Episode 83: Popper’s Second Axis (aka Bruce’s Epistemology?)

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Transcript

[00:00:08]  Blue: Hello out there. This week, on the Theory of Anything podcast, Bruce attempts to summarize his unique take on Karl Popper’s epistemology that straddles the line between orthodox and unorthodox, and is influenced both by Deutsch, more old -school Popperians, and his own unique interpretation of critical rationalism. Along the way, he may manage to offend just about everyone. I think this is intended more as a summary rather than a place where each claim is carefully cited, though I will testify to the fact that he’s done that in past podcasts. Rebutation, corroboration, explanation, induction, falsification, verisimilitude, the Popperian War on Words, and Popper’s Ratchet are all covered. I would encourage anyone listening who thinks he’s wrong to reach out and tell him. I think he likes that.

[00:00:59]  Red: Welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast! Hey, Peter. Hello, Bruce. Well, you know, Peter has been asking me for forever to do Bruce’s epistemology in under an hour, and I am not going to do that today, because I am going to do Bruce’s epistemology, but it is not under an hour.

[00:01:19]  Blue: Okay. So, this is the most epic episode of the Theory of Anything podcast ever, maybe the only one that people need to listen to. So,

[00:01:30]  Red: it’s kind of summarizing every single other episode up to this point. Okay. So, the Theory of Anything podcast is loosely connected together through critical rationalism, through Popper’s epistemology. And if you go way back to episode three and four, that would probably be where, I mean, episodes one through four, but three and four in particular, was my first attempt to explain Popper’s epistemology. And back then, I had a more or less standard view, you know, I had come through it through reading David Deutsch, and it comes across very using the language from David Deutsch. I hadn’t actually read Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery yet way back then. And then I read Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery realized I had misunderstood quite a bit about Popper’s epistemology. And a lot of the podcast has been going through various things where I’ve said, oh, you know what, here’s, here’s why Popper believed in cooperation or whatever, right? And Popper without refutation was a big thing where I was going through and I had discovered that Deutsch and Popper used the word refutation in distinctly different ways, and that that actually makes a big difference on how you read Popper. And so, Peter has been kind of nudging me, put it all together into one podcast. And he wanted me to do it under an hour, and I’m still going to take the challenge of doing it in under an hour in some future podcast. But to be able to get there, I need to really get all my thoughts together. And that’s what this podcast is. So it’s probably going to be a long podcast, but I’m going to go through my understanding of of Popper’s epistemology.

[00:03:08]  Red: So in my opinion, Bruce’s epistemology, as Peter would call it, is with some very slight tweaks, just Popper’s epistemology, but worded to be easier to understand. And like, for example, I really don’t use the word refutation because I believe that’s a misleading term compared to what Popper actually had in mind. OK, I mean, that’s a big thing. Like Popper used the word refutation constantly. When you ask people to summarize Popper’s epistemology, they’ll tell you it’s all about falsification or it’s about conjecture and refutation. And the fact that I dropped that term and I used the word counter example, which means the same thing. Instead, you know, it turns out that this actually does make a very big difference in how you perceive the epistemology, even though theoretically it’s exactly the same concept. So and there’s there’s several places where Popper, in my opinion, downplayed the most important aspects of his epistemology. And then he also, I think, he made central things that didn’t matter that much to scientists, but but did to philosophers. He was first and foremost writing to philosophers, not to scientists, which is one of the reasons why I think scientists haven’t been able to really grasp his theory easily. And Hopper was also English as a second language. And in my opinion, he chose some words such as refutation, that were misleading to native English speakers, came with philosophical baggage that maybe he didn’t even realize it had, including the word falsification, by the way, which he thought of as central to his epistemology, but left, in my opinion, false impressions to his readers.

[00:04:36]  Red: And I believe that by laying out Popper’s epistemology in different words, it sheds light on many things that people often miss or misunderstand about his epistemology, or maybe I’m wrong and maybe I’m changing Popper’s epistemology. And this is really and truly Bruce’s epistemology. And it’s in competition with Popper’s epistemology. And I’ve certainly had many people tell me that is the case, because they believe that my version is not what Popper actually said. If that’s the case, then I am asserting Bruce’s epistemology to be more correct than Popper’s epistemology. And I see it as an evolutionary improvement on what Popper had in mind. But I want to emphasize that I do not personally believe that is the case. I believe that this is 100 percent just stuff I got straight from Popper. And if you listen to the podcast regularly, a lot of these ideas I’m going to discuss are just past episodes from the podcast, and I sourced all of them from Popper. If you go back to the original episodes, I’m not going to source them from Popper this time due to how long that would take. But I’m going to everything in here, in my opinion, come straight from Popper’s books, and I don’t feel like I’m changing a thing. But if you think if you disagree with me and you think I’m changing Popper’s epistemology, then great. This is, in my opinion, a superior epistemology to whatever it is that people normally think Popper’s epistemology is. Does that make sense?

[00:05:58]  Blue: Makes complete sense. And I’m looking forward to this. I’ll try to shut up and do a lot of listening and not take us down too many rabbit holes.

[00:06:08]  Red: So this whole idea did start back from episodes 41 and 42 Popper without without reputation, which I’ve had a lot of people contact me and say that those were my best episodes. Maybe the problem of open -endedness is now competing with those at this point. That’s another one that I’ve had a lot of people contact me and say it was my best episode. I’m not counting like the episode where I interviewed Kiara or David Deutsch or something like that. Right. I’m just of the ones that is just me. That’s what they’re really talking about. So I did this podcast, episodes 41 and 42, right before doing a short presentation at a Popper conference, where I had the thrilling experience of getting criticized and responding to David Miller, the greatest living paparion. And I received more feedback on that idea, Popper without without refutation, than anything else I had done up to that point. And I had several people write to me and say, I think I was misunderstanding Popper. Thank you for clarifying this. The basic idea was that if you excise the word refutation and falsification from Popper and replace it with counter example, which obviously is the same thing, right? You lose nothing conceptually, but you suddenly clarify what Popper actually meant. Specifically, the word refutation carries the philosophical baggage of you have refuted the theory that you are studying, where you clearly can’t do that with a counter example due to the doom coin problem. So instead, what you are really refuting is a combination of the theory in question, plus all the auxiliary theories in the background knowledge. So no single observation can ever refute a theory by itself.

[00:07:49]  Red: Though you can then follow up by creating hypotheses about which theory in the system that you were testing failed, and then you can test those theories individually, if they’re all non ad hoc theories. We’re going to talk about this.

[00:08:06]  Blue: So it’s almost a matter of degree in a way, whereas refutation seems to have more of more destructive power than counter example. Yes. Is that fair?

[00:08:17]  Red: I think there are several things philosophically. The word refutation carries many philosophical connotations that Popper did not mean to imply. I think that’s just the truth, right? And you just mentioned one of them, probably the most important one, but there’s several others I’ve noticed where people just sort of grasp onto that word refutation, and it just carries meaning that just doesn’t fit with Popper’s actual epistemology, right? And you’re forced into this kind of contortion of, well, yeah, you can refute theories but only tentatively, which is the same as saying you can’t refute them, right? I mean, and if you’re a paparian and you’re talking to a non -paparian, they’re going to roll their eyes at you. And rightly so, right? Because you really are kind of going down a bad road when you’re trying to contort everything into around the word refutation like this. So where is the right place to start when explaining Popper’s epistemology? When it comes down to Popper’s epistemology, as we call it, let me just point out that it’s really not Popper’s at all. So critical rationalism is just the scientific method. And yes, I do mean method. We had a podcast about that. Popper famously said there was no scientific method, but I showed that contextually he actually said there was. It depends on what you mean, right? He meant that there was no method that could guarantee a correct solution, but there is a method of criticism. And that’s really what he meant, okay? And critical rationalism on the scientific method predates Popper by centuries, right?

[00:09:56]  Red: And there have been many great critical rationalists since Popper that have needed to work out problems with his theories in my opinion, often in large part because of his choice of words and how confusing they sometimes were. Plus Popper got a ton of his ideas from people like Charles Sanders Purse and other philosophers that came before him, some of which exceeded him in important ways. And the reason why I picked Pierce or Purse was because he talked a lot about the value of institutions, which I think is incredibly important to critical rationalism. And Popper does talk about that, but nowhere near to the degree or to the level of depth that Purse does. Which is why like Jonathan Roush, who is a paparian will often position himself more as coming from the theories of Charles Sanders Purse because he’s emphasizing institutions over conjecturing criticism.

[00:10:51]  Blue: But

[00:10:52]  Red: I do accept that Popper is the single most important philosopher when it comes to the philosophy of science. And because of that, I have no problem with saying Popper’s epistemology as a shorthand for this theory that Popper neither created nor was he the last word on it. There is never a last word, of course. And yet he is like just looms as the largest figure over this theory. So calling it Popper’s epistemology makes sense, right? And Popper was also the first to really just try to figure out formally what is we’re doing when we did the scientific method? Prior to that point, it was kind of almost more inexplicit knowledge, right? It was built into the institution that still is, by the way, it’s still mostly inexplicit knowledge. It’s built into the institutions. And he was trying to figure out and formalize what is it that scientists are really doing and why is science so dang effective? It making progress compared to our pre -scientific era theories. Now recall another podcast, there’s no firm boundary between pre -scientific and post -scientific in terms of explanations. It’s really the boundary demarcation condition that he came up with. So let’s talk about where to start here. Everyone, including Popper, claims that he came to his philosophy trying to solve the problem of induction. I’m gonna argue that he really came to his philosophy trying to solve the problem of why should we prefer scientific theories over non -scientific theories, such as religious dogmas or maybe pseudoscience? Or to put it another way, why are we justified in preferring scientific theories over dogmas? I intentionally used the word justification there. So this is a totally fair question that demands a fair answer.

[00:12:41]  Red: Induction was, at the time of Popper, the most famous attempt to try to solve this problem. And that is why everyone sees Popper’s epistemology as entangled with refuting induction. But let’s take a moment to understand the problem induction was trying to solve and what it got right and what it got wrong. A common theory at the time was that we inductively justify our theories, something like this. The theories worked so well so often that we came to trust them and eventually accept them as true. But Hume came along and showed that this can’t really be quite right. It doesn’t matter how often something repeats, it may still be wrong. If you could see a million white swans, a single black swan still proves you wrong.

[00:13:22]  Blue: Still seems to be the most mainstream idea out there, would you say that’s true?

[00:13:27]  Red: It depends on what you mean. I doubt, I think that if you were to ask most philosophers, that’d be true. I think if you were to ask most scientists, they’d kind of look at you funny. If they knew anything at all, they might say, oh yeah, that sounds more or less true, but they’ve never given it any thought. So I mean, I think the reason why I’m emphasizing this is because I don’t really think science has ever been rooted in induction at all. And even if scientists claim they’re using the quote inductive method, that’s just a term they’ve heard, right? It’s not, they’ve never given any real thought to it philosophically for the most part.

[00:14:05]  Blue: And why would they? They’re doing the thing and… Right,

[00:14:08]  Red: so science is not like deductive logic. This is one of the main things that I think people get confused on. The issue is that people primarily tend to think of reasoning as a form of logic. If you want a really great example of this, think about Mr. Spock in Star Trek. So he supposedly comes from a non -human race that has set emotions aside and relies entirely on reason to solve problems. And this usually, but not always, the show is very specific about this, gives him a superior intellect. So naturally his race of Vulcans relies on logic because everyone thinks that reason and logic are one and the same. This is why you can find these giant piles of books out there about logical fallacies. And supposedly if you study them, you will learn to reason better, okay? Now as a kid watching Star Trek, this never made sense to me. It was more than a little obvious that you can’t really apply logic to hardly anything that we need to reason about. So let’s say you wanna solve the problem of whether or not abortion should be outlawed. One can take the assumption that it’s a baby and one can take the assumption that it’s the woman’s body and then they reason from there. As a kid, I noticed that since the starting assumption is identical to the conclusion, this is the logical fallacy of begging the question or having a circular argument. So logic isn’t going to help you reason about this problem. In fact, there are few, if any problems humans want to solve that can be solved using solely an application of logic.

