Episode 41: The Problems of Refutation & Popper Without Refutation (part 1)

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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

[00:00:11]  Bruce: Welcome to The Theory of Anything podcast. Hey guys, how's it going?

[00:00:14]  Unidentified speaker: It's going great, how are you?

[00:00:15]  Unidentified speaker: Good.

[00:00:16]  Unidentified speaker: Great, good morning.

[00:00:17]  Bruce: All right, well, we're going to talk about Popper again today. Let me explain why I've done this. So I signed up to give a short 15 minute presentation at a Popper conference, and I'm calling the presentation Popper Without Refutation. So it's going to be really short, and I'm including that in this, but there's actually an extended conversation that I wanted to have. And I don't know if I can fit it into a single episode. We'll kind of go through it fast, but it may need a future treatment that's in a bit more detail. I guess we'll see. The idea here, though, is that over time, over years of reading Karl Popper, I collected a series of problems, specifically around the concept of refutation, that bothered me, that I thought, this can't be right, what I'm reading in Popper. And something happened. It was a conversation with Danny Frederick.

[00:01:04]  Bruce: I'll talk about it as part of the presentation, where he explained to me what Popper really meant. And it turns out Popper uses some terms idiosyncratically. So what I thought he was saying wasn't what he was saying. And once I understood what he was really saying, it clarified a lot. And I started to realize, now that I knew what to look for, I started to realize a lot of these problems I've been collecting, they're resolvable. And they've actually got pretty good answers. So I'm going to go through first the problems of refutation. Then I'm going to talk about Popper Without Refutation. And then if we have time, I will move on to some of the other things I've discovered, including, for instance, what's the demarcation that Popper came up with? Most people say it's between science and non-science. I actually am no longer convinced that's the best way to define it.

[00:01:46]  Bruce: And I feel like there's a number of clarifications you can make to Popper by understanding his special use of language and replacing it with more common terms. And it starts to make more sense. So let me take you through first the problems that I'd come up with. So I had a series of problems I had collected. So the first one was this idea that anomalies, anomalous observations, they don't actually refute anything. Now, this comes from Kuhn. Thomas Kuhn is a famous historian of science slash epistemologist who is at odds with Popper. And he, in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which, by the way, I highly recommend. Popperians should not be afraid of Thomas Kuhn. They should, I think, you know, the vast majority of his book, they will sign off on really easily, find to be great. The last chapter is the problem. And there I feel like he's just obviously wrong.

[00:02:36]  Bruce: So I don't think there's anything to be concerned about with Thomas Kuhn. I think Popperians should love Thomas Kuhn, even though he was at odds with Popper on some things. But Thomas Kuhn in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, by the way, Thomas Kuhn is more famous than Popper. And so people know about Thomas Kuhn more so than they know about Popper, which is an injustice because Popper was better than Thomas Kuhn. So Kuhn, he says, nevertheless, anomalous experiences may not be identified with falsifying ones. Indeed, I doubt that the latter exist. If any and every failure to fit were grounds for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times. This is really a very valid statement. And in fact, it's been formalized as the Duhem–Quine thesis. So the Duhem–Quine thesis, you can look it up on Wikipedia. It says it's that all empirical hypotheses require one or more background assumptions.

[00:03:29]  Bruce: Because that's true, when you have an anomalous observation, something that doesn't match what you expected, so it doesn't match prediction, there's no way to know if the problem is with the theory or with something in your background knowledge. In fact, it may even just be something tacit or assumed in your background knowledge that you didn't even realize you were assuming. Because of this, Kuhn's statement is actually correct that anomalous observations do not refute a theory and never can refute a theory. Given this, is this a problem for Popper? Well, some people think it is. I'm going to argue that it isn't, but let's put it out there as a legitimate problem that we want to see an answer to. Now, the next one was this idea of tentative refutation versus tentative support. So typically people, when they talk about refutation versus verification or sometimes support, let's go with the word verification for the moment.

[00:04:18]  Bruce: They talk about how there's an asymmetry between refutation and verification. And the asymmetry is described in various ways. Unfortunately, a lot of the ways people describe it is not correct. And Popper's actual statement about what the asymmetry is, I was surprised when I actually looked it up and read it for myself because it was not what I was expecting. So let me take this quote from David Deutsch from The Logic of Experimental Tests, which is probably one of the best papers ever written on scientific epistemology. Although it has a statement here that I'm going to question a little. It says, the asymmetry between refutation, tentative, and support, nonexistent, in scientific methodology, is better understood in this way by regarding theories as explanations than through Popper's own argument from the logic of predictions, appealing to what has been called the arrow of modus ponens.

[00:05:04]  Bruce: Scientific theories are only approximately modeled as propositions, but they are precisely explanations. So the key thing here is the first statement, that the asymmetry between refutation and support is that refutation is tentative, it's never absolute, but support is nonexistent. I think a lot of people would read that statement, they'd say, that just isn't true. When Eddington went out and he did his expedition to test general relativity during an eclipse, and he found that the observations matched Einstein's predictions, rather than Newton's, in what sense was that not support for general relativity? And that would be a completely valid question that deserves a completely valid strong answer. Now, you might say, well, it didn't support general relativity, it refuted Newton instead. Okay, so, but then, okay, but if that's true, then how is that different than just saying it supported general relativity?

[00:05:55]  Bruce: Because once you're in a theory to theory comparison, and you're doing a crucial test, why not just think of the word support as meaning that your competitors got refuted, right? I mean, why is it we have such a strong statement against the idea of support or verification, when really it seems like within a theory to theory comparison, which is what we're doing with the crucial test, we might as well just call it support and be done, because that's what most people call it. So for that matter, there's a second problem here. So let's take the idea of the perihelion of Mercury. Let me explain what that is. It was found that the orbit of Mercury didn't match Newton's predictions. Now, this wasn't the first time something like this had happened. They had also found that Jupiter's orbit didn't match Newton's predictions. And in fact, as we'll talk about it in a little bit, that was what led to the discovery of the planet Uranus.

[00:06:43]  Bruce: They saw that Jupiter wasn't matching the orbit it was supposed to. They said, OK, how much is it off by? And then they calculated, that must mean there's a gravitational body we don't know about, a planet we haven't discovered yet. And then they went out and they looked for it, where it should be, based on theory, and they found...

[00:06:58]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, and there it was.

[00:07:00]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:07:01]  Bruce: So the exact same thing happened with Mercury. Mercury's orbit was off. And they said, well, there must be a planet we don't know about. So that they even named the planet Vulcan, by the way. They were convinced there was a planet Vulcan. They went out and they looked for it, and they didn't find it. Nobody really knew what to make of that. But it was not perceived as a refutation of Newton's theory. And it was just perceived as, well, there's something we just don't know about. There's like a gravitational body that we're missing somehow, is what they believed. Now, there was also something called the Michelson–Morley experiment. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. What they found was that when the Earth is traveling towards the Sun, so you think about an orbit going around the Sun, at some points you're going kind of further away from the Sun, and some points you're coming closer towards the Sun.

