Episode 64: What is a “Refutation”?
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Transcript
[00:00:10] Blue: Welcome to the theory of anything podcast. We got Peter here. We got Camille here somewhere, but I think she’s away from the mic at the moment. So she might show up later in the conversation. We had an interview prepared today and then we had to delay. So we thought we would just kind of have a chat. Peter actually said he was listening to our previous podcast episodes on Popper without refutation and had some questions about that. And that will probably lead to other topics. So maybe we can start with that. So Peter, go ahead and ask any questions you’d like.
[00:00:41] Red: Okay. Well, you like to say I was delving into the archives. I’d actually heard that episode before, but, you know, having spoken to you directly about some of the, what seems to me a pretty unique take on Popper, but also seems to be at least how you explain it to be quite well supported by what Popper actually said. I just, I thought it might be helpful to go over that in a maybe a little, a little more succinct way, make kind of dial down what exactly is the difference between what you’re saying, what most Popperians are saying, and try to explore that a little bit. First of all, perhaps we could start at the word refutation. Yeah. What is it? What is it to a regular Popperian? What is it? What does it mean to David Deutsch? And what does it mean to a Bruce Nielsen?
[00:01:42] Blue: Okay. Good question.
[00:01:44] Red: Yeah.
[00:01:44] Blue: So I think the word refutation is problematic because it comes with a lot of psychological baggage. And I’ve kind of argued that Popper being English is a second language. It may not have had the same psychological baggage to him as it would to a native English speaker. And so I think he chose a word, went with it. I think he had good reasons for why he chose the word. I think that when you’re talking about logically speaking, it’s like the right word, but the moment you try to move it into a scientific context, it takes on a different meaning to most native English speakers. And I think that the net result is, is that you end up confused and that it’s perfect. It would be perfectly natural that people would try to read Popper as saying something that he didn’t actually say. And to make matters worse, they’re not entirely wrong. Popper had this concept of falsification and refutation, which I’ll explain in just a second. And then he also said, and you know, you can try to generalize this to the concept of criticism. A lot of times what people are trying to do is they’re trying to take the word refutation or trying to generalize it because it’s just a natural thing to do with the English language. Okay.
[00:02:58] Red: So, Bruce, here’s what I’m seeing in the dictionary. The action of proving a statement or theory to be wrong or false.
[00:03:05] Blue: Yes.
[00:03:06] Red: Is that the same, that basic definition is? That is. Okay.
[00:03:13] Blue: People are assuming that’s what Popper meant. And I’m arguing he didn’t.
[00:03:17] Red: He didn’t. Okay.
[00:03:18] Blue: Okay. So what did Popper actually mean? Well, in full context, and here’s the thing is Popper wasn’t completely consistent. I’ve actually documented where he sometimes uses the word exactly like it’s in the English dictionary, but then later he will explain, well, yeah, actually this is what I mean. And in full context, he does a pretty good job. But if you’re just reading one of Popper’s books, particularly if you’re not reading the logic of scientific discovery where he probably does the best job of just, of explaining himself, if you’re reading like conjecture refutation, let’s say there’s a really good chance you just misunderstand Popper. I know I did. At least I did. And so, and I met other people who I think clearly misunderstand him also. So when Popper uses the term refutation, what he really means is a counter example by experiment. Okay. So now this is maybe a little surprising, especially if you came to Popper through Deutsch, because Deutsch does not use the word that way. Okay. When you talk about Popper saying, science is about conjecture and refutation. By the way, he always means science, empirical science, right? He’s not talking about some generalized view. He occasionally dips into, here’s how you might generalize this, but that just wasn’t his area of interest. Okay. He always means, I’m talking about scientific theories. They’re empirical. They have universal laws. These universal laws are completely impossible to verify or confirm because they have infinite consequences. So because you can’t go do an experiment that confirms all of the infinity of possible outcomes that you would need to to confirm this theory, instead you’re held to the idea of looking for counter examples. Okay. And he called counter examples, refutations. So
[00:05:10] Blue: a refutation is very specifically, I have an empirical theory. It’s a scientifically empirical theory. It is something that has universal laws. It’s impossible to actually ever confirm the entire theory because that would require infinite amount of testing. So instead we’re going to make progress by trying to take conjecture, different universal laws. And we’re going to look for counter examples to them, which he calls refutations. Okay.
[00:05:38] Red: Okay. So the theory could overall could be fine. The theory overall
[00:05:43] Blue: is fine. Popper’s theory is fine.
[00:05:45] Red: There’s still refutations to the theory in question.
[00:05:50] Blue: Okay. So, so let’s say, let’s use the example of, and I always, I may be getting the planets wrong. I think in my original talk or podcast, I used the example of Jupiter and maybe I’m getting which planet it was wrong. Okay.
[00:06:06] Red: Okay.
[00:06:07] Blue: But I think it was that we knew about Jupiter and its orbit was off. And so it meant that there was another planet we didn’t know about, which I think was Uranus. That would be a counter example to Newton’s laws of motion. Does that refute Newton’s laws of motion? Of course not. Okay. That would be silly. And so calling it a refutation while it makes a certain amount of sense, it’s just the wrong word. It’s really just a counter example. In this case, what it really meant was that there was a planet we didn’t know about. So it didn’t refute Newton’s laws of motion in any meaningful sense at all. Now it was a counter example to Newton’s laws of motion though. Like without a doubt it was. Everybody knew it was a problem that needed to be solved. So what is it that Popper, so when Popper talks of refutation, what is he really talking about? If you really want to think of it as a refutation in the dictionary sense, it is, but only if you think of it as a combination of the theory plus the background knowledge. So if you think of it as, look, it’s a refutation not to Newton’s theory, but to Newton’s theory plus the assumption that there were X many number of planets. Then yes, we can think of it as a refutation in the dictionary sense, but nobody thinks of it that way. When we talk about trying to refute a theory, we’re talking about trying to refute the theory, right? We’re not thinking in terms of the theory plus the background knowledge. So if what you think is that Popper’s epistemology allows you to refute a theory by an observation, you’re wrong.
[00:07:51] Blue: That is literally impossible. There is no single observation that could ever exist that would actually refute a scientific theory ever. Now, Deutsch points this out in his paper, The Logic of Experimental Tests. And it was really, in part, Deutsch’s paper and reading Popper and seeing the way people tried to use Popper that started to make me realize, oh my gosh, we’re getting something wrong. Okay, we’re misinterpreting something. So Deutsch is correct that, so Deutsch tries to use the word refutation to mean actually proving the theory wrong, which is a perfectly natural way to try to read the word refutation. It just doesn’t happen to be what Popper meant by it.
[00:08:35] Red: Truthfully, it’s kind of what I always thought it meant. Right. That’s good.
[00:08:41] Blue: So Deutsch says, well, you can’t actually refute a theory with an observation. What you really need is you need a second competing theory. Now, if we’re talking about scientific theories, which is what we’re normally talking about with Popper, then Deutsch is correct. Now, David Miller criticized me bringing this up and he said, no, Deutsch doesn’t only mean for certain types of scientific theories, but like you could refute the statement, all swans are white with a single observation of a black swan. Now, I need to come back to that because like he’s not really wrong with his statement, but it’s actually a misleading statement in many ways. Deborah Mayo says, whenever you see Popperians trying to use examples of how you can refute a theory with a single observation, they always use examples that will only ever come up in philosophical circles. They’ll never come up in actual scientific studies. And she’s right. And there’s actually a good reason for why that is. And let me come back to that. The key point I want to make here, though, is that at least when it comes to actual scientific theories, which are complex, they’re not little tiny simple things like, you know, all swans are white, which by the way, isn’t even a good scientific theory anyhow, because it doesn’t attempt to explain anything.
