Episode 92: Popper on Philosophical Theories

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[00:00:01]  Blue: Hello out there. This week, on the Theory of Anything podcast, we consider, what specifically did Karl Popper say about philosophical theories? How is progress made when empirical tests may be difficult or impossible? As fallible creatures living in a world without certainty, what does it mean to solve problems in this domain? And is it a problem when critical rationalists declare their theories philosophical and thus immune from empirical tests? Personally, I loved listening to Bruce O ‘Pine on these interesting issues and I hope someone else out there does too. Welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast. Hey Peter. Hello

[00:00:57]  Red: Bruce. How are you today? Good. So we are continuing our discussion of conjectures and refutations chapter 8. This is the part I’ve actually been building up to. So we actually record the episodes out of order from how we release them. So for Peter and I, we recorded the first half of chapter 8, then we did the interview with Ivan and now we’re doing the second half of chapter 8. Once we release them, I’m sure we’ll release Ivan first and then these two will be back to back. But so this is a really interesting chapter. It’s a very popular chapter too amongst crit raps. So Peter, what did you think of this chapter here? Well, I didn’t quite have the background

[00:01:45]  Blue: with it that you do. I had no idea it was a popular chapter. I thought it was very cool. I thought he was basically just saying something very sensible that kind of aligned with common sense. I guess what I got of it is, well, first he sets up that philosophical theories cannot be refuted. I mean, that’s right there in the title. That’s the problem.

[00:02:16]  Red: That’s like the ontological definition of a philosophical theory too popular. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:02:22]  Blue: And then he sets that up in his own very clever way. And then basically at least how I interpreted his answer to that is that pretty obvious. You don’t perform necessarily scientific experiments, but instead you argue about them and discuss them and make cases for them. And yeah, it seemed pretty simple enough to me, but quite convincing. It sounds to me like maybe you have some criticisms of his approach, which I’m very curious about.

[00:03:00]  Red: I do. Yeah, I actually am somewhat critical of at least the second half of this chapter. Yes. And it’s not that I necessarily disagree with the points he makes. I think you’re right that he makes a very sensible point that if we don’t have the ability to do experiments on a theory, we can still criticize the theory. That’s clearly that’s like a true statement. If I disagreed with that, that would be really stupid of me, right? Okay. So, and I think this chapter, first of all, I have had numerous crit rats quote this chapter to me, so I know it’s popular amongst crit rats.

[00:03:38]  Blue: Is that right? And

[00:03:40]  Red: I think it’s the basis for Deutsche’s view as expressed in I want to say beginning of infinity that, oh no, no, no, this one I think is actually in fabric of reality that experimental tests are just a kind of criticism and that there are many other kinds of criticisms that we can level at theories and that it’s really we should generalize to this concept of criticizing theories rather than only concentrating on experimental tests. Some of that was kind of more of the crit rap interpretation of Deutsche. I don’t think he actually said that, but he did say that criticism is just a kind of sorry, experimental tests are just a kind of criticism, which by the way, I agree with. I think that’s a true statement, but I think a lot of that comes from this chapter eight, which is the one that where Popper tries to kind of work this out. So now the first half of chapter eight is our previous podcast, which was really talking about Popper’s proof that induction is incorrect. So. So it was Popper’s refutation of induction, but he was using it to make a point about philosophical theories. And we’re going to get to that point today. We then made a challenge to Popper and Deutsche’s claim that induction was impossible. So a couple of quotes from Popper induction, i.e. inference based on many observations is a myth. Page 70 conjectures and refutations. And I quoted that one before. And here’s one I don’t think I did quote. In my view, there is no such thing as induction, logic of scientific discovery, page 18. So Popper very definitely took the stance that induction does not exist.

[00:05:36]  Red: And that’s where, like, Deutsche, we quoted Deutsche saying that machine learning was not induction because induction does not exist. And Deutsche is just simply. Quoting Popper basically paraphrasing Popper basically when he says that I then proceeded to show that Peter and all human beings can, in fact, quote, induce things, that is to say that we can generalize from observations. And then I asked, does this refute Popper? And my answer in the episode was no, it does not refute Popper. I claimed that there were at least two uses of the word induction and people tended to confuse them. There was the general idea that we can generalize from from specific observations by any means, not not merely by observations alone, including maybe existing theories. And then there’s the Baconian idea or perhaps really is the logical positivists idea, according to Ivan, when we interviewed Ivan, he brought that up, that this really came from logical positivists, that you could derive theories solely from observations and that you could then justify these theories through more observations. And Ivan pointed out that the logical positivists were so successful in their theory that they refuted themselves and that there’s none of them left. That was a good line. I think it is. Like, that’s what you want from a Popperian standpoint. You want your theory to be so good that it can be refuted and you want it to be refuted, you know, and error corrected it out of existence, if necessary, if it’s a false theory. So and the choice to formulate your theory so specifically, so explicitly that it can be refuted and that all the logical positivists have ceased to exist. That really took a lot of excellent thinking on their part. OK, is that really

[00:07:29]  Red: true, though, that or is that more is that debatable that I mean, I they don’t maybe call themselves logical positivists, but are really they really not exist or it’s a fair question. I I don’t think you will find anyone that says I’m a logical positivists because it is well known that logical positivism was wrong. Yeah, I think what you will find, though, is vaguer, fuzzier versions of logical positive positivism, not the original version. If I can use an analogy and this is really important to the point that I’ve been trying to make in the last few episodes of this podcast, you can save any theory by being vaguer. OK, that’s what happened with communism. Communism in its original form was very specific and it was refutable. And then when it got refuted, if they simply made a vaguer version of it, whether a theory can. And so logical positivists today would say, well, the original logical positivists were clearly incorrect. I’ve got no doubt about that. But, you know, this vaguer version that I believe in that has no real implications that are testable, you know, or checkable in any way. Yeah, I think that could be true. And I think that’s exactly what you would find. Right. The original logical positivists, the way they formulated it, is gone for good, which I think is quite the accomplishment. I think Ivan’s right about that. So Popper refuted, in my opinion, Popper refuted the second kind of induction, this Baconian logical positivist version of induction, not the first. Indeed, his epistemology is Popper’s epistemology is a kind of induction in this more general sense of just simply generalizing from specifics, thus proving that we can generalize from specifics.

[00:09:19]  Red: That is to say, we can generalize from observations plus some starting theories. When we make conjectures and we eliminate refuted competitors until we have one theory left, we did, in fact, come up with a general theory to solve some problem. So I think crit -rats badly want to say, but this wasn’t generalizing from observations. When what they really mean is this wasn’t generalizing solely from observations because you had to conjecture theories first, and that was a very important part of the process. But surely observations played an incredibly important role in this process in two ways. First by creating a problem to solve. You had this observation at odds with the current theory, and you didn’t know how to resolve it. And in eliminating competing theories until there was only one left, the crucial test between theories. And then the end result is a scientific theory, which is a generalization that somehow came out of this combination of theories and specific observations, right? And that is Popper’s epistemology in a nutshell. I am, of course, stretching to make it sound as inductivist as possible to make a point. I think most people would say, well, that’s not really induction, but it kind of is. And that’s why I had that quote from Popper, where he says, you know, you can call my you can call the critical method that I’ve created, you can call that induction if you want. And then he quickly follows up with, yeah, but don’t do that. So, but the word induction, of course, has this kind of fuzzy set of connotations around it that could include Popper’s epistemology or it could be thought of as something more specific. And it’s the more specific thing that got eliminated.

[00:11:03]  Red: This is exactly the same thing as what I was saying with the logical positivists. You could think of induction as a kind of fuzzy concept that you somehow generalize from specifics or specifics observations play a role in some way. Or you can think of it as something far more specific that you actually create your theories from the observations alone. That is what Popper refuted. I then went over Tom Mitchell of machine learning fame, his argument for the futility of bias free learning in the previous episode. Mitchell demonstrated, or at least he claimed he did, the impossibility of creating an inductive machine learning algorithm that generalized solely from observations. However, he also did show that you could generalize from observations if you had some starting theory about the nature of the solution you are seeking to help guide you, what Mitchell calls an inductive bias. Interestingly, the example Mitchell used was an algorithm called the candidate elimination algorithm, which is actually just a naive falsificationist algorithm that is to say you use observations to eliminate options from a set of theories until you arrive at the soul generalization that isn’t refuted yet. An example of how something that when presented in a certain way seems like induction is called induction. But if you look at it from a different point of view is actually Popper’s epistemology. I don’t know that you can necessarily say that of every single machine learning algorithm, by the way. Clearly, that was true for the example Mitchell chose to use, but I have, I think as far back as episodes 26 and 25 and 26 made the claim that I don’t think that’s actually going to prove true for all machine learning algorithms.