[00:07:48]  Bruce: So they had this idea that they should be able to measure the speed of light as being faster when they're going towards the Sun, and slower when they're going away from the Sun. So they tried that, and what they found is that the speed of light was exactly the same, no matter whether you were headed towards the source of the light or away from the source of the light. As those of us since we live in the future and we have general relativity, that's the right answer, right? Because light's the maximum speed. That's not true under Newton, as far as anyone understood at the time. The perihelion of Mercury was an anomalous observation, but then again so was orbit of Jupiter being off. That was an anomalous observation also. And the fact that light didn't change speed, whether you were heading towards the source of light or away from the source of light, that's an anomalous observation.

[00:08:30]  Bruce: Did that cause us to refute? No, nobody considered either of these to be serious problems for Newton other than Einstein. Einstein was weird. He decided. And you know what? Some people say he wasn't even aware of the Michelson–Morley experiment. And I'm not sure that these observations were actually what motivated him looking into general relativity in the first place. So did these refute Newton? Well, they didn't. There was certainly no perception that they refuted Newton. And if they did refute Newton, then why doesn't the orbit of Jupiter being off refute Newton? In which case we know it didn't. In that case, it was just that we missed a planet. You know, under what circumstances can we actually say an anomalous observation refutes a theory? It's not at all obvious. In fact, or whether it is kind of obvious, it doesn't. Anomalous observations do not refute theories on their own.

[00:09:27]  Bruce: That's really the honest truth because of the Duhem–Quine thesis. If these can't refute a theory, even if, you know, because the Duhem–Quine thesis, then in what sense was the Eddington... So we have these observations that ultimately Einstein is going to explain. Perihelion of Mercury and the Michelson–Morley experiment. They're going to eventually be explained by Einstein's theory. We're going to find out that really you have to know about general relativity to explain these anomalous observations. Okay, nobody knows that at the time. Nobody cares. It's not even considered a serious problem. Einstein comes along. He makes his theory. Now, in theory, he now can explain these. Did that cause everyone to say, oh, you know, Einstein can explain the perihelion of Mercury and the Morley experiment? Well, no, it didn't change anybody's minds. Nor should it, because at that point, it would just be an ad hoc explanation.

[00:10:20]  Bruce: It would be an explanation that was made up to explain specific problems. And generally, Popper says we should never count such an explanation until it's testable. What really convinced people was the Eddington Expedition. They went out, they had this observation that no one had ever thought to look for before that seemed weird, that the stars around an eclipse would move because the sun has a gravitational body that's causing the light to bend. It's so far outside of our experience or anything we would have guessed. They check it, it's true, and they come away feeling like general relativity has been supported by this experiment. And I would say it has. Okay, it has been supported by this experiment. And when Popperians insist that there's no such thing as support, I think they're right, but only if you understand the word support in a very narrow, idiosyncratic sort of way.

[00:11:09]  Bruce: And I don't think most people look at it that way. So I think they're doing themselves a disservice by insisting that there's no such thing as support. Okay, so the absolute verification fallacy. I need to talk about this. So when I've asked people about this, when I've said before, okay, typically we're looking for crucial experiments that are inside of a theory to theory comparison, then why can't we just say that an observation, the crucial experiment came out supporting one of the two theories, rather than insisting that we say we refuted one of the two theories? Now, I've asked this question of numerous Popperians. And the answer I typically get back is that there's an asymmetry between refutation and verification because verification is impossible. You can't verify anything because the words verification imply certainty and nothing is certain.

[00:11:59]  Bruce: Whereas the words refutation for some reason don't imply certainty. I've always asked people, why don't the words refutation imply certainty? It just doesn't, is the answer I get back.

[00:12:08]  Unidentified speaker: That's a stupid answer.

[00:12:10]  Cameo: Do you say that's a stupid answer?

[00:12:12]  Bruce: It is a stupid answer. Okay. And then I’ll say: And why does verification have to imply certainty? Why can’t we have the concept of—

[00:12:17]  Cameo: Right. I don't think that verification supports certainty necessarily any more than refutation.

[00:12:24]  Bruce: I agree. The absolute verification fallacy is the idea that the asymmetry between refutation and verification is because the word verification always means verified with certainty, whereas the word refutation always means refuted tentatively. Since one can never be certain, verification is impossible, but refutation is possible. Let me emphasize, this really is dumb. If this is truly the source of asymmetry that Popper intended, which, by the way, it's not, but if it was, then Popper's wrong, okay? Because this is clearly just a fallacy. And why not just say that the Eddington Expedition tentatively supports general relativity? That seems like a completely valid thing to say. And then here's what makes it worse. It's the fact that, according to Popper, the word certainty doesn't imply certainty. So this is a quote from Popper, from Objective Knowledge, page 78.

[00:13:17]  Bruce: There is a common sense notion of certainty, which means, briefly, certain enough for practical purposes. When I look at my watch, which is very reliable, and it shows me that it is 8 o'clock and I hear that it ticks, the indication the watch has not stopped, then I am reasonably certain or certain for all practical purposes that it is close to 8 o'clock. OK, so Popper understood this idea that even the word certain doesn't imply certainty. So there's no way he thought verification implied certainty. So there's something wrong with the absolute verification fallacy. It's a misunderstanding of Popper. For our purposes then, we're going to look at this idea of single theory versus theory to theory comparison. If you have a single theory and you don't have an alternative theory, then really refutations are impossible and verifications are impossible.

[00:14:04]  Bruce: They're both impossible. If you're within a theory to theory comparison, then refutations are possible, but then again, so is support or maybe verification. I'll challenge that a little bit. Verification and support aren't really the same thing because all you're really saying is, is that we're verifying one's more accurate than the other, or we're supporting it because one passed the test and one didn't. When I put it in this way, this really seems like it calls into question at least a certain common understanding of Popper's asymmetry, which in fact is actually a misunderstanding of Popper's point. The other one is this idea of corroboration and support. So Popper had this concept of corroboration, which is really just identical to the concept of support. And in fact, Popper uses it as a synonym for the word support. So here's a quote from Popper from The Logic of Scientific Discovery, page 10.

[00:14:53]  Bruce: It should be noted that a positive decision in a test can only temporarily support the theory. For subsequent negative decisions in future tests may always overthrow it. So long as the theory withstands detailed and severe tests, we may say that it is corroborated. So here, Popper's clearly using the word support and corroborated as synonyms. Corroboration is a kind of support. Furthermore, Popper believed in the idea of corroboration as a matter of degrees, which may surprise some people. But here's a quote from Popper to prove it. This is Logic of Scientific Discovery, page 248. Instead of discussing the probability of a hypothesis, we should try to assess with what tests, what trials, it has withstood. That is, we should try to assess how far it has been able to prove its fitness to survive by standing up to tests. In brief, we should try to assess how far it has been corroborated.