[00:10:08] Red: Right.
[00:10:09] Blue: The only thing it can be said to explain is it can explain why every swan you happen to have seen up to this point is white. That might make it an explanation. Maybe that even makes it a scientific theory in a sense. It surely isn’t the type of theory that a real scientist is going to care about. And honestly, we all understand evolutionary theory at this point. We know that even if all swans did happen to be white, a mutation might change that in the future. So we still know it’s not the type of universal law that a scientist is ever going to care about. Right. So they’re not great examples. Once you realize this, you realize that Doge uses the word refutation to mean specifically they try to refute the theory, whereas Popper actually meant it as refute the theory plus the background knowledge. And I give tons of quotes to prove that he actually did mean that. Like he says this, right? You have to have the right quote and that’s part of the problem is that he says it, but then like it’s in passing and then he never mentions it again. And then he even uses it more like the dictionary. He often acts like you could refute this theory. Okay. With an observation. So he’s a little inconsistent. Okay. But if you actually look at everything he says, you can absolutely find proof that when Popper talks about refutations, he actually means you’re refuting the entire theoretical system, not just the one individual theory.
[00:11:30] Red: Hmm.
[00:11:30] Blue: Okay. So I was talking to Danny Frederick, who’s a now passed away, but respected philosopher of critical rationalism, who by the way, believes some things that I think are just not right. And I criticized him on other grounds. The main one being that he thinks that the goal of scientific inquiry shouldn’t be to find truth, which I think is just false. I don’t even think critical rationalism can survive such a critique.
[00:12:00] Red: Okay.
[00:12:01] Blue: But that’s like a totally different story. Yeah. In a discussion with him, him and I were arguing and I started to realize that we were talking past each other. I never did successfully convince him we were talking past each other, but I became convinced that we were talking past each other. And I realized I was using the word refutation to mean actually refuting the theory, whereas he was using the word refutation to mean refuting the theory plus the background knowledge.
[00:12:28] Red: Okay.
[00:12:29] Blue: Now interestingly, Frederick has a different term for what Deutsch calls a refutation where you try to refute the theory itself. He calls that rejection of the theory. So when Frederick uses the term refutation, he means you have a counter example to the theory, but what you actually refuted was the theory plus the background knowledge. Whereas once you then have later have a second theory that explains the success of the first theory, then you reject the older theory. So once you have general relativity from Einstein, you can, so we used the example of Jupiter. Let’s use a different example now. The example would be per helion of mercury. Okay. So that’s the same thing as the Jupiter example. You’ve got this motion of mercury that doesn’t match Newton’s laws. And so the same thing happened. They initially thought we must have missed a planet. So they calculated where this planet, which they named Vulcan was supposed to be. That’s where the term Vulcan comes from. And they then went out and looked for it and they could not find it, which was the opposite of what happened in the other case. Now in this case, now you have this counter example, but the number of planets you counted still looks to be right. You’ve tested the possibility that the number of planets was wrong and you failed to find the other planet. Okay. So in this case, we now understand that now that we have Einstein’s theory and we have general relativity, that that was actually the problem. The problem was that Newton’s laws of motion were actually wrong. And that’s why mercury doesn’t follow the Newton’s laws of motion.
[00:14:12] Blue: But you can’t really know that until you have this other theory that explains what’s wrong with Newton’s laws of motion. And up until you have Einstein’s theory, you just don’t know what, you don’t have no way of knowing if the problem was with Newton’s theory or if the problem is just something else that you’re missing. And so because of that, you can never really refute, you can never really refute a theory or as Frederick would put it, you can never really reject a theory until you actually have a second theory. That was what I realized. Okay. Deutsch is calling refutation what Frederick is calling rejection and what Frederick is calling refutation is what Deutsch calls a problem to solve. Okay. They’re using different terms, but they’re saying exactly, conceptually the same thing. Okay. Now, when Frederick explained this and I realized we were talking past each other, I tried to convince him we were talking past each other and he just, he doubled down. He was unwilling to accept that possibility. But as typically happens with conversation on the internet, the conversation just sort of died and there was never a resolution. But I became really curious and I thought, is it possible Frederick is actually right that Popper is using terms the way he does.
[00:15:30] Red: Frederick,
[00:15:31] Blue: by the way, admitted the term rejection didn’t come from Popper, that that was one he made up himself. So does he, Popper possibly use the word refutation the way Frederick does as meaning the theory plus the background knowledge refuting the combination. So now that I knew what to look for, I started looking up in Popper and sure enough that Popper absolutely clarifies that. And that was when I realized, okay, I have been misunderstanding Popper this entire time. I thought every time I used the word refutation, he actually meant refuting the theory itself. And just
[00:16:04] Red: to clarify when the Deutsch version of refutation where he’s talking about the theory, does that more align with the mainstream Popperian take?
[00:16:18] Blue: Okay.
[00:16:19] Red: That
[00:16:19] Blue: more aligns with the mainstream use of the word refutation.
[00:16:24] Red: Okay. Okay.
[00:16:25] Blue: Separate from what Popper means by it.
[00:16:28] Red: But the what you’re saying is that you’re making the case of what Popper actually meant, but then say like maybe a David Miller does he agree more with Deutsch or is that a third interpretation? Here
[00:16:43] Blue: is what David Miller said when I actually presented this. Yeah. He said, well, Deutsch is talking about scientific theories and that might be true for theories of chemistry or physics or something like that, but it’s not true for all theories.
[00:16:57] Red: Okay.
[00:16:58] Blue: So Miller who really is probably the greatest living Popperian is trying to argue a sort of middle ground. He’s trying to say no, actually, there are some theories you can refute with a single observation and the example, the stereotypical example is all swans are white.
[00:17:14] Red: Yeah. Okay.
[00:17:16] Blue: Now I’m not saying Miller is wrong because from a certain point of view, the statement all swans are white clearly can be refuted by the statement, I have a black swan here.
[00:17:27] Red: Yeah.
[00:17:28] Blue: But you just have to stop and think about it for a moment and you almost immediately see that this middle ground doesn’t really exist like you think it does. Okay. Let’s say that you and I thought that there were no white swans and then we go to Australia and we see a black swan walk walk by. Does the observation, what observation actually exists? Does the observation exist? I see a black swan there. Did that happen just because we saw a black swan walk by? No, of course not because neither of us are experts in swans. We would see a black bird walk by that looks swan -like and then we would have no idea if that was actually a black swan or not. We would want we might think it is. We might say, wow that looked like a black swan. Someone could have
[00:18:10] Red: spray painted this swan block or something.