[00:15:41]  Red: Though as we’re gonna see, Popper did show logic did play an important role, but you just cannot draw conclusions through logic like Mr. Spock wants you to believe.

[00:15:51]  Blue: I think that’s an incredibly fascinating point. And I just wanna put out there for our audience that I think Deutsch’s book that he’s writing if I’m not mistaken right now is about this very issue. Is that right? About people. Oh, no, is it? Oh, I think it’s about debunking the premise that logical fallacies that you know, if you just learn a bunch of logical fallacies you become a more rational person. That’s what I got anyway from the snippet that’s online. I

[00:16:26]  Red: used to have a blog and on that blog I attacked logical fallacies because I think they’re almost, not always but they’re almost never correct. When people try to deploy logical fallacies they almost inevitably use them in a way that doesn’t make sense. Okay. So I suggested instead we should have something called the rational fallacies. We’ll do an episode on that sometime. And I actually think that using Popper’s epistemology you can come up with a set of replacements for logical fallacies that are the actual rational mistakes that people make that have nothing to do with simple logical fallacies. Now, sometimes a logical fallacy can be a rational fallacy. So they’re not like completely compartmentalized from each other. But more often than not if you’re making a mistake in your reasoning it’s not a logical fallacy. It is my observation.

[00:17:16]  Blue: I mean, I think a lot of people just use them to make themselves feel better.

[00:17:21]  Red: Superior or superior. So I’ve actually seen I’ve paid attention to people invoke it. They’ll say, oh, well, you need to review logical fallacies. They’ll put a link or something like that. Like they don’t even tell you what the logical fallacy is in most cases because like nobody knows it’s got nothing to do with the way humans reason. Right? It’s just humans do not reason using logical deduction.

[00:17:42]  Blue: And I will admit straight up I’ve done that before.

[00:17:45]  Red: Have you?

[00:17:45]  Blue: I’ve been that guy who posts the meme. Oh, busted you. You used the logical fallacy.

[00:17:52]  Red: There is such a thing as logical fallacies. People will make logical fallacies. And there are cases where it makes sense to point out a logical fallacy. So I’m not trying to say it never is useful. It’s just nowhere near as useful as you would think, right? It’s because it just isn’t typically people aren’t making logical fallacies. They’re making other kinds of epistemological mistakes. You’re

[00:18:14]  Blue: not going to turn yourself into Mr. Spock by studying logical fallacies.

[00:18:21]  Red: And now it would be useless.

[00:18:23]  Blue: You wouldn’t want to either.

[00:18:25]  Red: So yeah. So the issue here is the logic known as modus ponens. So let me describe this. This takes the form of if X, then why? If X is true, then I can conclude why. So example, if Peter is human, then Peter is mortal. Peter is human. Thus, Peter is mortal. OK, that is modus ponens. I’m just like Latin, so

[00:18:48]  Blue: I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing it right. But we’ll move on. We don’t worry about pronunciation.

[00:18:53]  Red: We don’t. You know what? I’m a layman. It does not matter. I am. I have no reputation to defend. So. OK. So if a fetus is a baby, then I can conclude that terminating it is is murder. Or if the fetus is just a piece of the woman’s body, then I conclude that terminating it that is no worse than cutting your fingernails. There is a logic to the arguments, but only after you start with the assumption that you’re correct. So inductivists thought that what we really needed is a way to inverse modus ponens. What if you could instead of moving from your theory to a consequence, you could move from a consequence to your theory? So inductivists imagined some kind of logic similar to modus ponens, but inverted. So we might do something like this. If all swans are white, then I should only observe white swans. So far, that’s just regular logic using modus ponens. Now let’s invert it. I’ve only ever seen white swans, so it must be that all swans are white. This is the supposed inductive logic. OK. Now, Hume pointed out that this is wrong. No matter how many white swans you see, you can’t guarantee that all swans are white. Yet it seemed intuitively obvious to everyone, including Hume, by the way, that this is how humans reasoned. This led to a crisis. We reason using inductive logic, which is wrong. Thus, undermining the very concept of reason and suggesting that maybe religious dogma or pseudoscience is every bit as valid as scientific theories. This is, Hume’s bringing this out is what led to the words, the problem of induction. OK, I’ve seen the problem of induction actually formalized in different ways. This is one form of it. OK.

[00:20:42]  Red: Now, various attempts were made to solve this problem of induction. The most important of which is that there was an attempt to merge inductive logic with probability theory. The idea is that if you see only white swans, that doesn’t guarantee that all swans are white. Can it at least tell us that likely all swans are white? That is to say, can’t we justify the theory that all swans are white on the grounds that it’s that it is probable rather than it is guaranteed to be true? Now, this is the concept of justified true belief. Now, I always thought that justified true belief was the same as just saying justified as certain. That is not what justified true belief means. And this is the problem with philosophers. They pick terms that are to a layman means something totally different than what it does to a philosopher. OK. So here’s a quote from Joseph Pitts book, Theories of Explanations. He says, the problem is one of determining what it means to say you have enough evidence. So certainty being impossible. And he admits this, the philosophers invented this idea of justified as true enough that we may call it knowledge. Here’s a quote again from Joseph Pitt. In place of certainty, knowledge was claimed to be justified true belief. Page four of Joseph Pitts Theories of Explanation. So justified true belief was never meant to be justified as certain as I think most crit rats think it means. It’s actually this idea that you’re somehow certifying it as knowledge, even though you’re admitting that you don’t know for sure it’s true. So justification in this sense was supposed to be an alternative to certifying something is true. Everybody agreed it was impossible to certify something is true.

[00:22:27]  Red: Does this make justification is technically a form of fallibilism? Maybe, yeah, that’s kind of an interesting thing. You probably wouldn’t normally think of a justificationist as being fallibilist because they’re kind of different schools of thought, but they kind of both have this idea that you can’t guarantee something is true.

[00:22:46]  Blue: Wait, I might not be completely following you. I would think of those as kind

[00:22:51]  Red: of.

[00:22:52]  Blue: Opposites, in a way, just a little bit. And how are you saying that they are

[00:22:58]  Red: because justified true belief, which is what justificationists believed in.

[00:23:02]  Blue: Yeah,

[00:23:03]  Red: never was justified as certain. It was simply this idea that it’s probably certain. Ah, OK, OK, there’s a there’s a thread of fallibilism in justificationism.

[00:23:13]  Blue: They’re not the opposites that you probably thought they were.

[00:23:16]  Red: OK.

[00:23:17]  Blue: OK, not to philosophers or

[00:23:19]  Red: philosophers. OK,

[00:23:21]  Blue: well, probably there’s scientists, too. I mean, even if someone subscribes to justificationism, like as you pointed out before, if you if you press them on it, well, are you really, really certain? And then they’ll probably admit that something closer to fallibilism. Right.

[00:23:38]  Red: Yes. And in fact, if you really look at scientists, the whole language of science is based around the assumption they could be wrong. That’s why everything’s a theory. Everything’s a hypothesis. Right. I mean, science science is to its core non non justificationist in the sense of certifying something is true. They do not ever believe they’re certifying something as true. Right. Yeah. But neither did the justificationists. So I mean, like nobody seems to believe that, right? It’s it’s we’re kind of straw manning when we talk about that. That’s something I know most people don’t know. That’s why I’m bringing this out. OK. OK. So instead, though, the justificationists had in mind kind of being able to certify it is probably true. OK. And the inductive and, of course, there’s probably more than one kind of justificationists. I’m kind of saying later on during Popper’s era, they would have looked at it this way. But maybe originally justificationists would try to say we certified this is true. OK. But they really came to understand that was a problem. It doesn’t work. So inductivists of Popper’s day and today are making a conjecture that the justification is rooted in probability theory, that scientific theories are more likely to be correct than dogmas. The idea was that since nothing could be guaranteed to be true, maybe we could at least guarantee it was probably true or something like that. Now, we just have to work out under this way of thinking what science is doing that causes their theories to be more likely to be correct using probability theory and the problem of induction will be solved. And this has the rather obvious problem. That you can be stated as a question.

[00:25:13]  Red: What does it even mean for a theory to be both probably true and also wrong? This is I got that from David Miller, by the way. The whole line of thought is just wrong. OK. And yet you can kind of see how they came up with it since we can’t guarantee something is true. Maybe we can at least use probability theory. Maybe we can at least justify it as probably true. What was Popper’s answer to justificationism then? So enter Popper. Unlike Hume and Hume thought there really was a problem of induction. Indeed, that’s problem of induction is due to him. Popper became convinced that the whole thing was just a pseudo problem. But Popper did think that inductivists were getting a number of things correct. First, they were right to ask what justifies, quote, acceptance of scientific theories over dogmas. And second, they were right. That reason must be rooted in logic. And third, they were right that we need a way to reason from observation back to theory via an inversion of modus ponens. What the inductivists were wrong about was that there was some magic yet to be discovered form of inductive logic. Popper pointed out also that we already have a way in logic to invert modus ponens. It’s called modus tollens. And that was all we needed to reason from observation back to theory. So let’s talk about modus tollens. It starts the same as modus ponens if X then Y. But this time I’m going to give you not Y. And from there, we can now conclude that X is not true. So example, if Peter is human, then Peter is mortal. Peter is not mortal. Thus, Peter is not human. Makes perfect logical sense.

[00:26:50]  Red: And we are reasoning now backwards, inverted from modus ponens. This insight led Popper to an astounding, astounding idea about how humans beings actually reason from there. He worked out why scientific ideas are preferable to dogmas or preferable to pseudoscience, if you prefer. So you are, in fact, justified in some sense to prefer scientific theories over dogmas or pseudoscience. So Popper’s epistemology now. So Popper imagined humans human reasoning working like this. We start with conjecturing a bunch of possible theories. Obviously, you actually start with a problem you want to solve. But then we start from there with conjecturing a bunch of possible theories. And we put those theories into a contest with each other. So he imagined this as a sort of Darwinian struggle to survive, but among theories rather than organisms. The champions of each theory will try to explain why their theory is preferable to the competing theory while showing that one of two things, by showing one of two things. One, you can show a problem with the competing theories by showing that they make false predictions. That is, you can show counter examples of how that that competing theory makes predictions that fail. So there must be something wrong with that theory or at least some of the auxiliary theories that it’s based on. While presumably showing that your theory makes the correct prediction. OK, or you can show why there why your theory explains things the other theory can’t. OK, so, for example, show positive examples can show how their theory can make positive predictions that the other theory didn’t make. OK, now, preferably you want to do these two things at the very same time. And that is the gold standard. OK.