[00:15:44]  Bruce: Clearly, he's talking about matter of degrees here. So the idea of, I'm going to get to this, the idea of strengthening a theory, many Popperians will tell you it's impossible. But, or supporting a theory, supporting it in degrees, they'll tell you it's impossible. I do not find that in Popper. Okay, Popper himself does not seem to have ever made such a claim. In fact, this idea of degrees of corroboration, that's actually what Popper calls it. He calls it degrees of corroboration. He originally called it degrees of confirmation. He dropped it because he was dealing with the Vienna Circle, which is a famous group of philosophers. To them, the word confirmation implied proving the theory true, right? Which Popper believed to be impossible. So when he found that even, when he found that they were misunderstanding the term, he switched to a different term that had a slightly different connotation.

[00:16:31]  Bruce: But if you go look up the word confirmation and the word corroboration, you will find that they are absolutely synonyms of each other. I didn't put it here on the slide, but I did go look them up. And the word corroboration means to confirm something, and they're defined in terms of each other, right? I mean, they are literally just synonyms, okay? Now, it's true that synonyms usually have slightly different connotations. And in this case, they do. The word confirmation means something stronger in most people's minds than the word corroboration. It means the same thing, but it means it in a stronger degree. And so Popper was probably right to get away from the word confirmation and to go with the word corroboration, because it got people closer to the concept he was thinking. But in fact, it doesn't matter what we call it, okay? We can call it support, corroboration, confirmation.

[00:17:20]  Bruce: We can call it verification. That may be not the best word for it, but we could if we wanted to. And it would all mean the same thing, okay? Now, because of this problem, there are some Deutschians in particular, so Deutschians are Popperians, that feel that Popper's corroboration is mistaken. Now, I've talked to numerous ones. I've got a blog post from Brett Hall, who's, you know, nobody doubts his Deutschian chops, where he talks about he's not sure he agrees with Popper's corroboration. He doesn't think that it's maybe a valid concept. Okay, but let's consider something here, back with the example of the perihelion of Mercury or the Michelson–Morley experiment. Technically, those quote refute Newton, even though nobody saw it that way. If that's true, and if there's no such thing as corroboration and it's an unimportant concept, then we wouldn't need the Eddington Expedition.

[00:18:13]  Bruce: It would be unnecessary to test the theory. We would be able to say, look, it's already got these two problems, we've solved it, so this is the better theory. We've refuted Newton. Well, no one's going to accept that. And for good reason. One of them is because, as I said, that would be an ad hoc theory. That would be, you've made this theory that solves these two problems and has no other testable consequences.

[00:18:33]  Unidentified speaker: That would be ad hoc.

[00:18:34]  Bruce: If you start allowing ad hoc theories, Popper's epistemology breaks down entirely. You can always come up with an ad hoc theory to explain an anomalous observation. That would really not make sense. We really want this concept of testing something strongly and corroborating it through tests. It's somehow very important. Yet, based on how a lot of people understand Popper, it seems like it should be unimportant. We're missing something here. In fact, if we really took this idea that corroboration was unimportant seriously, then we would never need to test a theory ever because the reason why you make a new theory is to solve an existing problem with an old theory. So every new theory will therefore be “better” than the old theory because it solves some problem that the old theory has, plus it has no additional problems, hopefully. So going out and testing it would be unnecessary.

[00:19:29]  Bruce: Well, that's silly. Of course we need to go test theories, right? And test them as strongly as possible. Remember that quote I just got from Popper about how far it has been corroborated. We want to see how severely the theory has been tested. So the concept of corroboration from Popper is an incredibly important part of his epistemology. His epistemology does not work without it because otherwise everything becomes ad hoc. Testing would be unnecessary. So we're missing something here. What is it that we're missing is what I'm asking. Now, the other thing is that there are certain theories that require verification. Now, I actually got this from something you said in one of our podcast, Cameo. You were talking about Popper's idea of refutation, and then you kind of added in or verification. And I was thinking about that because Popperians really hate this idea of verification.

[00:20:19]  Bruce: It's supposed to not exist. But there really are some theories that require verification. Now, I should probably note that when I say this, they're not really true scientific theories. I'm stretching the word theory a little bit here, but not in a way that's necessarily inappropriate. In fact, Popper, I'm going to use an actual example from Popper where he allows the word theory to be stretched in this way. So one example would be Bigfoot exists. The theory that Bigfoot exists, how would you refute that theory? Well, you can't. What you do is you verify that theory. You go out and you find Bigfoot, and once you found him, you put him in the zoo somewhere. Now you have verified the theory that Bigfoot exists. You can't ever refute that theory. Now that's a silly example, but let me give you a more realistic one that's an actual scientific example.

[00:21:08]  Bruce: And this does come from Popper himself in Logic of Scientific Discovery. He takes the theory that the element with atomic number 72, which is hafnium, exists. That theory, how do you refute that theory? Well, strictly speaking, you don't. What you do is you go find the element with atomic number 72. And by finding it and by verifying its existence, you verify that theory. So what's going on here? Is this an example of where Popper is wrong that science is about refutation and not verification? It's not. So, you know, spoiler, I'm going to explain in a moment that people are just misunderstanding Popper on this. But it's important to realize that verification does play an important role inside of science, particularly in the case of tests. When you have a prediction, you don't refute the prediction, you verify the prediction. So there's something more going on here.

[00:22:06]  Bruce: And as I've read Popper more deeply, I've come to understand he's actually addressed all this. So these are pseudo problems. Let me emphasize that. And yet I do want to put it out there. This is a problem you need to be able to understand, right? You need to understand how Popper resolved it. Now Penrose, based on that last one, comes up with a challenge for Popper. So Roger Penrose, famous scientist, he says in his book Road to Reality, pages 1020 to 21, he says he's challenging the idea of Popper's falsification. And he says the theory of supersymmetry predicts superpartners for all the observed fundamental particles of nature. But none of these has so far been observed. The reason they have not, according to supersymmetry theorists, is that supersymmetry breaking mechanisms of an unknown nature cause the superpartners to be so massive that the energies needed to create them are still beyond the scope of present-day accelerators.

[00:23:03]  Bruce: With increased energy capabilities, the superpartners might be found, and a new landmark in the physical theory would thereby be achieved, with important implications for the future. But suppose that still no superpartners are actually found. Would this disprove supersymmetry? Not at all. It could and probably would be argued that there had simply been too much optimism about the smallness of the degree of symmetry breaking, and even higher energies would be needed to find the missing superpartners. So based on this, Penrose claims that he's now shown that Popper's falsification is incorrect. This can't be the boundary. The boundary between science and non-science can't be falsification, because here we have something that's an important part of science, an important part of physics, and yet it can only be verified. Very similar to my previous example, but this is a stronger real life example that is currently part of physics and currently is being dealt with, whereas we've discovered [unclear; possibly hafnium] at this point.

[00:23:57]  Bruce: Okay, now sometimes best theories exist without refuting the competition. So a man is murdered and his wife has a motive. The police are going to start their investigation with the wife, because they know she has a motive. Therefore, making her the best theory as to who committed the murder compared to anyone else that they currently know about. So the theory that someone else committed the murder is not refuted, like at all, just because we happen to know the wife has a motive. Yet the police rightly investigate the wife, given that this is now their best explanation. How do we fit this example with Popper? Now, if you're a good Popperian, this one's probably easy for you. But let's put it out there as one of the things that we want to see get answered. A similar one would be a DNA test. Let's say that, a while back, there was this whole thing about Thomas Jefferson had a slave.

