Is Popper's Methodology Applicable to the Natural Sciences?

[Jon_Irenicus]

In On Praxeology and the Praxeological Foundation of Epistemology, Hoppe actually tried to deduce the truths of natural science from the action axiom. I only listened to it in the car (it’s available in the Mises.org media library), and didn’t carefully study it, so I can’t say how successful he was.

You must mean protophysics, i.e. the principles of measurement &c.

And it’s worth noting that Quine is probably not for your thoroughgoing Misesian either…

On the topic, Laurence BonJour has a nice section on Quine in his In Defense of Pure Reason.

[BruceOnTheLoose]

Popper was just flat out wrong about science. Long ago, it was worked out that if you followed Popper’s falsificationist logic straight through, the inevitable conclusion was that no progress is possible in scientific knowledge at all. It’s ironic that he is considered by many (particularly scientists) to be a defender of positivism, or something resembling it.

Someone recommended reading Kuhn. I don’t. Slim book (Revolutions), but still a waste of time - historical interest only. Kuhn spent most of the latter part of his career fighting againts “misreadings” of that book. In effect, he was repudiating it, since the “misreadings” he was battling were what just about everyone got from the text, because, well, it’s what the text says.

@alansmithee

@Jon Irenicus

Agreed, though I do not think the layman will find Quine accessible at all.

And it’s worth noting that Quine is probably not for your thoroughgoing Misesian either…

Quine I would say is definately worth reading. An very astute thinker and really an amazing mind…

This whole Chalmers discussion reminds me of university, had to read that book there and it wasn’t all that fun for me. Lakatos, Popper, Kuhn…how the heart sinks..

I don’t know if you’ve ever read “Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists”, by David Stove, but if reading the original arguments of Lakatos, Popper and Kuhn makes your heart sink, then reading Stove might give your heart a lift. He rips them (and Feyerabend) apart mercilessly, exposing the rhetorical tricks whereby they make their severely flawed arguments and improbable conclusions sound plausible.

In my opinion, the best picture of science is approximately that summarised in Susan Haack’s “Defending Science - Within Reason”.

[Solid_Choke]

@nazgulnarsil

I am probably alone in that I don’t really see scientific induction as a problem. science is about formalizing causation. when we observe it in a natural context causation is merely two statistically highly correlated events.

So every time you drop a ball it hits the floor. The problem of induction says that just because it has hit the floor every time in the past isn’t enough of a justification to say for sure that it will hit the floor this time.

Yeah, so? WHat other avenue is open to a rational agent? In order to function one MUST act as if what was true in the past holds true in the future. Until a conflicting piece of evidence presents itself there is only extrapolation of the past or random guesswork.

I don’t really know what you mean by “problem of induction”. The two concepts I know of that are called that don’t claim that, using induction, you can’t know for sure. What they say is that using induction you can’t know AT ALL. In Hume’s version, he doesn’t say simply that we should be careful because induction doesn’t work all the time, he says that induction has no justification that doesn’t rely on induction. The problem of induction asks why induction is rational at all, not that it sometimes doesn’t work.

Try thinking of the problem of induction like this:

Imagine a chicken in a coup. Everyday the farmer stops by the coup with some chicken feed. This is the case no matter if it is raining or sunny, fall or summer, even or odd days of the month, etc…The chicken believes that today the farmer will bring feed but instead the famer brings a hatchet and lops off the chickens head. Why are people that rely on induction more rational than the chicken?

Cannot counter-induction be justified in the same way (that is, by relying on counter-induction)? Why not believe that because something has happened in the past it WILL NOT happen in the future? Someone who relies on induction and someone who relies on counter-induction will use all the same examples to show why they are acting rational.

BTW I use induction everyday of my life and would be dead without it. I just don’t know if it can be justified using an argument that isn’t circular.