[00:28:36]  Red: So Popper called this where you’re doing both of these at the same time. He called this a crucial test. So basically you showed that the competing theory makes a prediction differently than your theory. Then you go do the experiment and then you go. You know, voila, your theory gets it correct. The competing theory gets it wrong. You have at once shown that your theory made a positive prediction and the other three made a negative prediction. And this is the example of the editing expedition. All right, they go out and they’re going to do a contest between Newton and Einstein’s general relativity, and they do the eclipse thing. And boom, they suddenly show Newton made the wrong prediction and Einstein’s made the right prediction. And so at once you’ve shown a problem with with the one theory and you’ve shown a positive example for the other theory. That’s the gold standard. That is a crucial test. OK. Now, by showing advantages of your theory and disadvantages of the competing theory, the goal is to kill off the competing theory while yours is the last standing. This is survival of the fittest, if you will, of theories. OK, rather than organisms, the surviving theory, which has objectively outperformed every single competing theory currently known, that’s important, is now, by definition, the best theory. It would make no sense to go with some inferior theory that made worse predictions or fewer predictions. Thus, you are, at least for the moment until a better theory is conjectured, justified in accepting the best theory for the moment. This was Popper’s answer to the original question of why should I prefer scientific theories over dogmas? Notice a few features of Popper’s answer.

[00:30:12]  Red: He never requires that we guarantee a theory to be correct. Although neither did the inductivists. OK. He does offer a justification of sorts to why we prefer scientific theories over dogmas, namely that they have gone through this contest with other theories and come out at the last standing one. But the only guarantee that this offers is that this theory is better than any known current competitor based on the tests we’ve currently thought up so far. OK. But there may be a better competitor discovered in the future that will outperform this theory. So this forces us to leave the door open forever to that possibility. So Popper’s answer is entirely rooted in regular old deductive logic. And it doesn’t require any magic inductive logic that everyone was desperately trying to discover. This last needs a bit, a bit of further explanation. Why is it a contest of theories like Modus Tolens? Recall, Modus Tolens starts with if X than Y. Think of the theory as X and Y as the observation. What Popper had in mind was that if you can show that the competing theory made a false prediction, that is to say you have a counter example to the theory. Then similar to Modus Tolens, that observation Y now tells you that something is wrong with theory X. OK, but there’s a problem with that. OK, that is roughly correct. But in real life, it doesn’t work that way. There is a problem that Popper did work out over the course of his career, but that maybe he didn’t do the best job of explaining.

[00:31:43]  Red: And his later students, particularly Lactos and Deutch, tried to resolve this better and have written some really interesting things that try to resolve some of the problem that Popper left behind here. Now, I’m going to argue Popper didn’t really leave a problem behind that if you actually read across all his books, he does address this problem. But it’s not the most obvious that he does. Right. And I think that’s why there’s kind of this lingering. We’re not quite sure how to deal with this. And people have to come up with different answers to it. The issue is that science doesn’t really work like Modus Tolens, either. The issue is that science never takes the form of testing just a single theory. All theories are built on other theories. So you are really testing every single auxiliary theory as well. To put this into logical form, we have if X, which is the theory, and A and B and C and D and E and blah, blah, blah. OK, the auxiliary theories that the theory depends on, then why? Why being the observation? I just found not why. So unfortunately, according to Modus Tolens, all I really know is not X or A or B or C or D, et cetera. It’s one of them is wrong. You don’t know which one. So I haven’t, in any realistic sense, refuted the theory in question using the logic of Modus Tolens. This is the famous Dune -Quine problem in a nutshell. Still, Popper was onto something here. If a failed prediction can’t really be said to refute a theory, it can at least be said to refute the combination of the theory plus all the auxiliary theories it relies on.

[00:33:12]  Red: Or to put it another way, it demonstrates objectively that there is a problem that the defenders of the theory must now solve. This is particularly powerful if it’s done in a crucial test where the other theory makes a differing prediction and it’s correct. OK, now you don’t just have a problem to be solved. You have a competing theory that has solved the problem and you now must deal with that. OK, so the Eddington expedition was a counter example to Newton while also showing that it was not a counter example to general relativity. Given that context, this really does put Newton’s theory on the rocks while offering an alternative theory that isn’t impacted by the problem. While also I note explaining why Newton’s theory had a problem. So side note here, actually, the Eddington expedition did not really show this. Like really, we need to probably do a podcast and that is myth that it showed that. But for the moment, we’ll stick with the standard story that it did and keep to keep things simple. If you really want to know any expedition kicked off later, more experiments that then eventually became overwhelming. But Eddington expedition itself had massive problems. In fact, it actually the average position of the star, according to the expedition, was actually almost exactly matched Newton’s, not not Einstein’s. Eddington kind of talked around that and explained why he thought that certain instruments were better instruments than others, things like that, which we kind of know now in retrospect, he was doing it based on the fact that he wanted general relativity to come out as the winning theory. Does a crucial test therefore refute a theory?

[00:34:55]  Red: Lakatos and Deutsch suggested we call this a refutation, but even they admitted it doesn’t really refute the competing theory other than tentatively. We’ve had real life cases where a theory failed a crucial test only to come back later. The best example of this, I know, is light wave theory versus light particle theory. Light particle theory failed a crucial crucial test against light wave theory and was therefore considered by the scientific community to be refuted, just like Lakatos and Deutsch want to call this. But then Einstein showed the photoelectric effect and that was a crucial test, too. But this time against light wave theory. So the light particle theory was resurrected and both theories were considered approximately correct, but in different domains, until a better theory merging the two quantum mechanics was invented. So strictly speaking, no theory ever gets refuted under Popper’s epistemology. If by refuted, you have in mind some specific event. OK, what really happens is the better theory subsumes the lesser theory. Even then, there is no guarantee that the subsumption is total and we always have to have to be open to the possibility that an old theory will make a comeback to solve some problem that the supposed better theory can’t solve. Now, it seems really hard to believe that this could ever happen between Newton and general relativity, right? Nobody anticipates Newton’s going to make a comeback some day against general relativity. One of the reasons why is because we can demonstrate general relativity makes the same predictions as Newton except in circumstances where we know Newton makes false predictions. So naturally, no one expects this to ever happen that Newton will make a comeback. But there is no guarantee Einstein is more correct.

[00:36:32]  Red: It could be that there’s some weird set of circumstances that we have yet to discover where Newton actually is more correct. I don’t believe that for an instance, but like you can never rule that possibility out, right? The real reason we consider Newton a refuted theory is because we simply do not currently know of any such observations. Anyone that disagrees and says, oh, no, I think Newton is more correct in some circumstances, they are welcome to go find an observation and publish it. And if it’s repeatable, that will at that point causes to rethink the assumption that Newton was subsumed into general relativity. Absent someone actually showing that observation and publishing it, we’re going to continue to believe general relativity subsumes Newton.

[00:37:15]  Blue: But you’ve also told me before that there’s a conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Is that correct?

[00:37:23]  Red: That is correct. I’m that’s a different issue.

[00:37:27]  Blue: OK.

[00:37:28]  Red: I’m intentionally well, I’m intentionally picking two theories that were one subsumes the other. General relativity does not subsume quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics does not subsume general relativity. They are just in conflict. They’re just in conflict. That’s right.

[00:37:42]  Blue: OK.

[00:37:43]  Red: And that’s why they’re looking for a theory of quantum gravity, right? They want one that subsumes both because that’s what science does. Science cares not about refuting theories, it cares about subsuming them.

[00:37:52]  Blue: I see.

[00:37:54]  Red: OK. So for now, our best theory is objectively general relativity, not Newton because we have no unknown counter examples of where Newton is superior. That is all the justification you’re going to get or that you’re going to need in science. Now, this idea of subsumption is one of the single most important ideas in Popper’s epistemology. He did talk about it a lot, but for some reason it gets overlooked. A Popperian Darwinian contest of ideas isn’t really about trying to refute the competing theory per se. You can think of it that way if you want, I’m not against the word refutation here. Just you need to be careful because it doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s about trying to show that your theory is so superior to the competing theory that cue the song, anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you. This is the true gold standard of scientific epistemology, not refutation. Once you realize this, the whole doom crime problem just disappears. Yes, you can’t be a single observation refute competing theories, but who cares? What we’re really after is to show all other theories have unresolved problems that my theory can resolve and that there are just no current alternatives. Interestingly, Popper’s epistemology is properly a subsumption of induction. It still has all the parts of induction that make induction so interesting, but without the problems of induction, Popper’s philosophy of science shows how we can, quote, justify accepting scientific theories over dogmas without needing to guarantee the theory is either correct or even probably correct. So let me actually, for those who are really maybe nails in the chalkboard or

[00:39:33]  Red: that I keep referring to Popper’s theory as a kind of justification because they just are convinced that Popper was the opposite of justification. Let me actually quote Popper here. He says, we can never really justify a theory, but then he goes on to explain that we can find a rule, quote, of preferring theories which are better corroborated than others. We can sometimes rationally justify the preference of a theory in light of its corroborations. This is page 281 and 282 of logic of scientific discovery. So whereas the justification is we’re trying to justify the theory, what Popper really justifies is reference for a theory and that subtle difference does matter. And then he also shows compared to induction, how we can utilize regular deductive logic for our reasoning without needing a special inductive logic. And Popper’s epistemology shows how we can reason from observation to theory via counter examples rather than positive examples like inductive logic by creating problems for theories that the alternative theory may not have with induction now properly subsumed by Popper’s epistemology, at least for our purposes today. There are a number of interesting things that come out of this new understanding of how science works. One obvious problem is that it is that don’t all contested ideas, including dogmas more or less follow the same pattern. Consider religious dogma over the ages. There is hardly a lack of criticism available in the form of a competing religion. Can’t we therefore say that religion actually followed Popper’s epistemology too? We’ll just make a small adjustment. We’ll replace observations with criticisms and we’ll say that religious dogmas are in contest with each other, where they try to criticize the competing dogma while showing the advantages of their dogma.

[00:41:22]  Red: The religion that wins is the one that gets the most converts by showing their dogma has fewer problems and the most benefits compared to the competing dogma. Thus religion does or so goes this argument, engage in a culture of criticism and thus follow Popper’s epistemology other than that we’re replacing counter example by observation with the more generic criticism where counter examples are just a kind of criticism. This is one of the most overlooked aspects of those that champion a culture of criticism as the most important aspect of Popper’s epistemology. In fact, there have been many cultures or criticism throughout history, if only in the form of competing religions or countries or ideologies or competing politics, right? There have always been many individual cultures that allowed for quite a bit of criticism as well. Even Deutsche admits to the beginning of many enlightenments, but I think that those are way more common than people realize. Furthermore, it isn’t like there’s some culture today that has ever not tried sometimes quite effectively quashing certain kinds of criticism. Our society does that, tries to do that, does do that on a regular basis, right? So strictly speaking, there has never there has never not been a culture of criticism in some loose sense, nor has there ever been a culture of criticism in some strict sense. Obviously, it’s really kind of more a matter of degrees that we are much better at culture of criticism today than the people from the past. But there’s always been culture of criticism to some degree. Now, folk epistemology, which is the term I use for the way humans reason by default throughout history is well aware of these aspects of Popper’s epistemology, that all theories are in contest with competing theories.

[00:43:09]  Red: They often kill each other as part of this contest back in the in the past, right? They were also well, well aware that you should try to refute theories by criticizing the competing theories rather than killing people. This was actually very common, like St. Augustine discussed this right way back in time, right? I mean, this is something that the ancients had tons of knowledge about. They believe that you should try to show that your theory explains more than the competing theory, that is, you’re trying to maximize explanation. It’s a perfectly natural to claim that your ideology explains more and better than the competing ideology. In fact, Tom ism of the 13th century, which is the official philosophy of the Catholic Church did this extensively. OK, this is 13th century. Well, what word are you saying there? Tom ism. Tom ism. It’s St. Thomas.

