[00:59:49]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:59:50]  Bruce: We're going to say mostly straw man on this one. Maybe with the caveat that there are probably a number of critical rationalists that would present Popper as saying something more similar to Strevens than we take Popper to be saying.

[01:00:04]  Peter: In my plausibility ranking for him making a straw man of Popper, I think has gone up.

[01:00:13]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:00:14]  Bruce: Let's talk about belief now, because I've emphasized that word several times for reasons that I'm sure you've already guessed. So this brings us to the second big point of contention in the previous statement. Strevens is arguing specifically that no matter how many true predictions a theory has made, you have no more... this is quoting Strevens. No matter how many true predictions a theory has made, you have no more reason to believe it.

[01:00:38]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:00:40]  Bruce: So and this is his trying to explain Popper.

[01:00:44]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:00:45]  Unidentified speaker: So he continues.

[01:00:46]  Bruce: Let me repeat that. Popper is sometimes said by the new Oxford American Dictionary, for example, to have claimed that no theory can be proved definitively to be true. But he has held a far more radical view than this. Popper thought that of the theories that have not been positively disproved, we have absolutely no reason to believe one rather than another. It is not that even our best theory cannot be definitively proved. It is that there is no such thing as a best theory, only a surviving theory. And all surviving theories are equal. Pages 19 to 20, by the way. Now, we have already shown that Popper did not claim all unfalsified theories are equal. So, we are calling straw man on that one, it looks like. Though, that idea does perhaps represent modern critical rationalist thinking, even if Popper himself did not necessarily accept that view.

[01:01:43]  Peter: When you say it represents their thinking, I think part of the problem is that it represents what they say, but it doesn't, I'm not sure, that's how they behave.

[01:01:53]  Unidentified speaker: That's a fair point.

[01:01:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, let's talk about that for a second.

[01:01:56]  Bruce: It's actually, you're good to call me out on that because you're making a good point. It does represent the explicit theories that they advance.

[01:02:04]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:02:05]  Bruce: But it isn't necessarily what they actually subscribe to in terms of how they behave.

[01:02:10]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:02:11]  Peter: Well, it comes down to how do we demonstrate what we believe more truthfully? Is it the way we behave or what we say?

[01:02:21]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, that's something I think about all the time.

[01:02:24]  Bruce: That's a fair corrective I didn't think of.

[01:02:27]  Unidentified speaker: So, thank you for raising that.

[01:02:30]  Bruce: So, it should be noted that the context here, though, is reasons to believe one theory over another. So, Strevens' point is one of showing evidence. He is asking us to check what really happens in real life with real scientists. Do scientists find reason to believe in one theory over another, even though none of them are yet falsified?

[01:02:57]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, you know what?

[01:02:57]  Bruce: This is very similar to what you just said, except you were saying about critical rationalists, and I'm saying it about scientists, I guess. Okay, what do scientists actually do? What we find is, and this I think is just a fact, that every scientist and his mother do have personal reasons to prefer believing in one theory over another, even out of a group of unfalsified theories. So, now, even Popper does seem to have admitted this to some degree, so we're not necessarily saying that's at odds with Popper. We're still not claiming that this is, this could still be considered a straw man of Popper. But scientists don't just agree on which theory happens to be the, scientists don't agree on which theory happens to be the best one to accept. In fact, it's not even close that scientists agree on which is, of several unfalsified theories, which one's the best. So while we're on the subject, Strevens adds this charge against Popper. Quote, Popper, this is me making up something Strevens might say. It's not a real quote from Popper. Popper, you're acting like there is some neat division between falsified theories and unfalsified theories. Popper specifically talks as if it's just obvious division and the existence of the division is available to us. We can easily sort falsified theories from unfalsified theories. They're just two separate categories. But I, Strevens, am arguing that no such division exists, at least at any one given moment in time. You never actually falsify a theory.

[01:04:25]  Bruce: It's true that due to Baconian convergence and due to the Iron Rule of Explanation, that over time opinions, by which I mean beliefs, says Strevens, converge. But it is a very long and slow process, and there is never some point at which a theory suddenly changes status from unfalsified to falsified. And we don't have to then consider it again, and we're only looking at the unfalsified theories. In other words, Strevens is arguing that science is explicitly about belief, and belief is the driving force of science, whereas Strevens is claiming that Popper is saying that science has no need for belief because you can falsify or criticize a theory and just go with the best one.

[01:05:11]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:05:11]  Bruce: Now, none of that's an actual quote from Strevens, but that is how I read Strevens and as his criticism of Popper here. So is this, if I'm getting Strevens correct, is this, Strevens is what he's claiming, is it incorrect in theory? Is it incorrect in practice? Is this maybe a valid criticism of Popper?

[01:05:32]  Unidentified speaker: I guess is the question.