[00:12:47]  Red: And I even gave examples of machine learning algorithms that did not use any sort of variation in selection and yet still came up with an inductive achievement of some sort. Thereby, in my opinion, refuting Campbell’s evolutionary epistemology, although I still think highly of Campbell’s evolutionary epistemology, I think it has a high degree of verisimilitude. OK, so what was Popper’s main point so far? It is that Newton’s theory is not derived from observations like people think and that, in fact, deriving a theory from observations by itself is an impossibility. Moreover, he is arguing that Newton’s theory is false due to Einstein and general relativity refuting it. What relevance does this have to his discussion about philosophical theories? Well, let me actually extensively quote from Popper here because I don’t want to misrepresent his arguments since I am going to be somewhat critical of them. So I’m going to try to pull out parts, but try to get it in full in his own words. So from page 258 of Conjectures and Refutations, in order to solve the riddle of experience and to explain how natural science and experience are at all possible, Kant constructed his theory of experience and of natural science. I admire this theory as a truly heroic attempt to solve the paradox of experience. Yet I believe that it answers a false question, and hence that it is, in part, irrelevant. Kant, the great discoverer of the riddle of experience, was an error about one important point. But his his error, I hasten to add, was quite unavoidable and it detracts in no way from his magnificent achievement. I love how Popper words that. I feel like it’s very appropriate the way he’s going about criticizing this other theory. What was this error?

[00:14:37]  Red: As I have said, Kant, like almost all philosophers and epistemologists, right into the 20th century, was convinced that Newton’s theory was true. This conviction was inescapable. Newton’s theory had made the most astonishing and exact predictions, all of which had proved strikingly correct. The important point, however, is is Kant’s error. As I have called it, it was an unavoidable error, unavoidable that is before Einstein. So now page 259, thanks to Einstein, we now look upon Newton’s theory as a hypothesis or a system of hypotheses, perhaps the most magnificent and most important hypothesis in the history of science and certainly an astonishing approximation of the truth. Page 259, Kant’s solution to the problem is well known. He assumed correctly, I think, that the world as we know it is in our interpretation of the observable facts in the light of the theories we ourselves invent. As Kant put it, our intellect does not draw its laws from nature but imposes them upon nature. While I regard this formulation of Kant as essentially correct, I feel that it is a little too radical and I should therefore like to put it in the following modified form. So now here is Hopper’s version of Kant’s formulation. Our intellect does not draw from its draw its laws from nature but tries with varying degrees of success to impose upon nature laws which it freely invents. The difference, says Popper, is this. Kant’s formulation not only implies that our reason attempts to impose laws on nature, but also that it invariably it is invariably successful in this.

[00:16:27]  Red: For Kant believed that Newton’s laws were successfully imposed upon nature by us, that we were bound to interpret nature by means of these laws, from which he concluded that they must be true a priori. This is how Kant saw these matters and Poincaré saw them in a similar way, page 259. So again, also on page 259, we invent our myths and our theories and we try them out. We try to see how far they take us and we approve our theories if we can. Then on page 259 and going across the 260, he says, and I love this quote because it’s Popper’s ratchet. The better theory is the one that has the greater explanatory power and that explains more. That explains with greater precision and that it allows us to make better predictions. That is Popper’s ratchet. Notice that Popper never deviates from his ratchet from seeing the greater explanatory power as equivalent to explains with greater precision and thus makes better predictions. Those three things are identical to Popper. This is all directly at odds with those that have those defend untestable theories like, say, communism, or we’ve talked also about Brett Hull’s theory of intelligence. Both those theories are defended as being more explanatory, yet claim that their theories make not a single testable prediction. A good explanation for Popper is a risky explanatory theory. That’s the only kind of good explanation that Popper was really interested in in his writings, right? And you can see that from that quote that I just gave. Or at least this is how Popper sees it when we’re on the scientific side of the demarcation between science and metaphysics. But what if we’re dealing with metaphysical theories that can’t be tested?

[00:18:21]  Red: Now, I’ve had numerous crit rats tell me no biggie, just like kind of just like Peter just said, you can switch from switch to criticism for tests or just a kind of criticism. And then they’ll often quote this very chapter to back up their claims.

[00:18:36]  Blue: And he goes through in it in a sometimes, I think, quite humorous way. You know, some of the philosophical kinds of philosophical theories he’s talking about, such as determinism, idealism. The world is my dream, but like a simulation hypothesis. We probably call solipsism today or solipsism. Yeah, but he calls it idealism. Yeah, yeah. But he could easily have, if he was writing today, brought up the simulation hypothesis, I’m sure. Yeah, or irrationalism, volunteerism, what is that? Just the in our own volitions, we know ourselves as wills. OK, I guess, getting back to the Schopenhauer thing, maybe. And then nihilism as well, which he defines as the I love the connection he makes between nihilism and boredom. These people are who look at look inside themselves and they see nothing but boring people. So they they conclude that that that boredom is all there is. That’s pretty funny. But yeah, so these these are philosophical theories that he believes are wrong, but that are also irrefutable.

[00:20:01]  Red: Yeah, so that was more throwing out. OK, so how do we transition between these two thoughts? Well, Kant’s problem is an example or so Popper claims of this very problem. So Popper then proceeds to give us an example of philosophical theories, which you just listed, and that he feels are false, even though they can’t be refuted or falsified. The main example he uses is determinism. So I’m going to concentrate on his determinism argument. OK, now Popper famously was an indeterminist and wrote numerous things against determinism. OK, so he defines determinism as the future is contained in the present in as much as it is fully determined by the present. Let me slowly reread that because I think this that this is going to turn out to be important to. Hopper’s point, but also my criticisms of Popper, the future is contained in the present in as much as it is fully determined by the present. Now, he does later explain he means included, but including natural natural law. So it’s the present plus the laws of physics is what he really means here. OK, it’s interesting that he does not mention stochasticity or randomness in his definition of determinism or here. OK, like most people would, they would say that it’s a process that has no stochastic determinism is a process that has no randomness in it. I think you could terribly read him as intending that, however. So let me actually explain why I think you could. One might argue that even if the laws of physics were stochastic, the present plus laws of physics still determines the future.

[00:21:41]  Red: And in fact, I will explain that that is in fact the case for quantum mechanics, the famous quantum mechanics, because it has an actual stochastic portion of the laws of physics. However, I think a more charitable reading is that you really pay attention to the word fully, fully determined when he says that. OK, and that what he means here is that. That if the laws of physics were if the laws of physics were stochastic or random, then the future would not be fully determined, fully determined by the present plus the laws of physics, because it would also be determined by a series of random events. OK. So I think implicitly he’s including stochastic determinism means that there’s no stochasticity in physics, but he doesn’t actually say that. And that’s me reading charitably. If you disagree with me, that’s fine. I’m fine with taking it exactly the way he says it. Terminism is the future is contained in the present. It is much as it is fully determined by the present. So in this case, in any case, Popper points out that he feels that this is a false theory, even though it is, in his opinion, an irrefutable theory. So on page two, sixty three, he says, listening to this statement, you may well wonder how I could hold a theory to be false and irrefutable at one and the same time. I, who claim to be a rationalist, for how can a rationalist say a theory that a theory is false and irrefutable? Is he is he not bound as a rationalist to refute a theory before he asserts that it is false? To show why this isn’t a problem. He uses an example of a purely existential statement.

[00:23:22]  Red: So to Popper, his whole idea of the. A symmetry between verification and refutation is based on the logical difference between an existential statement and a universal statement. And we talked about this numerous times, but particularly in the Popper without refutation episodes. I want to say his episodes forty one and forty two. But here’s an example where he gives a really good example of this. So on page two sixty five, he says, there exists a pearl, which is ten times larger than the next largest pearl. He shows that as an example of a purely existential theory. And then he gives an example of a theory that’s an existential theory also, but this time constrained by time and space such that we can test it. So now he says, at this moment and in this box here, there exists at least two pearls, one of which is ten times larger than the next largest pearl in this box. OK, so both of these are existential statements, but the second is restricted such that we can test it. Now, Hopper points out that we can refute the second theory by testing the constraints in that theory and that those constraints logically would have to be represented as universal statements in first order logic. I would note that we can also verify this theory as well. This is going to cause, I know, a lot of critrats, problems that I just said that, but it is absolutely true. The way Hopper uses the terms refutation and verification because of the way the theory is worded. When you check the box, you are either refuting the theory or you are verifying the theory. It has to be one of the two.

[00:25:13]  Red: OK, because you just check and there actually either is or isn’t two pearls in the box and one is ten times larger than the other pearl in the box. Those that think Popper claims that you can never verify a theory have fallen into what I call the absolute verification fallacy as discussed in my Popper without refutation episodes 41 and 42. The idea that verification is always this is the idea that the absolute verification fallacy is the idea that verification is always absolutely true for always unspecified reasons and never tentative, but refutation is always tentative for some always unspecified reason. This is clearly a bad explanation. OK, the example above with the pearls is Popper’s actual view. That what we’re as I talked about in episode 83 in Popper’s second axis, I claim that the problem Popper was actually trying to solve was the nature of experimental tests. Namely, that to do experiments requires reasonable spatio temporal constraints in the form of universal laws and that experiments therefore are always aimed at these constraints and must be if they weren’t aimed at these constraints, then it would be a purely existential theory and you could never actually do a definitive test. Now, Popper points out that this is true even when we have an existential theory that can be verified. He does this in more than one place, by the way. He uses the example of hafnium also, which is the example I’ve used in the past. Popper never has a problem with the idea that some theories, specifically existential theories, can be verified. He never has a problem with that. His point is that for it to be reasonably verifiable theory, there must be constraints.