[00:24:47]  Bruce: Did the children of that slave—were they Thomas Jefferson’s? And they did these DNA tests, and then there was a bunch of controversy around that. They found that the markers from Thomas Jefferson's DNA were found in the descendants. Some people claim that proved that Thomas Jefferson had in fact mated with his slave and so this impinges his character. Then other people who were very pro Thomas Jefferson tried to defend, and they said, well, actually, his brother lived in the same house or was around all the time, and he has likely the same markers. You get this big discussion around this, this conjecture and refutation process. Let's make up one that's a little bit simpler but similar to that. Let's say that you have this DNA marker, and in the general population, it's only a one in 10,000 chance. But it just so happens that the famous person that you're wondering, Thomas Jefferson or whoever has it, and so do the descendants of this woman who was the slave.

[00:25:43]  Bruce: We know, and for the sake of argument, let's assume that there's no brother around, there's no other people around that we know of that could have that marker. Just based on probabilities, absent any other information, it really does seem like the best explanation now is that this person is the father. Now, we don't know that for sure. We haven't really refuted the opposite thing. There may be somebody else that lived in that town, that lived in that house maybe even, that happened to have the marker and we just don't know who it is, and we don't have a way of testing for it easily. Absent any other information though, I think most people would say, yeah, our best explanation is that this person is the father. I would agree. I think that is the best explanation, even though we never actually refuted the competing theory. Now that I've gone through these problems, let's talk about the idea of popper without refutation, which is really what led me down the path to getting answers to all these questions.

[00:26:36]  Bruce: So now David Deutsch, in the logic of experimental tests, page 8, he says, in the absence of a good rival explanation, an explanatory theory cannot be refuted by experiment. Okay, boom, right there. Thank you, David Deutsch. He's completely correct. He has now answered one of the first questions. He's agreeing with Kuhn, you cannot refute a theory based on [an observation alone]. At most, it can be made problematic. That's the quote from David Deutsch. Sorry, that's not me saying that. If only one good explanation is known and an experimental result makes it problematic, that can motivate a research program to replace it, replace the theory, or to replace the explanation, or to replace some other theory. But so can a theoretical problem, a philosophical problem, a hunch, a wish, or anything. So David Deutsch is agreeing with Kuhn. He's agreeing with Kuhn that you absolutely cannot refute a theory by observation, which I think is the right answer, and I think that explains why nobody perceived Newton being refuted by these anomalous observations.

[00:27:40]  Bruce: Of course not. It's precisely because of the Duhem–Quine Thesis. By the way, Deutsch brings this up in his paper. He explains it's because of the Duhem–Quine Thesis. It's because the problem may exist in any part of the background knowledge, and there's no way upfront with an observation alone to know which part. I'm sorry, was there a comment or question?

[00:27:57]  Cameo: Not so much a question. I think specifically when we're talking about Newton and refuting Newton, we discussed this a long time ago. I think people are funny about Newton. I mean, even now, like the theory of relativity really does challenge even now, a lot of what Newton says, and people still accept that Newton hasn't been refuted. Like, and I'm not necessarily talking about within the science world, but people believe Newton was right. And I'm just wondering specific to this, if the strength of our collective, like, confidence in Newton's theory of gravity is part of why we didn't feel like he was being refuted, just because people believe it to be true.

[00:28:49]  Bruce: That's a great question. So first of all, let me say that when I'm talking to scientists, and I say Einstein refutes Newton, none of them will ever argue with me. So amongst the scientific community, I don't think there's any doubt at all that Newton is considered an incorrect theory.

[00:29:05]  Unidentified speaker: I agree.

[00:29:06]  Bruce: Now, when I'm talking to philosophers, that is not true. Now, I've got problems with philosophers. Honestly, I don't particularly like philosophy. My philosophical interest in Popper is a counter example to my general dislike of philosophy. But from a certain point of view, I am a philosopher, right? I'm really interested in philosophy, but I'm not really interested in the history of philosophy. I feel talking to people who are professional philosophers, I feel like they're mostly just confused. And I find them more difficult to talk to than a regular person. And I find that they have a hard time even understanding good reasonable arguments.

[00:29:44]  Cameo: We need to take that whole last statement and put quote marks around it and just have it be like the theme for this podcast.

[00:29:55]  Bruce: And obviously, that's not true of all philosophers. I think Karl Popper was obviously a philosopher that I respect a lot. David Deutsch, he's a scientist, not a philosopher, but he's really kind of more a philosopher in many ways. And he's my favorite author and my favorite philosopher. You could actually easily find lots of counter examples to what I just said, right? It would be easy to find philosophers that I like a lot because there really is good philosophy that happens out there. And they've played this really important role in the foundations of science and even play an important role today. But the number of bad cases is so large. And we'll have to get into this in maybe some future episode. And I've talked to people who are students of philosophy. They are one of the worst groups to try to talk to and to try to reason with. And I'm not telling you it's because they know a lot.

[00:30:42]  Bruce: It's not, right? They are confused on many, many, many things. And I'm not sure why that is. I'm not sure why it is that a philosophy education in some sense makes you dumber. I don't even know what to make of that as of today. But having said all that and knowing that there's some really good ones, by the way, my friend Andrew Crenshaw out on, he's a Popperian out on Facebook. I was talking with him about this. I asked him about this. He gave me a very good answer. He says, well, Bruce, you know, the truth is, and by the way, he'd be a good philosopher in my mind. He says, the truth is, is that philosophy is just hard, you know? I mean, we've got these questions and we're trying to ask them. It's hard to even figure out how to phrase the question in the first place. And yeah, the spam to ham ratio is really bad, but that's what we would have expected, right?

[00:31:33]  Bruce: And the fact is, it doesn't matter that most of it's bad. The important thing is, is that some of it's good. And that's really, really, really the only thing that matters. And it's like, okay, I totally agree with that answer. That is a very good answer.

[00:31:45]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, that's a good answer.

[00:31:48]  Bruce: Okay, so let me get back to your question though. So amongst philosophers, I've had a philosopher, an instrumentalist that I'm friends with. I pointed out to him that Newton was refuted and he said, no, it's not. I said, yes, it is. And he goes, no, Newton still is used because it's got simpler calculations. It's just a matter of what it's useful for. And Newton is useful as long as you're not near the speed of light, as long as you're not near a black hole or a large gravity, large source of gravity, then Newton is a simpler set of formulas that gives you correct predictions. And that's all that matters. Now, as an instrumentalist, I would expect him to say that. That really is a bad answer. It's not that anything in there is inaccurate, because certainly we have kept Newton around as a good approximation of general relativity. And we still use it.

