Re: Exact Opposites

On 16 Apr 2013, at 15:37, hibbsa <hibbsa-/[email protected]> wrote:

> The problem of, and for, Popper's analysis of Scientific
> philosophy-to-date, was the low/peripheral status of such efforts, in
> real terms of influence/importance in the practical shape Science was
> taking. Some of the great pioneers of science had certainly wondered how
> this miracle was happening. Trying to describe what they were intuiting
> about this was a natural thing to do. In the event they fell short of
> nailing the problem and Popper set them straight.
> 
> But right or wrong, the significant point is in terms of the reality of
> what was taking place in scientific discovery, other than to the extent
> they were in fact correct (which they weren't as Popper says),

No, he didn't say that there's no extent to which "they were in fact correct", i.e. to which empiricism is true. Empiricism contains a great deal of truth, even though it also contains major mistakes.

> had no
> influence or bearing on how science was actually happening.
> 
> Which of course was one of the conclusions Popper himself came to, but
> what he meant was actually something else. That his epistomolgy of
> knowledge held that all knowledge, including scientific, evolves by the
> same mechanism.....thus to the extent progress was made in science, the
> explanation was C&R regardless of whether they thought it was something
> else.
> 
> But Popper was seeing the causality along the lines of (1) Enlightenment
> was a happy coincidence of developmetns (2) Criticism leR (3) Beginning
> of infinity exponential progress was the result.....not because of but
> despite the pioneers, whose ideas were comprehensively and exactly
> wrong.

No, they were partly true.

It's not such a surprising 'coincidence'. The fact that empiricism contains a lot of truth is one reason. Another is that it is actually impossible to act according to empiricism. Therefore people who thought they were acting according to it were always doing something else. Sometimes they were doing science. This made it much easier for science to be done. Belief in empiricism began to be a significant drag on (some) sciences only later, when scientists such as Mach tried to take empiricism/inductivism more seriously, while methods of measurement and observation were becoming much more sophisticated.

-- David Deutsch