[00:26:59]  Red: And what you’re really testing are those constraints, which means you’re trying to refute the constraints. That’s his actual point. OK. So we are still in some sense still potentially refuting the theory when they check the box. So his refutation based epistemology is a better way to think of things, because all experiments will come down to refutations. But very few theories are existential theories. We have to almost come up with contrived ones to get examples. And therefore, you’ll rarely, if ever, be actually verifying a theory. But there are cases where you will be like the hafnium example. Like this pearl example. It just so happens to be that if the pearl is in the box, we are also verifying the theory. There is nothing in Popper that suggests we shouldn’t refer to this as verification, for that is what it is. Now, I kind of didn’t decide there, but my apologies. Let me go back and reread and get back on track here. He says, listening to the statement, you may wonder how I can possibly hold the theory that is false and irrefutable at the same time. This is really what he is now going to try to explain. OK, he wants to explain why an existential theory, unless it has refutable constraints, can just never really be reasonably thought of as an empirical scientific theory. OK, so he gives the example and here’s the problem that he’s struggling with that really seems to confuse people. Existential theories feel like they’re empirical. And let me give an example of this. In my Popper without refutation episodes, I think it was those we gave the example of Roger Penrose, where he tries to show that Popper’s epistemology is incorrect because because string theory has testable constraints.

[00:28:50]  Red: Sean Carroll made the same argument in his podcast that that falsification can only take you so far because there are some theories, scientific theories where you can test without that. There’s no way to falsify them, but you can verify them. Specifically, string theory makes certain predictions about super partners that but doesn’t give us any constraints as to what level of energy the large Hadron collider would have to be at to be able to find them. So you can always you could always find these super partners. And another one was monopoles. He is the example of monopoles. There only needs to be a single monopole somewhere in the universe for that theory to be out to be true. We may someday find the one monopole in the universe, right? And therefore verify the theory or we may someday get a collider large enough that we find super partners and thereby verify the theory. But we can never really falsify the theory because they can Penrose points out. You could always just argue, well, we just need a larger collider. OK, so they try to point out that this shows that Popper’s epistemology is incorrect because it defines science as only being about falsification. This is really just a misreading of Popper, a common misreading, one that crit rats misread Popper on on a regular basis. People studying Popper intensely as part of their, you know, beliefs about life regularly misread Popper in the same way that Sean Carroll and Penrose do. OK, I think this needs to be accepted. What Popper is trying to say is that there’s no definitive test for these. And there isn’t.

[00:30:27]  Red: And he’s suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t be thinking of them as scientifically empirical theories if they have no definitive test, no up or down test that we can do. That the very fact that you go do the test and nothing happens. And then you go, well, I didn’t find the super partner. You know, great. OK. I mean, sure, go keep testing. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the test didn’t tell you anything if it doesn’t come out positive. So he gives an example of why if you really want to say that string theory should count as an empirical scientific theory, OK, which this is what Sean Carroll and Penrose are kind of tacitly arguing, then you have to accept the following as a scientific theory. There exists a Latin formula, which if pronounced in the proper ritual manner cures all diseases. This is Popper on page 265. Despite this being an irrefutable theory, most of us would consider it to be a false due due to our other best theories. So he goes on to say and I love this quote. This is page 265. Even so, we are justified in believing that this irrefutable existential theory is false. We certainly cannot prove its falsehood, but everything we know about disease tells us tells against it being true. In other words, though we cannot establish its false falsity implication, we could, if it was refutable theory, the the conjecture that there is no such magical Latin formula is much more reasonable than the irrefutable conjecture that such a formula does exist. Now, I need to do another little side here just for a second. This paragraph from Popper just caused nearly every crit round I’ve ever talked to to go ballistic.

[00:32:12]  Red: So I have crit read friends that if I were to have said this and they didn’t realize it was Popper that said it, that they would, without a doubt, say to me, no, that’s all justification. Popper is against justification. We cannot prove anything ever. We cannot establish anything ever. And there are no such thing as good reasons. OK, but Popper is very much at odds with the crit rat community on this. Popper trusts that you understand that words like justify, prove and establish are understandable terms, not to be confused with any claim of absolute certainty. So to Popper, we are justified, despite not establishing its falsity, like justified in not believing this theory, despite not establishing its falsity. His words, not mine, like we could if it were an empirical theory. Now, here’s the thing. Let me just also getting back to the Penrose example. Is this a scientifically empirical theory? I don’t think Penrose or Sean Carroll would argue that it is. And yet it is empirical in the sense that Sean Carroll and Penrose are trying to suggest, because in theory, you could eventually find a Latin formula that cures all diseases. And so there are you really prepared to declare existential theories like this? This is Popper’s point that they are scientific empirical theories. So I think the issue here is the word science. We we tend to want to say that string theory is a scientific theory. And I think that it is a scientific theory. But it’s not a scientific, empirical theory, right? It’s it’s an early attempt to figure out how to make it a far more testable theory, right? Yes, in theory, maybe we could find super partners or monopoles by chance.

[00:34:00]  Red: And at that point, that would tell us something important about these theories. It wouldn’t verify the theories as absolutely true, because nothing can do that. It wouldn’t even verify the theories as necessarily better than their competitors in this case, because the competing theories don’t actually have a definitive yes or no on these questions. So it wouldn’t count as a crucial test. But it would mean that these theories explain something that we wouldn’t have known about without these theories. That means that they are non ad hoc theories, that they’re independently testable and that would change our perception of these theories. And there would be a push to try to figure out what to do, how to make the theory, the theories would gain extra interest at that point. But they probably wouldn’t become paradigm theories that replace. They would not become paradigm theories that would place quantum mechanics or general relativity, because those are easily testable theories. And string theory isn’t really very testable in any real sense at all. And everybody knows this and that’s not really misunderstood. OK, so. By the way, this is also why I’m against the crit rap war on words. This paragraph from Popper that I just read, I feel responding to a reasonable argument like this by claiming that the person is being justificationist is just a way to have to deal with the actual criticism being presented based on the fact that it’s basically nearly impossible to speak English without using some term sometime that might imply justificationism, particularly if the criticism is intentionally, hostily reading the person instead of trying to make sense of the argument being offered so they can respond to the actual argument.

[00:35:44]  Red: It’s interesting how my crit rap friends differ from Carl Popper on this. All right, it and let me give another example of this that I really hope if any of them are listening that they’ll understand what I’m trying to get at here. Is the word certain justificationist? OK, if any word is justificationist, it’s got to be the word certain, right? But here is how Popper speaks of the word certain and certainty in connection with the word certainty. This is from Objective Knowledge, page seventy eight. Something must be said here for the sake of clarity. There is a common sense notion of certainty, which means briefly certain enough for practical purposes. When I look at my watch, which is very reliable and it shows me that it is eight o ‘clock and I could hear that it ticks an indication that the watch is not stopped. Then I am reasonably certain that that that the or certain for all practical purposes that it is fairly close to eight o ‘clock. Then it gives us another example. When I buy a book and get twenty twenty pence change, I am quite certain that the two coins are not counterfeit. If someone asked me, are you sure that the piece in your hand is that is a ten penny piece? I should perhaps glance at it again and say, yes. It’s Objective Knowledge, page seventy eight. He goes on to explain that depending on how much depended on his certainty, he’d increase the amount of testing first. If a lot depended on it, he might go to a bank and have the coin checked. If a man’s life depended on it, he might get the chief cashier of the Bank of England to certify that it’s not counterfeit.

[00:37:23]  Red: So now, if even certainty, the word certainty doesn’t even normally imply justification, or absolute certainty, then clearly no word can be inherently justificationist. So my crit -wrap friends that kind of parsed through arguments, looking for words that they can accuse our justificationist and then not have to deal with the actual criticism. I want to suggest that that’s really just weaponizing words, that actually there’s no basis for ever grabbing a word and saying that’s justificationist because the word certainty is not inherently justificationist. There are no inherently justificationist words, nor ever could there have been. All right, let me go back another side. Sorry. So just repeating what I said before, we’re talking about there exists a Latin formula which is pronounced in proper ritual manner. Here’s all diseases from page two sixty five. Despite this being an irreviewable theory, most of us would consider it to be false due to our other best theories. And then I read that paragraph that I had the aside on. Even so, we are justified in believing that this irrefutable existential statement is false. We certainly cannot prove its falsehood, but everything we know about disease tells against it being true. In other words, though we cannot establish its falsity, the conjecture that there is no such magical formula is a much more reasonable than the irrefutable conjecture that such formula does exist. So he’s given an example of how we would go about rejecting a theory, even though it’s it’s technically irrefutable. And just again, just to emphasize the word justified here really means justified in terms of preference between theories, which Popper does believe in that kind of justification. He uses the word believing for crit rats that try to say there’s no such thing as beliefs.

[00:39:16]  Red: Don’t it’s wrong to understand the word in such a stringent way, believing. He just simply means accepting the theory that we’re belief really are really can just mean I accept this theory is currently the best. And when he talks about proving or establishing its falsity, he really just means we’ve done a refutation by experiment for it, which we all know isn’t any sort of absolute proving or establishing as falsity.

[00:39:42]  Blue: It seems like a lot of what you’re talking about is just reading other people charitably in a way. Yes, they’re they’re using these words, not as like absolute infallible truths. But just, you know, if you say that I’m certain that. Grass eating grass doesn’t cause cancer or doesn’t cure cancer. Like, I mean, of course, you’re not really, really certain. It’s possible they might come up with a study that says that eating a certain kind of a grass might cure a certain kind of cancer. But it seems like a pretty dumb idea still. I mean, right? Yeah.