[00:18:13] Blue: Exactly. Okay. So we would probably want to go like capture the swan. We’d probably want to see if it’s painted. We’d probably then go what if it’s DNA is like a totally different bird and it just happens to look like a swan because of convergent evolution. So we’d probably want to go find an expert in, you know, birds or something and we’d probably want to say maybe an expert in genes and we’d probably want to say look is this actually a swan? After we went through all those tests yes at that point the observation here is a black swan now exists but you did not get there through a single observation. You got there through a number of different tests.
[00:18:50] Red: Yeah.
[00:18:51] Blue: Trying to compete, trying to test out competing possibilities. That’s actually the answer to what David Miller was saying is that yes from a certain point of view here is a black swan refutes the statement all swans are white but that observations don’t exist like that. An observation is you and I just sort of see a black bird and then we have to start testing our alternate theories. Was it a painted bird? Was it a painted swan? We have to go test that. This is actually the answer to the whole question is that observations are always theory impregnated. Hopper is famous for saying that. People haven’t thought through though what that means in the case of using an observation to refute something. An observation statement assumes you’ve done certain kinds of tests to get to that observation statement. So the thought experiment is kind of misleading in a way. The whole black swan white swan thing is it’s not really how people make theories about the world. No it’s not. But it also explains why it’s completely unproblematic. We could be skeptics. We could say look an observation can’t refute a theory which is what people say about popper. That’s like the big criticism where I quote tons of people criticizing popper showing that you cannot with an observation refute a theory and they’re right but it does not mean a thing because you have to understand popper not as literally meaning an observation refutes a theory but as meaning an observation creates a problem that allows you to start conjecturing how to solve that problem and you can go out and you can test the different parts of the theoretical system. You can test what’s my guess about the number of planets correct.
[00:20:42] Blue: You can test anything. You start to do tests. You start to severely test the different parts of the theoretical system and at some point you just cannot find the other planet that you expected to see there and you start to wonder is it possible that Newton’s laws are wrong and do I have to actually challenge Newton’s laws? I never have to actually refute Newton’s theory per se. I simply have to get to the point where I can’t solve the problem any other way and then happen to come up with someone perhaps to come up with a good conjecture general relativity in this case that actually does solve the problem. That will eventually now become the premier theory. We never truly refute theories like Newton’s theory never really went away. We even still use it as at least an approximation of other theories but even if we didn’t use it as an approximation of other theories what really happens is the theory just sort of dies out because it stops being productive compared to its competitor and that’s what Popper’s epistemology really gets you. It objectively creates problems through observation that then can be solved through testing and through conjecture and testing. Once you realize that you realize that the skeptics view is wrong but also the standard way of giving of explaining Popper’s epistemology is misleading. It’s not even that complicated I just explained it to you in a few minutes it’s not hard and really if you just started using the word counter example instead of refutation you would almost assuredly get people understanding you better.
[00:22:18] Blue: Even for the cases where you literally can refute a theory with a single observation like all swans or white even then thinking of it as well actually refuted the theory plus the background knowledge is really useful because then it encompasses the idea we should check to see if this is a dirty swan or a painted swan or something like that right? That’s something you should absolutely test. So it’s always a good idea to think of it as a Popperian refutation is a refutation of the theory plus the background knowledge and even in cases where you can legitimately argue that isn’t the case it was still productive to think of it that way at some point in time right?
[00:22:59] Blue: So I’m going to just go on a limb here and I’m going to say number one a Popperian refutation is always if you’re thinking of it as a single observation is always a refutation of the theory plus the background knowledge it is never just of the theory if it is of the theory the reason why is because you’ve done a series of tests prior to that point so that the observation statement now contains those severe tests as well you’ve actually tested alternative theories just not the theory proper you tested did my instruments work you tested is this a painted swan you tested is did my number of planets actually count them correctly did I miss one okay you see what I’m saying is that it’s never just the observation it’s always this series of tests you’ve done so if you just rethink of it as a preparing refutation is a refutation of the theory plus the background knowledge you can never actually go wrong it’s always a smarter way to think of it so
[00:23:57] Red: you’re saying that that’s a preparing refutation but it’s not actually what how Popper conceived of a refutation
[00:24:05] Blue: well see he did but only if you look at everything he said if you look at individual statements you can find cases where he acts as if a refutation is just a single observation that refutes the theory
[00:24:18] Red: I see
[00:24:18] Blue: so you have to kind of say am I talking about any one particular quote from Popper when I talk about Popper as a whole
[00:24:25] Red: but I think that’s what I found very convincing about your last podcast on this how you you really went went through the actual text where Popper was talking about it and you know you had some pretty pretty strong examples there
[00:24:39] Blue: they’re not that hard to find that was the thing that surprised me and you know it’s funny the the debate I had with Danny Frederick on Facebook led to all this right him criticizing my views ultimately misunderstanding what I was saying actually led to me clarifying my own views and realizing that I had in fact misunderstood something even if it wasn’t the thing that Danny and I were actually debating it’s a really good example of how criticism is just valuable yeah right yeah but okay so now let’s let’s go back so I think I’ve now explained basically I’m claiming everybody’s getting something wrong okay it’s is Popper had the the correct idea overall but he sometimes delved into ways of thinking where you could use a single observation to refute something so I think he sometimes was wrong right even even if I think you could make the argument well I mean like in context he’s making a certain point I think that’s always true right is it impossible to always say the correct thing because you’re always trying to narrow your language for a specific point I
[00:25:54] Red: guess that relates to what also what I was wondering I mean okay so dutch has his take it’s a little different Popper varied and exactly how he used these words maybe David Miller has sort of a middle middle ground in the real world though doesn’t really matter that much it doesn’t pretty easy to determine what someone means in actual communication okay
[00:26:19] Blue: here’s where the problem comes
[00:26:20] Red: okay
[00:26:21] Blue: so David Deutch he has written two very excellent books that include a significant amount about Popper but he never at any point uses the word refutation in the way Popper actually does and in fact he downplays the idea that we even particularly care about the demarcation that Popper was talking about because correctly he points out that we can generalize Popper we can think of it not just as hey I need an observation to refute this theory but we can say hey you know the vast majority of theories we criticize them and if it doesn’t survive criticism never mind whether it’s an observation or not that theory will die and basically what Deutch does is he generalizes Popper to the idea that you have a number of competing theories and you criticize the theories and the one that survives is your best theory okay so now Popper isn’t against that you can find places where Popper talks about such a generalization so this isn’t an idea that Deutch made up lock, sock, and barrel on his own he’s getting it from Popper okay what Deutch is adding to it what he’s bringing to it is he’s saying this is actually a better way to think of Popper’s epistemology that’s not true and I’m going to explain why it’s not that David Deutch is wrong you can generalize Popper in that way and that’s actually a completely fair point but when you say it in that way when you say oh all criticisms