[01:05:34]  Bruce: So is it true that Popper sometimes speaks as if theories can be easily sorted into falsified and un-falsified? So it turns out that this is a complex subject, and we just did a whole episode on falsificationism and is it falsifiable? Go listen to that one if you want more on this. So, a few podcasts ago, we talked about, we showed examples of where Popper, especially in his early years, does say things that seem to indicate that he thought you could really and truly falsify theory using a single basic statement as an observation. For example, here's one I did not use, but that is an actual quote from Popper from his book Two Fundamentals. It says, if a potential falsifier actually occurs, and thus an observation statement, a basic statement inconsistent with a given theory is true, or which amounts to the same thing, if an event prohibited by the theory does occur, then the theory is falsified. It is false, refuted. Such a false, falsified theory is evidently falsifiable, and therefore it is an empirical scientific character, even though on account of its refutation, it is excluded as false, but not as unscientific, from the hypotheses of accepted science. So, that quote right there, Popper is without a doubt, doing exactly what I see Strevens accusing him of, that he's claiming that there's this easy way that you just look at, is this theory falsified or not?

[01:07:07]  Bruce: And then you're looking at the unfalsified theories, and then you're preferring them based on, you know, maybe corroboration, maybe based on criticism, maybe based on light of other theories that are provisionally accepted, but that really you just have to consider the unfalsified theories. Strevens is saying that is not true, that is not how science works in practice or in theory. Popper is wrong on that point. And I just gave you a quote where Popper really does seem to be saying that. Do you following what I'm trying to say here is that there seems to be at least in terms of this one quote that I happened to pull out. It does seem like Popper is making a claim that theories are either falsified or not, whereas Strevens is claiming that it just isn't how it works. Like you do not actually falsify theories. You have evidence. You recall from the episode we did on his theory that what you do is you come up with an experiment and you do the experiment and it may not go towards your theory. But that may be because something was wrong with one of the auxiliary theories. And you have every right under scientific thinking to then come up with a new test that tests the auxiliary theory.

[01:08:17]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:08:18]  Bruce: Now we know Popper, that is the no ad hoc rule. That is what Popper taught. So from that point of view, Strevens and Popper are saying the same thing. But if that's true, how can you make sense of that quote I just gave from Popper? Like that's quote from Popper. If potential falsifier actually occurs and thus an observation statement, a basic statement inconsistent with a given theory is true. Or, which amounts to the same thing, if an event prohibited by the theory does occur, then the theory is falsified. It's just a false statement. It is just technically false. I don't know what else to say.

[01:08:49]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:08:49]  Bruce: And this is the problem that I feel like I bump into with Popper all the time. If you look at the broader epistemology he's building, if you look at it in terms of the lens of the no ad hoc rule, I don't see him as necessarily at odds with what Strevens is saying. But if you look at the actual quote of what he said, it's hard to deny that Strevens didn't have a point here, right? That Popper is acting like theories are either falsified or not. It just isn't how it works, right? You never falsify a theory. You never do it, right? It's always an open question of, can you come up with an auxiliary theory that's alternately testable? And can you come up with a way to test that that was the problem instead? And you get to do that forever until you exhaust every non ad hoc theory you can think of, right? As long as you can keep creatively coming up with new tests, you get to do it forever, basically, right?

[01:09:41]  Peter: Are you describing Popper's Ratchet here?

[01:09:44]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, I am.

[01:09:45]  Peter: In a sense?

[01:09:45]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:09:46]  Peter: So that kind of, in some ways, Popper's Ratchet, thinking of Popper in that, using that term, which is your term, correct?

[01:09:55]  Unidentified speaker: That's my term, yeah.

[01:09:56]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:09:57]  Peter: Where you...

[01:10:00]  Unidentified speaker: I'm struggling for the...

[01:10:01]  Peter: Define Popper's Ratchet.

[01:10:03]  Bruce: So Popper's Ratchet's this idea. It's really just a form. It's the outcome of following the no ad hoc rule. So the idea is that if your theory, if a counter evidence comes up for your theory, it does not falsify your theory. You have every right to instead come up and test one of your auxiliary theories, to come up with an independent test for the auxiliary theory that you think is wrong, and do that test. And if it shows that that was the auxiliary theory that was wrong, you're still in business. You never, and because you can, it's just a matter of creativity, right? Like you may personally run out of alternative theories to test, at which point maybe you either become a pseudo scientist, or maybe you give up and you move on to something else. Or maybe you just get more creative, right? And you spend more time trying to figure out, okay, what is it that I misunderstood here? And how do I make this correct, right?

[01:11:01]  Unidentified speaker: In a testable way.

[01:11:02]  Bruce: And because it's like the halting problem, you never get to know if the reason why you ran out of testable theories is because your theory was false, or if it's just because you weren't creative enough. You never get to know that, right?

[01:11:16]  Peter: Well, it seems like that perspective kind of blows the criticisms that we're talking about of Popper, sort of out of the water in a way, if that's an incorrect interpretation of a more nuanced, deep interpretation of what Popper was saying, then, yeah, it seems the best pushback.

[01:11:40]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:11:40]  Bruce: So Popper's Ratchet, then, is that you always have to increase the amount of testability, right? It doesn't matter which theory you do it, right? You don't get to save your theory by making your theory less testable. You only get to save your theory by making one of your theories. It may be the Auxiliary Theory more testable. You have to always ratchet towards increased testability.

[01:12:03]  Unidentified speaker: Increase.

[01:12:03]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:12:04]  Peter: I like how you put that.

[01:12:06]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:12:06]  Unidentified speaker: You know what?