[00:40:24]  Red: I think you’re exactly right. So and this is one of the things like when I’ve talked to various crit rats and I’ve said, wait, I feel like our epistemologies are quite different. What is it you think poppers epistemology is? Now, of course, I get different answers, depending on the person. But a very common answer seems to be something like this, that it used to be in the past, that everybody, everybody, all scientists and people thought that you could establish theories as absolutely correct, and that’s what they thought they were doing. And so they thought that that they were proving beyond doubt that their theories were truth. And then one day, Popper came along and he showed that this was impossible. And that was actually the most important part of poppers epistemology, right, is that that he showed that justification is false. And I think that that misreading of poppers epistemology. And I think that absolutely is a misreading of poppers epistemology. I don’t even think it’s true. If it is a correct reading of poppers epistemology, then poppers epistemology is wrong because there’s a long history of of science not believing their theories are proven beyond doubt, right? But predates popper considerably. Now, I do think that poppers correct, that certain theories did get regarded as absolutely true, such as Newton’s theory. But that was kind of the exception, OK, that it was really hard for them after 200 years of never finding a single counter example. They kind of just fell into thinking, well, we’ve proven this theory true, right? But notice that science always uses the word hypothesis theory. I mean, this fault, this fallibilism that Popper is famous for really does predate Popper, right? He may have formalized it much better.

[00:42:06]  Red: And he definitely took advantage of Einstein discovery, general relativity and the fact of that forced the scientific community to rethink whether it’s possible to establish even Newton’s theory as true, right? And then he used that. So

[00:42:22]  Blue: when you see Popper as pointing out that that truth is just a web of of guesses. Or that our theories are just a web of gifts, guesses to use Xenophonies, the Greek philosopher, as that he quotes, that he’s really just pointing out something that most scientists actually do believe and did believe for a long time, but they just didn’t maybe have the language to express this as succinctly as Popper did.

[00:43:01]  Red: I think that’s exactly right. So I think that they weren’t sure, right? Like, well, haven’t we proven Newton’s theory of gravity is true? Like, does anybody really doubt that? You know, I mean, you can see how that would be a very natural thing for people to wonder about, right? And when Einstein came along and derailed Newton’s theory of gravity, that was a big shock. And it wasn’t one that the scientific community could just accept right off the bat, because it had kind of in their minds become a sort of established truth. But I don’t think you’ll find that I think you’ll actually find that there’s a kind of a muddle among scientists where sometimes they talk about establishing theories is true, and sometimes they talk about, well, they’re just theories and that they didn’t really get as specific and explicit as Popper did as to what we mean by those things. And I even think in the cases where you have scientists talking about this is established science, that there’s a charitable read of them that they don’t really mean we’ve proven this theory beyond true, beyond correct, that they really mean, you know what, this theory just has no good competitors, right? And you almost need to stop and talk to the person at length to figure out which they had in mind. And there’s a good chance that they don’t know either. Like they’re just saying words, trying to express a general idea. And if you get them to be more explicit, my guess is, is that some of them will turn out to be justificationist. And most of them won’t, that most of them will say, well, I mean, obviously we could find some future theory.

[00:44:36]  Red: I guess I’m not saying I’m absolutely certain, but I do think that this is more or less settled, right? And Popper allows for that, right? Popper allows for the idea that you could have basically, at least for a time, a settled theory, that this theory is the best theory, that there is no good competing theory for it. That’s what Newton’s theory kind of was until Einstein’s came along. So there’s no ultimate justification. There’s no ultimate settling of a theory, but we can justify preference of one theory over another. We can justify settling on this theory over another. So you have to be kind of careful about this, all right, because these words are just loose enough that you can reasonably read them as justificationism or you can reasonably not read them as justificationism. And at least initially, you should really charitably be not reading them as justificationism until the person really tells you otherwise. That’s my point of view. OK, through carefully talking with them and questioning them, trying to understand what their point of view is. So let’s talk now about this idea of refusability, because again, I think that there’s even a misunderstanding of the very concept of refusability in the Crickrack community and that Popper had something explicit in mind that gets confused. OK, let me let me actually go through and explain what I mean here. So Popper on page 266 says, some 25 years ago, I proposed to distinguish empirical or scientific theories. Notice that empirical theories or scientific theories are the same in Popper’s mind. When he says scientific theories, he just means empirical theories, but not all theories that we call scientific theories are in fact empirical.

[00:46:24]  Red: And I honestly feel that’s one of the places where Popper kind of screwed up and he shouldn’t have said it that way. OK, but he says I propose to distinguish empirical or scientific theories from non empirical or non scientific ones precisely by defining the empirical theories as the refutable ones and the non empirical theories as the irrefutable ones. My reasons for this proposal were as follows. Every serious test of a theory is an attempt to refute it. Testability is therefore the same as refutability or falsifiability. And since we should call should call empirical or scientific only such theories as can be empirically as can be empirically tested, we may conclude that it is the possibility of an empirical refutation which distinguishes empirical or scientific theories. That was page 266. So on a side note, the issue here is that the word refutability. He’s he’s defining it in such a way that it’s very explicitly means that you can do an experimental test and that there can be a definitive outcome at the end of the test. That’s that’s what he means by refutability or falsifiability. OK, that isn’t what the word means in common usage. It just really isn’t. OK. So in the early days, in my early days with the crit rap community, we used to have some software that would allow for quote, paparian conversations where you’d you’d take what someone said and you’d make an argument. And if you disagreed with it, you could mark it as refuted and then give your reason why you had refuted that argument. The other person could then undo the refuted mark by responding back with their reason why that refutation had been refuted.

[00:48:13]  Red: And then you would kind of refute each other’s reputations, you know, down the line.

[00:48:17]  Unknown: OK.

[00:48:18]  Red: The software,

[00:48:19]  Blue: you mean this was like a program?

[00:48:21]  Red: It was an actual website that we could get.

[00:48:24]  Blue: Oh, it doesn’t

[00:48:24]  Red: exist anymore, but we actually used to have it.

[00:48:27]  Unknown: Yeah.

[00:48:27]  Blue: OK.

[00:48:28]  Red: Dennis Hackathall wrote it was kind of a cool idea. However, the end results were probably exactly what you would have expected that really just the most persistent person won, regardless of the quality of their arguments. The the issue here is that is exactly what Popper explains above to popper. A refutation is always an experimental test on an empirical theory. Well, not always. I’ll actually give you a counter example of that. But in context of what he’s currently talking about, that’s what he means. So it’s not merely your personal reason for why you think a theory is false. A refutation is a very high quality kind of criticism. I’m going to say that again, because this is so important and this is going to be a big part of the next podcast. A refutation to popper, a Popperian refutation, is not your personal opinion of why you think a theory is false. It is a very high quality kind of criticism. An experiment, in fact, that is objective or rather intersubjective. That is, we can all go do the experiment for ourselves. And it is not subjective. OK, this is the Popperian idea of a refutation. It’s a very, very, very high standard. It is only to the point where it only applies to a small set of theories, specifically empirical theories.

[00:49:54]  Blue: So wait, can I let me make sure I get this right? So we refute empirical theories, but non empirical theories. We can just kind of think they’re they’re dumb and not believe them. But well,

[00:50:09]  Red: they are different. I think that is definitely how many crit rats read Popper here.

[00:50:16]  Blue: Oh, OK. But you are not

[00:50:18]  Red: saying I am not in that camp at all. OK,

[00:50:21]  Blue: OK.

[00:50:25]  Red: So so if philosophical theories, Popper says if philosophical theories are all irrefutable, how can we ever distinguish between true and false philosophical theories? This is my question that I’ve asked multiple times now. How do you tell a bad? How do you tell a good philosophical theory from a bad explanation? OK. This is the serious problem. This is the serious problem which arises from the irrefutability of philosophical theories. That’s Popper saying that page 266. So he then goes on and he says, we may distinguish here between three types of theories, first logical and mathematical theories, second, empirical and scientific theories, third, philosophical and met or metaphysical theories. How can we and each of these groups distinguish between true and false theories? Well, Popper is going to now take us through his his explanation on this. So Popper, when talking about logical and mathematical theories, he says superficially tested. He says we superficially tested. Then we more severely tested by trying to refute it. Now, notice that this is Popper in a rare case where he uses the word refute and he’s not talking about an empirical refutation and refutation by experiment because we do not do experiments on logical and mathematical theories. What clearly what he’s really talking about here is that you show there’s some sort of contradiction. OK. And because of that, it’s very clearly analogous to what we do with empirical theories. So I’m very comfortable with his use of the word refutation here. But it’s an example of how Popper does not stick completely consistent. I mean, what we had before, he was without a doubt using the word refutation to mean do an experiment and that’s it. Now he’s extending that a little bit.

[00:52:13]  Red: Well, actually, it could be a logical contradiction. OK.

[00:52:17]  Blue: So it’s kind of the difference between what might take place in two dimensions on the blackboard versus the three dimensions of life. Right.