[00:43:58]  Blue: OK,

[00:43:59]  Red: it’s his philosophy. OK. He’s extensively like it writes volumes, trying to maximize explanation around theology. But this is hardly the only example. The ancients completely had this idea that you’re supposed to maximize explanation. To many people, these things may be what Popper’s epistemology is, but they really they really aren’t different from just regular folk epistemology. If so, if it was actually true that Popper’s epistemology was culture of criticism and maximize explanation and, you know, criticize competing theories, if that’s all there was to Popper’s epistemology, then Popper’s epistemology would be identical to folk epistemology or to be, in other words, identical to every group of people throughout history. And it would not be a rational improvement. But Popper knew this and actually he had a really clever solution to it. Think of epistemology as having two axes. OK. The first axi is labeled criticize the compete competing theory to show problems with them. And the second axes is labeled formulate your theories boldly so that they take heavier risks against empirical tests. This is the axis that folk epistemology misses entirely is the second axis. And it is why science succeeds and folk epistemology failed throughout history, even when there was a culture of criticism. So the gold standard of the second axis is to formulate your theory such that you can check them empirically via experiment. This is how Popper explains this. Observations are not just everyday criticisms based on your inner gut feelings. They are objective criticisms that everyone can check for themselves. Popper, the way Popper would put this is he would say the objectivity of science is in the inner subjectivity of experiments.

[00:45:45]  Red: It’s the fact that we are actually criticizing these scientific theories with experiments that anyone can go do and repeat for themselves. So the old adage about that criticism doesn’t land for me. That is folk epistemology, whereas show me the empirical evidence counter to my theory, that is pure science critical rationalism. Now, a straight observation isn’t what Popper had in mind. He had in mind the ability to do an experiment, a repeatable experiment that anyone can go repeat for themselves. Religious dogma rarely, if ever allows for such repeatable experiments. So a scientific theory by which we really mean a theory highly corroborated by science, not not some early research project. Scientific theory in this sense is one that has been formulated such that we can test it via empirical experiments. Now, we have to now answer the question, what’s an empirical experiment? And this actually turns out to be a huge part of what Popper realized and came up with and explains in his books. This leads to the question, what kind of theories allow for repeatable experiments that can be used as objective criticisms or intersubjective criticisms, if you prefer to Popper? This was the center of his epistemology because he saw it as defining the boundary between empirically testable theories and non empirically testable theories. This is the demarcation criteria. Consider a theory like Bigfoot exists. This theory is worded purely as what in logic would call an existential statement of the form there exists a Bigfoot. It makes a truth claim, but offers no constraints on time or space of where big this Bigfoot exists. Many people would consider this an empirically testable theory.

[00:47:29]  Red: And I can understand why they would say that because you could, in principle, test the theory by finding Bigfoot and thus verifying that this theory is correct. OK, but there is clearly something wrong with this theory in terms of how science might look at it. It is not inconceivable that some scientists will decide to test this theory by, say, searching the entire woods for Bigfoot, hoping to find him. But if the test came up negative, you still have learned nothing about theory. You might have just missed Bigfoot, or maybe he can, like Bigfoot believers believe, jump through dimensions and avoid scientists or something along those lines. OK. So this clearly isn’t the kind of test we have in mind when we think of a scientific experiment. I’m not against calling it a test. I’m not even against calling it an empirical test if you really want to. But in the scientific sense, this is not what we had in mind when we talked about an empirical test. What we really want is a definitive test. Well, where we perform the experiment and at the end, no matter the outcome, we’ve learned something about the theory in question. So Popper realized that such an experiment must have a very limited spatiotemporal aspect to it. If the theory had instead been Bigfoot’s nest is found within this particular acre of land in the woods, we could then go check for ourselves because now we have constraints on space and time such that it’s realistic. We can just go check, right? So if we found the nest with Bigfoot hanging out with a Loch Ness monster and they were watching the Super Bowl, that would teach us one thing about the theory.

[00:49:02]  Red: Or if we found no nest anywhere on that land, that would show us something else about the theory. But either way, we’ve definitively learned something about the theory. We aren’t left in this weird state of doing the test. At the end, we know nothing more than when we started. So Popper realized something, a good experiment is rooted in good constraints specified by the theory to spatiotemporal constraints. The constraints have to be so specified that we can search a very narrow spatiotemporal region for the required result. And if we fail to come up with the result, we know something was wrong with the theory or at least with one of the assumptions we built the experiment on. Or to put this in another way, what we are really doing in a scientific experiment is we are using the constraints proposed by a theory to test the theory. Constraints are logically speaking equivalent to the opposite of an existential statement. They are a universal statement in logic. So an empirical theory, by which we mean one that can perform a definitive experiment on, must contain some constraints in the form of one or more universal statements. So a good theory is one that boldly claims nature or reality is constrained in some way. That means all definitive tests or experiments take the form of trying to find a counter -example to those constraints. This means experiments are specifically logically rooted in counter -examples, not positive examples. Now, don’t make the mistake of thinking this means positive examples are unimportant. They are important. But for an entirely different reason that I’m getting to. Now, this is quite the insight that experiments are specifically about trying to, in some sense, find counter -examples, not positive examples.

[00:50:46]  Red: To realize why this must be, consider the idea of testing a theory, but not in the setting of a crucial test against a competing theory. So you go out and you test Newton’s theory long before general relativity exists and say you find that the experiment passes. OK, did you prove the theory correct? No, of course not, because the theory has an infinity of consequences. And the only way that you could realistically verify the theory is correct would be to experimentally test the infinity of cases. That’s physically impossible. It’s intractable, so you can’t do it. But if you found a counter -example, that would not, while that would not refute Newton’s theory, it might actually be a problem for one of the supporting auxiliary theories. It does refute the combination of Newton’s theory and the supporting theories. So now you would have an objective problem that must be solved, not just someone’s personal subjective opinion of a criticism. Notice how this is very unlike dogma, where sure you can offer subjective criticisms to dogmas. For example, I’m a Mormon, and I’ve had many Catholics tell me your version of the Trinity doctrine makes Jesus less divine than the father because they don’t share the same substance. But there seems to be no objective way and they offer this criticism. And to them, this is a very compelling criticism that refutes Mormon theology and shows that Catholic theology is better, right? But there is no objective way to test this criticism. What the hell is a substance in the first place? Can I check for myself that Jesus and the father don’t have the same substance?

[00:52:22]  Red: Can I check for myself that if Jesus does not have the same substance as the father, that this somehow lowers his divine rating? And what if a substance is just a common shared moral purpose, which is the Mormon theology version of this? Since other Christians can’t define what a substance concretely is in the first place, there’s no way to tell if the Mormon version counts or not. It’s all just a matter of subjective opinion, okay? So there’s all sorts of criticisms that fly around in a culture of criticism between religious dogmas and they’re all subjective, so they don’t matter. You can’t make the same sort of progress you can with an objective criticism. So now compare this to Einstein. Einstein’s followers saying to Newton the editing expedition obtained an observation that matches our theory and not yours and you are welcome to go try the experiment for yourself, which is what they did, by the way. This is the nature of how an objective criticism is different than a subjective criticism and why observations are not merely one kind of criticism. And this is what experimental tests really give us, objective criticisms. This is why a culture of criticism is not enough on its own, although it’s very important. It’s definitely a precursor, if you will. Religion had a culture of criticism between religions, if not within a religion for centuries without any progress being made. Popper’s real insight here was that a culture of criticism is meaningless if you don’t also have the right attitude towards your theories, such that you choose to specify them in a way that they are risky by making bold predictions.

[00:53:55]  Red: This is our second axis that delineates Popper’s critical rationalism from folk epistemology that was used throughout the ages. Popper had in mind four things and I quoted this in our past podcast that I’m not going to quote, but I’m going to summarize here. That the theory is made as much as possible axiomatic so that we can easily apply logic to it without surreptitiously being able to vary it constantly to save it from counter examples. The theory constrains, and also the theory constrains as much as possible, more on that in a moment. By the way, saying the theory constrains as much as possible is exactly equivalent to saying it has as much empirical content as possible. He also had in mind that the theory is not ad hoc. Popper defined not being ad hoc as having your own independently testable consequences, entirely unrelated to the problem that you want to solve. This is exactly equivalent to what Deutsch calls reach, okay? If a counter example of the theory is found, you aren’t allowed to add, and this is the fourth thing that Popper had in mind, that if a counter example of the theory is found, you aren’t allowed to ad hoc save it via introducing an ad hoc auxiliary theory. This last is equivalent to taking a critical attitude towards your theories. It’s similar to Deutsch’s hard to vary criteria, but see episode 82 or some thoughts and criticisms and how it might somewhat differ from this, and why this is better than the hard to vary criteria. So let me repeat those since that was a little bit of a long paragraph. Popper had four things in mind, make the theory axiomatic, make it constrain as much as possible.

[00:55:31]  Red: The theory is not ad hoc, and you do not ad hoc save it through an auxiliary theory. Those are the four things Popper had in mind that make up the second axis that differentiates critical rationalism from folk epistemology. This last requirement that you don’t save your theories through ad hoc auxiliary theories is called the no ad hoc rule. It says, you are only allowed to put forward theories that are independently testable, that is have enough reach that they have testable consequences other than the problem you’re trying to solve. A counter example tells us something is wrong with our theory or rather wrong with one of our theories, but perhaps not the specific one that we wish to study. In a fairly common case, the theory that proves incorrect via a counter example might just be the theory that your instruments were working correctly. However, I would note that the theory, my instruments are working correctly is itself an independently testable theory and thus not an ad hoc theory because you can test if the instruments working in some other way, it can be independently tested other than the experiment that you were doing. Therefore, trying to save your theory by my instruments weren’t working correctly under Popper’s epistemology, there is nothing wrong with that. You can save your theory from a counter example using the claim my instruments weren’t working correctly so long as you can show via an independent test that your instruments were miscalibrated. So it isn’t that a scientist isn’t allowed to save their theory from counter example period. That can’t be correct because things go wrong with auxiliary theories all the time.

[00:57:11]  Red: It’s that you want to save your theories from counter examples, that if you want to save your theory from a counter example, you’re expected to do so via a no non ad hoc auxiliary theory. That is to say one that can be independently tested. The upshot of all this is that one of the most interesting but overlooked aspect of Popper’s epistemology that I call Popper’s ratchet. It’s the idea that you were only allowed to solve problems by increasing the empirical content of your collective theories, never by decreasing the empirical content.

[00:57:44]  Blue: Did you concretely define what an ad hoc theory is?

[00:57:48]  Red: I did, but it’s one that to repeat, it’s one that has independent tests separate from the problem you’re trying to solve. So an ad hoc theory would be one that has no independent tests.

[00:57:59]  Blue: Okay,

[00:58:00]  Red: okay. So it has no reach, right? It’s a theory that has no reach. So it’s got no independent tests. So it’s got no reach. Let’s say it’s the, those two are the same thing. And that’s

[00:58:09]  Blue: Popper’s language, correct?

[00:58:11]  Red: Reach is Deutsche’s language, ad hoc is Popper’s language.

[00:58:16]  Blue: Okay.

[00:58:17]  Red: Okay, once you understand that the no ad hoc rule and its consequence, Popper’s ratchet, you realize that science is a competitive sport or at least it’s a competitive game like chess, okay? Science consists of legal and illegal moves. In science, you may show a problem with a competing theory via a counter -example, show an advantage of your theory via a positive example that other theories didn’t predict, or you can save your theory from one of the problems that the other side was trying to do. But you must always do so via increasing empirical content. If you try to make one of those moves without increasing empirical content, the move is considered illegal and you get grounded as pseudoscientist. This is why scientists are correctly obsessed with empirical and experimental evidence. They aren’t empiricists, they are critical rationalists. If counter -examples say something is objectively wrong, go figure out how to solve that but only by increasing empirical content of your theories, then what does a positive example tell us? Now, many Poparians claim nothing. I’ve talked to many, many, many, many Poparians that claim that Popper was wrong to play so much emphasis on corroboration of theories when only refutations matter. The attention to what Popper actually says, we can never rationally justify a theory but we can find a rule of preferring theories which are better corroborated. That’s positive examples than others. We can sometimes rationally justify the preference of a theory in light of its corroborations. Okay, corroborations just being positive outcomes for an experiment. Popper absolutely believed in this idea of the importance of corroborations and positive outcomes in tests. Like he really, really believed in it. This idea that they don’t matter and they mean nothing.