[01:12:07]  Bruce: I agree with you on this. So let's, I have more to say here, and I'm actually moving towards something that I think is an important point, but let's just take an aside here. Strevens is making a specific claim, I think, against Popper, which is that Popper put everything in terms of falsificationism, and then you get the occasional comment where he says, well, yeah, sure, maybe you have good, you can use criticism to choose between unfalsified theories, right? And Strevens is saying, that's just wrong. And I just read this quote from Popper. Popper does come across like he's saying that sometimes.

[01:12:44]  Unidentified speaker: Not always.

[01:12:44]  Bruce: Like, we found some quotes from Popper where he clearly isn't agreeing with Strevens, isn't agreeing with the way Strevens is portraying Popper, but we found some quotes where he kind of is, okay?

[01:12:57]  Unidentified speaker: And this makes sense.

[01:12:57]  Bruce: I think Two Fundamentals was one of the earlier books. I think Popper just got better at this over time, where he started to, having heard criticisms of his theories, he got better at nuancing it better and explaining it better.

[01:13:10]  Unidentified speaker: But that makes sense to me, right?

[01:13:12]  Bruce: Like I can see an early Popper sincerely thinking that it's just pure falsification. And then later starting to realize, there's something more going on here, right? And I don't think Popper ever really made the no ad hoc rule as central as I make it, right? So you're not going to find Popper's ratchet, that term, anywhere within Popper. And you can find the ideas in Popper. There's like five or six really strong points, like in the past podcast where I actually quote Popper and develop it using the quotes from Popper. So I don't think there's any doubt that Popper agreed conceptually with what I'm talking about. But there's only five or six.

[01:13:49]  Unidentified speaker: They're strong statements.

[01:13:50]  Bruce: I don't think there's any doubt. They're not statements that are easily interpreted in some other way. But I don't think that you're going to find that people who read Popper in general come away with the Popper's ratchet view of Popper in mind. Because it just isn't the way he words things in general, right? And because of that, I think what I want to say here is this, that Strevens does have Popper wrong, and he is Straw Manning Popper. But that Popper, the reason why he is, is because Popper really did mis-explain it in his earlier works. That's, I think, the stance I personally want to take here. Put this another way, I think Strevens is correct at times that Popper does outright say you can refute a theory with a single observation, even though this is a false statement, and even under Popper's more nuanced epistemology. So it seems Strevens' criticism of Popper does have some teeth, at least if we're looking at earlier statements from Popper and only those statements, which I admit is kind of unfair, right? The thing is, is that people aren't all going to be scholars of Popper. They're not all going to read every single one of his books. They're going to just read a book by Popper, and they're going to come away with what they come away with, right? So, if Popper's logic of scientific discovery includes some technically incorrect statements, people aren't going to go, oh yeah, Popper changed his mind on that, especially if Popper never really claimed to change his mind on that, right?

[01:15:26]  Bruce: They're going to simply have this quote from Popper from his early book, and they're going to say, oh, that's wrong. And from that point of view, you could almost understand why they kind of reject Popper and then don't look further, right? And I do think this is a problem that we bump into here, because when it comes right down to it, let me just go on a limb and say this. I think Strevens is stating something more clearly. I think Popper did have something similar in mind, even if Strevens didn't see it, but I think Strevens is stating it far more clearly. And I think Strevens is therefore in some sense an improvement on Popper here, okay? That what he is saying is, falsificationism is really institutionally what causes progress. Nowhere in Popper will you find something stated that empirical evidence, falsificationism, is a speech code. Strevens calls it that, right? It's this idea that you need to put all your arguments in terms of the hardest, most powerful falsifications, right?

[01:16:32]  Peter: That's what he says, it's a speech code.

[01:16:34]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, he says it's a speech code, right?

[01:16:38]  Bruce: Individual scientists use anything they want to decide what to work on.

[01:16:43]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:16:43]  Bruce: And it may have nothing to do with falsificationism. It may have nothing to do with criticism even, except in some very vague sense that everything can be counted as a criticism.

[01:16:55]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:16:55]  Bruce: Scientists work on what they work on because they believe it.

[01:16:59]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, sure.

[01:17:01]  Bruce: And that belief runs way far ahead of the actual critical discussion. I do not find anywhere in Popper where he says that, where Strevens says it, and I think Strevens is right.

[01:17:12]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:17:14]  Bruce: But I don't think it's necessarily incompatible with Popper if you understand Popper in terms of Popper's ratchet.

[01:17:20]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:17:21]  Bruce: If you think of Popper not in terms of a sort of pure falsification of theories, but instead in terms of Popper's ratchet, I think Strevens is maybe a half-notch improvement on Popper, at least in this one particular area, I mean.

[01:17:36]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:17:37]  Bruce: Not maybe in general. So that's why I'm going to say, yeah, I think Strevens is wrong here, but I do think his wrong criticism had some teeth. I would definitely argue that Popper does a better job in his later books and starts to really emphasize that his falsificationism is really not about falsifying theories, per se, but about the logical relationship of theory to empirical evidence and how that allows progress to happen.

[01:18:06]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:18:07]  Bruce: Which is, I think, exactly equivalent to Strevens' iron rule of explanation. I think those two are more similar than it first appears.

