Popperian Methodology Research Articles

Popperian methodology and the Semmelweis case.

Semmelweis' discovery of the etiology of childbed fever has long attracted the attention of historians of medicine and biographers. In recent years it has also become of increasing interest to philosophers. In this paper I discuss the interpretation of Semmelweis' methodology from the viewpoint of the inference to the best explanation and argue that Popperian methodology is better at capturing the dynamics of the growth of knowledge. Furthermore, I criticize the attempts to explain the failure of Semmelweis to have his discovery accepted on the basis of the Kuhnian concept of paradigms, and warn that this view may endorse dogmatism as the norm The Kuhnian position also raises the problem of the authoritarian nature of scientific institutions which defend a paradigm against unorthodox, rebellious views, such as in the case of Semmelweis. Popperian philosophy is seen as a challenge to promote a link between an open society and open science with its main aim being to cherish a free critical spirit.

Ecos popperianos na metodologia econômica de Elinor Ostrom

Resumo O artigo procura apresentar e analisar a discussão metodológica em economia empreendida por Elinor Ostrom, buscando identificar nela a influência da epistemologia popperiana. A ênfase voltou-se para os conceitos de Princípio da Racionalidade e de Análise Situacional, com os quais Popper contribuiu para a metodologia das Ciências Sociais. O artigo mostrou que esses conceitos encontraram equivalentes na análise da autora, e que Ostrom não apenas reconhece a importância da contribuição popperiana, mas dela faz o ponto de partida para sua proposta metodológica aplicada à governança de recursos comuns. O artigo refere-se, também, ao fato de que ao longo do tempo a metodologia dessa autora gradativamente abre a uma interlocução metodológica mais plural, conservando, no entanto, aspectos essenciais do projeto popperiano para a metodologia em Ciências Sociais, entre os quais a adesão ao individualismo metodológico.

“The Most Philosophically Important of All the Sciences”: Karl Popper and Physical Cosmology

Problems of scientific cosmology only rarely occur in the works of Karl Popper. Nevertheless, it was a subject that interested him and which he occasionally commented on. What is more important, his general claim of falsifiability as a criterion that demarcates science from non-science has played a significant role in periods of the development of modern physical cosmology. The paper examines the historical contexts of the interaction between cosmology and Popperian philosophy of science. Apart from covering Popper's inspiration from Einstein and his views on questions of cosmology, it focuses on the impact of his thoughts in two periods of controversy of modern cosmology, the one related to the steady state theory and the other to the recent multiverse proposal. It turns out that the impact has been considerable, and continues to be so, but also that the versions of Popperian methodology discussed by cosmologists are sometimes far from what Popper actually thought and wrote.

GP08 is the New F53: Gul and Pesendorfer's Methodological Essay from the Viewpoint of Blaug's Popperian Methodology

Abstract: This paper examines the methodological arguments in Gul & Pesendorfer (2008) from the prospective of Blaug's Popperian methodology. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part examines the similarities between Gul & Pesendorfer's essay and Milton Friedman's famous essay published in 1953. The second part turns to the question of how the Gul & Pesendorfer's argument stands up to a Blaug-type Popperian analysis.

Dlaczego Popper nie był kryptoindukcjonistą

The article is an attempt to answer the question whether the result of the connection between corroboration and verisimilitude is an inductive element in the Popperian methodology. For this purpose the essay collates Karl Popper’s view with David Hume’s scepticism and inductionism of Rudolf Carnap. Further on the paper analizes the compromising”(for inductionism and critical falsificationism) proposition of Evaldas Nekraˇsas. The article also contains a presentation of Imre Lakatos’ allegation of Popper’s scepticism and the accusation of inductionism as formulated by John Watkins. The study of the disputes between the philosophers leads to the conclusion that the critical views are baseless. The final hypothesis is that these are not the right ways of proving the allegations of crypto-inductionism.