[00:32:34]  Bruce: We know when to use it to use it as an approximation for general relativity. However, the statement that Newton is an approximation of general relativity is a false statement. It's only an approximation of general relativity in some circumstances. And the way we know when to use it instead of general relativity is by using general relativity. General relativity is the superior theory. It is the more accurate theory. There is never a case where general relativity is inferior in terms of its predictions to Newtonian physics. And we have to use that greater knowledge that is embodied in general relativity to be able to know under what circumstances we can use Newton safely. This is really the same as saying general relativity has greater verisimilitude. This is the thing that he as an instrumentalist refused to acknowledge, but it is the truth.

[00:33:27]  Bruce: And that is the sense in which it's refuted. When we talk about refuted theories, maybe the word refutation is not the best word. And that's really where I'm going with this. What we're really talking about is that we know that general relativity is a better theory and is therefore closer to reality. And that's what matters in this case.

[00:33:47]  Unidentified speaker: That is just a fact.

[00:33:49]  Bruce: And a denial of that fact, trying to deny it, is to be wrong. And that's the problem. Now, what about laymen? Why do laymen, like, if I were to go and tell people, the average layman, even a fairly scientifically knowledgeable one, I would say, yeah, there is no such thing as the force of gravity. They would tell me I'm wrong.

[00:34:07]  Cameo: They would fight you to the death.

[00:34:10]  Bruce: Yes, they would. Because gravity is often used by laymen as an example of a scientific fact.

[00:34:18]  Cameo: It's the one that we can see with our eyes, right? That's why Newton resonates so much with people, because you also have this pairing of the apple falling on his head, and he recognized this. Like, there's also this story that goes with it, and it makes sense to us, and it reflects what we see in the universe really prettily.

[00:34:40]  Bruce: Yes. Now, it is not the case, though. According to Einstein's theory, there is no force of gravity. You know, it's actually just that we have this warp, this curvature in space that warps as you have a greater amount of gravity, and when you have people moving parallel on a curve, they come together, and that feels like a force. Like, if me and Cameo started a mile apart, both aimed ourselves towards the North Pole, and then walked in parallel to each other, we would eventually bump into each other, and it would be like a magical force was pulling us together, when in reality it's just the curvature of the world that we're walking on. Okay, there's no actual force there. That's what gravity actually is, according to Einstein's theory. Now, you know, let's keep in mind, there's no such thing as a final theory. Maybe quantum gravity will say something different, who knows?

[00:35:26]  Bruce: But at least according to our best theory, there is no force of gravity, and most people don't realize that, even though they've been taught general relativity in school, and I think that Cameo is right. It's because it is just such a compelling viewpoint based on one's own experience. There's another reason why I think Newton has a special, was traditionally always considered a special case. And Popper talks about this. You have, when Newton, Newton in some ways, like if you were to say, when did the scientific method get invented? And Popper would argue there's no such thing as a scientific method. But you know what I mean. When did science get invented? It's really hard to say, right? Some people would point to Galileo. Some people would point before Galileo. Some people would point to Newton. But Newton was a shock to many. You had Galileo developing this idea that you can use math, and we should take seriously these theories.

[00:36:19]  Bruce: And he develops a lot of the scientific ideas that get used by Newton. But when Newton came out with this all-encompassing theory that before Newton, they thought that the physics of the stars and the physics of the Earth were entirely different things, and they had different theories for them. Newton suddenly shows it's the same thing. He unified everything. And not only that, but we proceed to test out and corroborate Newton's theory for hundreds and hundreds of years. Actually, it was more than that. When was Newton? He was a long time ago. So a very long time, we have Newton reigning supreme with not a single known counter example to him. And during that time, Newton came to be accepted as the absolute God-revealed truth about the world. And almost all philosophers saw him that way. Almost all scientists saw him that way. And so Einstein was a shock.

[00:37:12]  Bruce: In fact, it was such a huge shock. This explains why the perihelion of Mercury was not perceived as a counter example to Newton. They could not get through their heads. Newton is making a false prediction. They could not accept that was even a possibility. The [Michelson–Morley] experiment, same thing, right? It really wasn't until we had the Eddington Expedition, where, and now this is an example of where Thomas Kuhn is wrong. Thomas Kuhn claims that you get anomalous observations and scientists try to explain them away. That part seems to be somewhat true. And then eventually they collect and you have a crisis. And only then do people go and try to find an alternative explanation. That is not the case with general relativity. What really happened was Einstein convinced people that his theory, that these problems were actually problems. Namely, by coming up with a better theory that made novel predictions no one had even guessed and then demonstrating that it could make these correct predictions counter to Newton.

[00:38:12]  Bruce: And only then did the crisis take place. And even then, as we've discussed, it took a long time for people to accept Einstein's theory. He did not win the Nobel Prize for his theory. He won it for the photoelectric effect instead. And one of the past podcasts I said it was Brownian Motion, but I was wrong; it was the photoelectric effect. They gave him a Nobel Prize because they knew he was important to science, but they did not give it to him for general relativity because general relativity was considered controversial at the time. It took quite a while for the scientific community to realize and accept Newton was wrong.

[00:38:49]  Cameo: So do you think that ultimately that ends up contributing when you have, he brings, there's this, they observe this refuting thing in nature. Is that, I mean, it did take science a little while to accept that Newton was being refuted by observation.

[00:39:13]  Bruce: Yes. Yes. So now this is where we're getting to with this quote from David Deutsch. Let me finish the quote. He says, but in any case, the existence of a problem with a theory has little import besides, as I said, informing research programs. Unless both the new and old explicanda are well explained by a rival theory. In that case, the problem becomes grounds for considering the problematic theory tentatively refuted. This is from page 10 of this paper. Okay, so Deutsch is saying that a refutation requires not just anomalous observation or any number of anomalous observations, but also requires a second explanation. Now, this is actually a good answer. Now, we're going to see there's a little bit of a problem with it. Although it's more of a linguistic problem, it's not conceptually a problem. Understand that sometimes you pick words and the words aren't the best way to convey something, but sometimes what you're really saying is just accurate.

[00:40:05]  Bruce: And this is really the case here. Under the Deutsch understanding of the word refutation, you do not refute something with an anomalous observation or any number of anomalous observations. You do it with a combination of an anomalous observation or observations and a second explanation. And this is not a bad way to think of the word refutation. As we're going to see, it's not the way Popper thought of it, but it is not a bad way to think of it. And it gets at a fairly common understanding of the word refutation. And so if we want to think of it that way, this explains, this is really a pretty good answer to Kuhn's concern, right? As you say, well, no, it's not that an anomalous observation refutes a theory. It's that an anomalous observation leads to a research program, which in turn, with a second explanation, refutes the theory. This is probably, and this wasn't that really how Newton's theory got refuted, was by the existence of both anomalous observations and a second theory.