[00:52:27]  Red: Yes. I think so. And in fact, he kind of talks about that. I’ll get to his quote here on that in just a second. OK. So he says, quote, if we are unsuccessful, we then try to prove it again. I want to say, oh, no, Popper’s being a justificationist again. OK. But obviously he’s talking about mathematical proofs, right? Says, or you try to refute its negation and then he repeat, he says, and then he says on page 267, our task. Remember, he’s talked about logical mathematical theories, not scientific ones. Our task in is the testing, the critical examination of two or more rival theories. We solve it by trying to refute them either either the one or the other until we come to a decision in mathematics, but only in mathematics. Such decisions are generally final in valid proofs that escape detection are rare. OK. He’s trying to point out how mathematics differs from science and how they’re similar. One big difference is that we do have mathematical proofs. Now, I know David Deutsch kind of challenged that perception. That’s a discussion for another time. But let’s just go with what Popper’s saying right at the moment. I think at a minimum, scientific theories don’t have something equivalent to a mathematical proof, right, even though proofs are not final. They do not prove beyond doubt. And honestly, Popper’s not saying otherwise. I don’t think there’s actual any disagreement between Deutsch’s elaboration on this on this and what Popper’s actually saying. OK. And mathematical proofs are kind of a different beast that you don’t have an equivalent to for science. So now he talks about empirical theories. Fundamentally, he says the same procedure is used as math and logic.

[00:54:11]  Red: That is to say, we try to refute our theories. Quote, page 267. The only important difference is that now we can make use of empirical arguments in our critical examinations. Popper argues that even this difference isn’t really a difference from from the logic of math version because, quote, empirical arguments occur only together with other critical considerations. Critical thought as such remains our main instrument. So he’s trying to say, look, there’s some differences. Mathematics has these proofs and you may try to use them to refute the theory, you know, and it’s the refutation is not an experiment. It’s not an empirical argument, but it is still kind of a refutation because it’s a logical contradiction. But really at some general level, these are kind of the same thing where we’re really using critical thought as our main instrument. Now, why is he saying this? Because he wants to show that we can do the same thing with philosophical theories. So now page 267. Now, if we apply these considerations to philosophical theories, our problem can be reformulated as follows. Is it possible to examine irrefutable philosophical theories critically? If so, what can a critical discussion of a theory consist of? If not of attempts to refute the theory. Now, notice he’s now gone back to using refute in the stronger empirical sense because he’s saying that you cannot refute philosophical theories by definition. All right. And what reasonable arguments can we deduce for and against a theory which we know to be neither demonstratable nor refutable? Oh, no. There goes Popper being a justificationist again. I want to emphasize this because I really want to make it clear Popper was just so comfortable using words that crit rats today leap on as justificationist.

[00:56:00]  Red: And Popper uses them extensively over and over and over and over again. OK, note that he’s asking about arguments for a theory, not just against and acts as if some kind of theories are demonstratable. And in context, he clearly seems to me at least seems to be talking about the mathematical proofs. OK, Popper now says, in order to illustrate these various formulations of our problem, by example, we may refer again to the problem of determinism continue perfectly well that we are unable to predict the future actions of a human being as accurately as we can predict an eclipse. But he explained the difference by assuming that we know far less about the present conditions of a man, about his wishes and fears, his feelings and motives, then about the present state of the solar system, page 267. And then he says implicitly, determinism contains this hypothesis. There exists a true description of the present state of this man, which would suffice in conjunction with true natural laws. That’s where I say he really meant with natural laws for the prediction of his future actions. This is, of course, again, a purely existential existential statement. And it is thus irrefutable, says Popper, page 268. Can we, in spite of this fact, discuss Kant’s argument rationally and critically? He then goes on to say, we could here take the stance that we’re going to ignore this theory until it is made into a testable theory. But Popper points out that if we do take this stance, we’re essentially deciding to never rationally or critically discuss philosophical theories. And this doesn’t really seem like a reasonable stance to take. OK.

[00:57:42]  Red: Then he says, my solution is this, if a philosophical theory were no more than an isolated assertion about the world, flung at us with an implied take it or leave it without a hint of any connection to anything else, then it would indeed be beyond discussion. But the same might be said of an empirical theory also. Should anybody present us with Newton’s equations or even with his arguments without explaining to us first what the problems were, which his theory was meant to solve, then we should not be able to discuss the truth of Newton’s theories rationally no more than the truth of the book of revelations, page 268. Page 269. Without any knowledge of the results of Galileo and Kepler of the problems that were resolved by these results, and if Newton’s problem of explaining Galileo’s and Kepler’s solution by a unified theory, we should find Newton’s theory just as much beyond discussion as any metaphysical theory, in other words, page 269 still, every rational theory, no matter whether scientific or philosophical, is rational in so far as it tries to solve certain problems, a theory is comprehensible and reasonable only in its relationship to a given problem situation and can be rationally discussed only by discussing this relation. And then here on page 269, we finally get to Popper’s formulation of how to discuss and criticize philosophical theories. He says, for we can now ask questions such as does it solve the problem? Does it solve it better than other theories? Has it perhaps barely shifted the problem? Is the solution simple? Is it fruitful? This is one that comes up with Popper a lot, the fruitful criteria. Does it perhaps contradict another philosophical theory needed for solving other problems? Page 269.

[00:59:34]  Red: Questions of this kind show that a critical discussion, even of irrefutable theories, may well be possible. Page 269 still, we could now proceed to discuss cost -determinism rationally and critically. Kant believed in determinism with respect to the phenomenal world as an unavoidable consequence of Newton’s theory. But he never doubted that a man as a moral being was not determined. Kant never succeeded in solving the resulting conflict between his theoretical and practical philosophy in a way that satisfied himself completely. And he despaired of ever finding a real solution. Popper then conjectures that perhaps determinism doesn’t really follow from Newton’s theories. We may ask, for example, whether it really follows from Newton’s theories. Page 270. Let us conjecture for a moment that it does not, says Popper. He points out that since Kant really wanted to be an indeterminist, what that should somehow that should somehow one show determinism didn’t follow from Newton, that Kant would have changed his mind without determinism ever being refuted. He says, quote, this is Popper again now. I do not doubt that a clear proof of the truth of this conjecture would have persuaded Kant to renounce his doctrine of determinism, even though his doctrine happened to be irrefutable. And even though he would not, for this very reason, have been logically compelled to renounce it. OK, in other words, Kant only accepted determinism. This is what Popper is arguing anyhow, because he thought it followed from Newton’s theory, because he, quote, Page 259 believed that we were bound to interpret nature by means of Newton’s laws, because he had concluded that they must be true. A primary. But if Kant had realized Newton’s theory was not true, thanks to Einstein’s theory, Popper believes Kant would instead be an indeterminist.

[01:01:29]  Red: Popper’s point point being that once we look at the problem situation, it is possible to choose between theories without ever empirically refuting one of the theories simply by criticizing it in other ways, such as as if determinism really even followed from Newton’s physics in the first place, particularly if you realize Newton’s theory isn’t even true. Now, I actually looked this up. How much time was there between I didn’t write it down, unfortunately, between Kant and Popper, really between Kant and Einstein? Well, it was centuries, right? It was they lived in different centuries. So of course, Kant couldn’t possibly have have known that Newton’s theory was going to get refuted. And this is why Popper thinks that Kant would have perceived the whole thing differently had he just known Newton’s theory wasn’t actually true. So despite a theory not being refutable, we may still solve a philosophical problem. Now, quote page two seventy one, based upon the conscientious and critical examination of a problem situation and its underlying assumptions and the various ways of resolving it. So this is really kind of now in a nutshell Popper’s argument and determinism was his main example. You gave four other examples that he used, OK, but he concentrated overwhelmingly on determinism and this also explains why he was spending so much time trying to show that you could not induce Newtonian physics from observations and that we had a misunderstanding of the fact was to show that we had a misunderstanding that Newtonian physics was in fact false and never was established with absolute certainty to be true in the first place.

[01:03:12]  Red: So Popper’s main point could be summarized as we can critically discuss a theory by looking at the problem it tries to solve, even if it’s not an empirical theory. OK, and indeed, he really goes stronger than that, claiming even empirical theories can only be discussed in terms of the problem it solves. This makes empirical tests a special case of, quote, critically discussing the problem the theory solves. OK, now let me confess that I really do not find Popper’s argument to be at all convincing. I find it convincing is at a certain level of abstraction. But let me actually kind of talk through and why I. Well, first of all, explain the degree to which I can’t agree with him, because there is a strong agreement at a certain level of abstraction between me and Popper on this. So, yes, absolutely. We should discuss theories critically if we if we can’t refute them. And yes, empirical refutation is just one kind of criticism, as George would say. And yes, we should look at the problem situation. And there may be that may be a great way to go about resolving irrefutable theories. And yes, we should absolutely do exactly what Popper says here. For now, we can ask questions such as, does it solve the problem? That’s a great, great question to ask. Does it solve it better than other theories? That’s a great question to ask. Has it perhaps merely shifted the problem? Oh, absolutely. Is the solution simple? That would be a great thing I would want to discuss about a theory. If I couldn’t empirically test it. Is it fruitful? Yeah, sure, absolutely. Does it perhaps contradict other philosophical theories needed needed for solving other problems? Absolutely. I just don’t.