[00:28:04] Blue: we’re open to any criticism an observation is just a special example of a criticism and when you do that to downplay the demarcation between science and non -science or as I prefer to say it between empirical theories and non -empirical theories when you do that you have lost something incredibly significant out of Popper so significant that in some ways you’re no longer doing Popper’s epistemology here’s what you lose Popper the genius of Popper was that he came to his epistemology in terms of the question of what counts as science which keep in mind means empirical theories I’ve argued science in a more general sense includes metaphysical theories and Popper never really denied that he usually when he says he talks about the demarcation he doesn’t usually speak of science versus non -science he usually speaks of empirical science he’s usually pretty specific I found a couple counter examples to that where he says science instead and there you’ve got some potential for misunderstanding I admit but when he talks about this what Popper was really trying to do what he was trying to work out what led him to trying to solve the problem of induction was these theories out there that claimed to be science that worked Freudian theory communism things like that and keep in mind Popper was a communist at one point like these were theories that he found very tempting
[00:29:35] Blue: so he really gave some thought to the question what makes empirical theories special and when he started thinking through what makes empirical theories special now that’s naturally the demarcation criteria is hey I’ve got certain kinds of theories that are special because they’re empirical and other kinds of theories which aren’t bad they may be true they may be very important but they lack something what is that thing that they lack this is what Popper was trying to actually get at when he talks about now remember a refutation to Popper is always an observation not just a general criticism this is true I cannot find a single counter example to where he uses the word refutation specifically as a kind of observation if maybe somebody else who’s read more of Popper than me can give me an example but like I’ve gone through a whole bunch of books and I just can’t find counter examples he really seems to have been pretty consistent on this one the whole empirical versus non empirical theory is that Popper’s language specifically is that is that confusing though because part of what his thing was or is that just Deutsch but to criticize empiricism with the whole theory impregnated as it turns out empirical and empiricism aren’t the same thing however fans of David Deutsch who have just read David Deutsch’s books but haven’t tried to research this deeply don’t understand those aren’t the same thing and so they get tied in knots over this and it’s really bad at times particularly on Twitter where they just really don’t get I
[00:31:20] Red: see
[00:31:21] Blue: so empiricism empiricism is a specific bad philosophy it’s the philosophy that our senses can’t be wrong yeah okay so it’s a absolute source of truth yeah that is obviously not something Popper would agree with okay because he didn’t believe there were any absolute sources of truth but Popper was absolutely arguing empirical theories are special they are important they are distinct from non -empirical theories in important ways he was absolutely arguing that so Popper’s is deeply in fact exclusively empirical I say at least the version he writes in logic of scientific discovery as I mentioned he does mention how you might generalize it so if you want to talk about a generalized version of Popper you’d be right to say it’s not always empirical okay but in terms of what he was writing about in his book it was exclusively empirical theories he was talking about okay and he makes this painfully clear when you read his book okay and when you read the logic of scientific discovery if you read say conjecture refutation it’s nowhere near so clear
[00:32:35] Red: okay
[00:32:36] Blue: I got all the way through conjecture refutation without even noticing that because I hadn’t read logic of scientific discovery yet and so I hadn’t read the more clear statements that he makes okay so what is it that makes a theory empirical basically what makes a theory empirical so think about how we theorize things now Saadia’s husband Mark he has offered a criticism of Popper that is actually kind of correct okay although it’s more a criticism of the Deutsche and Fan version of Popper than Popper himself he would say I don’t think I really buy there’s anything special about Popper’s epistemology and keep in mind what he really means is the Deutsche Fan version of Popper’s epistemology but to him that’s what Popper’s epistemology is because that’s how he has interacted with him right he’d say you know what people have forever criticized things and it’s not like you can do something different than have a set of possibilities that you’ve conjectured and then you criticize them and you end up with whatever’s left people have been doing that way before Popper Popper hardly discovered that and
[00:33:47] Blue: you know science was around long before Popper was and so I don’t really understand what’s special about Popper because all he’s really doing is describing what we all know we all do anyhow okay here is what Mark is missing Popper was about empirical theories that’s what he’s missing yes you can generalize it like Deutsch does to non -empirical theories but when you do that you’ve lost the importance of empirical theories here’s what Popper said Popper said look when you have a scientific theory how do you do an experiment well to be able to do an experiment requires that your theory locks down some sort of prediction that happens within some reasonable spatial temporal area right it has to happen within a reasonable period of time it has to happen within a reasonable locality that we can actually verify the outcome okay if that isn’t true then it’s not empirical now this is an incredibly sensible way to think of the term empirical okay to basically to equate it with being able to do an experiment okay and I don’t think there are many scientists who would argue with Popper over this that empirical means able to do an experiment okay I will give you some possible counter examples to that because I’ve attempted to criticize this and when I found people criticizing it and took their criticisms I will give you a counter example to that in just a second but I think the vast majority of scientists would say that is a completely reasonable way to look at the word empirical is that this theory says something about real life where I can actually perform an experiment okay now what Popper is pointing out is that to be able to have it be constrained to a certain spatial temporal area
[00:35:45] Blue: implies that the theory has some sort of universal law that constrains the outcomes and that just logically speaking just logically speaking that implies that what we’re really going to be experiment doing with the experiment is looking for a counter example because and the reason why is very simple if I go out and I have a theory and this theory has infinite empirical content and I go and I confirm it say 10,000 times there’s still an infinity of content that I can’t confirm okay so what I really want is I want to try to find a single counter example well as it turns out that’s exactly what we do with experiments and you really just cannot find counter examples to this because that really is what we do with experiments
[00:36:30] Blue: when I say I’m going to go test Einstein’s theory of general relativity using the Arthur Eddington expedition and I’m going to go quote verify the theory of general relativity what I’m really doing is I’m demonstrating that in that one particular case it matches the stars in an eclipse match what Einstein’s theory said and don’t match what Newton’s theory said now I may word that as I verified Einstein’s theory and I’m not even wrong in a certain sense I am clearly verifying Einstein’s theory but nobody in their right mind would think I have now verified every possible outcome of the entire infinity of content that exists in Einstein’s theory in fact in many ways we’re painfully aware of that there’s almost immediately a question okay sure this experiment came out in favor of Einstein’s theory but does that really mean his theory is true and we know it doesn’t mean that right it really just means it beat Newton’s theory so Popper would say look what really mattered here was that you refuted Newton’s theory that you had a counter example to near Newton’s theory therefore Newton’s theory now has a problem that Einstein’s theory doesn’t that Einstein’s theory even explains why it’s a problem for Newton’s theory we now have a fairly clear -cut case that general relativity is something worthy of looking at further in reality it took decades between Arthur Eddington’s expedition and science actually accepting Einstein’s theory as better than Newton’s part
[00:38:11] Blue: of that was just social stuff like Thomas Kuhn says but part of it was because they couldn’t figure how to do better tests and they really wanted to more severely test it than that okay is one test which by the way at the level of technology that existed back then wasn’t really even a great test because everything was kind of out of focus it was hard to know how to measure them I mean it wasn’t the great test that we try to make it out today in fact you can put it into probabilistic terms and according to Debra Mayo we weren’t even talking about a p -value of 0.05 right I mean it was it was really a fairly questionable outcome of the test so it makes sense that we had to wait for technology to catch up before the theory was really going to be more strongly testable now eventually they invented radioscopes Debra Mayo explains this and I’m doing this off the top of my head so maybe getting this wrong they invented better ways to test the theory and once we had much better ways to test it all of them just landed right directly in Einstein’s theory and against Newton’s and at that point we drop Einstein’s theory it’s now considered a rejected theory although we still use it as an approximation