[01:18:20]  Bruce: But with this, we kind of took an aside there. This isn't even the most interesting part.

[01:18:25]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:18:26]  Bruce: I want to emphasize, Strevens puts this all in terms of belief.

[01:18:31]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:18:32]  Bruce: The idea of belief is interesting because Deutsch has, David Deutsch has popularized this idea that a critical rationalist doesn't believe anything and that there is no need for belief, except on our podcast, we interviewed him and we, the Increments guys interviewed him and asked him about this, and we did too. But I think it was on the Increments podcast. They asked him about this and he said, well, there may be need for the word belief, you know, like in religion. You know, you go to your religious leader and you say, what do we believe on this subject? And outside of that, Deutsch has really kind of said, there's just no need for belief. Belief is just something that's unnecessary and it's just not a part of critical rationalism. So now let me say here that despite this popularization from David Deutsch, that there are critical rationalists that do not agree with David Deutsch on this. That they think beliefs are not as problematic as Deutsch is suggesting. The Increments guys in particular, the reason why they asked Deutsch this question was because they didn't really agree that beliefs were necessarily as problematic as that you could just remove your beliefs, right? That was why they were kind of asking him questions around this. In fact, it's interesting that I did a podcast not long afterwards. We did our podcast on Popper and God and Joseph Agassi paper about Fideism. And in one of those, I said, I believe in beliefs and I kind of expressed the idea that I didn't agree with Deutsch on this, that I think beliefs are a necessary part of science.

[01:20:18]  Bruce: I had one of the Increments guys reach out to me and just send me a little note saying, hey, glad to see that you actually agreed with us on this.

[01:20:25]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:20:26]  Bruce: So there's a bit of a rift amongst critical rationalists on this, where you've got kind of the Deutschian critical rationalists who believe that there is no need for belief. And then maybe me and the Increments guys, maybe some others who think that's not really true. Human beings absolutely do have beliefs. And that is part of how we actually come up with and decide what we're going to work on. And therefore, it is a part of science. At least it's part of the science of what research programs you're going to be doing. Now, here's the thing, though. Deutsch may have popularized this idea, but it's pure Popper. And I don't even know if everybody realizes this, that Deutsch is actually just getting this from Popper. So, here's an actual quote from Popper. This is In Search of a Better World, page 6. I am opposed to the thesis that the scientist must believe in his theory. As far as I'm concerned, I do not believe in belief, as EM.

[01:21:22]  Unidentified speaker: Forster says.

[01:21:23]  Bruce: And I especially do not believe in belief in science. I believe at most that belief has a place in ethics, and even here only in a few instances.

[01:21:36]  Unidentified speaker: So, it...

[01:21:38]  Bruce: Deutsch is actually just, I think, correctly repeating what Popper says here.

[01:21:45]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:21:45]  Bruce: So, Deutsch may have popularized it. Maybe not everybody realizes that this came from Popper, but this idea that there is... that science has no need for belief, that's pure Popper.

[01:21:56]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:21:57]  Unidentified speaker: So, now, wait a minute.

[01:22:00]  Bruce: Before we go too far on this, let me just say that back in episodes 106 and 107, that was the Popper and God and the fideist ones. Popper very strongly said that the choice to be rational was in fact an irrational act.

[01:22:16]  Unidentified speaker: Isn't that a case of belief?

[01:22:19]  Bruce: So doesn't that mean that Popper did believe in beliefs then? How's that different than having a belief? If you're going to irrationally believe in rationality, doesn't that just mean you believe in rationality? Maybe even just irrationally so? So I think this is a little bit of a problem. It might be a contradiction even, but maybe not. And here's why. You might argue that what Popper meant in the above quote, when he talked about maybe you do need belief in the matter of ethics, that might be what he was talking about. He might have had in mind, yes, the initial belief in rationality is a matter of belief. But after that, you don't need it.

[01:23:00]  Unidentified speaker: That might be what Popper said.

[01:23:02]  Bruce: That's a possible way to interpret or read Popper. Although this is just an interpretation. I don't know for sure if that's what he intended or not. I'm just doing my best to come up with a steel man possible way to not make this a contradiction, if that makes sense.

[01:23:15]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:23:16]  Bruce: So the issue here being that Popper does allow for belief in some cases. And I think Deutsch strengthens this. I think Deutsch really has no place for belief outside of, say, religion, which Deutsch is an atheist, so he's got no need for it at all in his mind.

[01:23:33]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:23:36]  Bruce: So maybe let's just stop for just a second, as I know I'm maybe getting a little bit confusing, but I feel like this is a really important point.

[01:23:42]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:23:43]  Bruce: Strevens is claiming that Popper believes there's no need to believe more in one theory over another. We have a quote from Popper where he says, you should, you can prefer one theory over another. But if you do it in terms of the word belief, it does seem Popper actually was against believing in one theory more than another. There's maybe an open question of what's the difference between prefer and believe, right? I'm gonna ask that question in just a second. But Peter, maybe give me some thoughts at this point. Maybe you weren't even aware before right now that Popper believed that you didn't need beliefs, in science at least.