[01:00:09]  Red: It just isn’t something that comes from Popper. It seems to have come from later critical rationalists not from Popper himself, okay. And now I can, let me just steel man that point of view though. There is a reason why later critical rationalists, not Popper, tried to claim that positive examples mean nothing. And you can kind of make sense of it. If all you’re really doing is refuting theories by counter example and then you don’t learn anything, the idea is you don’t learn anything from a positive example. Then it would typically be said like, well, you got a bunch of competing theories, positive outcomes don’t matter. But when you do the experiments and the tests that knocks out the competing theories and then you’re the final surviving one, I mean, that sounds almost perperate, right? So you can kind of see how, based on a kind of rough first order look at Popper, you might think Popper was emphasizing corroboration for no good reason, okay. I’m going to explain why he did. And it’s super important in the fact that later critical rationalists started to downplay it, that’s a problem, okay. So if it were really true that positive outcomes attested didn’t mean anything, then you could really easily make the test that you shouldn’t bother testing at all. And I’ve actually met at least one Popperian that tells me that’s the case, right? Or at least I know some that aren’t quite sure how to answer that question. But Popper actually gave a definitive answer to this question. To understand it, we need to tie it back to the idea of ad hocness, okay. Recall that to Popper and ad hoc theory is one that has no independently testable implications.

[01:01:55]  Red: So imagine if general relativity solved the problems known at the time for Newton, namely the perihelion of Mercury and the Mickelson -Morley light experiments, but didn’t give a single additional testable implication, okay. It would have been weird to prefer general relativity in this case over Newton’s theory because it’s really just an ad hoc theory. It would be trivial to come up with an infinity of such ad hoc theories. So there would be no reason to prefer one over the other and experiments would quickly become meaningless since all the theories would make the same right predictions. What really makes general relativity convincing was the edigin expedition, not the fact that it solved the perihelion of Mercury and the Mickelson -Morley light experiment problem. And now why is that? It’s because it was an independent test. It was an implication other than the known problems at the time. That’s what made it so convincing, okay. It showed that the theory had reach or in other words that it had its own empirical evidence, empirical content I mean. To put this another way, what science is trying to do is to seek theories that are as little ad hoc as possible. By the way, that is almost a quote from Popper, which is just the same as saying that they have the highest empirical content or the most reach. So let me state that again because I feel like this is important. To be as little ad hoc as possible is the same as saying you have the highest empirical content which is the same as saying you have the most reach. Okay, recall Bruce’s rule moral reach doesn’t count as reach. Perical reach is the only type of reach that counts.

[01:03:39]  Red: This is equivalent to our second axis by the way, which makes critical rationalism superior to full -copistemology. So under full -copistemology, we try to refute the competing theory without regard to whether or not our theory has any empirical content. Creationists are correct that Darwinian theory is full of unsolved problems. This is from the episode on the problem of open -endedness some of which likely even refute the current theory and its current form. In fact, let me state this more strongly so that you actually understand what I’m talking about. The types of things creationists come up with a lot of it’s garbage, I will admit but some of the problems that they’re raising for Darwinian theory probably are refutations of Darwinian theory because Darwinian theory is a false theory. Darwinian theory is very much wrong in some important way and that was what I was trying to bring out with the problem of open -endedness. So creationists are actually right, they’re right that they’ve refuted Darwinian theory in some sense. What creationists fail to understand is that their theory has no empirical content at all so it doesn’t matter. And the reason why is because empirical content is a choice. Surely creationism could have empirical content. As a creationist, back when I was a kid, I used to try to work out empirical versions of creationism, imagine the experiments where I’d show that the dinosaur fossils were all being misdated due to the dinosaurs actually getting wiped out in the flood a few thousand years ago or something along those lines. In other words, creationism could be formulated such that it put constraints on reality and is thus testable.

[01:05:18]  Red: But the moment I’d think of such a testable version of creationism it didn’t take long for me to find counter examples that I couldn’t do anything with. Plus I started to collect problems that Darwinian evolution solved that creationism was just silent on, more on this in a second. So whether or not a theory has empirical content is a factor of a person’s willingness to formulate the theory boldly by making it offer specific testable constraints. This is why the choice to not have ad hoc theories is really equivalent to having a critical attitude. Okay, so poppers demarcation criteria where your theories have to be formulated such that they have empirical content that could in principle have a counter example to them. That’s exactly equivalent to having a critical attitude because every theory can be formulated such that it can’t be refuted and every theory can be formulated such that it can be refuted. Now let’s take the two axes again. The first axis is labeled criticize the competing theories to show problems with them. The second axis is labeled formulate your theories boldly so they take heavy risks against empirical tests. Now let’s relabel those as first axis show unresolved counter examples that potentially show us the theory is wrong. And the second axis we could relabel as show your theory explains more by making daring predictions via constraints on nature that we couldn’t have foreseen without the theory. So we have these… So we have the two axes that we care about. The first is that the theory has unresolved counter examples that potentially show us the theory is wrong. Though we can never know for sure that they don’t instead show us that one of the auxiliary theories is wrong.

[01:07:08]  Red: The second axis is if the theory explains more or not by making daring predictions that we couldn’t have foreseen without the theory. As we’ll see this is exactly equivalent to saying the theory has more empirical content. To see why this is let’s imagine a scenario where we have two competing theories and we come across an observation that doesn’t refute the first theory but wasn’t predicted by it either. Okay, now I’ve used an example multiple times on this podcast that’s exactly like that. It’s the theory eating oranges stops scurvy versus vitamin C stops scurvy. Okay, so let’s think of these as competing theories and why does vitamin C stops scurvy have more empirical content than oranges stops scurvy? It’s because it is more specific. It’s a more specific theory and thus makes more specific predictions by constraining reality more. Specifically vitamin C stops scurvy explains why oranges stops scurvy but oranges because oranges are high in vitamin C but this more specific theory makes predictions that the less empirical theory can’t make. For example, it also predicts that chili peppers, kale and kiwis should stop scurvy because they’re high in vitamin C also. If any of those failed to stop scurvy since they are high in vitamin C then the theory vitamin C stops scurvy has a counter example that doesn’t apply to the original theory oranges stops scurvy. So the more specific theory is bolder or riskier by having higher empirical content due to explaining more and therefore having more potential counter examples. These are all the same thing to be bold, to be risky, to have higher empirical content, to explain more, to have reach. These are synonyms. Okay, it’s the same as being non ad hoc.

[01:09:03]  Red: But let’s say you find that kiwis also stops scurvy. Is that a counter example to the theory oranges stops scurvy? Well, no, of course not. The original theory oranges stops scurvy is completely silent on whether or not kiwis stops scurvy. Further, if kiwis stops scurvy, we actually by experiment find that they do, that in no way means that we were wrong that oranges do too. What is really going on is that science prefers theories that explain more and therefore have more empirical content. This is a restatement of Popper’s Ratchet, which is merely a consequence of the no ad hoc rule. But here’s the thing. Let’s say we do find a positive example as an experiment to the theory vitamin C stops scurvy. Let’s say we eat a kiwi and we don’t get scurvy. That positive example does tell us something about the theory vitamin C stops scurvy. And it also tells us something about its relationship to the original theory oranges stops scurvy. Namely, it proves that the theory or vitamin C stops scurvy isn’t an ad hoc theory because it has reach or independently testable consequences. This is the idea of corroboration and why it’s so central to Popperian epistemology. It’s not what it really shows is lack of ad hocness. Okay, or the existence that the theory has reach. So positive examples, let me restate that because I know I’m doing my best here and I know that a lot of this is probably new enough to people that they’re not gonna quite get what I’m saying on a first try. A positive outcome experiment tells you something about the lack of ad hocness that the theory has. So it has to do with the second axis, not the first axis.

[01:11:00]  Red: So I do get an argument here sometimes that goes like this. Prior to testing vitamin C stops scurvy, one might say that is no longer an ad hoc theory because it is independently testable. So vitamin C stops scurvy. So let’s say that we’ve all accepted oranges stops scurvy and Peter has now proposed vitamin C stops scurvy as a better theory. Okay, so I’ll get an argument from some paparians that at this point, vitamin, even though we haven’t tested it yet, the theory of vitamin C stops scurvy is the better theory because it’s more empirical. And you can kind of see where they’re coming from, why they would say that, okay? And it’s not an ad hoc theory. We can see how to test it. Let’s go try eating kiwis instead of oranges. So it’s called the better theory. So in fact, I’ve actually had paparians argue to me at this point that we should give that theory equal status to the current best theory even before testing it due to it being a non ad hoc theory. That is it has independent tests. But in fact, here’s the problem. It’s trivially easy to come up with such theories. Maybe orange, the orange peels the white fluffy stuff on the inside, that’s what actually stops scurvy, you know vitamin D stops scurvy. We’re talking about maybe Florida oranges here. Like you can come up with an infinity of trivially easy theories that are in fact independently testable, but just haven’t been tested yet.

[01:12:30]  Red: Well, I can understand why people saying we should give it, maybe it even deserves some level of status, but it’s not really yet a better theory than oranges stop scurvy prior to testing it because there’s like a whole bunch of alternative theories that are equally testable. And somebody has to take the effort to decide I think it’s this one and then go test it. We don’t really know for sure that at this point the theory is superior or not until we actually have a positive example by experiment to demonstrate that fact, to differentiate it between the infinity of other testable theories that haven’t been tested yet. This is why positive outcomes in experiments, positive examples are so important to Popper’s epistemology. They are the way you differentiate a theory so that you know this theory not only has independent tests, which is one level, but it’s actually past independent tests. And therefore we now know vitamin C stop scurvy is actually a better theory than oranges stop scurvy. Whereas vitamin D stop scurvy, that’s also an independently testable theory, but we don’t know at this point that it’s better than oranges stop scurvy. And in fact, it’s not better than oranges stop scurvy because it’s a false theory. Consider if we had mistakenly thought that vitamin D stop scurvy because we were using oranges from Florida, which happened to be high in vitamin D. This theory is not ad hoc and it’s more empirical than oranges stop scurvy. Should we immediately endorse it as a better theory? We should not until we’ve tested it and we find a positive example for it.

[01:14:12]  Red: When we do not find a positive example for it, we’ll consider vitamin D to be stop scurvy to be problematic and we’ll go back to oranges stop scurvy until we have a better theory to replace it that has actually survived severe testing. So really we’re looking not just for a non ad hoc theory, but a non ad hoc theory that has survived severe corroborating tests before we are in a position to say, this theory explains more than the old theory.

[01:14:41]  Blue: Got a little hung up on this Florida oranges being high

[01:14:45]  Red: in vitamin D. There used to be a commercial about Florida oranges being high in vitamin D.

[01:14:51]  Blue: I knew you were thinking of something like that, at least according to chat GPT, that may not be true. I’m not sure it’s actually true.

[01:14:59]  Red: It’s more a joke.

[01:15:01]  Blue: Okay, okay, okay.

[01:15:03]  Red: Florida oranges is like a brand.