[01:04:52]  Red: There’s nothing here I disagree with strictly speaking. But it isn’t hard to see that we’ve now created a magnificent loophole in Popper’s epistemology. And this is really where my concern comes in. OK, we might call this the crit crit rat loophole or the crit rat backdoor. All you need to do is declare your favorite theories to be philosophical. And even according to Popper, if you read him this way, you get to ignore all potential reputations and instead you get to have a discussion about that much if your list of questions such as does it solve the problem? Does it solve it better than other theories? Has it perhaps shifted the problem? Is it more fruitful? Is it simpler? I mean, these are much simpler questions, much if your questions to be having discussions about compared to an empirical test.

[01:05:39]  Blue: OK, so I just want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly. So, you know how I’m listening to the quotes that you’ve read from Popper about being fruitful and does it solve the problem and things that I kind of think, well, he’s basically just in a more articulate and methodical way, answering this question about how do how do you tell if a philosophical argument is a good argument or not? You argue about it and decide if it’s a good argument or not. And, you know, and it’s messy, you know, there’s but and it’s there’s ambiguity there, but, you know, what else can you do? I mean, it sounds like you’re just not satisfied with that. Is that what I’m getting? It’s not just it’s not just that I’m not satisfied with it. It’s that you’re basically opening up a back a back door, a loophole, right? And are you saying that that’s what Popper is doing? No, that’s what the critical rationalists are misinterpreting him. That’s what the critical rationalists are misinterpreting. So presumably, Popper never intended to encourage people to declare their theories philosophical just so they can get easier, easier standards of criticism, OK, his demarcation criteria was meant to say, look, don’t intentionally make your theories philosophical if you can avoid it. And and I know that because he says on. Conjectures and refutations, page 48, irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory as people often think, but a vice. So irrefutability is a vice period end of story.

[01:07:23]  Red: OK, now, I know I’ve harped on Brett Hall’s theory of intelligence a lot on this, because it’s a great example of this. There is nothing really stopping the defenders of Brett’s theory from being a scientifically testable theory other than the defenders really badly don’t want to see their favorite theory get refuted. Now, I’ve given examples of how you would test it, right? If if Brett’s theory of intelligence was that it’s all just comes down to a difference in time and interest and that that society values some knowledge over others. OK, that theory is is actually a worthwhile theory. It’s truly a worthwhile theory, but only if you don’t decide to declare it a philosophical theory. The first thing you should do is you should try to find counter examples to the theory, empirical counter examples. And there are how. Why does a person who’s getting senile? They clearly have more time and because they’ve been alive longer and they’ve had more interest, their interest hasn’t changed. And yet they actually lose intelligence over time. And even if they’re just getting older, not senile, that’s true. Popper himself admits that this got harder as he got older. And if they’re growing senile, they’ve got an actual like Alzheimer’s or something, then clearly, like you just absolutely do lose your intelligence. And it’s you can never explain these exception cases in terms of Brett’s theory. This means that Brett’s theories got a problem, an problem that’s going to require a reformulation of the theory. OK, in fact, we’re going to do a podcast episode where I’m going to actually suggest how to reformulate Brett’s theory to make it a better theory. Because I actually do think Brett’s theory is pretty good, right?

[01:09:03]  Red: Like within a certain domain, if you’re not talking about an actual disability, like a mentally challenged person or someone going senile, I think Brett’s theory has got a lot of promise, right? But the defenders didn’t want to admit that they wanted to declare it a philosophical theory and not allow it to come under refutation and then force them to error correct the theory, because they liked the theory. They didn’t want to have to have it challenged. Now, since IQ theory is admittedly low on explanation, though testable and potentially refutable, the defenders of Brett’s theory simply argued that their theory is a quote better explanation and they have no real incentive under this interpretation of Popper that we’re talking about to ever pull their theory to put their theory to the test. Did offer, say, Rothbardians or Misi and economics or animal feelings or any of the other famous theories that kind of get passed around the Deutsche and or rat community.

[01:10:01]  Blue: So basically flawed humans rather than employing Popper’s ratchet, they’re using this metaphysical versus empirical theory thing as just kind of a more like a tactic of debate or something like it almost like a trick.

[01:10:19]  Red: Yeah, that’s correct

[01:10:20]  Blue: in your view, which makes a lot of sense.

[01:10:23]  Red: OK, now, let’s let’s understand why they’re doing this, though. So obviously, you don’t want your theory like we get attached to a theory, so we don’t want to let them go easily, right? Dogmatism, but dogmatism isn’t always bad. OK, here’s what I’m arguing. Popper practically by accident, not intentionally laid out a plan for how to circumvent his own epistemology in this chapter. So let’s take a look at some of these theories that we’ve talked about that are quote more explanatory and yet being declared philosophical. Does it solve a problem? Sure, Brett’s theory of intelligence and the libertarian theories, I just mentioned, they solve problems. You can simply, in fact, you can simply declare IQ theory and governments to themselves be problems. Governments are coercive, right? That’s a problem. OK, and now these theories, Missian economics that solves a problem. I don’t know if Missian’s the right term here. Miss, Miss, Missis Ian at the end. That is how it’s spelled, but I can’t pronounce it. So I’m going to call it Missian.

[01:11:27]  Blue: Sounds right to me.

[01:11:29]  Unknown: I don’t know.

[01:11:29]  Red: Um, does it does it solve it? Does it solve it better than other theories? Sure, Brett’s theory of intelligence and and alcohol capitalism solve the problem of IQ and the problem of coercive governments, respectively, better than, say,

[01:11:45]  Unknown: accepting

[01:11:45]  Red: IQ theory or accepting government coercion or so they would argue. Has it merely shifted the problem? Nope, governments really are coercive, and that’s a problem. And human intelligence really can’t be put on to a single number like that. Is the solution simple? What could be more simple than explaining IQ tests in terms of terms of valuing certain kinds of knowledge or measuring the ability to take IQ tests? What is more simple than not having an extra completely unnecessary kind of coercion and replacing it with market forces? Is it fruitful, fruitful? Well, surely the people who defend these theories see it as fruitful. It leads to all sorts of interesting moral theories or at least interesting to and caps and crit rats anyhow. Does it perhaps contradict other philosophical theories needed for for solving other problems? None that they can think of. Never mind that it kind of violates poppers, epistemology itself, but they don’t interpret poppers, epistemology quite the same way that I do, right? And suddenly, wham, bam. Thank you, ma ‘am. We get to declare these completely untestable theories as best theories. And we’re still following poppers, epistemology, as he laid out in chapter 8.

[01:13:00]  Blue: But they’re good theories. But we just, you know, they’re just the the proponents of these are not following popper’s ratchet, so they’re not, you know, demonstrating that someone with Down syndrome can score off the charts on an IQ test or that, you know, that the that there is an actual society that exists based on these anarcho -capitalist ideals, which I would love to see myself.

[01:13:29]  Unknown: I hope it does work.

[01:13:30]  Red: I would put it this way. There’s a specific claim that the defenders of these theories are making. And that claim is false, right? Like it’s objectively false. The claim isn’t anarcho -capitalism would be a better society, might be a better society, right? Like that may be true. That that’s a kind of untestable claim. Like just based on our instincts, maybe you sincerely believe that, maybe somebody else sincerely doesn’t believe that. The claim that gets made in the crit -rack community is really very specifically, we have applied poppers epistemology and all we have refuted all competing versions of economics and Mesian economics or Rothbardian economics is the sole remaining best theory. And this is now a best paradigm theory comparable to, you know, quantum mechanics. That’s really the claim they’re making. That is absolutely completely a false claim. They’re trying to pull in and assign best theory status to theories that honestly can’t be declared best, right? There’s lots of decent competing theories in this space. And we don’t have a great way to actually separate the wall at this point, right? We may in the future and maybe someday we will come up with an anarcho -capitalist society and we’ll find that it actually does solve the problems better, right? Or maybe not. Like I don’t think we could possibly to make the prediction that is the best solution, that would be a prophecy under poppers epistemology, right? And as for, you know, Brett’s theory of intelligence, I think what without doing a separate podcast where I actually lay out what my own version of this would be, I think Brett’s theory of intelligence functions more as a really good criticism of our current kind of implicit notions of intelligence.

[01:15:23]  Red: One that doesn’t work in the case of disability, but that actually may work pretty well if we’re not talking about cases of disability. And if we were to see the theory in that light, I’m still not sure we could declare it a best theory, but I think it’s a theory that shows lots of promise. You would have to spend a lot more time trying to figure out how to make it a testable theory, because it should be a testable theory. I mean, this running towards trying to declare it a philosophical theory, that’s exactly what you shouldn’t be doing because it’s got so much potential as a testable theory, the fact that they don’t currently know how to test it. I actually give examples of how you could test it. You know what I mean, right? The fact that they can’t think of ways to test it really has more to do with the fact that they don’t want to test it than because then the fact that this theory doesn’t have potential to be tested.

[01:16:14]  Blue: Well, you’d have to really nail down what a disability is, too, I think. That’s another kind of empirical question that’s there’s a lot of gray area.