[00:39:27] Blue: and we start to accept that Einstein’s theory is the quote correct theory even then have we proven Einstein’s theory correct well no of course not no scientists would believe we did when we say it’s a correct theory what we really mean is it’s more correct than Newton’s theory right so what let me wrap let me wrap what I just said together we may speak in the language of verification we may speak in the language of we verified this theory or we confirmed this theory but we always in context of empirical scientific theories we always really mean we refuted the competitors by observation the competitor made a prediction that didn’t come true this is what Popper noticed and he’s correct no scientist would really argue this now what arguments could you make with Popper on this well one of them would be string theory you could say well string theory makes predictions like the existence of super partners and but it doesn’t tell you under what circumstances to expect those super partners so we make bigger and bigger colliders and we may someday find a super partner and when we do it’s going to be a big deal it’s going to be something that really in vitalizes string theory and gets us thinking harder about it will in some sense actually verify that something’s correct about string theory
[00:40:57] Blue: and yet you can never actually refute string theory because string theory if you don’t find the super partners then the argument would just be well we need a bigger collider until you know you could in theory maybe need a galaxy sized collider to be able to find the super partners right so you can’t actually refute string theory and yet it is still empirical because you can test that the super partners exist at least in principle if not in practice okay now what popper would say to this if popper’s here if you’re a doi chain I don’t know what you say to that because this is like a completely legitimate argument if you’re a deep paparian and you really understand popper’s argument your argument is yeah you’re right that’s an example of a theory that can only be verified which is what we mean by non empirical right nobody really doubts that you can call that empirical if you want you can say yes it’s quote empirical because in theory we can test it okay but what experiment are you actually going to perform there’s no experiment you can do that comes out with a definitive answer that’s the sense in which it’s not empirical is that you can’t do an experiment that’s definitive if you really really really want to call it empirical then fine okay because we’re not really arguing over words we’re already arguing over concepts if you really want to say string theory is an empirical theory because in theory you could find the super partners and that would
[00:42:30] Blue: confirm or verify at least that one aspect of the theory so therefore I’m going to call it empirical then great that you know what maybe people even sometimes use the word empirical in lame terms to mean that here’s the problem with calling that empirical scientifically speaking the following theory must now be considered scientific bigfoot exists unicorns exist because as it turns out there’s no way to perform an experiment and yet we may someday find a unicorn or we may someday find a bigfoot proper points out you can’t even claim it’s improbable if you try to take into consideration the entire universe rather than just the world there could be a bigfoot that that evolved on some other planet out there in some other galaxy right so just in terms of practicality science will never call a theory based around the existence of something rather than a universal law constraining something it will never call those scientific theories that’s popper’s point he’s not making a different point he’s not trying to say something normative he’s not trying to dogmatically define a term he’s just trying to be practical he’s just trying to say look scientific theories will always be about experiments experiments will always be about constraints and constraints you only test them by violating them okay that’s popper’s epistemology in a nutshell
[00:43:58] Red: can can I ask you is the is this interpretation of popper that seems pretty convincing to me but is it controversial amongst these same kind of popperians that we’re pushing back on about refutation okay
[00:44:15] Blue: let me let me get to that so here’s the question though let’s say that you buy my argument that that is that is what popper meant by refutation we could still take dutch’s version of popper and we could still say but isn’t dutch’s version of popper still correct right sure I might so it’s tempting to say and and fans of David Deutch on twitter in particular
[00:44:41] Blue: use the word refutation to simply mean I have personally criticized this theory and I subjectively found a criticism that I subjectively found convincing so let’s take some real life examples so Dennis Hackathall famous who’s been on this podcast who I’m friends with he is famously put up he considers himself a critical rationalist but he is famously put up an article on how he knows that animals that the best theory is that animals don’t feel things okay they have no qualia they have they’re just meat robots is what he calls them now I’m not I don’t want to get too far into this I don’t let me just say that the arguments he makes are entirely outside of poppers epistemology completely if you understand poppers epistemology as being about empirical tests what he actually does is he the arguments he uses are as follows he says well let me I can give you example after example of animals that don’t understand things you know you’ve got the squirrel that you put it on the concrete and you give it a nut and it goes through its little motions of trying to dig into the concrete and then tries to go through the motions of trying to bury the nut even though there’s nothing there for it to bury life okay so this is a clear example of an animal not understanding something okay now you might ask what’s that got to do with them feeling anything which by the way would be a really good question Dennis argues in his article as far as I can make sense of his article that we know that like robots today don’t feel anything so if an animal is actually like a robot we ought to conclude that it’s not feeling anything
[00:46:19] Red: and this is on his blog or this is on his blog okay
[00:46:23] Blue: okay now I think what this argument is is it’s an intuition pump it makes you see animals behavior as robotic and it makes you try to associate them with robots which you know don’t feel anything now in his mind he has now refuted the theory that animals feel things because in his mind if animals really felt things they shouldn’t act like robots at every level this is a terrible terrible paparian argument like it’s the opposite of critical rationalism first of all it’s induction he’s literally trying to say I can give you an example of animals behaving automatically and I’m therefore
[00:47:08] Blue: able to conclude and generalize to the idea that absolutely everything the animals do they show no understanding and I’m trying to generalize to just like analogously a robot doesn’t feel things and doesn’t understand things and has automatic movements therefore you should conclude that animals are the same way oh well why right it couldn’t be the case that animals have automatic movements but understand some things and just have some automatic movements if I knew for sure a squirrel was entirely automatic movements would that tell me that an ape is entirely automatic movements if I knew for sure that all animals used automatic movements would that actually allow me to make an analogy that I therefore can just because there’s this specific case robots have automatic movements and feel nothing that I can therefore generalize to animals make automatic movements and feel nothing there’s nothing about this argument that makes rational sense from a paparian standpoint none of it none of it survives critical rationalism it is the opposite of a critical rationalist argument in his mind though because he came to critical rationalism through Deutsch this is a solid critical rationalist argument and the reason why is because in his mind he thought through what he thinks should be an implication of the opposing theory and then he came up with what he just subjectively felt like was a good argument in his mind now he’s now criticized that argument he’s refuted it and therefore his arguments the only one that’s remaining standing okay now the reason why I keep emphasizing the word subjective is because that’s what we’ve got here right I don’t have any way to test any any single aspect of his argument empirically I don’t have any way of knowing if just because robots don’t feel things animals don’t because they use automatic movements I have no way of knowing just because a squirrel uses automatic movements that therefore an ape is using automatic movements for that matter I’m not even using some of the arguments that are even better like for example the fact that humans use automatic movements like we know that right well he acknowledges that in his article he says well it’s true humans use automatic movements but humans can change their automatic movements because they have understanding well okay so basically even your counter example that you’re trying to use you know doesn’t apply to humans that the one example that we have so there’s just no reason to believe that the existence of an
[00:49:42] Blue: automatic movement therefore implies a lack of qualia humans have automatic movements and they have qualia so it’s this nothing about this argument works as a critical rationalist argument meaning