[01:15:05]  Blue: I just don’t want to repeat misinformation here.

[01:15:09]  Red: Yeah, Florida oranges doesn’t mean oranges from Florida. It was like a brand.

[01:15:12]  Blue: Oh, I see. Maybe it’s orange juice fortified with vitamin D. I suspect that’s what it actually is. They were fortified with orange juice with vitamin D.

[01:15:20]  Red: They wanted you to believe that the sun was giving the vitamin D, and it was typical advertising campaign. Sorry, just want to be accurate here. Okay, so according to Popper, positive examples are very important to science. Maybe even just as important as counter examples, but for a totally different reason. Whereas counter examples show problems, positive examples show increased explanatory power and thus increased empirical content or lack of ad hocness. This is the Popperian concept of corroboration in a nutshell. Again, ideally we want a true crucial test that does both of these at once. Okay, and that was why I took this kind of big aside on vitamin C stop scurvy versus oranges stop scurvy. That’s an example where the two aren’t really in competition with each other. So you’re judging them solely on the second axis, not the first axis, right? Because nothing that refutes the first theory won’t also refute the second theory. So, but we can still judge them and that’s why we need the both axes is we can still judge them. We can still judge vitamin C stop scurvy as the better theory if it passes tests then oranges stop scurvy and it will even subsume and replace oranges stop scurvy once we have corroborated that vitamin C stops scurvy. Okay, but this is also why we prefer the second theory over the first is because it entirely subsumes the first theory. To be clear, that means vitamin C stop scurvy once it’s passed a positive test has subsumed oranges stop scurvy but it does not subsume it until it has passed a positive test. Presumably more than one test. We would want to severely test it, right?

[01:17:08]  Red: But, and it would have to be a repeatable test and we’re not changing any of that but we’ll just say survives a test as a shorthand for that. Not all positive examples count only ones that would have counted as a counter example if the test had failed or to put it other way positive examples only count when the theory is making an unforeseen and risky prediction that no other competing theory can explain. This makes sense, Newton and general relativity make nearly all the same predictions except in a few circumstances. So general relativity was born with just as many positive examples as Newton plus it also had the positive examples of perihelion of mercury and the Morley -Mickelson experiment. So it actually had more positive examples but the only positive example that actually counted was the Eddington expedition where it proved all at once that Newton had a problem and that general relativity was not an ad hoc theory. So we have these two axes in Popper’s epistemology, axis one, are there counter examples to your theory that are unresolved problems and axis two, are there theories out there that can explain more than your theory in such a way that it can be empirically tested via positive examples. Ideally, a best theory is like general relativity where we only know of counter examples for the competing theories and only know of positive examples in favor of it. Now this brings us to the concept of verisimilitude. So what if you do have counter examples to your current best theory? Best theory means you don’t have any better competing theories. That’s all it means. What if you do have counter examples to your current best theory?

[01:18:50]  Red: In fact, this isn’t an uncommon thing according to Thomas Kuhn and I tend to agree with him here because counter examples only refute the combination of a theory plus all its supporting auxiliary theories, all of them combined. A counter example simply can’t refute a best theory. Really nothing can refute a theory any more than something can verify a theory. But this does leave a fair question from Kuhn. Why favor a best theory if at any given moment even best theories have counter examples? Now, one thing I think I would argue against Kuhn here that I don’t think he could have foreseen is that not all theories do have counter examples. QM has no counter examples by experiment as of to date, famously, okay? And I’m not even sure strictly speaking, general relativity has any counter examples by experiment either. The real concern with general relativity is that it contradicts QM and also that it gives ridiculous results inside of a black hole, but it’s not like we can go do experiments inside of a black hole, right? So in some sense, it doesn’t really matter. Kuhn’s making a true point that best theories often have counter examples, but like it’s not absolute guarantee that they do. He makes the claim all theories have counter examples. All theories have anomalies is his term for it. And I’m not sure that’s necessarily true, but I think it’s usually true. And I think it was always true up to the point that Kuhn had written his book. If that makes any sense. The correct answer to Kuhn is that science doesn’t really care much if a theory is true or not. What it really cares about is if the theory is truer than its competitors.

[01:20:36]  Red: Let’s think about the concept of subsumption here. This is Popper’s concept of verisimilitude. Let’s go back to both our Newton and general relativity example, as well as our oranges versus vitamin C example. In both cases, we have good reasons to believe general relativity and vitamin C stop scurvy are truer or have more verisimilitude than their competing theories. Okay, the good reasons being that we’ve tested it, that we know of a counter example to Newton. We know of a positive example for vitamin C stop scurvy that these are the reasons why we would prefer general relativity and the vitamin C theories as compared to their competing theories. Sorry, that’s a little bit clumsy the way I put that. The reason why we prefer it is for Newton’s theory, there’s the existence of a counter example, so we don’t prefer it to general relativity. For vitamin C, do the existence of a positive example that might have been a negative example, but wasn’t. We prefer the vitamin C theory because that proves it’s more empirical. That proves it’s not ad hoc. Of course, those aren’t the only two experiments. Both of these theories have gone through a lot of additional testing, but we’re to simplify. So verisimilitude or truth likeness is the explanation for why scientific theories are sticky and don’t get refuted by every single experiment that counts as a counter example. It isn’t enough to merely refute a theory, even if you could, which you can’t. You’d need to also offer a competing theory that subsumes that theory.

[01:22:15]  Red: This is why Deutch and Lakatos, both apparently independently, proposed that we reimagine refutation of a theory as being when a new theory subsumes it rather than when we merely have a counter example to it, like Popper had in mind. Though this rewording is just as likely to lead to misunderstandings as Popper’s original wording. So I don’t think I favor this use of the term refutation either, but I agree with what they’re trying to say in principle. I prefer to personally just drop the term refutation.

[01:22:47]  Blue: Can I ask you a question? Yes. Now, David, if I’m not mistaken, David Deutch does not like

[01:22:53]  Red: the term verisimilitude.

[01:22:57]  Blue: Disagrees with Popper on that. I’ve never been able to quite get my mind around why that is.

[01:23:04]  Red: So I remember listening to a podcast where he talked about that and I don’t have the quotes handy so I can’t back check myself. But it’s he prefers to talk about getting closer to reality rather than getting closer to the truth. When it comes right down to it, I don’t think there’s any difference between those two. There may be differences in philosophical baggage. And he kind of hints at that, that it’s more a matter of he doesn’t like the philosophical baggage of trying to seek the truth. Instead, he wants it. Everything’s false anyhow. So what’s the point in seeking the truth? So we should just seek to get closer to reality.

[01:23:40]  Blue: So we’re getting closer to something. But it’s just that it’s more like the concept of truth that that he’s pushing back against.

[01:23:49]  Red: Yeah, you know, the problem is, is that there’s no way to make sense of why you would want to get closer to reality unless it’s because that was the truth. And verisimilitude is really just the concept of getting closer to reality, which is exactly the same as getting closer to the truth. So to me, I actually have no problem with really either Deutsche’s language or Popper’s language on this. And I feel like it’s a knit that it’s a distinction without a difference, if that makes any sense. So I just don’t care, like I will talk easily about verisimilitude and I think it’s very important. Like, I don’t know how I would have explained this in this podcast, many of the concepts I’m trying to explain if I couldn’t reference the idea of truth, right? It would become awkward trying to figure out how to avoid that. So so I think that probably it’s the wrong way to go about trying to say getting closer to reality and trying to insist upon that. Although that’s a completely fair way of talking about it, too.

[01:24:52]  Blue: Though it seems to me, reality has its own kind of, you said, philosophical baggage, doesn’t it? I mean,

[01:24:58]  Red: oh, yeah. And then there’s the fact that Deutsche has his criteria for reality that it appears in our in our best theories. I mean, like that’s a philosophically troubled criteria. Like, I can understand why he brought it up and why he raised it. And it actually makes a certain amount of sense to me. But like you can immediately say, oh, but under Newton’s theory, there was a force of gravity, so it was real. And then then we switched to Einstein’s theory and now it’s not real. I mean, like you understand still what he was getting at that we should treat it as real, but like it’s not. It still isn’t really a criteria for reality the way people would normally think of that, right? I feel like there’s philosophical baggage everywhere. And I actually think Popper’s language was probably the least philosophical baggage. So that’s what I’m going to go with. What we’re really looking for is the right kind of theory. OK, we are trying to maximize are we trying to maximize explanation in our theories? The answer to the question is it depends what you mean by explanation. What we’re really trying to maximize is lack of odd hawkness according to Popper or improved empirical content. Popper’s ratchet that empirical that empirical content implies there are more potential experiments that can be counter examples to our theory. So our theory is getting riskier and riskier. But there is only one way to do that, and that is make your theories can strain more, or in other words, be more and more universal. And this can only happen if your theory actually does explain more. So think here of oranges versus vitamin C stopping scurvy. Vitamin C explains more, right? It does.

[01:26:41]  Red: That’s why it has higher empirical content. The problem here is that the word explain more is too vague. And vagueness is exactly what we’re trying to avoid under Popper’s epistemology. Communism is very explanatory in that there is no data that it can’t explain. Creationism explains all sorts of things in a totally non testable way. Brett Hall’s theory of intelligence suffers from the same problem. His theory defenders claim it explains more than IQ theory, but only in a completely non testable way. All of these are, in some sense, explanatory or maximizing explanation, but not in the way that science nor Popper had in mind. So it is better to say that science is trying to maximize lack of ad hocness or is trying to maximize empirical content and see that as equivalent to saying that science is trying to maximize empirical explanations rather than merely explanations. So why does maximizing the right kind of theory result in such fast progress? Now, I argued in a past podcast that the reason why is because it’s like saying, OK, if your theory is true, then it must have real life testable consequences. So you should have no objection to formulating your theory such that it makes specific predictions. We can go test. OK. Since all true theories about reality should have real life consequences and false theories should not be able to comply with this requirement, except insofar as they have some various millitude, then this requirement never removes a true theory from the search, but it drastically prunes the search tree and makes the search tractable. Now, all of this leads to the question I’ve raised multiple times, which is what about metaphysical or philosophical theories that don’t have experimental tests in the first place?

[01:28:29]  Red: Or as I like to put it, what’s the difference between a good philosophical or metaphysical theory or explanation and a bad explanation? This is not a question that Popper spent much time on. You can definitely find quotes from him about this, where he’ll talk about you can use criticism instead of observation, things like that, which is where the Deutschians get this. OK. And I think it’s fair to say that it’s that both science and Popper strongly favor empirical theories over non empirical theories when they’re in competition to each other, or you might even go further that Popper never foresaw the idea that someone would try to raise a non empirical theory as a competitor to an empirical theory. And that what he really had in mind was that you can criticize between two non empirical theories, even if you can’t use experiments or observations. But Popper was so Popper was very open to the idea that if a philosophical theory, including his own, he didn’t see his own theory as empirical, had no empirical competitor, there might be a fair way to prefer one over the other without resorting to an experiment. In a future podcast, I would like to try to give my own tentative answer to this very difficult question. Let me just admit this is a very difficult difficult question. If you look at the podcast episode we did on clarifying Popper, the guy who wrote that, I forget his name, Bruce Caldwell from episode 68, that’s what it was. He pointed out that critical rationalism in the sense of criticizing theories rather than falsificationism, where you’re actually. Can do it, can criticize using experiments, that there is no known way to know if that criticism was better or worse.