[01:24:21]  Peter: I'm kind of digesting that. I mean, I guess I heard, I don't recall hearing that stated so directly. I'm not sure if it could, if it's a statement from Popper that completely rings true for me, because I can think of definitions of belief where scientists do or anyone, we do have beliefs in all kinds of things. Yeah, I guess it depends on how you're defining belief in a way.

[01:24:51]  Bruce: So let's turn a nuance that, because I think that's a fair point.

[01:24:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:24:55]  Bruce: I think the word belief is so broad and has so many sub meanings that we may be facing a very serious problem with a claim like, there's no need, I don't believe in beliefs, right?

[01:25:06]  Peter: But like what your example about how Einstein at the beginning, when he first had his, what do you call it? The happy realization?

[01:25:13]  Bruce: Yeah, the happiest moment of his life.

[01:25:17]  Peter: When he first had that and then spent eight years or whatever, trying to make it more than a belief, I guess. I mean, but it started with something that seemed a lot like a belief in a way. So, a realization, I guess you could say. But, you know, I mean, of course people believe things. Of course, scientists believe things for all kinds of whole complicated, interwoven web of good and bad reasons. So, I'm not sure if that statement is something I completely subscribe to, but it depends how you define belief.

[01:26:03]  Unidentified speaker: And, you know, I think that's-

[01:26:04]  Bruce: What's a version of belief that you would agree with it on? Maybe let's do that, because that might make it easier.

[01:26:10]  Peter: Well, I mean, I think if you think of a dogmatic belief, I mean, belief, it can have the connotation of a dogmatic belief or it can have the connotation of just something that currently makes sense to you. And I mean, there's nothing wrong with that.

[01:26:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:26:35]  Bruce: So you're making a distinction between a dogmatic belief, which by the way, here, since we did say maybe dogmatic beliefs are okay, I think you really mean a strongly dogmatic belief, right? Where you're religiously holding to this idea and you are absolutely not open to allowing it to be falsified.

[01:26:54]  Bruce: That would be the bad version of belief.

[01:26:56]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:26:57]  Bruce: And then there'd be the better version of belief, which how did you just put it?

[01:27:02]  Unidentified speaker: You put it in a good way.

[01:27:03]  Unidentified speaker: So remind me.

[01:27:06]  Peter: That it's just something that you happen to think is true, that you put out there for criticism and you're open to other perspectives and, you know, it's not, but that it's not, it's not like you're saying that it's the infallible truth.

[01:27:25]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:27:27]  Bruce: So I think that's a good distinction, Peter. And let me, I have debated this with numerous CritRats trying to ask them questions around this. And some have been quite helpful. Some have been less than helpful because they're very dogmatic about their belief in non-belief. But others have put this in ways that I think I can agree with, right? Like I had one put it to me, one of the better ones, put it to me as, well, I mean, of course, human beings have beliefs in some sense. It's a very general term, the very idea that you have a collection of theories, you falsify all but one. And so now that's your best theory. That sole surviving theory is your best theory. So you embrace it as true. I can, this guy said, I can totally see how the word belief might mean that. And if it does, then clearly, clearly, that's compatible with critical rationalism, with science, et cetera.

[01:28:20]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:28:21]  Bruce: His argument though, was that the word belief is so vague, that it just carries too much connotation to religion, dogma, things like that. And therefore, he didn't prefer the term belief. And he was putting it definitively in terms of use of a term, which was really good, because that's a good answer, that he was willing to put it that way.

[01:28:46]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:28:47]  Bruce: It's non-essentialist. When you can acknowledge that the word has multiple meanings, and you're only talking about for yourself, you're not trying to criticize other people's use of the word belief, you're just saying, I personally am choosing not to use the word belief, because there's just too much potential to get the wrong connotation. That really strikes me as a pretty good, subjectively good personal answer. Not the answer I'm coming up with personally either. Like I will use the word belief just fine, and I think it's fine. But I can totally see where this guy's coming from. Now, in the same conversation on Twitter, threads with other CritRats, I had all sorts of total garbage being said, right? Like, oh, because belief always means that you believe it no matter what. It's like, well, that's totally untrue. You're being an essentialist when you say that. [It's?] totally untrue. That is just not what the word believe means to most people in most cases, right? And just some of the ridiculous defensive things, CritRats were saying, trying to defend this idea. And so I was glad that at least someone could like lay it out for me in a way where I could go, yes, I can see what you mean, right? Like, I'm still not sure it's the way I'm gonna live my life, but subjectively, this seems really reasonable to me, okay? That it's just the word belief itself, it's just not a great word, okay? So that would be one way we could go about criticizing the word belief. But let me just say that that's just not the way I think Deutsch or Popper come across.

