Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 13:59:41 +0000
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Re: Primacy of practice, sophistry, and other fun stuff


Mervyn

Not really a philosopher of science - more a professional engineer - 
with a strong conventionalist/constructivist bias...

steve

Mervyn Hartwig wrote:

> Hi Steve,
>
> To say that Popper was a cold war warrior is not necessarily to 
> dismiss his philosophy of science (though it could be used as an 
> excuse to do so), rather to call into question his denunciation of 
> Plato, Hegel, Marx etc in the non-phil sci books referred to. I'm 
> aware that there are important realist strands in Popper's philosophy 
> of science, and look forward to reading Fuller some time. That said, 
> he operated until his dying day with a positivist conception of a 
> causal law (such that the D-N model of explanation is often referred 
> to as 'the Mill-Hempel-Popper' model), so to say that he wasn't  a 
> positivist can only be something like half true, as this is pretty 
> central to positivism.
>
> I hope you don't mind my asking, but are you yourself a philosopher of 
> science by any chance (they're still in fairly short supply in CR)?
>
> Mervyn
>
>  <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk> writes
>
>> Mervyn
>>
>> Within the philosophy of science perhaps the biggest argument of the 
>> century is between Kuhn notable 'The structure of`scientific 
>> revolutions' and Popper -  like most  people on the left I also 
>> assumed that the below rationale was broadly correct - Fuller has 
>> done a remarkably good job of throwing this presumption into question.
>>
>> I am not concerned to defend Popper regarding the Open Society or the 
>> Poverty of Historicism, after all a social-democrat like Popper could 
>> hardly be expected to agree with Marx and Hegel,  rather the interest 
>> I have is in Fuller's attempt to recover the philosophy of 'science' 
>> and 'knowledge' from the predominance of the relativist Kuhn's 
>> paradigm shifts, 'where knowledge is adequate to its objects'. The 
>> argument goes that Popper '...took seriously both that science 
>> aspires to universal knowledge and that scientists - our 
>> representatives in this project are inherently flawed and biased 
>> agents. The result was to make  science game-like and democratic as 
>> possible...' But to clarify this Popper's version of science is 
>> essentially dialectical pitting one hypothesis/theory against another 
>> over a disputed issue. This goes back to Athens, the model being 
>> Socrates model of questioning, constructed in the 18th/19th centuries 
>> as the 'academic practice of scholarly disputation', from this 
>> derives the German dialectical tradition and of course Hegel and 
>> Marx.  An example of this dispute in a non-science area is the 
>> Popper/Adorno dispute over positivism which when looked at shows 
>> perhaps rather typically that they are remarkably similar... both 
>> anti-positivists, both dialectical thinkers, one a marxist the other 
>> a social-democratic liberal.
>>
>> A single issue it seems to me throws the outright rejection into 
>> question: "At the height of the Vietnam War, Karl Popper called for 
>> scientists to adopt a version of the Hippocratic Oath to restrain 
>> their propensity for harm."
>> regards
>> sdv
>>
>> Mervyn Hartwig wrote:
>>
>>> I don't know about Kuhn, but anybody of intellectual integrity with a
>>> reasonable familiarity with Hegel and Marx who reads The Open Society
>>> and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism could scarcely doubt 
>>> that
>>> Popper was a cold war warrior. He is not only sly, he is dishonest,
>>> deliberately suppressing key words and omitting context in quotes to
>>> suit his cold warrior distortions and travesties. His characteristic
>>> method is to set up a scarecrow and demolish it as if it were the real
>>> thing. To spring to his defence on this issue in the current context 
>>> can
>>> only mean to defend the totalitarian commercialism (Collier) that 
>>> Popper
>>> himself promoted and which is now being imposed on the world by all
>>> force necessary. (The very skies over London have been emptied for the
>>> god of totalitarian commercialism to arrive as I type this...)
>>>
>>> Mervyn
>>>
>>> steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk writes
>>>
>>>> James
>>>>
>>>> The fifties cold warrior labelling of Popper has been challenged in 
>>>> very
>>>> interesting ways by Steve Fuller just recently in his book Kuhn vs 
>>>> Popper.
>>>> As Fuller points out it is Kuhn who is in the pay of the coldwar 
>>>> warriors...
>>>>
>>>> (this is not to disagree or comment on the thrust of the below - 
>>>> merely to
>>>> spring to the defence of popper...)
>>>>
>>>> regards
>>>> sdv
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Hi Carroll
>>>>>
>>>>> Your punchline was strong -- that the purpose of reading Plato's
>>>>> Republic was to understand The Enemy.  But, only one? Why is his name
>>>>> on Lenin's tomb?  Your approach calls to mind the Fifties cold 
>>>>> warrior
>>>>> Sir Karl Popper's *Open Society and Its Enemies*, after which George
>>>>> Soros named his foundation. Slyly, Sir Karl manages to suggest that
>>>>> Plato's target is workers who must be kept in their place, whereas 
>>>>> his
>>>>> real target (see the Gorgias) is the unscrupulous Nietzschean rich 
>>>>> who
>>>>> want to exploit and rule.
>>>>>
>>>>> It is nearly always forgotten that the society of Plato's first 
>>>>> choice
>>>>> is a communist one, and that the rest of the argument is about a
>>>>> second-best society. And even the second-best society is not a class
>>>>> society in Marx's sense, in that the philosopher rulers do not
>>>>> appropriate the surplus, but live a frugal life.
>>>>>
>>>>> I suppose the jury is out on whether Plato meant by "gennaion 
>>>>> pseudos"
>>>>> Big or Noble Lie, or both, but the myth of noble and base metals 
>>>>> in the
>>>>> soul is an answer to the problem of legitimising the rule of
>>>>> reason, and defending it against the power of wealth. Lenin had the
>>>>> same problem. It's quite a problem!
>>>>>
>>>>> James
>>>>
>
>
>
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