Popper's Science: inductionism, foundationalism, justif.....
"hibbsa" <hibbsa-/[email protected]> Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:28:42 -0000
| Newsgroups | gmane.science.physics.fabric-of-reality |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Building on the theme Popper misassigned the philosophical fragments of scientists with the status of broadsweeping proxies for Science itself. A plausible reasoning which may have underpinned the avenue Popper took his evaluation of Science down, would be his strongly held - and correct - view that Philosophy was a pre-eminent force with an objective presence that would tend to enclose and over the longer cycles increasingly define the direction of all reason and action. Which is amazingly true. But that insight may have added comfort to the dependencies introduced by him limiting real visibility of Science to any useful elements in those philosophical fragments truly reflecting Science. Which would have been seriously mistaken, because all those influential defining traits he was observing about philooiphy, are not properties of philosophy at all, but arise as the influence of background/enclosing influences generally. It is in fact a description of physical causality, in that any enclosing or background influence will exert perhaps a small influence....on everything. Small or not, the implicit character of background influences means never any criticism, and as the influences moves to the back an ever decreasing prospect of ever being picked up by C&R or any other process. The consequence is that while enclosed more explicit knowledge evolves in time, and is continually tested in anger allowing for many such to drop away altogether, implicit influences never get smaller (i.e. broken up by new distinctions) so relative to other principles implicit influences get ever bigger in their effect, moving both to the background and in the shaping of every new principle to ever higher degrees. This should be disturbing, because what it means is that the history of all systems of thought terminates with such status the system of thought in its entirety is nothing other than a big fat representation of implicit influences. But anyway back to Popper. The point is, the influential character of philosophy that Popper was thinking of, is a physical causality and as such it is only true when the philosophy really was an enclosing incluence at the appropriate time back in history. It isn't something that is retrospectively true. You can't define a philosophy and decide it encloses everything else and then backdate it to your past actions, and expect it to be true. And it is for that reason, that the influence of background and enclosing influences - and so philosophy certainly - that actually this insight about the influence of philosophy, is a powerful falsification of any notion Popper had he could use those philosophical fragments for proxies of Science. They never were background or enclosing influences. They never had any influence over the reality of Science. Some like empiricism may contain truths, but elements of truth - even a large number - are totally useless as proxies for Science, absent exposing himself to a second independent window into Science and successfully using it to match the element he thinks might be true in empiricism or whatever, to its faithful manifestati0n in Science. Otherwise, what has the 'truth' told Popper new about Science? Everything is true given the right context...and there's an infinity of contexts out there.