[01:30:17]  Bruce: Like, this reasonable read of it seems like maybe it does it too much justice. I mean, if Popper had actually said, or Deutsch had actually said, well, there's nothing wrong with using the word belief in most cases, but I don't personally prefer to, then I would just not be taking issue with it. But I've never heard Deutsch say that. I've never, that quote I just read from Popper, he does not say that. There's something more being asserted here, or at least seems like something more is being asserted, that really becomes more questionable and feels like it deserves some pushback, if that makes any sense. It's unclear a little what they mean. I remember the Increments guys talked about this in one of their podcasts. They said, I'm not even sure what the Deutschian CritRats mean when they talk about you don't have beliefs. Do they mean literally human beings don't have beliefs? Let me just ask this in terms of Popper. If Popper is here saying, well, you know, beliefs don't exist. Well, then, okay, Popper's wrong. We can just consider him falsified. We can move on, right? Like there's nothing else we need to discuss here, okay? Or, you know, are they saying something more like normatively you shouldn't have beliefs? Like I get the feeling that's what Deutsch and maybe Popper really meant. But like I've never seen a clear statement where they make it clear what they're really trying to say.

[01:31:45]  Peter: Well, here's what I asked ChatGPT for a quote from David Deutsch about belief. And from that Scientific American article or interview, I think it is he says, I think that belief is an irrational state of mind and I try to avoid it. As far as I'm concerned, I do not believe in belief, as EM. Forster says, and I especially do not believe in belief in science.

[01:32:13]  Bruce: Which is almost exactly a quote from Popper.

[01:32:15]  Unidentified speaker: Notice that.

[01:32:16]  Peter: So he's, but he's saying he's almost, I don't know, it almost sounds like a little bit of an ironic statement to say you do not believe in belief.

[01:32:28]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:32:28]  Peter: In science. But it almost seems to be recognizing in some way that the word is a complicated word.

[01:32:37]  Bruce: Let me also say that in Deutsch's case, this wouldn't have been true for Popper. There's the problem of Bayesianism. I think there were Bayesians around in early Bayesians. Reasoning was definitely around in Popper's time, but Bayesian epistemology wasn't. So you wouldn't have had a community that considered themselves competing with Popper on this. Deutsch, as we know, we did an episode on words and concepts and talked about, what does Deutsch even mean when he says there's no such thing as randomness or no such thing as stochasticity? Deutsch has a definitely strong stance against anything around randomness, probability, stochasticity, things like that. And in Bayesian reasoning, there's this idea that you have a belief, okay, the belief state. Bayesian reasoning uses probability theory, probability calculus, not to work out frequencies, like dice rolling or something like that, but to instead work out the plausibility of a theory or a one-off event, something like that. And they try to do it based on, they try to put numbers to it, right? And when you do these updates with Bayesian reasoning, whether it's the good kind or the bad kind, they call that a belief state because what you're doing is, is you're measuring how true you think the theory is based on the current set of evidence, okay? So, you, you know, 80% believe in this theory, but it's 20% criticized still. Something along those lines, right?

[01:34:13]  Unidentified speaker: Compared to its competitors.

[01:34:16]  Bruce: And I think that that really, that whole idea that you can place numbers on theories like this just galls critical rationalists. Now, I have to tell you, I'm intentionally studying Bayesian reasoning to try to make a sense of this myself and to form my, formulate my own opinion as to whether the critical rationalists are right to be so galled by this. And let me just say that my initial criticism of the CritRat community on this would be that every CritRat, including David Deutsch, I've seen him say this in interviews, will say, well, Bayesian reasoning is fine in certain circumstances. But I've never seen them explain what those circumstances are. And they always say, well, there's Bayesian reasoning, which is fine, but there's Bayesian statistics, sometimes they say, depending on what they mean. But Bayesian epistemology, that's false.

[01:35:10]  Unidentified speaker: That's just inductivism.

[01:35:12]  Bruce: But I've never actually seen any of them take a serious attempt to try to explain under what circumstances it's fine and what circumstances it's not. I don't think that's a small criticism. I think the fact that they have not addressed that is a gaping hole in their criticism. And that's actually what started interesting me was I wanted to know myself under what circumstances you should be using Bayesian reasoning and what circumstances you shouldn't. And I wanted to figure that out and give an answer to that question. And that was what drove me to start studying it. Now let me just say that even David Deutsch seems to agree that in some cases Bayesian reasoning is appropriate. The word happens to be belief in those cases, right? They use the term belief. That's just the term that is officially used by that whole discipline. And it's not a bad term. Like the whole idea is that you have this mathematical model. You know, you're trying to determine what the odds are of one thing versus another, you know, based on what frequencies you know exist, let's say. So you come up with this idea that given these symptoms, there's a something percent chance that you are, or maybe this test, you took a test or something like that, there's a something percent chance you have such and such disease.

[01:36:33]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:36:34]  Bruce: You never know for sure if you have that disease or not. That's just not the way reality works.

[01:36:39]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:36:39]  Bruce: So you base it based on some sort of Bayesian analysis. And therefore, that final number that you come up with, that's called your belief. And if new evidence comes in later, you do a Bayesian update and you update that belief. And it just doesn't even seem like a bad term to me. Like, this idea that there's something wrong with it. I can't figure out why it would be a problem. Like, what else would you call it that would have been better?

[01:37:04]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:37:05]  Bruce: The whole idea is that you either do or don't have the disease. You don't know if you do or don't have the disease. But you're trying to use evidence. You're trying to use frequencies that you know exist. And you're trying to come up with an answer. Now, I don't think very many critical rationalists would have a problem with a Bayesian analysis in a case like this, because it's one of the cases that would be considered appropriate, right? So how does that fit into critical rationalism? And why is the word belief so bad in this case, right? It's just a word, like it is. It's not like I've got some better word that I can offer instead. And if I did, it wouldn't historically be the right word. No one would understand what I'm talking about, because there's tons of historical precedent of calling that a belief. Now, is this the same as human beliefs in dogma?