[01:16:24]  Red: There’s a we’re dealing with a space where there is no best theory. And that’s the true Hopperian analysis, right? That’s this theory has some advantages. That theory has some advantages. I suspect and we just briefly I know I did this in another podcast. Let me just briefly explain. I suspect IQ theory does a really good job of detecting disability. And I suspect that’s why IQ theory has survived so many corroborating tests. I don’t know if IQ theory does a great job of detecting much else. And like I’m not an expert in this space. So maybe people can give me examples of counter examples for that. I had somebody ask me about this. He says he he he because of the criticisms we’ve offered of Brett’s theory in the past, he contacted me asking me if I was an IQ or intelligence realist. And I said our IQ realist, that was the term he used. And I said, you know, I don’t know that I am right. I mean, the fact that I’m criticizing Brett’s theory doesn’t mean that I think IQ theory like is what we think it is. And he says so he gave a quote from somebody who said there’s tons of evidence. And I can’t get the quote. He’s I didn’t bring it with me. Unfortunately, unfortunately, says there’s tons of studies that show that IQ IQ correlates with job success and success in school and things like this. He says, are you saying you don’t think that that statement’s true? I said, no, I absolutely believe that’s a true statement. But if IQ only really detects disability, there would be tests that show that show that it correlates with job success or success in school.

[01:18:04]  Unknown: Like

[01:18:04]  Red: what we’re really there’s just kind of two views here. It may only detect up to a certain point and then it just kind of levels off. And after a point, it doesn’t detect genius. It only detects disability. It would still have tons of studies. That’s exactly what you would expect, right? These studies have to actually differentiate between two versions of IQ theory, one that only looks at disability. And then after that, it’s not really meant to detect anything anymore. And one that makes a detection that if you have a high IQ, you’re going to be just more successful in life in general. And I don’t know if that second theory has really been put to the test. Well, or if it has, I’m not sure it came out in favor of the theory. Because of that, I don’t know that I could declare myself an IQ realist, but it doesn’t mean that I’m throwing out the the true scientific nature or the corroborations of IQ theory.

[01:18:58]  Unknown: I

[01:18:58]  Red: suspect that those are legitimate tests, a real legitimate attempt to refute the theory that say something interesting about life at a minimum. Say that there really is such a thing as a disabled person, someone where even though they’re a universal spider, they simply are learning knowledge and have reduced learning capacity compared to most people, am I saying that there’s no such thing as a genius? Maybe. But honestly, I don’t know. I feel like that’s now an open question. I don’t know if there is a best theory of intelligence that says that geniuses definitely exist or that we couldn’t explain them in terms of Brett’s theory. I don’t even know how I would go about testing that today. I suspect it could be tested if I was an expert in this field, but I don’t know how to go about testing that today. So I’m way more open on this and I’m not prepared to declare any theory as a best theory. In fact, and this is something that I’ve talked with so many crit rats about, I just don’t feel like they get me when I say this. I’m not arguing against their theory. I’m arguing that their theory is not a best theory. It just isn’t the same thing, right? I’m very open to their theories being true. I’m very open to their theories saying something useful or something that has very similitude or even being true, right? But I feel that they are mistakenly applying proper epistemology to try to declare it a best theory today. Most theories we debate don’t have a best theory. There’s nothing wrong with that being true.

[01:20:29]  Red: And so we should be very open to the fact that that the competing theory has something useful to say to us that we must eventually subsume into our chosen theory. That’s one of the reasons why I brought Ivan on to talk about Bayesian epistemology. I do not support Bayesian epistemology. I think it’s an inferior theory to Popperian epistemology. At least it’s it’s an inferior theory to what I understand Popper to be saying. I if we’re talking about the interpretation of Popper’s epistemology that I detect in most crit rats, which is probably what most Bayesians would interact with, then I don’t know that it is better than Bayesian epistemology, right? So but I think that this stronger, more stringent version of Popper that I’m trying to push for, I think it is absolutely better than Bayesian epistemology. That doesn’t mean that Bayesian epistemology might not have something to teach us, right? That that ultimately we will have to adapt what we call critical rationalism to include ideas from Bayesian epistemology. In fact, Ivan’s presentation of Bayesian epistemology really kind of drove home for me the fact that there’s some really interesting things that I’ve never heard of that I would like to now integrate into my understanding of critical rationalism. Precisely because Bayesian epistemology, which I believe to be a ultimately false theory, has some really true things to say that I’ve never thought of, right? That I actually think could improve my own epistemology. OK, sorry, that was a huge aside. Let’s actually assess this now. OK, how good are these arguments and explanations really? In fact, let’s assess Popper’s prime example, determinism. Was Popper’s argument against determinism a good explanation or a good argument or a good, if you will, loosely speaking, refutation?

[01:22:14]  Red: In fact, it was, in my opinion, a very bad argument or explanation. For one thing, determinism is actually a correct theory. Popper’s determinism described determinism as this, the future is contained in the past in as much as it is fully determined by the present. OK, so again, it doesn’t mention stochasticity, but does seem to imply it. So I’ll assume that was what was meant because that will strengthen his point here. Here’s the thing, though, this idea that the future is contained in the present in so much as it is fully determined by the determined by the sorry. The future is contained in the present in as much as it is fully determined by the present. That is true for every physical theory we have ever had, arguably including quantum mechanics, thanks to many worlds interpretation. OK, like that’s literally every physical theory has included determinism. OK, Popper seems to have largely missed the true point here. He’s trying to assess determinism as if it’s a standalone, completely untestable theory when really determinism is a hard, fast implication of at the time all the best scientific physical theories and even today still all the best scientific physical theories. And even if you want to argue that quantum mechanics as otherwise doesn’t really, the implications of Popper and Kant that they’re worried about don’t change when you move to indeterminism. Now, how do I how can I say this? It’s because computational theory, it shows that adding stochasticity changes nothing whatsoever to the kinds of algorithms you can run. OK, that is part of computational theory. We’ve discussed this in I don’t remember which episode, but way in the past when we talked about computational theories.

[01:23:59]  Red: That’s why the Turing machine does not need to include a random element because adding stochasticity changes nothing. Competition, sorry, go ahead.

[01:24:11]  Blue: Sorry to interrupt, but tell me if you agree with this statement about determinism, it seems to me the more relevant point about determinism is that we can never really know everything about the present, just as we can never know everything about the future. So it’s not just that the future is indeterminate. The present is indeterminate in some ways. OK, so that does that make some sense?

[01:24:39]  Red: Well, that was that was exactly Kant’s argument, according to Popper.

[01:24:42]  Blue: Right. Oh, OK.

[01:24:43]  Red: So Popper’s rejecting that argument. OK, he’s clearly rejecting that argument. That was that was what Kant believed, though. OK, by the way, Kant was right and Popper was wrong. I mean, that’s what this really comes down to.

[01:24:54]  Blue: I never I never thought I would sympathize with such a statement. But I guess so.

[01:24:59]  Red: So computational theory allows us to take any random process and replace it with a fully deterministic pseudo random process and the algorithm will still work. I should note, sometimes they don’t work quite as well. So there may be a slight difference. But for in terms of the hypothesis that you can simulate anything on a Turing machine, it doesn’t change anything. OK. So it’s always safe to use determinism as you’re starting assumption, even if you know it to be false. Determinism is that strong a theory. It is one of the very best theories we have ever had. So I am not sure there is anything positive we can take away from Popper’s example here. He was just wrong in his assessment of determinism. Is determinism now? Let me ask a question. Is determinism irrefutable, like Popper’s saying? In other words, is it really a philosophical theory? So now Popper wants to phrase it as a philosophical theory like this. There exists a true description of the present state of this man, which would suffice in conjunction with true natural laws for the prediction of his future actions. This is, of course, again, a purely existential existential statement, and it’s thus irrefutable. That was all a quote from Popper that I previously read. But wait, Popper. It isn’t too hard to figure out how to refute determinism. Let’s understand the concept of refuting not as an experimental test anymore, but more like how Popper defined refuting for math and logic, i.e. as a kind of logical contradiction or counter example, not necessarily an empirical one.

[01:26:35]  Red: Then all you have to do to refute determinism is come up with non -deterministic physical laws and then show that those are corroborated by testing and that the competing theories are refuted. Or put another way, you can refute determinism by refuting the deterministic physical laws that implied it. Quantum mechanics was a set of physical laws that potentially refuted determinism in that it perhaps makes some of the laws controlling the man random or stochastic so that you can’t predict his future actions. Well, that is until many worlds came along and ruined that argument, of course. OK, but we could have imagined a version of quantum mechanics. And of course, many people still believe in this version of quantum mechanics that makes indeterminism an essential part of physical laws. In which case, determinism is now a refuted theory. So determinism is a testable, loosely speaking, theory that can be falsified, loosely speaking, if it’s not true. If you allow me to find refuting in a slightly looser way, which at least seems consistent with how Popper understood the term when talking about math and logic, here’s the point. Sure, I can frame determinism as a philosophical theory, but it can be just as easily framed as a testable or falsifiable theory by allowing for it to be an implication of physics, a best theory of physics, and then refute the physics that implied it. If our goal is to always make our theories easier to refute and to falsify, I’m now slightly generalizing Popper’s ratchet, then this would be the right way to frame determinism, not the way Popper chose to frame it. So much seems to ride in our choice of how we frame our theories.