[01:30:10]  Red: I don’t think that’s actually true. And I think I can do better than that. But I think honestly, it’s very common today, even amongst crit rats, especially maybe even amongst crit rats, to see things in terms of, well, did that did that criticism land for me? OK, which really means you’re going back to folk ofistemology, right? It’s it’s you’re away from critical rationalism at that point. And since Popper gave no definitive answer to this question, I guess I don’t blame them for just basically saying, well, you criticize theories and then does that theory land for you or not? And really getting back to subjective vibes, inner gut feels as to whether criticism, quote, refuted a theory or not. And I think that’s kind of where we we we’ve wound up amongst the crit rat community, because there is no really well known published answer on what is the difference between a good, metaphysical, philosophical explanation and a bad explanation. And yet there is a difference and there’s an objective difference between those two. So we’re going to cover that in a separate podcast, though. I’m not going to get into that. That would be its own thing. And even when we do finally cover that topic, I’m going to have to admit I don’t have a definitive answer. I have a good first cut answer, but it’s not strong enough yet, if that makes any sense. There’s more research that needs to be worked out here. There’s still a legitimate problem to be solved. So anyhow, that’s it. That’s the end of my attempt to summarize my understanding of Popper’s Pistemology in a single podcast.

[01:31:50]  Blue: The way you were talking, I thought you were going to go on for at least another hour. Let me ask you one question here. If it’s not an interesting question, I’ll just cut this. But you said something about the dune, quine problem.

[01:32:07]  Red: Yeah.

[01:32:08]  Blue: And so that’s the idea that words mean different things to different people.

[01:32:15]  Red: No, it’s the idea that you can’t you can’t refute any theory by observation. Oh, so, you know, so there’s so so. Deutsch makes a distinction between doom, quine problem and doom, quine thesis. Oh, and I forget which one’s which. And I don’t feel like it’s a. There’s kind of this idea you can’t refute a theory by observation. That’s like true.

[01:32:38]  Blue: Yeah. And then there’s this idea that comes from that.

[01:32:41]  Red: You can’t because you can’t refute theories by observation. In fact, it’s impossible to reason about theories. And that’s false, right? So doom, quine couldn’t mean either of those, unfortunately, right? And you have to kind of specify which you mean. And that was why Deutsch called one the doom, quine problem and one the doom, quine thesis. And I always forget which is which. And this is an example of philosophical baggage. You use a term, it comes to be associated, you know, induction. It’s really hard to disentangle the word induction from the way it got used by philosophers. And then it also got entangled into to just mean doing statistics. And now people refer to statistical inference as inductive inference. And paparians will get their hackles up and go, no, that’s there’s no such thing as induction, you know? And it’s like, no, no, no. The word induction can mean different things in different contexts, right? It doesn’t it doesn’t always have to be the Baconian Baconian logical induction that Hopper show doesn’t exist. So you got the same problem with almost every term out there. So.

[01:33:54]  Blue: OK, well, let me ask you, let me push back on one one thing here. So just to be clear, what you’re saying goes against the grain, goes against a lot of grains, I think, both in how Hopper is popularly thought of and how hopperians think of him. What gives you the right to do this, Bruce? Like you you’re just some guy from Utah. You’re not a college professor. You don’t have a PhD. You don’t have what are your credentials?

[01:34:26]  Red: Yeah, that’s a that’s a good question, actually. OK. So obviously, the short answer is the Popperian one that credentials and authority don’t matter. But like that’s such an unsatisfying answer in so many ways, right? So I feel like your answer, your question deserves in like the answer. The answer authority doesn’t matter. Credentials don’t matter. That’s a true answer, and I do want to bring that out, right? That people should look at my arguments on their own, regardless of my credentials. But there’s like there’s like a totally legitimate question here that really does need to be answered in some way. Although it’s not one I can necessarily answer for you, right? And when it comes right down to it, human beings do primarily reason through authority. They do, right? And you almost have to. And so there’s kind of this idea that if a layman who has no credentials and isn’t, you know, someone who studied philosophy, I’m not a philosopher. I don’t even care about philosophy, you know, other than Popper’s philosophy. I’ve never like I literally can’t possibly be as well versed in Popper as nearly any philosopher or Popper you can come across, right? Like I’m not even close. So there’s there’s this desire, maybe even kind of correct desire to feel skeptical and to say, OK, how can this guy possibly be right? He’s saying something that really, at least on the surface, sounds very different than what I’ve heard elsewhere. And because of that, I can completely understand that skepticism. And in fact, I’m going to argue you’re right to feel skeptical. Right. Just at a purely maybe you can call it inductive level.

[01:36:20]  Red: The fact is, is that if you took seriously every single argument out there, you know, it makes a certain amount of sense to try to narrow your down to, oh, well, at least I’m going to try to talk to somebody who I know knows that subject, right? Is they don’t even know the subject. Why am I wasting my time? Right? Sure. Here’s the problem, though. I’m either right or I’m wrong. That’s just an objective fact. Or I’m closer to right. Would be the more correct way to say it, right? As I’m probably am wrong, but maybe closer to right. Or I’m further away from being right. And the standard way you would think of popper is better. And my way of looking at it is problematic in some way. OK, what we need is we need a way of how to assess that. And that’s actually the question of what’s the difference between a good philosophical explanation and a bad explanation, which we haven’t answered yet. And it’s a little bit difficult to answer. Here’s what I would say, though. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that even though I didn’t source things in this episode, because I knew that would just take six hours if I did, I have sourced everything in past episodes. In other words, I have each of these claims I’m making that popper said something and you’re going, wait, isn’t that the opposite of what I thought popper said? I’ve actually quoted him in past podcasts. So I think a sincere attempt to do this. The first thing you have to realize is, let’s say you listen to this episode and you go, oh, wow, Bruce is making lots of sense.

[01:37:49]  Red: I think Bruce is right. That doesn’t that’s no better than listening to this episode and going, oh, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s not a philosopher of science. You know, I can ignore him. Like both those attitudes are actually wrong in some way. Right. And in fact, they’re wrong in the same way. They’re they’re dismissing they’re dismissing. They’re accepting or dismissing me without actually gaining the knowledge for yourself. And really, there’s just no alternative to getting the knowledge for yourself. If you really want to know that I am, in fact, explaining poppers, cosmology correctly, you have to start with this podcast and then you have to go through and you have to go through the sources I’ve done. And you need to go look this up for yourself. And I think what you’ll find is that I’m right. OK, I just don’t think there’s any way around that that I literally am taking this straight from popper. In the few cases where I feel popper was wrong, I feel like I can show easy counter examples to show he’s wrong, which then have to be contended with just like through critical rationalism. OK, and I think that this is really what it comes down to. This whole episode, we’re we’re kind of hinting at the answer to what’s the difference between a good philosophical explanation and a bad explanation, although we’re not giving it yet. And hopper’s answer was, well, concentrate on objective criticisms, which are experiments. That’s the that’s the gold standard of objective criticisms that’s going to turn out to be the answer to our question, right?

[01:39:25]  Red: You have to actually figure out what types of criticisms are correct criticisms because they’re objective and what types of criticisms are subjective so we can just ignore them. And how do you tell the difference between those two? And then from there, once you understand that, it doesn’t is not that hard to start to work out. Is this explanation better than that explanation? And it starts boiling down to logic, really. You can just kind of have this set of conjectures and you’ve got a set of counter examples or positive examples. And that’s just for experiments, but maybe it would be objective criticisms and an objective observations. Only one theory can explain. And you can actually work out if this theory is better than that one. And I think one of the and I often say critical rational critical rationalism is a harsh mistress. The simple truth is, is that the vast majority of the time. This theory has some advantages and some disadvantages. And this theory has different advantages and different disadvantages. And the state of a critical rationalist discussion in most cases is that there’s no winning theory. And I think this is something that people really, really struggle with. Even in the crit rack community, in fact, I think the crit rack community has a particular soft underbelly on this that they really want certain explanations to be quote, best explanations. When in reality, the true state of the critical discussion is that there’s pros and cons to different theories. And it’s very hard to get to a single best explanation. In fact, it’s rare that you get to a single best explanation. Those are what we call the paradigm theory. So only a few of them.

[01:41:02]  Red: And you may even have like a best explanation based just based on this discussion right now, right? But you would have to then to really know if it was a true best explanation, you would have to go open it up to criticism. You’d have to go read all the other alternative viewpoints. You’d have to look at all the experiments they’ve done. And if you look at maybe all the things that I’ve criticized, some of David Deutch’s theories, some of his fans’ theories on, I think all of them suffer from this same problem, right? And they have this idea, oh, universal explainer ship is this single jump before that animals weren’t creating knowledge. And so they must be meat robots and so they must not feel things. You know, there is a logic to it that comes out of things that they believe in explanations that they accept. But they aren’t really paying attention to are these are the criticisms subjective versus objective. And so they kind of end up with just vibing. Oh, that makes sense to me. And then that becomes the best explanation to them. When in reality, it’s the real answer is we don’t know, but here is the state of the current experiments. There’s the ones that are repeatable. Here’s the explanations that were made and how they pass corroborating tests. And oh, do you on your theory? Do you have any corroborating tests? No, you don’t. Oh, OK, well, guess what? You’re an inferior theory under critical rationalism. OK, doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But at this point, we’re ignoring you until you come back and you play the game and you make your theory testable.

[01:42:32]  Red: And almost all of Dwayche’s theories or the Dwayche fan theories that I disagree with, all of them suffer from that problem, right? That there’s that they’re they’re trying to grasp on to subjective criticisms instead of objective criticisms. And I know I’m not explaining this well and it deserves its own podcast. But I hope you can kind of see where I’m going with this, that the reason why science makes so much fast progress compared to philosophy is because philosophy is largely mired in a much harder case of how to tell which theory is better. Whereas science is as long as you’re following Popper’s epistemology, which scientists do follow, even if they don’t know what Popper’s epistemology is. And as long as you’re following specifically the no ad hoc rule, OK, and you’re following, you’re you’re going to fall into Popper’s ratchet that way. You always have this objective way to say this theory is better than that theory. Let’s move to that one. And here, objective means inner subjective, but just this is Popper’s term to he does called objective, so I’m going to go with it. And you can make very fast progress that way. I suspect you could make much faster progress in philosophy if you had a better concept of how to tell which criticisms were objective and which were subjective. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen that like Popper doesn’t really talk about it. And so I think that that’s why like the Crit Rat community, the Deutschians in particular, they have picked up all these theories that they think they’ve got these great criticisms against the competing theory, and that’s why their theory is the best. But they’re actually just subjective criticisms. So they’re meaningless.

[01:44:18]  Red: There are reasons why they prefer that theory. That’s really all it means. It doesn’t mean anything. So what do I mean by subjective criticism? Let’s take the example I used of religion versus science here. Right. I used the example of Catholics and Mormons arguing over the Trinity doctrine. There’s tons of subjective criticisms that get raised. Oh, that makes Jesus less divine, you know, something along those lines. There’s just there’s no way to know if the criticism means anything or not. Right. I can’t just go check it for myself. So it’s not objective. Science is the exact opposite of that.

[01:44:57]  Blue: OK.

[01:44:58]  Red: So when a Crit Rat, let’s say Dennis Hathcothal says, you know, oh, I can show you that animals do automatic movements and see machines do automatic movements. And therefore that show if animals were feeling things and if they were creating knowledge, then they wouldn’t be doing automatic movements like this, right? To him, that’s a great criticism under folk epistemology. That is a good criticism. It’s it’s very convincing in many ways. But under critical rationalism, it’s entirely eliminated from the conversation because there’s just no way to check. There’s no way to even know if there’s any connection at all between animals making automatic movements and if they feel things or not. Or if or even if that means they create knowledge or not. Right. It’s it’s a purely subjective criticism at this point. Or maybe let me put it this way. However nice sounding that explanation and that set of criticisms that Dennis is offering may sound to someone that may even be very convincing to you. The fact is is that they’re not formulated in a way where they take any chances. They doesn’t actually have any empirical content of its own where I can go out. I can say, OK, given that this is your theory, let me go check whether it actually the independent consequences prove true or not. And let me go do an experiment at none of that. It’s entirely missing from the way Dennis is formulating his theories and his refutations. Instead, it relies entirely on intuition on whether it feels right to you or not. And so under critical rationalism, you just cut it off. You just go to the zoo. You’re done. And it’s just gone. It’s you can bring it up.