[01:37:52]  Unidentified speaker: No, it's not.

[01:37:53]  Bruce: It's just a word, guys. It happened to be the word that somebody picked.

[01:37:58]  Unidentified speaker: It was the best one they could come up with.

[01:37:59]  Bruce: And it actually does kind of invoke the right idea in these cases, right?

[01:38:04]  Unidentified speaker: So, I don't know.

[01:38:05]  Bruce: It's just, I struggle a little here. I can buy the idea that the word belief may not be the best word because it's too general, but I struggle with the idea that it's somehow problematic. Now, let me just say Popper does give an explanation as to what he means. So, let me give an actual quote of Popper explaining his actual views on beliefs in a bit more detail.

[01:38:30]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:38:31]  Bruce: So, this is from Unended Quest, page 97. It may be mentioned, although this is not a thesis of logic of scientific discovery, that the proposed solution of the problem of induction also shows the way to the solution of the older problem, the problem of the rationality of our beliefs. For we may first replace the idea of belief by that of action. And we may say that actions or inactions are rational if they are carried out in accordance with the state prevailing at the time of the critical scientific discussion. There is no better synonym for rational than critical. Belief of course is never rational. It is rational to suspend belief.

[01:39:16]  Unidentified speaker: That's the end of the quote.

[01:39:19]  Bruce: So here Popper is explicitly sees rationality of belief as better understood as rationality of action, which is defined in Popper's words as action, quote, carried out in accordance with the state of the critical scientific discussion at the time. Okay, he even explicitly states, beliefs of course are never rational. It is rational to suspend belief. Now, Peter, let me make a point here and ask you a serious question. Can you or somebody explain to me, what's the difference between believing in something and acting as if it's true? Is there a difference between those two? Because if there is, I admit I don't see what it is.

[01:40:02]  Peter: I don't know. The way I'm feeling in my life is that I'm just riding a wave of emotion. Honestly, I don't see a difference either.

[01:40:17]  Bruce: I don't. I think that's why I've pushed back on this aspect of Popper's writings.

[01:40:23]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:40:25]  Bruce: Now, however, in defense of Popper's stated view, let me now try to interpret it in a somewhat more positive way that I think I can agree with.

[01:40:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:40:36]  Bruce: Let me say that I do sometimes wish people suspended beliefs a lot more than they do.

[01:40:41]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:40:42]  Bruce: Since all theories are only conjectural, and since we do have a really bad tendency to fool ourselves, it does seem like it would be really, really nice, maybe even really, really, really nice, if, say, AI doomers and CritRat anarcho-capitalists maybe showed a little more epistemic humility about their beliefs and their chosen systems that they're really excited about.

[01:41:06]  Unidentified speaker: Sure.

[01:41:07]  Bruce: And I kind of wonder if this is what Popper's really trying to get at, right? Is an almost normative idea that, look, what you really do is you criticize your theories as best you can. Science does, anyhow. And so because of that, you might, one might argue that you're better off not really believing anything, right? That you really just kind of look at, well, what's the, what's the state of the critical rationalist discussion? What's the state of the scientific discussion, let's say, to be a bit more clear there. And, you know, just at this point, science has a consensus of sorts. There's never a total consensus about these, these areas. And here's the evidence why, you know, you can almost kind of see an argument here that this would be better if we really were a little better at just not being so dogmatic all the time about our beliefs, right? Whether you want to call that, whatever you want to call that, I can see an argument to that effect. So with that in mind, let me now take the role of Strevens' attorney here. And let me actually offer an attack I can imagine Strevens saying here, okay, to try to prosecute Popper. So he might say, well, you know what, Bruce, guys, there are several CritRat beliefs that the CritRat community believes far stronger than the actual state of the [critical rationalist discussion?]. So we can think of certain parenting styles being the sole moral style, theories around that, the two sources hypothesis, AI being orthogonal to AGI. By the way, I have a good quote from Deutsch where he disagrees with that, just saying.

[01:43:01]  Bruce: Traditional schools being a net negative, maybe even at the college level, a little unclear. Tests being immoral, not ineffective, immoral. The disobedience criteria, animals not having feelings because only universal explainers are conscious, and everything else is an automaton. All of an animal's knowledge being in its genes, all humans being equally intelligent, and genetic influences on humans ranging from zero to very little. That's just a few, right? These are real things that real critical rationalists will argue about, not, you know, I'm kind of open, this is just an idea. They believe it, right?

[01:43:43]  Unidentified speaker: They do.