Karl Popper on Physical Cosmologies

The eminent Austrian-British philosopher Karl Raimund Popper (1902-94) is one of very few modern philosophers who is known by most and whose views have influenced course of science. to his famous demarcation criterion, first stated in 1933, a scientific theory must be falsifiable, that is, result in predictions of such a kind that they, should they disagree with observations, refute theory.1 Popper presented his falsificationist philosophy of science in Logik der Forschung from 1934, but it became generally known only with enlarged English translation of 1959, The logic of scientific discovery. The ideas in this book, and demarcation criterion in particular, played important role in cosmological controversy that raged from 1948 to about 1965 and in which new steady state theory confronted evolution cosmology based on Einstein's general theory of relativity.2 The leading steady state protagonist, Hermann Bondi, was fascinated by Popper's philosophy which he thought proved methodological superiority of steady state model over big bang models. 'The steady-state theory is far more testable than any other, he wrote in 1966, one year after discovery of cosmic microwave background. According to Popper and other philosophers of science, this makes it clearly preferable to alternative theories.3It may be less well known that Popper's views of science continue to play a role in modern astronomy and cosmology, and are widely accepted by practitioners of these sciences.4 Recently these views have become involved in another cosmological controversy, one concerned with multiverse proposal of numerous other universes in addition to one we live in.5 In so-called landscape version defended by Leonard Susskind and some other physicists, multiverse theory is incompatible with Popperian standards of testability. This has caused Susskind to dismiss falsifiability criterion and generally views of Popperazi. On other hand, Lee Smolin and other critics of multiverse cosmology emphasize necessity of Popperian methodology. Referring to Popper, Smolin suggests that scientists have ethical imperative to consider only falsifiable theories as possible explanations of natural phenomena.6In light of how influential Popper's philosophy has been in modern astronomy and cosmology, it is remarkable that he had very little to say about these sciences. Only on a few occasions did he refer to physical cosmology, a topic that does not appear in any of his major publications. While debate over steady state theory involved several philosophers (including Adolf Grunbaum, Milton Munitz, and Rom Harre), Popper remained silent. Yet he had interest in cosmology, which he called the most philosophically important of all sciences.7 From various scattered remarks in his books and papers it appears that he considered cosmology, although philosophically important, a somewhat immature science, and also that he had little confidence in victorious big bang model of universe.We learn more about Popper's attitude to physical cosmology from a letter he wrote me on 10 June 1994, just a few months before he passed away. The letter, covering seven handwritten pages, was a reply to some questions I had asked him in preparation of my book Cosmology and controversy. It is a source of considerable interest, both from perspective of history of cosmology and from perspective of history of philosophy. I can only quote from it now, after it has been deposited at Karl Popper Library in Klagenfurt, Austria,8 and copyright questions have been clarified.In his younger days, so Popper says in letter, he was an ardent admirer of Friedmann's suggestion, a reference to Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann who in 1922 had shown that there are expanding and other dynamical solutions to Einstein's cosmologica! …

Methodological and normative individualism in The Calculus

I came to The Calculus of Consent not as an economist interested in extending economic analysis into the political realm but as a student of sociology who—influenced by Karl Popper’s critical rationalism—was dissatisfied with what counted as “theory” in his chosen field and had turned to Smithean classical political economy and the so-called “new” political economy of the 1960s in search of a theoretical approach to social phenomena that promised a more solid foundation. As a beginning student, I had come across the writings of Hans Albert, the principal advocate of Popperian methodology in Germany, and was instantly fascinated, and convinced, by what he had to say about a methodologically sound empirical social science in general and about the tradition of classical political economy as “a general sociological research program” (Albert 1967, 1979) in particular.1 In my dissertation (The two sociologies—individualism and collectivism in social theory, Vanberg 1975) in which I defended the individualist-economic tradition in social science against the collectivist Comte-Durkheim tradition in sociology I referred, though only once, to The Calculus. Drawing largely on Hayek’s writings in the history of social thought, my main interest was in the theoretical tradition that revolves around “the twin concepts of the formation of spontaneous orders and of selective evolution” (Hayek 1988: 146), a tradition that had little to say about the problems of collective action that The Calculus focuses on. Such neglect of one of the “two kinds of order” that Hayek (1973: 36ff.) had contrasted— namely “spontaneous order,” exemplified paradigmatically by the market order, and “organization,” i.e., order created by deliberate coordination—I found increasingly dissatisfying, and I began to look for contributions that might fill the missing second half of a truly general and consistently individualistic social theory. This led me to return to The Calculus. In my habilitation thesis (Market and organization—individualistic social theory and the

Dual Intuitionistic Logic and a Variety of Negations: The Logic of Scientific Research

We consider a logic which is semantically dual (in some precise sense of the term) to intuitionistic. This logic can be labeled as “falsification logic”: it embodies the Popperian methodology of scientific discovery. Whereas intuitionistic logic deals with constructive truth and non-constructive falsity, and Nelson's logic takes both truth and falsity as constructive notions, in the falsification logic truth is essentially non-constructive as opposed to falsity that is conceived constructively. We also briefly clarify the relationships of our falsification logic to some other logical systems.