[00:49:57] Red: empirical argument yes so so it’s more of a non -empirical metaphysical philosophical theory that is correct is that are those all kind of the same yes okay
[00:50:12] Blue: for the sake of argument I’m not saying he’s wrong like maybe animals don’t feel things like I don’t know right yeah I’m assessing is the argument itself that the argument is purely subjective he he’s decided this sounds like a good criticism to me therefore I have now refuted the theory and I only have one theory remaining and it’s mine if people can do now this answers Mark’s question this is how people actually argue in real life right they may be using the Deuchy in generalization of popper they’re criticizing the other theories and they’re showing that their theories the best one everybody does that right and even people who know nothing about popper that’s just how we argue okay there’s no other way to argue the mistake that’s getting made here is that they’re trying to act as if the existence of this subjective criticism that they feel very strongly about personally is somehow equivalent to a refutation and it’s not right because a refutation is an actual observation that we can test that came out of an experimental test okay a parian concept of a reputation which is why I believe we should call encounter examples instead of refutations because it’s very natural for Dennis to think that the word refutation could just be generalization that means any kind of criticism even including just subjective ones that he personally feels very strongly about that’s not an unreasonable way for him to read the word refutation
[00:51:43] Red: okay
[00:51:44] Blue: it just isn’t what popper meant by it okay so why does this matter though because we might argue it doesn’t matter sure popper meant an observation but an observation is as Deuchy says just a special kind of criticism okay or just a certain kind of criticism yeah it is it’s an objective kind of criticism none of Dennis’s quote refutations his criticisms none of them are anything but subjective they are feel good pump your intuition types of criticisms okay which once you’re outside the realm of empirical theories is what you mostly rely on right it’s and so this brings us to a paper from Bruce Caldwell called clarifying popper which I absolutely recommend people read and he’s trying to work out how would you apply popper to economics because economics famously can’t be refuted by observation and the reason why in this case a little different than the case I’m using with Dennis it’s because there are so many forces that work in an economy that we don’t really expect any of our economic theories to make good testable predictions even if I know for sure that demand goes up and therefore prices go up and that then creates additional supply that I totally buy that right like I totally think that’s a true economic principle but it’s it’s dang hard to test inside of an economy and you can almost always find counter examples to it and then it’s just because there’s some other reason there’s some other force at work that was overriding that situation whatever it was right there’s I could make up an example if you want it’s really easy
[00:53:27] Blue: to think of counter examples economies are complex things we know that just because demand goes up it necessarily follow that supply immediately follows there could be some reason why it doesn’t for some reason eventually the long run it should but for any one particular prediction you could just be wrong because there’s something else causing a problem in the economy at the moment right because
[00:53:53] Blue: of that it’s really hard to figure out how to apply poppers and in fact called what argues it’s impossible to apply poppers epistemology by which I mean the empirical epistemology not the Deutsche and more generalized version to economics that you can’t is fine because you can then still criticize it you can still then jump to the Deutsche generalized version and you can try to still correct errors by other means through criticism but you have lost something special you have lost the ability to actually create experiments and by experiment work out which are the best loss now why does this matter and it’s very simple and Bruce call I wish I could find the quote I don’t have the quote handy but he explains it very simply he says the issue here is that while we can all agree with popper that you should criticize theories and you should pick the best one it’s not at all obvious which criticisms are the better ones and which ones are the worse ones and it turns out that’s largely subjectively a matter of opinion that’s not true for empirical theories for actual outcomes of experiments and remember in popper we’re talking about repeatable outcomes okay not just some throwaway outcome where everybody can go off and they can create the exact same criticism the exact same reputation of the theory through the exact same experiment and they can all just for themselves go out and see yes this theory makes this prediction and this experiment is a counter example to it
[00:55:32] Red: so economics is a non empirical area of human inquiry or whatever
[00:55:41] Blue: so I think it might be more accurate to say it’s less empirical lesson
[00:55:46] Red: okay yeah that seems fair
[00:55:48] Blue: so because like for instance you could almost assuredly take something like supply and demand create a really simplistic experiment where there’s no other forces at work and you can probably show it actually is true and so I don’t think it’s actually accurate to say economics has got zero empirical this because there are certain types of experiments you can do that you can work with but they’re not super convincing in the case of economics because what we really care about is full economies not simplified experimental outcomes I
[00:56:24] Red: guess that’s one thing that people say the difference between Austrian and Chicago is that Austrians pretty much know it’s a philosophy they’re advocating where the Chicago school with Milton Friedman try to make it into more of a science that’s
[00:56:41] Blue: right
[00:56:42] Red: which
[00:56:43] Blue: is really hard in the case of
[00:56:44] Red: economics yeah yeah and some people say impossible but
[00:56:48] Blue: this is Caldwell’s point and this is in essence what Popper was answering the reason why empirical theories are special is because they’re the only case where we have criticisms that lack the subjective element and where everybody can objectively look at the exact same criticisms and can all agree yes this is a problem the moment you get outside of empirical theories yes of course you should use criticisms on them and you should try to improve them the criticisms which is completely correct the mistake is not recognizing the importance and the specialness and why empirical theories are special why they are honestly better because they have this special condition where we have objective criticisms of them that we can all agree upon now someone might argue with me a little here well what about the fact that experiments aren’t always repeatable well if they’re not then that’s a valid criticism of that experiment right we’re talking about what it is repeatable or you might say oh what about the case that people get different outcomes of an experiment well okay that’s a problem that’s a valid criticism of an experiment is that I did this experiment and I came up with a different result reality makes it so that there are experiments that are just repeatable and we get good enough at doing them and we get good enough at understanding them that we all can kind of agree this is a problem
[00:58:21] Blue: and that’s what makes empirical theories special and that was what Popper was actually trying to say okay so he’s not against generalizing his epistemology in fact Donald Campbell goes on to try to generalize his epistemology and Popper gave a glowing review of Campbell’s attempts to do that talks about how Campbell anticipated stuff he was writing and I’ll have to find the quote for that okay so like Popper’s totally in favor of taking his epistemology and generalizing it like Deutsch is trying to do
[00:58:50] Red: but
[00:58:52] Blue: we’ve lost something and it is the realization that empirical theories are special so now let’s go back to and we haven’t done a podcast on this but the question do animals feel things that’s a completely valid scientific inquiry and there’s a whole body of research where they’ve tried to work that out where they’ve worked out what would be an implication of that and they’ve made attempts to do experiments now you can always say well that experiment missed something but you can always say that period right you
[00:59:25] Blue: can Popper points out you can always just dismiss the outcomes of an experiment and thereby not accept them right you can always just come up with some sort of ad hoc save for your theory and you can say oh well maybe this is what happened okay if you’re willing to do that then you’re violating Popper’s epistemology because Popper’s epistemology includes not doing things like that that’s specifically what he’s ruling out by convention and to ignore that body of work which would require a whole podcast to go into even if you think it’s wrong it’s still just a conjecture I conjecture animals feel things okay now how would I actually do an experiment with that okay so I’m going to try to experiment and I’m going to try to take fish which don’t react to pain and I’m going to try to inject into their lip saline for one group and be venom for another and I’m going to take these fish that we know don’t react to pain I’m going to see if they even know the difference between these whether they have saline solution in their lip or be venom while it turns out the ones with be venom all swim over to the side of the tank and stuff their lip against the tank and they try to get in the nerves okay well that doesn’t prove beyond doubt that fish feel things but that was absolutely what you would have expected if they did so