[00:41:02]  Bruce: I think this is probably a more accurate way to talk about refutation. Now, if this is the case, though, it really, for many years, because I was aware of the Duhem–Quine thesis, actually before Deutsch even had written his paper, I had come to the, and you can see this in my blog post. Historically, I have blog posts that existed before Deutsch's paper, where I came out and I said, we really have to see refutation as only happening in a theory-to-theory comparison. So I had come up on my own, based largely on reading Thomas Kuhn, by the way, not Popper, that you have to have a second theory to be able to refute a theory. Now, when I realized that, then I got a good source of backup on that when David Deutsch said the same thing in his paper, The Logic of Experimental Tests. But I was always really bothered by quotes from Popper, because Popper just does not seem to agree with this.

[00:41:52]  Bruce: So, for example, Popper says, insofar as scientific statements refer to the world experience, they must be refutable. And insofar as they are irrefutable, they do not refer to the world experience. Now, maybe that doesn't sound that bad to you, but if you really want to get technical, that is a false statement if we're looking at the word refutable in the Deutschian sense. Because a refutation requires anomalous observations plus a second theory. To be able to say that Newton's theory wasn't a set of scientific statements until Einstein's theory came along is just not true. And this statement, if I'm trying to read it with the Deutschian version of refutation, it just does not make sense. Okay, here's another one. Can the assumption of the truth of test statements justify either the claim that a universal theory is true or the claim that it is false?

[00:42:43]  Bruce: To this problem, my answer is positive. Yes, the assumption of the truth of test statements sometimes allows us to justify the claim that explanatory universal theory is false. Again, no mention of the need for a second theory. How about this one? As to falsification, special rules must be introduced, which will determine under what conditions a system is to be regarded as falsified. We say that a theory is falsified only if we have accepted basic statements, which is a test statement, which contradict it. A basic statement, just to describe this a little bit, Popper would never accept a single test. So a basic statement would be a test that has been repeated by multiple people amongst the community. So it's an actual, what's the term I'm looking for? It's an actual thing that has been repeated. It's something that really does have to be explained.

[00:43:28]  Bruce: You can't just explain it away as I had a bad test case anymore. So he's saying, yeah, basically, you can refute a theory with tests alone. That's what he's saying here. OK, this is from Logic of Scientific Discovery, page 66. The other two were The Open Society and Its Enemies, volume 2, page 13, and Objective Knowledge, page 7. If a refutation really requires a second explanation, the above passages just have to be seen as not true. And for many years, I read Popper as being wrong on these quotes. And I thought, really very seriously thought, Popper didn't understand the concept of refutation correctly. Now, I'm not the only person, obviously, that had problems with what Popper was saying. Now, obviously, Kuhn did. Now, here is Victor Gijsbers of Leiden University. He has a series of YouTube videos. And in those, he goes over the concept of falsification, falsificationism, things like that.

[00:44:21]  Bruce: And he says Popper was wrong about the logic of falsification. Example, and he gives you the example of a frog left in a freezer. He says, let's say we have a theory that a frog left in a freezer will die, okay? Then we come back in a week and the frog is still alive. Have you refuted that theory? And he points out that you haven't because it might be that the freezer is broken. It might be that someone came along, saw the frog, took it out to save it and then snuck it back in just before you went to go check a week later just to try to throw you off the trail and mess up your experiment.

[00:44:54]  Cameo: It might be that it takes two weeks to kill a frog in a freezer and not one week.

[00:44:59]  Bruce: Yeah, whatever, right? I mean, the point being that the logic of falsification does not work if you understand it in the way that Popper seems to be suggesting, that you can, through a single test statement, refute something. And so he says philosophers of science nowadays are almost unanimous in concluding that Popper was in fact wrong. Okay, now I'm going to go on a limb here. I'm going to say what I've just explained is one of the main reasons why Popper did not catch on, is because when you read Popper, when you read the statements like the ones I just quoted from here above, they seem like they are obviously false, and it's very easy to think of counter examples to them. And I think this is one of the reasons why Popper is rejected by most philosophers. Certain aspects of him are actually quite popular amongst scientists, particularly the concept of falsification seems to have caught on quite strongly in science, although they understand it wrongly, which is unfortunate.

[00:45:53]  Bruce: But Popper got largely overlooked because of this problem. I'm going to make that claim. Maybe I'm wrong, but that is what I think. And I'm now giving you some examples of this, where this is clearly one of the main things that causes people to think they can prove Popper wrong. Now I had a conversation with Danny Frederick, who is a well-known scholar of Popper who passed away recently, and this was on Facebook. Now, Danny Frederick, he was kind of a funny guy. So I started talking with him about the fact that refutations required a combination of a theory, sorry, required a combination of anomalous observations plus a second explanation. He says, no, you're wrong. I'm like, no, Duhem–Quine, you absolutely must have a second theory to be able to refute a theory. He goes, no. And he says, you're confusing two things, refutation and rejection of a theory.

[00:46:45]  Bruce: I'm like, what do you mean by that? So he goes, OK, so rejection of a theory is where you actually put the theory away and pick a new one. He says, this isn't Popper's term, by the way. This is my own term. He's a famous scholar himself. So this is his own epistemology based on Popper and terminology. OK, he says that's rejection of a theory. That's an important concept that Popper didn't spend enough time on and didn't have a word for. So but that's what I call it. And you're talking about rejection of a theory, not refutation of a theory. I'm like, this doesn't make sense. And so I start to argue with him. And he accuses me of mangling Deutsch. He accuses me of just not understanding and all sorts of things take place. And at some point, quite a ways down the discussion, it finally strikes me what he's saying. And I go, you know what? I think we're actually saying the same thing.

[00:47:31]  Bruce: I think we might be using different terms for the same concept. He goes, no, that's not the case. I go, no, hold on. I think we are. I think we're actually saying the same thing. And we've been saying the same thing the whole time. We're just talking past each other. He's like, no, that's not the case. I go, okay, I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. How about, really, I think we're saying the same thing. But you're so insistent, I think that it gives me pause. So how about I state back for you what it is your position is now that I've been talking with you a while. I believe I can do that. I will state it. And if I don't get it right, I'll correct it until you accept my summary of your point of view. He goes, okay, so I make a big summary of his point of view, which by the way is available on my blog. And I explain in detail what his view is.

[00:48:19]  Bruce: Now, I've done this with people numerous times. Never once has the person been willing to accept the summary on the first try. They always change something. So he found one word to change, which in my opinion made no difference whatsoever. But he found one word to change, but he accepted absolutely the rest of the explanation. So I changed the one word and then he bought off on it. He said, yes, this is my opinion. Here is what he was saying. And this is actually very interesting. And I'm really glad I had this conversation with Danny because this really changed the way I read Popper and started answering a lot of these questions that I've been collecting, these problems of refutation. He said, a refutation is a combination of the theory plus the background knowledge. So yes, you can have a single observation that refutes a theory. In fact, a single observation that is anomalous refutes a theory.

[00:49:11]  Bruce: But by theory, we mean the whole theoretical system, the theory in question, Newton, plus the background knowledge, number of planets, whatever. It's that combination that gets refuted. When he explained that to me, I realized this is, he's using the word refutation to mean what Deutsch means by the word problem. And I can't, I mean, it's kind of a decent way to, it's not like it's totally outside the bounds of how you might use the word refutation. Words in real life have multiple meanings depending on context. This is just the truth about things, right? And you can see how, if you're talking about the whole combination of theories, that a single observation really and truly always refutes the theoretical system. There's never a counter example. If you don't buy that, try to give me a counter example.