[01:46:41]  Red: You can use it for part of making conjectures, if you want, under critical rationalism. There’s really nothing illegal when you’re making conjectures. I’ve suggested that maybe we could think of critical rationalism as having two stages, the conjecture stage and the criticism base. In the conjecture stage, everything counts. Receiving a revelation from God is legitimate. You know, having an angel show up and say, animals, don’t feel things. That’s completely legitimate in the conjecture base. But in the in the criticism phase, we only care about objective criticisms and we don’t care anymore at all about subjective criticisms. Now, there may it may not always be super obvious what counts as subjective versus objective. But I think in many cases it is fairly obvious. And I think that’s why the problem is not entirely solved. There are things that are. Obviously, objective criticisms, such as not an experiment is an obvious is the gold standard example, but like a contradiction. If two theories are in contradiction to each other, QM versus general relativity, that is an objective criticism without being an experiment. If I were to use church -turing thesis, OK, Deutsch says that church -turing thesis is part of is a branch of physics. And I agree, because I think it’s actually a physical theory. But it’s not a branch of physics in the experimental sense. You’re not going to do experiments doing church -turing thesis and then try to perform an experiment in a large Hadron collider to see if it’s correct or not. The real way you, quote, test the church -turing thesis is that you try to come up with a computing machine that’s different from the Turing machine. And it’s basically impossible. You have a well -defined theory and it’s metaphysical.

[01:48:28]  Red: It’s not an experimental theory, but it’s defined in such a way that it’s very obvious what a counter example would look like. Even if you don’t can’t find any actual counter examples, like if if you were to actually show me, but let’s say that what’s his name, Lee Cronin, who believes that it’s wrong. OK, he’s trying to come up with an experiment. And so Lee Cronin is a good scientist. He understands that he doesn’t just get he can say whatever he wants, but it’s meaningless until he can come up with an experiment. OK, because during the criticism phase, only thing that really matters is objective criticisms. So he he needs to be able to show that you can, in fact, build a machine using his chem computer or something, you know, computer or whatever that has a different can compute things that the church Turing, the Turing machine can’t compute. OK, he used to physically show that and show this is how you would do it. OK, it’s not a strictly speaking an experiment. This is more like a metaphysical theory. But the theory, the Turing thesis is so specific that you know exactly what a counter example would look like. And we just can’t find any. OK. And this is actually the beginning of the answer to what’s the difference between a good philosophical explanation and a bad explanation is that we can take some of these same concepts that popper apply to science. And we can see that they that they apply over to metaphysical theories. Metaphysical theories may not have experimental counter examples, but they can have counter examples if they’re a good metaphysical theory.

[01:50:01]  Red: And the real question is how do you take each of these parts of popper’s epistemology and how do you apply them to metaphysical theories? And that’s the question that I want to answer in a separate podcast someday soon is I’ve got some interesting ideas about how to go about doing that.

[01:50:18]  Blue: Well, that sounds good. And I really appreciate how seriously you take critical rationalism, right or wrong, I’d like to know if you’re wrong. I hope someone someone can demonstrate that.

[01:50:33]  Red: You know, I’d like to know if I’m wrong, too.

[01:50:35]  Blue: Seriously enough to get there. And one more question I was in the last couple of days, I’ve watched that Peter Bogosian interview with David Deutch twice, which was this is an excellent interview. You know, and I’m not trying to diss Bogosian. He’s he’s an amazing guy who does cool stuff. But I also got the feeling that, you know, this is a I think a professor of philosophy. I, you know, I really got the feeling he’d never talked to a hearing or knew very, very little about. I mean, you really

[01:51:14]  Red: see

[01:51:14]  Blue: the street epistemologist. He’s the street epistemologist,

[01:51:17]  Red: remember his name.

[01:51:18]  Unknown: I

[01:51:18]  Red: just remember the street epistemologist. OK.

[01:51:20]  Blue: Yeah. Yeah. And he was he did that grievance studies thing, which was very cool. And but, you know, he and he really did listen to David Deutch and seemed interested in what he was saying and all that. But, you know, here’s a guy in academia who’s seemed to to to know very little about, you know, the deeper popperian. I mean, everyone’s heard of like a couple of things about Popper, but the deeper popperian epistemology. Why? Why is it so niche? I don’t know. OK. Like, what do you think?

[01:51:54]  Red: I I think I’ve said this in a past podcast and it deserves its own podcast. But let me give the short answer. I think it’s Popper’s fault.

[01:52:03]  Blue: Oh, another provocative statement. OK.

[01:52:05]  Red: Yeah. I OK. So I wasn’t going to say this in this podcast, but let me let me just kind of hint at it here. I I was a blogger for a religious blogger and I blogged on a. Kind of liberal, non -believing religious blog. And then a conservative, believing religious blog. And then I moved over and blogged within the Critrat community, you know, years later. So I’ve been around some really interesting, different internet communities. And if you were to ask me a very sincere question. How much more rational is the Critrat community compared to these two religious communities, a non -believing, atheistic religious community and a believing, non -theistic community? I definitely think that there’s some pros and cons to each community. Right. And so it’s not like it’s a clear cut that they’re all the same. But I think rationally speaking, they’re all about the same. I think Critrats on a incredibly regular basis just make the most obvious rational mistakes. And that was part of what led to me trying to reword Popper’s epistemology in hopes of maybe actually moving the needle a little on this, right, that that people who are studying Popper’s epistemology. I mean, think about that for a second. These these these are people who are reading Popper’s epistemology in detail and they are no better than people who know nothing about epistemology on average. OK. Why is that? How can that even be? Right. It’s such a weird thing to think about. OK. And I think the answer is, is that. Popper’s very hard to understand. He gives you this feeling of clarity when you read him. But like you went through and you we talk about like my version of Popper here.

[01:54:06]  Red: And you basically say it’s all very provocative. It’s not what you’ve heard before. I mean, you’ve read Popper. All of I’m getting this all straight from Popper. Like all of it can be quoted directly from Popper. And yet people aren’t coming away with why collaborations are important or even even just the idea that you shouldn’t be comparing empirical and non empirical theories. Like very few crit rats even seem to understand that idea. OK, which is why they then pull up a a metaphysical theory and they say, here’s my theory. And it won’t explains more because they don’t understand that explanation dealt with empirical explanation, not moral explanation or something else. Right. And they’re they’re missing almost all of the important things that allow you to actually make progress. And I think that the the outcome of that is that even though they’re reading Popper, they’re not understanding Popper and that there’s kind of a popular way to read and understand him that really has little to do with what he

[01:55:06]  Blue: actually said.

[01:55:08]  Red: And I don’t know how to explain that. Right. I mean, like, could it be that all of them are just in bad faith? Reading it, that’s impossible, right? I honestly think that Popper is the one to blame that he chose to word things in his epistemology. If you read him very carefully, I think he’s saying what is correct. But the very fact he’s using the word refutation, so much philosophical baggage, there’s almost no chance people are going to come away with anything. But the idea that you can falsify a theory and philosophers, they know Popper said you can refute or falsify theories that to be a scientific theory, you have to be falsifiable. And they also know that’s impossible. And so at this point, they feel like they can entirely dismiss Popper’s theories. And if Popper had, in fact, said that you could falsify theories in the way people normally think of that, he would, in fact, have been wrong. And his epistemology would have been useless because you can’t falsify theories. That’s just the way it is, right? Instead, what you’re really doing is you’re subsuming theories and you’re looking for counter examples to have problems that the other theory can’t solve. I mean, like, it’s it makes sense if you read the whole thing and you really understand this idea of objective criticisms and what he is trying to get at. Why? How often have you heard people say that Popper’s demarcation criteria was a secondary thing? No, it was the reason it was the thing that led to him understanding why science made progress, right?

[01:56:37]  Red: It’s the level of difference between how people seem to understand Popper, even if they are considered themselves critical rationalists compared to what Popper actually said, it’s just a very large gap. And there are some exception cases, right? I mean, obviously, I’ve said a lot of positive things about David Miller. I think he’s excellent. I do have things I disagree with him over some pretty strong ones that I actually think that he is one of the ones responsible for the Popperian war on words that I think has led to a number of misunderstandings. But I think that in general you read his books and it’s like, yeah, this guy gets it, right? There isn’t I may have nits with how he words things just like I have nits with how Popper words things. But like he definitely he definitely seems like he understands critical rationalism entirely, right, better than I do. Jonathan Rausch, I think Jonathan Rausch is excellent when it comes to critical rationalism. He said he summarizes critical rationalism and you can tell he gets it and he understands the importance of how it’s rooted in experiment and how it’s rooted in empirical explanation, things like that. So there are definitely people reading Popper coming away with a correct understanding of Popper because I think it’s all there, right? Even if it’s maybe hard to get it in just one book, you almost have to read multiple of his books starting with Logic of Scientific Discovery, which is the hardest book. I didn’t understand Popper really much at all until I read Logic of Scientific Discovery. I thought I did. And so I can understand why people would come away thinking they understand Popper and then they’re really it’s something very different, right?

[01:58:15]  Red: This idea that Popper was actually about justificationism instead of against it. He’s against a certain kind of justificationism, justifying the theory. He’s entirely in favor of a rule for preferring theories, justifying through that. That’s what a good reason would be, by the way. David Miller attacks the concept of good reasons. And I think he’s wrong, too. I think what he means by that is there are no reasons that justify a theory. And there’s no good reasons. He means there’s no reasons that justify theory is certain. That I agree with. And so I think he’s right in so far as he actually means it. But I think it’s got to be one of the worst ways to word things because, of course, there are good reasons for doing things or not doing things. And it when I’ll suddenly have crit rats come to me and say, well, there are no good reasons. It’s like, ah, OK. And now I don’t even know what to do. You know, once they’ve kind of latched onto this kind of wordest version of Popper, where they’re they’re almost it’s almost more like they’re looking for words that you said that were wrong. Can I see that word as justificationist? Oh, well, then you’re wrong because you used a word that was justificationist. Or did you say good reasons? Oh, no, there’s no such thing as good reasons. You know, did you did you say, you know, evidence for oh, there’s no such thing as evidence for. And it’s almost a word police rather than an actual comprehension of the of the underlying concepts that Popper was getting at, if that makes any sense. And I honestly don’t think it’s the rat’s fault. I think it’s Popper’s fault.

[01:59:49]  Red: I think he was very less than clear.

[01:59:52]  Blue: OK, well, that’s a compelling way to put it. And I appreciate you, Bruce, and I appreciate what you’ve said here. And I hope I hope our audience does, too.

[02:00:01]  Red: Yeah, I probably offended everybody. But OK,

[02:00:05]  Blue: well done.

[02:00:13]  Red: 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 Deutch’s philosophy, as well as other interesting subjects. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please give us a five star rating on Apple podcast. 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. The first is via our podcast host site, Anchor. Just go to anchor.fm slash four dash strands, F O U R dash S T R A N D S. There’s a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations. If you want to make a one time donation, go to our blog, which is for strands.org. There is a donation button there that uses PayPal. Thank you.

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