[01:43:45]  Bruce: They honestly believe it to their core that this is the truth. And I'm not even saying these theories are wrong, right? I think if we look over that list of theories I just gave, I'm not trying to call them out as false theories, right? A lot of them I don't know to be false. I would say, in fact, that list ranges from the pretty okay to the very bad. Some of them are pretty bad, some of them are maybe not that bad. But I think all of them have one thing in common. The CritRat community believes these theories, their belief of these theories has significantly outrun the actual state of the critical discussion and that that's an objective fact, okay? At a minimum, each of these theories has real problems. That the CritRat community will often ignore. And I've tried to get them to address it and they won't, okay? And all of them have very strong competing theories. Every single one of those theories I just listed have really powerful competing theories that have not by any stretch of the imagination been falsified, okay? So these are beliefs that are very strongly held by many in the Critical Rationalist community despite their belief that there is no need for beliefs. So, Strevens here makes the argument, look, you're just wrong about this, guys. Belief is a part of being human. It's just the way it works, right? And scientists use it just like the Critical Rationalist community uses it to decide what theories they're going to back, which theories they're going to argue in favor of and search for evidence to support for. This is Strevens' point, right?

[01:45:29]  Bruce: This is just reality, okay?

[01:45:31]  Peter: Well, to me, it just illustrates just how hard it is. Even when you join an anti-tribal, anti-dogma kind of community or tribe or whatever you want to call it, like, it's just really hard for humans to think outside of that.

[01:45:50]  Unidentified speaker: For any of us.

[01:45:52]  Bruce: Yeah, and I do think that's Strevens' point here, right? Is he's trying to make room for this. So Popper was, at least in those early books, trying to argue against belief. And Strevens is trying to argue in favor of belief. And this is a case where I just find myself entirely in the Strevens' camp, right? I think the evidence is overwhelming. Like, I just think there's just overwhelming evidence that Popper was just wrong about this. Other than you can choose to read him in a way. I just gave a way, you might be able to choose to read him where I can agree with him in principle at least. But let me say this, even in that case though, I have a concern.

[01:46:28]  Unidentified speaker: Let me express it, okay?

[01:46:30]  Bruce: It seems like this brings us to a question or maybe questions, okay? The first is, is Popper's belief against belief normative or descriptive? What I mean here is, is Popper saying, yes, people have beliefs, but they shouldn't, or is he saying people don't really have beliefs? If it's the latter, obviously by counterexample, we can declare Popper falsified, we can move on. But if it's the former, let's assume it's the former, then is he right that we should strive to not have beliefs? If he's right in a normative sense, is it realistic? Does it make sense to charge scientists something like, hey, scientists, suspend your beliefs because all theories are just conjectural? And is that likely to be a positive change that scientists will be able to just go, oh, hey, that's a good point. From now on, I'm going to just suspend my beliefs from here on in, and it'll most likely be successful, right? Or is it maybe even, as I've argued elsewhere, dangerous and that scientists would more likely end up, like the CritRat and CritRat and Bayesian communities, full of beliefs that they sincerely but wrongly think are sole surviving theories or more probable theories, depending on the wording of each community here.

[01:47:42]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:47:43]  Bruce: I don't, I honestly, I put this forward as obviously, you know where I stand. I think it's more dangerous than helpful, right? Even if I admit that there's a point to what Popper's saying, which I do admit, I do admit, I wish people suspended beliefs more often.

[01:48:00]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:48:02]  Bruce: Even, even when I take that into consideration, I see Popper's statement that I quoted there as just dangerously bad. Like, I just don't see a way around it. And I really do think that, like maybe we can have a discussion about, should we believe as much as we do and as often as we do, and should we run so far ahead of the critical discussion like we do?

[01:48:23]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:48:24]  Bruce: Maybe that's a fair discussion. But I absolutely do not believe that it does us any good at all to say, I don't believe in beliefs. Like I see that as, if anything, just dangerous and I just can't accept it.

[01:48:39]  Unidentified speaker: Does that make sense?

[01:48:40]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:48:41]  Peter: And seems like a pretty good concluding statement if you're going there.

[01:48:45]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:48:45]  Bruce: Let me say this then for this section.

[01:48:47]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:48:48]  Bruce: So let's reread the quote from Strevens. So this is what Strevens had said, his charge against Popper. Suppose you have accumulated much evidence and discarded many theories. Of the theories that remain on the list, it's impossible according to Popper to say that one is more likely to be true than the others. Scientific theories, if they are not falsified, forever remain conjectures. That was a quote from Popper. No matter how many true predictions a theory has made, you have no more reason to believe it than to believe any of its unfalsified rivals. Now that we've had this full discussion, going back and forth, looking at how it maybe is and sometimes isn't a misinterpretation of Popper. Is this a fair criticism of Popper? To what degree, in what ways is this a fair criticism of Popper? And in what ways is it a straw man of Popper?

[01:49:35]  Unidentified speaker: Now that we've looked at the full evidence.

[01:49:38]  Bruce: It seems to me that the issue here is that he put it in terms of belief, right? Probably knowing that Popper didn't really believe in beliefs. I think it makes the whole criticism difficult to parse.

[01:49:51]  Peter: Well, I got to say largely thanks to your influence, I've had my mind on the singularity and the far future of the universe and immortality and so many of these other out there issues that it's sometimes hard to come back to these conversations about epistemology. But I have enjoyed this conversation and I've enjoyed listening to your perspective here. So thank you, Bruce.

[01:50:22]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:50:23]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you, Peter.

[01:50:31]  Peter: Hello again. If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's Four Strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BNielson01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group, The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[01:51:15]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.