[00:50:00]  Unidentified speaker: I got to buy it.

[00:50:04]  Bruce: But if this is what the word refutation means to Popper, then those statements that I was talking about from Popper before all now make sense. They are all correct statements now. So long as you understand, he's talking about the full theoretical system, not the individual theory that we happen to care about. Now, how does this change the way you look at Popper? Okay, so just to be kind of clear here, Frederick uses the word refutation to mean a single observation or set of observations that cause a problem for a theory, and Deutsch calls that a problem. Okay. Then, Danny, so then Deutsch refers to the moment where you have the rival theory, and it explains the problem. You can now tentatively reject the previous theories, and that's what Deutsch calls refutation. That's what Danny calls rejection. Okay. So this led to, first of all, this led to an interesting idea, which is the whole idea of Popper Without Refutation.

[00:51:05]  Bruce: You don't need the word refutation. We can actually say, we can call the first event a problem, we can call the second event rejection, and we can get rid of the word refutation altogether. Now, why would I want to do this? Obviously, probably no one's going to want to do this, because the word refutation is so strongly associated with Popper at this point culturally, that it wouldn't make sense to get rid of the word refutation. But it was eye-opening to me to realize I didn't even need the word refutation, that the word refutation was causing a misunderstanding. It was leading to people, because we tend to think of the word refutation as being about the theory itself, and not about the theoretical system, the theory plus the background knowledge. This is what's leading to people misunderstanding Popper. This is what's causing people to reject Popper wrongly.

[00:51:54]  Bruce: Now, did Popper really understand that it was the full theoretical system? Danny was very insistent this was the case. Now that I knew what to look for, I went out and I searched for, is this actually true or is Danny mistaken? Turns out he is right. Here's a quote from Popper that comes from Realism and the Aim of Science, page 187. A more serious objection to my epistemology is closely connected to the problem of context and the fact that my criterion of demarcation applies to systems of theories rather than to statements out of context. This objection may be put as follows. No single hypothesis is falsifiable because every refutation of a conclusion may hit any single premise of the set of all premises used in deriving the refuted conclusion. The attribution of falsity to some particular hypothesis that belongs to the set of premises is therefore risky.

[00:52:48]  Bruce: Okay. Notice that this is precisely what Danny Frederick was talking about. Okay. I mean, like almost word for word. So this doesn't surprise me. David Deutsch is a scientist. I'm not a philosopher. I'm not a scientist or a philosopher. I'm a layman. Danny Frederick is a well-known famous popper scholar. So it's not that surprising that Frederick's actually read all Popper's works. David Deutsch, by his own admission, hasn't. So he was more familiar with what the terminology of Popper is. Now, this is a problem that exists with Popper, is that first of all, he uses words somewhat idiosyncratically. In fact, keep in mind that English was not his primary language. He was German. And his original version of his book, Logic of Scientific Discovery, which is the key book that he wrote, the only book that he wrote, really, the other books are collections of papers and presentations, things like that, was originally written in German.

[00:53:45]  Bruce: And from what I understand, reads better in German than it does in English. He had to translate it. He translated himself. He had to pick words that were the best words he could find in English to convey the ideas that he was trying to get across. And this statement here about the system of theories, I don't know if there's other places where he makes that clear, but this is a super clear statement, but it's in just one of his books. You have to really have read Popper widely to put together a lot of these things, because he doesn't necessarily explain it in each individual book, right? But this was very eye opening for me. Now, let's compare this with the dictionary definition of refutation and falsification. I just Googled these and it gives me a definition. Here's the definition for refutation. The action of proving a statement or theory to be wrong or false, falsification.

[00:54:32]  Bruce: The action of falsifying information or a theory. This is how people normally think of these words, and it is not the way Popper intended it. That's why people read it in. That's why people, including myself, including Deutsch, including very intelligent people, read Popper and do not come away with the realization that when he's talking about a refutation, he's talking about the whole theoretical system, the theory plus the background knowledge. Now, let me also say, I kind of left this out for the sake of brevity, that Popper then goes on from that previous quote to say, it's not really a problem. And he gives a very good answer as to why, right? It's, to put this kind of just straightforwardly, there's no issue here. The fact that you're actually refuting the combined system isn't a problem because the next step is to conjecture which part of the system is wrong.

[00:55:31]  Bruce: So if I get a refuting case in the case of Jupiter, so Jupiter's orbit is off, that is a refutation of the combination of Newton's theory plus the assumption that there's only seven planets. And it properly refutes that combined theory. Now in that case, the problem wasn't Newton's theory. The problem was that there's actually eight planets and we had missed a planet. That is a good way to think of refutation. That's not necessarily a bad way of defining it, but it is counter to the way people normally think of it. And that's why people misread Popper. And that's why Popper hasn't caught on as well as he should. To make matters worse, Popper often leaves you with the impression that it's just the theory itself that gets refuted. So Nathan Oseroff, who's another Popper scholar, in his paper Addressing Three Popular Philosophic Myths About Karl Popper's Demarcation Criteria, he says, Reading Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery would be sufficient for many people to arrive at the conclusion that falsifiability applies only to individual theories.

[00:56:37]  Bruce: So he gives quotes from Popper where he says it. He says, when you falsify a theory, he always says a theory when he really means theoretical system. So Oseroff says, Any use of the word theory in relation to Popper's falsifiability criteria should be understood as an elliptical expression for theoretical system. This is from page 10. The first one was from page six of that paper. So Popper has largely done himself a disservice, right? He has written his book using terms that they're not inaccurate. You know, I can see why the word theory could mean theoretical system. I can see why the word refutation could mean theory plus background knowledge, right? But that certainly isn't the way people normally think of it. Therefore, people are bound to misread Popper because of the way he's currently wording things. So here's my proposal. Now, I'm not suggesting we actually do this when we're talking amongst Popperians, but when we're talking to people who are outside, you know, Popper's people who already know Popper well, I think the word refutation is a misleading term.

[00:57:44]  Bruce: I think what we really should call it is a counter example. And verification is itself a misleading term. I think it should be called a positive example or a positive instance. Popper used the word criticism. So to Popper, a refutation is specifically a problem with an empirical theory. So refutation is an actual observation statement, a basic statement from an experiment, okay, or an observation that exists, where he would use the word criticism for a more general problem. So a philosophical theory that has no empirical content can't have refutations because you can't do experiments on it. But it could have criticisms, problems with it that are criticisms. I think we should just use the word problem for all of those and use counterexamples specifically for a test case, what Popper calls a refutation. If you change those things, and the word conjecture needs to change a little bit too, Popper would often speak of conjecture and refutation as a summary of his epistemology, which I'm now claiming is misleading.