[01:00:49] Blue: this was a case of where they could have refuted the theory they didn’t experiment and they failed to and it corroborated the theory then that natural tendency to say but you didn’t prove it that’s justificationism that’s what we don’t do in popper right all we do is make conjectures and then we say what’s the implication how would I test that how would I falsify that how would I have a counter example to it so my challenge to Dennis would be okay stop mucking around with little tiny subjective philosophical arguments that honestly I don’t think mean anything right now instead work out the implications of your theory turn it into a testable scientific theory if animals don’t feel things like you think that absolutely should have implications what are they if you’re going to simply take the stance there are no implications that I’m not saying you’re wrong I’m just saying you’re not scientific and that’s enough for me
[01:01:45] Red: well what what makes sense to me is that yes animals feel things they feel things as animals though I mean they don’t have self -reflection that humans do which has makes us feel things as as humans but you know maybe that’s a not empirical theory
[01:02:05] Blue: there I don’t know how you test that but you know we have to do this as a podcast okay there actually are some really interesting competing theories here because I’ve actually tried to look up the competing rather than just satisfied with my own subjective criticism actually looked up what’s the science say what are they attempted what are the competing theories I can actually tell you what they are but I’d have to like look them up have a prepared explanation and some of them are just cool right some of the things they’ve come up with like one of the ones that I really think is particularly brilliant is animal grief the fact that the fact that grief in humans is arguably against evolution because you feel grief you stop taking care of yourself and you die and then you can’t replicate your genes
[01:02:52] Red: okay
[01:02:53] Blue: so how do you explain human grief the fact that we feel grief for humans well the way we do it we do do it right we conjecture an explanation but it has to be consistent with other good explanations so it has to be consistent with evolutionary theory so we say well evolution produced this feeling that you want to be near your kin and you want to be close to your kin and you want to take care of your children and you have this fear of them dying so that you will take care of them that’s the adaptive part once the child dies there’s this unfortunate feeling that you now have to experience because otherwise it wouldn’t have been adaptive in the first place so while that particular outcome in that case that is non -adaptive it is overall adaptive this is a pretty good argument
[01:03:43] Red: okay
[01:03:44] Blue: and one of the things that’s brilliant about it is everybody will tell you there’s no way to actually test for the existence of qualia a lot even in humans this is where the idea of a philosophical zombie comes from well Deutsch says look we just simply consider real anything that shows up in our best explanation if our best explanation of why grief exists is that it includes an explanation that evolution produced a feeling okay now qualia is part of that explanation we don’t need to explain what qualia is it’s now considered real just because it is part of a good explanation if you buy that argument for humans you have to buy it for animals and as it turns out some animals die from lack of self -care due to grief their mother dies and then they die et cetera famously dogs but like apes do too elephants do not all animals do but some well if unless you can actually offer a testable explanation alternative to grief as to why this is happening then that is the best explanation it’s not that we’ve proven it right we don’t even care if it’s proven right that’s justificationism it’s just can you offer an alternative that’s equally testable and this is a testable theory because for instance we’ve seen animals die from lack of self -care we’re going to hypothesize that that’s due to the feelings of grief
[01:05:15] Red: okay
[01:05:15] Blue: so what would we then find correlating with the feelings of grief well we would expect that they would have the same sorts of hormonal surges that humans have so they will actually track down the apes that they’re following and they’ll look for which ones are showing these signs of grief and then they’ll look at the hormones and their feces and they’ll see if it correlates the same way as it does for humans and as it turns out it does now if it hadn’t that would have refuted the theory but it does and its refutation is what matters okay it’s not trying to confirm something we’ll never prove beyond doubt animals feel things okay we never will we don’t need to there’s not even a desire to if you’re a critical rationalist right and it’s not a matter of what you believe I don’t believe animals feel things or don’t believe animals feel things I simply know that if you want to explain animal grief right now the only testable explanation in that is out there that exists at the moment is that animals feel grief
[01:06:18] Red: at least some of us feel grief okay I had a friend who came back with well no I can give you an alternative explanation it’s that the program that they’re running in their head which doesn’t feel anything it doesn’t know what to do when it’s supposed to follow this program or something it’s
[01:06:40] Blue: supposed to follow the child around the child dies and it just doesn’t sort of know what to do
[01:06:45] Red: so
[01:06:46] Blue: it’s like okay great I mean like I know you can always offer ad hoc saves like this just have no doubt about that okay my question for you is what are the actual implications of that theory and how do I test it well it didn’t happen right
[01:07:01] Red: because
[01:07:01] Blue: it’s a totally made up easy to vary theory that tells you nothing about the world right it’s sole purpose for existence was to try to ruin the good explanation which is that the animals in question here apes in this case feel great
[01:07:16] Red: think
[01:07:16] Blue: about how this quote explanation has no empirical content of its own it simply tries to offer a vague explanation meant to mimic the empirical content of the good explanation namely that apes that seem to die of grief are in fact dying of grief due to the lack of self care because they feel bad that it has no empirical content of its own eliminates this theory from the critical rationalist contest but notice also that its explanatory power actually comes from its competitor it’s basically saying a parental animal that loses a child will act in a way that looks identical to grief due to the vague idea that it doesn’t know what to do clearly that is so vague it could never have actually had any empirical content of its own but it doesn’t even explain the actual case because the case that was in question was an adult child ape dying due to the loss of its mother so it still isn’t really explaining anything and why would evolution evolve such a poor response in the first place that is clearly negative in value when it could have evolved something else so it quote doesn’t know what to do how about evolving that it does know what to do that seems like the far more straightforward thing that evolution would evolve this whole explanation that’s supposed to be an alternative just fails as an expert alternative explanation from a rational standpoint on every single level
[01:08:37] Red: I can I ask you one more quick question that hopefully won’t lead us into a non another long tangent here sure could you explain the difference between an explanation and a theory in light of your ideas on refutation and falsification so I actually use those two terms interchangeably an explanation and a theory
[01:09:05] Blue: yeah so maybe that’s a bad answer though because maybe the two words don’t mean quite the same thing
[01:09:12] Red: okay
[01:09:13] Blue: so let me say that both of those terms probably mean many different things in many different circumstances words tend to have multiple meetings right
[01:09:22] Red: yeah
[01:09:23] Blue: so if I were to say look I’ve got this theory that the JFK was killed by a conspiracy okay
[01:09:32] Red: yeah
[01:09:33] Blue: well I mean like that’s not a theory in the scientific sense right I mean it’s vague it doesn’t make any testable predictions I can go try to experiment with so we wouldn’t call that a theory in the scientific sense and yet using the word theory is non problematic because you know what I really mean is I’ve got this idea that I think is true seems
[01:09:53] Red: to me do I choose is it quite broadly like when he talks about a theory he’s not just talking about the scientific theory yeah that’s what I get yeah okay