Evolution of organ systems: Phylogeny, function and reciprocal illumination

‘Mainstream’ cladists have formulated a rigorous Popperian methodology of falsifiability and have claimed that pattern in evolutionary biology is logically prior to the reconstruction of process and that cladograms have logical precedence over phylogenetic trees and phylogenetic trees over evolutionary scenarios. It is further claimed that cladograms are more scientific than phylogenetic diagrams and diagrams more so than evolutionary scenarios. Here I argue that evolutionary biology deals — in contrast to physics — with unique events which can be told only in a narrative. There is reciprocal illumination between pattern and process. Eolutionary scenarios, i. e. narratives of cladogenetic, anagenetic, adaptive and biogeographic processes are the ultimate goals of all systematic and evolutionary biology. There is reciprocal illumination between all elements of the evolutionary scenario. The criterion for a reliable scenario is its inner coherence.

On the unification of psychology, methodology, and pedagogy: Selz, popper, and agassi

There can be little dispute that psychology, the study of how humans learn, and methodology, the analysis of the processes of learning, should form the basis of a theory of teaching. A good pedagogical theory should take account of the natural processes which people employ in order to learn. If done correctly, learning is made easier. If not done, there is the risk of forcing students into molds which may hinder learning. Whatever such natural processes may be, however, they alone are not sufficient for the foundation of a theory of teaching. The acquisition of knowledge needs to be distinguished from the acquisition of mere opinion. Learning requires that the natural processes be refined and improved. A theory of how that should be done requires a methodological view which explains how knowledge is acquired. A theory of teaching should, then, unify results in psychology and methodology with specific proposals for teaching methods. The way in which such a unification is to be achieved depends, of course, on which of the various theories in psychology and methodology one adopts. Given the great number of these, there is scope for a variety of combinations. I will confine myself in this paper to one experiment in the unification of psychological, methodological, and pedagogical theories. The psychology is that of the Wiirzburg school, primarily of Otto Selz. The methodology is that of Karl Popper. The pedagogical theory comes from Joseph Agassi. The unity is both historical and logical. Popper started his career as a psychologist and defender of the Wiirzburg school (Berkson & Wettersten, 1982; Popper, 1928; Wettersten, 1985): One reason, he says, for his abandonment of psychology was that what he had hoped to achieve had already been accomplished by Selz 0~oppe r, 1970). 1 Popper used his psychological background in the development of his methodology. Joseph Agassi then used the new Popperian methodology in the development of his theory of teaching. Since the basic ideas in the fields of psychology, methodology, and pedagogy have been well explicated elsewhere and the notion of unifying them has already been proposed by others, 2 a few words are in order as to what I hope to accomplish in this essay. Agassi's theory of teaching is well-known among those who have crossed his path since both he and various students of his have employed it for a number of years. As far as I know, however, there is no explicit statement of it and its relation to the psychology and methodology which preceded it. This seems unfortunate to me; Agassi's work has both theoretical and practical interest, but it can only be appraised if we have some description of it and its rationale. This I hope to provide here. I have,

The significance test controversy

The pre-designationist, anti-inductivist and operationalist tenor of Neyman-Pearson theory give that theory an obvious affinity to several currently influential philosophies of science, most particularly, the Popperian. In fact, one might fairly regard Neyman-Pearson theory as the statistical embodiment of Popperian methodology. The difficulties raised in this paper have, then, wider purport, and should serve as something of a touchstone for those who would construct a theory of evidence adequate to statistics without recourse to the notion of inductive probability.

The Significance Test Controversy

The pre-designationist, anti-inductivist and operationalist tenor of Neyman-Pearson theory give that theory an obvious affinity to several currently influential philosophies of science, most particularly, the Popperian. In fact, one might fairly regard Neyman-Pearson theory as the statistical embodiment of Popperian methodology. The difficulties raised in this paper have, then, wider purport, and should serve as something of a touchstone for those who would construct a theory of evidence adequate to statistics without recourse to the notion of inductive probability.