[00:58:49]  Bruce: Instead, we should probably call it problems and conjectured solutions, which has the nice addition to it that Popper says we always start with problems. So even though we always start with problems, he still called it conjecture and refutation. It really should be refutation and conjecture or problems and conjectured solutions. So if we rethink a Popper with just very small change of wording, I actually think Popper becomes a lot more understandable. Now, how might rethinking this language lead to answering some of the problems that we've talked about? That's where I'm going to move on to next. However, this might actually be a good place to stop. We could finish it up the next time if we want.

[00:59:29]  Cameo: I think if you're halfway through, this is a great time to stop.

[00:59:35]  Bruce: So let me summarize just quickly, since likely I'll be releasing this on Monday so that it's available for when I do my presentation for the Popper Conference. So I haven't really solved the problems yet. And I want to go through and I want to demonstrate that now that I'm reading Popper correctly, it turns out all of these problems are really fairly easily solved. That there really are no, none of these are actual problems for Popper, but they were actually based on misunderstandings of reading Popper wrong. And it was a bit of a shock to me that I had been misreading Popper for years. I had been thinking he meant something by the word refutation and something by the word theory, and I was wrong. He actually meant something else. And while I haven't actually solved the problems yet, my guess is that you can start to make some guesses as to how this will pull the thread that unravels the mystery and shows how to deal with each of the problems I previously raised.

[01:00:33]  Bruce: But as I went through starting to unravel this mystery, what I did is I did a more close reading of Popper. I read The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which is his main book. And he explains a lot of things in there that I think get missed. And that's what we'll discuss next time. For instance, the next thing we will discuss is the asymmetry. What is the asymmetry between refutation and verification? Let's instead change that to say, what's the asymmetry between counter examples and positive examples? When you understand it in that way, there is an asymmetry. It's not what people think, right? It's largely misunderstood. As I said, a lot of people seem to understand it as the absolute verification fallacy, which is just wrong. What Popper actually lays it out as is as a logical asymmetry, and that's very important to understand about Popper, is that this was all based on his understanding of logic and how it applied to science.

[01:01:32]  Bruce: I think that's why a lot of this misunderstanding happened, because in the world of logic, when you have a universal statement, which would be a for-all statement for all x, y is true, that's a universal statement, it is known in logic that you can quote only refute those, you can't verify them. Then if you have an existential statement, a statement like there exists an x, it's well known that you can only verify those statements and you can't refute them. Now, that is the correct terms in logic. In logic, you would use the word refutation when you're talking about how you go about refuting a universal statement, and you'd use the word verification for how you go about verifying an existential statement. And what Popper was really doing is he was taking those terms from logic and he was importing them into science without quite noticing that in science they had slightly different connotations.

[01:02:29]  Bruce: And I think that's where the real confusion comes from, is that you have to realize this difference where the asymmetry Popper's interested in exists in the logic side, and then he's trying to reapply it into science, which is brilliant, by the way. It's a work of genius now that I fully understand it. But I can see now why he went with the word refutation, even though it's a little bit misleading. But I do think counterexample is a better word for it. So I'll go ahead and I'll stop there. It's a teaser for next time. But I'll actually go into what Popper actually said. And I think that's enlightening because it turns out Popper actually explains himself pretty well. If you take the time to read all his works and read his book in depth, he does explain things. Even though he's using words that are somewhat misleading at times, he does a fairly good job of clarifying himself.

[01:03:16]  Bruce: It's just that sometimes you have to know about the exact right passage to where he clarifies himself before you understand what his point was.

[01:03:24]  Cameo: So I think it'll be interesting to see you take all of this that we've talked about over the last hour and compress it into 15 minutes. First, I mean, I cannot wait to see how that works out. I also think you're going to get an absolute firestorm of...

[01:03:48]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, yeah.

[01:03:49]  Cameo: You're going in with a lightsaber and just like stabbing Obi-Wan Kenobi all over and over again.

[01:03:55]  Bruce: So let me say that I know that that's true. The fact that I'm even suggesting taking the word refutation out of popper is bound to get me persecuted. So I'm actually going to be soft walking it in my actual presentation. I'm not going to, for example, this is a much longer presentation than what I'm doing for my 15-minute presentation. I have a different slide pack for the 15-minute presentation, and it is only the Popper Without Refutation slides. I'm not going to cover the problems of refutation. I'm not going to cover what's going to be in the next podcast that we'll do in two weeks or whatever. So I'm trying to get some visibility on this problem that people are misunderstanding popper because of this, and that's really my intent here, which is, I think, something the Popperians, the critical rationalist community ought to be aware of, right, is that people are coming away with a poor understanding of Popper's epistemology based on some of the choice of words we've used.

[01:04:57]  Bruce: And I'm going to give other examples of that. In the next time we do this, I'm going to give other examples. For example, another teaser for next time, Popperians will deny that you can strengthen the theory. That's led to some Popperians, the Deutschians, denying you can support a theory, denying that you can corroborate a theory, which most Popperians would say, no, you can support or corroborate a theory. I think these all follow from the fact that to Popperians, the word strengthen a theory means something different than what your average layman means by that. What is the intuitive understanding of strengthening the theory? Well, I don't think it means what a Popperian would read that as. And I think that leads to incommensurability between Popperians and non-Popperians talking because the Popperian quickly bites the head of the other person off and says, no, it's impossible to strengthen the theory.

[01:05:46]  Bruce: And the other person goes, no, I strengthen theories all the time. No, really, I know I strengthen theories all the time. I know it can be done. So you can't tell me it can't be done. And what they're really doing is they're talking past each other. They're both right for the way they happen to be defining terms. And I think there's a number of those that exist and that have collected over time where Popperians have stopped speaking like normal people. And that if they were to speak more like normal people, it would be more understandable to outsiders. So that's really what I'm going to be concentrating on. And that's important to understand is that I don't make any claims here that I am even improving upon Popper's epistemology. All I am doing is clarifying his intent, what choice of words he picked that might be misleading to some people.

[01:06:36]  Bruce: And that's it. That's all I'm doing. At one point, I thought I had discovered problems with Popper. I no longer believe I have. Right. I mean, I believe Popper addressed every single one of those problems that I brought up. Popper was awfully good at looking at criticisms of his theory and addressing it. But I do think there's no one good source you can go to where Popper explains his epistemology straightforwardly where your average layman can get it. And I do think that's a bit of a problem. All right. We can wrap up here.

[01:07:09]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:07:10]  Cameo: Well, we know what we're talking about next time, right?

[01:07:13]  Bruce: All right. Thank you, guys. The Theory of Anything podcast could use your help. We have a small but loyal audience, and we'd like to get the word out about the podcast to others so others can enjoy it as well. To the best of our knowledge, we're the only podcast that covers all four strands of David Deutsch's philosophy, as well as other interesting subjects. If you're enjoying this podcast, please give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. This can usually be done right inside your podcast player, or you can Google The Theory of Anything Podcast Apple or something like that. Some players have their own rating system, and giving us a five-star rating on any rating system would be helpful. If you enjoy a particular episode, please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on Facebook or other social media to help get the word out. If you are interested in financially supporting the podcast, we have two ways to do that.

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