[01:10:02] Blue: and then let’s use the example of Bigfoot so I’ve got this theory that Bigfoot exists well that’s clearly not a scientific theory because there’s no way to do an experiment to test it right on the other hand because it’s open ended I don’t know where I there’s no there’s no experiment I can do where I can say now I’ve confirmed that there’s no Bigfoot right it’s okay on the other hand the Loch Ness monster has to exist within a specific lake to be considered the Loch Ness monster so I let’s say that I’ve got this theory that the Loch Ness monster does not exist okay now notice that I flipped it okay yeah because now I’m going to try to refute the theory by by counter example so I go out and take a bunch of boats and I do a sonar mapping of the entire lake and we find no Loch Ness monster well that still doesn’t prove beyond doubt there’s no Loch Ness monster maybe the Loch Ness monster is a super intelligent alien that knew how to swim around the boats or something like that right but what I did is I had a scientific theory that within this one particular lake there is no Loch Ness monster and then I strenuously severely tested it by going out and taking all these boats with sonars and scanning the whole lake and we did not find the Loch Ness monster okay so the theory there is no Loch Ness monster continues to hold and is a valid scientific theory okay whereas the the theory the Loch Ness monster exists is not a valid scientific theory because there’s no way to actually do an experiment for it does that make sense
[01:11:38] Red: I see yeah well I don’t feel bad for being being a little suddenly a little confused on the difference but I get what you’re saying
[01:11:47] Blue: okay now let me tie this to explanation okay this is another one where the fans of David Deutsch particularly on Twitter misunderstand something important
[01:11:56] Red: okay
[01:11:57] Blue: so in science Popper argues that an empirical theory that what you want is you want to you want to replace the theory with a better empirical theory okay so that some theories have more empirical content than others and that all things being equal meaning both theories have survived all tests you would always prefer the more empirical theory or the less empirical theory so let me give you an example of that okay the example Popper uses I don’t like but it gets it makes the point is let’s say you have a theory that the planets followed ellipses or a theory that the planets followed circles all things being equal you would prefer the theory that the planets follow circles because a circle is a type of ellipse so ellipse so a circle has more empirical content it’s easier to falsify easier to find a counter example to is what I mean then the theory that it is an ellipse now this is the problem is this is a bad example because first of all the planets don’t follow either ellipses or circles and because of that it’s hard to really grasp why we would prefer the circle when we know it’s a false theory so let me give an example of this that’s better because it’s a true theory so let’s start with the theory oranges stop scurvy okay well is that an explanatory theory well the twitter rats on twitter they’ve argued for these types of theories that they don’t count as explanatory theories because they don’t explain anything they’re just talking about a correlation okay well that’s wrong
[01:13:31] Blue: because this theory does explain something it explains that if you take an orange you won’t get scurvy that’s what it explains it doesn’t have any empirical content or explanatory content outside of that but it’s not zebra and
[01:13:45] Red: it’s hard to vary as well it is hard to vary or eat a banana yeah you’re not going to slice
[01:13:52] Blue: more over more over it can be falsified what I mean by that is you can find counter examples to it you could actually go out have people eat oranges and if they get scurvy anyhow then that theory is false right and you’re going to get a better theory
[01:14:08] Red: okay
[01:14:09] Blue: now consider the following theory and I know I use this example in a past podcast vitamin C stop scurvy well this is a better theory than the oranges stop scurvy theory
[01:14:20] Red: okay
[01:14:21] Blue: in this case they’re both true but the vitamin C stop scurvy is far more precise and therefore has higher empirical content and it’s easier to figure out which experiments to do now we can go you told me I got this wrong before but you said lemons have vitamin C and therefore we can go try lemons and see if those also stop scurvy yeah okay and we can go try fruits that don’t have high contents of vitamin C which happened in real life by the way they they thought that there was certain kinds of fruit so they would bring these fruits with them that didn’t have vitamin C and they would all die of scurry
[01:14:52] Red: so the natural experiment right
[01:14:56] Blue: so we now have a much better theory now let’s move on to vitamin C stop scurvy by causing the growth of connective tissue I’m not a scientist on this okay like I looked this up on Wikipedia or something and there’s this detailed explanation for how vitamin C has these mechanical effects inside the body that cause it so that scurvy isn’t created well this is a way better empirical theory and the reason why the reason why each of these theories is better is because we’re maximizing explanatory content and we’re doing it in a way where it increases the empirical content okay
[01:15:36] Red: now
[01:15:37] Blue: one of the things that the Deutsch the Deutsch fans on Twitter get wrong is that they’ll say this theory pet theory of mine maximizes explanatory content by which they mean does not maximize empirical content they just personally subjectively feel like it’s a really good explanation okay so they’ve moved us away from the objectiveness of empirical theories and back into the subjective realm again they do this all the time right they’re always trying to find ways to immunize their theories through by using subjective arguments instead of objective arguments yeah okay and the example of Brett’s theory with IQ the fact that I argued it actually is a scientific theory and I think it is I think it’s a good scientific theory one worthy of respect but they were trying to immunize it as no it’s just a philosophical theory because they didn’t want they wanted to apply they wanted to call it explanatory but they didn’t want to subject it to experiments because then it would be a refuting theory
[01:16:32] Red: so
[01:16:34] Blue: what you end up with is an attempt to maximize explanatory content while minimizing empirical content okay well that’s that’s the problem with communism that’s exactly what Popper was trying to explain is wrong with an explanation like communism sure people love communism because it’s quote highly explanatory right it explains everything in fact no matter what you come up with it explains it explains every possible outcome of every possible situation in which case it really means it explains nothing okay so what we’re really looking for is we’re looking for max the way you maximize empirical content is by maximizing explanatory content but we’re interested in explanations that are empirical okay so we want those two to always be together that you’re maximizing explanatory content and empirical content at the same time in which case yes maximizing explanatory power is always a benefit right even if the theory is wrong it’s still good because then you can show there’s something wrong with the theory and you can figure out how to try to tweak it and how to try to improve on how to error correct it things like that
[01:17:42] Red: right so
[01:17:43] Blue: we want maximum explanatory content pretty much no matter what even if the theory is false right
[01:17:49] Red: so
[01:17:49] Blue: in some ways that’s more important than actually refuting the theory now obviously it’s probably better to think of it not as one’s more important than the other but these are two different things we want at the same time okay what the theory to pass all tests we can think of and we want it to have lots of tests because it has high explanatory content and thus high empirical content
[01:18:10] Red: but
[01:18:11] Blue: if we’re doing this in context of Popper’s epistemology we’re expecting explanation in empirical content to be the same thing so yes one might argue that communism or Brett’s theory on intelligence that those are explanations and that they have good explanatory content but not in the sense of actually being able to do an experiment and have empirical content by which we can judge it so in that sense they were not maximizing when we talk about we want to maximize explanatory content in Popper’s epistemology we’re always assuming that we’re doing so in a way that maximizes empirical content at the same time when thought of in this way if we’re using the word theory in the scientific sense or the word explanation in the scientific sense where we’re maximizing explanatory content so that we can maximize empirical content then I think those two words really mean the same thing you can say the theory of general relativity or the explanation of general relativity and they’re like the same thing but I definitely think that the way the words just get used in general they can mean all sorts of different things and they don’t necessarily mean the same thing
[01:19:23] Red: so
[01:19:25] Blue: a theory would be an idea about something an explanation would be trying to describe in detail in empirical detail why that theory is true I have a theory that there’s this force called gravity and I’ve got this explanation that it’s because of the curvature of space as per Einstein’s theory but in reality we don’t have a scientific theory that there’s a force called gravity we have Newton’s theory of gravity or Einstein’s theory of gravity which include explanatory content which allows us to make it empirical so I think that as long as we’re sticking within empirical theories they’re kind of the same thing
[01:20:11] Red: well very clarified a lot there and throughout the our entire discussion here and I thank you for that you’re welcome and I’ll look forward to doing it again soon alright thanks everybody ok thank you bye
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