[01:28:16]  Red: We choose to, we can choose to frame them and frame them in such a way that they are irrefutable, or we can choose to frame them in such a way that they are refutable. It is often a choice that we make that makes them refutable or not. OK. So Popper on page 269, he’s making his argument about. We need to know about the problem situation. He says, without any knowledge of the results of Galileo and Kepler of the problems that we resolved by these results and of Newton’s problem of explaining Galileo and Kepler’s solutions by a unified theory, we should find Newton’s theory just as much beyond discussion as any metaphysical theory, page 269. Now, I have learned physics multiple times in school without any reference to Galileo or Kepler, and I could have told you how to criticize Newton’s theories without knowing anything about Galileo or Kepler. In fact, I to this day still know nothing about Galileo or Kepler’s theories. Now, I suspect what Popper actually means here is that we can’t really understand why we should prefer Newton’s theory over its previous competitors at the time without knowing about the problem situation it was created to deal with. If this is a charitable, fair way to read Popper here, then I agree with what Popper is saying, but surely Popper worded this in a way that is at best misleading, right? I really, really, really can go about talking about criticisms or refuting or having critical discussion of Newton’s theories without knowing anything about Galileo or Kepler. And in fact, this happens all the time.

[01:29:57]  Red: In any case, we clearly can have critical discussions about Newton’s theory without knowing the history of the problem of the theory that it was trying to solve. So that would be another criticism I would level at Popper’s what Popper is saying here. I think knowing about the problem situation that existed at the time could be an important way to criticize a theory, especially if we haven’t since moved on to Newton versus general relativity, which is the actual state that I live in, which would have been different than the state that Kant lived in. Popper has at times, even just in the quotes we just considered, suggested fruitfulness as a criteria by which to judge philosophical theories. I would like to offer some criticisms of that as well. So, for example, in logic of scientific discovery, he says, my only reason for proposing my criterion of demarcation is that it is that it is fruitful, that a great many points can be clarified and explained with its help. Now, that’s a true statement. So I’m not disagreeing with the statement itself. But if we try to look at fruitfulness as a criteria to choose between philosophical theories and we try to lay that out, just, hey, use fruitfulness. In this way, you’re practically begging communists to declare their theory a, quote, best critical rationalist theory. A Marxist can now say, oh, but our theory is so fruitful. Think about how much Marxism has for good or ill, depending on your opinion, impacted modern society. It’s one of the most influential political theories ever. If you happen to be a Marxist, you believe it is overwhelmingly impacted society for good, you know, creating social programs that have saved people. And

[01:31:37]  Red: it would be very easy for a Marxist to use fruitfulness as a criteria to prove that their theory is the best theory. And that’s why it’s an

[01:31:45]  Blue: ambiguous word. I mean, what is what is fruitful mean? Exactly. Exactly. Think of about ten different connotations of the word. Probably.

[01:31:52]  Red: Right. And thus, Marxism is fruitful and it passes Popper’s fruitful criteria. OK. And also, let’s consider how fruitful induction is compared to even critical rationalism. So how fruitful has critical rationalism been on how we go about doing science today? In somewhat, I mean, like, we know falsification kind of got embedded into the heart of most scientists’ minds, usually in a way that’s not really quite correct to what Popper had in mind. But even just the fact that it’s there and that that scientists tend to see themselves as having a more they need to have a more critical attitude because they’re trying to falsify their theories, even if they totally miss the fact that he actually is talking about experimental tests and that they’re always an attempt to refute a constraint, a universal statement. But, you know, I feel like it’s been somewhat fruitful. But I think we’ve mentioned that critical rationalism just really hasn’t had the influence that you might expect of how good the theory is. So it maybe hasn’t been the most fruitful theory, at least up to this point. So the main takeaway, so by comparison, how fruitful has induction been? Well, it was. And in fact, maybe even arguably still is the preeminent philosophy of science. So we might argue, inductivists would certainly argue that all progress of science is part of the fruitfulness of induction and that it is the basis for a huge and at a minimum, we could say that induction is the basis for a huge important field, machine learning. OK, and it also gave birth to Bayesian reasoning and Bayesian epistemology, which are without a doubt, one of the most fruitful areas of study right now. I think one of the reasons why, and

[01:33:37]  Red: this is my own opinion, that Bayesian epistemology is so popular right now is because Bayesian epistemology hooks itself to Bayesian reasoning, maybe inappropriately. I think that that’s an argument to be made, right? I say maybe, but actually I think it is inappropriately. But that’s I’m trying to be open here. And Bayesian reasoning is very, very fruitful and mathematical and very precise. And it really is a great set of theories in so many ways, right? And there just isn’t anything equivalent. There isn’t a critical rationalist version of machine learning. They had to use the concept of induction to try to figure out machine learning. And it’s impossible. And again, I know Deutsch would argue, rightly, machine learning isn’t really induction, meaning Baconian induction, or Bayesian reason isn’t really induction, meaning Baconian induction, right? And yet it was the the ideas of induction that gave rise to all of these. You can’t really call them not fruitful. OK. So, of course, I’m sure it’s going to want to say, but yeah, those philosophies are mostly miss mostly misleading. So just how successful has critical rationalism been at not misleading people? I’d say not very, right? So fruitfulness is such a loosey goosey criteria that I don’t have any real hope of it being any sort of guide towards preferring one theory over another. You’re going to just end up disagreeing over what counts as fruitful. You’ll likely declare whatever theory you happen to prefer to be fruitful. And to you, it’s going to seem really fruitful. And the whole thing will end up being circular. So now this is something that we’ve talked about from Bruce Caldwell’s clarifying popper, episode 68, to get a summary of it.

[01:35:25]  Red: And Bruce Caldwell does a very good job in this paper clarifying popper explaining this problem that exists with critical rationalism. OK. He says critical rationalism states that that sometimes it is appropriate to evaluate a theory using the strict empirical criteria of falsification and quantificationism. But at other times, especially within the social sciences, one is better able to criticize the theory by applying the canons of situational logic. OK, so popper argued for situational logic. We don’t need to know what that is. Go listen to episode 68 if you want explanation of that. And there are still other circumstances, particularly when metaphysical theories are considered, when other routes to criticism are preferable, which methods of criticism are most appropriate cannot be specified in advance. That will depend on the subject matter and the problem to be solved. But one can say that within the ecology of rationality envisioned by the evolutionary epistemologist, the goal is to subject all theories to the optimal optimal amount of criticism. I think it’s a great summary of what we’re just talking about, showing that Bruce Caldwell understands what popper is saying very well. OK. So sure, we should switch from false from falsifiability to criticizability if we must. But what does that actually mean in practice? Does it mean we all get to just subjectively decide which criticism lands for us and which don’t? And I think kind of in what I’m arguing is that the Crit Rat community has really done two things. They’ve first tried to push as many theories to be philosophical as possible so that it can’t be refuted. And then they’ve kind of pushed this idea that it’s really just up to us to subjectively decide which criticism planned and which don’t.

[01:37:13]  Red: Now, Bruce Caldwell points out the problem with this, although he sees it as an unsolved problem. OK, he says, when it comes to criticizability, similar problems appear. Aren’t all theories criticizable? After all, even an uncriticizable theory can always be criticized on the grounds that it’s uncriticizable. And just how how is criticizability to be identified anyway? Perhaps most important are there any criteria by which the effectiveness of a criticism may be assessed? How does one decide what constitutes an optimal amount of criticism or even a criticism or even when a criticism has been successful? Clearly, not all criticism should carry the same weight. Otherwise, a proof of logical inconsistency would have to be considered on equal footing with the following criticism provided by one of the of the referees. I do not like the Dr. Fell, the reason why I cannot tell. But this I know and I know it well, I do not like the Dr. Fell. That is an example of a criticism that we would all agree is just not on equal footing with a logical proof of logical inconsistency. OK, so how do we tell which criticisms are more effective and which aren’t and which ones count more and which don’t? OK, and Bruce Caldwell’s conclusion is we don’t know the answer to that question. Which is why Popper tries to encourage you to see a lack of refutability, a lack of being able to do empirical tests as a vice for your theory. And it’s not something you should be advancing as my theory is philosophical and be proud of that fact.

[01:38:55]  Red: When I’ve mentioned this to crit rats, I’ve almost always received an answer or something like this and they’ve said, oh, so you’re saying every scientific theory is better than every philosophical theory, including Popper’s own epistemology. And this is really an unfair, very uncharitable reading of what I’m saying. I think the proper way to look at this is, first of all, if we are going to declare Popper’s epistemology to be a philosophical theory, and I’m actually going to argue in the next episode, it’s not made that argument in short in other episodes, but let’s say it is. Surely it is its competitors are also all philosophical theories. And one of the main things that I’ve criticized the community on is that they’ll take a scientific theory, one that has survived actual empirical tests and they want to declare their philosophical theory the competitor and then they want to use the software criteria from chapter eight to declare theirs the more fruitful, the more simple, the better theory and thereby replace the scientific empirical theory that they don’t like. And this is this is literally the opposite of what Popper had in mind. OK, so chapter eight is a very popular chapter among crit rats, but maybe not for the best reasons. It lays its in it. Popper lays out his first attempt to work out how to apply his philosophy of science to philosophical theories. He’s roughly correct. We can look still look at theories critically, even if we can’t test them. But a solution is far too vague. And his main example, determinism is literally counterproductive. He is widely interpreted as replacing false falsifiability with criticizability and Deutsch ended up stating that outright when he points out that testing is just one possible criticism.

[01:40:45]  Red: As a result, it is nearly impossible to tell if one theory is preferable over another, using the criteria that Popper lays out. This is the problem in a nutshell. How do you tell a good philosophical explanation from a bad explanation?

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