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Talk:Karl Popper\Archive1

Contents 1 Style for Nupedia credit? 2 Continental tradition 3 Peter Singer's criticism 4 Talk about jealousy!! 5 =References section is an abomination 5.1 Oh my shirt 5.2 New photo 5.3 Excelelnt review of the Self and Its Brain 5.4 GA Re-Review and In-line citations

[edit] Style for Nupedia credit?

Article says: "An earlier version of the above article was posted on 16 May 2001 on Nupedia; reviewed and approved by the Philosophy and Logic group; editor, Wesley Cooper; lead reviewer, Wesley Cooper; lead copyeditors, Cindy Seeley and Ruth Ifcher."

What are Wikipedia style guidelines for credits of this type? I was under the impression that Wikipedia articles don't have explicit credits. Is there some exception for former Nupedia articles? -- Writtenonsand 01:45, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Nupedia, the predecessor to Wikipedia, did have a review and approval procedure. Wikipedia was started by Larry Sanger, Nupedia's editor, as a means of speeding up their disappointingly slow progress. Then Wikipedia boomed and took over, so Nupedia was shut down and Sanger (who holds a PhD in philosophy), left the project. --Blainster 21:18, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Continental tradition

What does "continental tradition" mean? Idealist? Hegelian specifically? The philosophical distinctives of the various German schools of thought of the nineteenth century: Hegel, Kant, Marx, etc.? Continental rationalism? Something else entirely? Srnec 05:48, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Oh..I think I know what the problem here is. The criticism that Taylor aims at Popper states literally that Popper belittles the "tradition" or something alon those lines. Well, it doesn't get ANY vaguier than that. So, after reading Taylor's article and little bit about Taylor, it is easy to deduce that he is referring to what is now commonly though meanignlessy called "continental philosophy" (i.e. phenomenology, exitentialism, Franfurt school , postmodermism perhaps) versus "analytic" philosophy. I wrote continental school or tradtion. I will make this more specific and add a link, if there is not one already--Lacatosias

[edit] Peter Singer's criticism

Is this argument from Singer's NYRoB essay adequately represented in the article?

Popper wants to say that it is possible to avoid assuming that the future will, or probably will, be like the past, and this is why he has claimed to have solved the problem of induction. We do not have to make the assumption, he tells us, if we proceed by formulating conjectures and attempting to falsify them.

Unfortunately, we still have to act. If I did not assume that because water has come out of my tap in the past when I turned the handle the same will happen today. I might equally sensibly hold my glass under the electric light. On this pragmatic issue Popper's more recent contributions do have a little more to say, but it does not help. He says that, as a basis for action, we should prefer "the best-tested theory." This can only mean the theory that has survived refutation in the past; but why, since Popper says that past corroboration has nothing to do with future performance, is it rational to prefer this? Popper says that it will be "rational" to do so "in the most obvious sense of the word known to me…. I do not know of anything more 'rational' than a well-conducted critical discussion."

The reader familiar with Popper's contempt for linguistic philosophy will rub his eyes at this. Popper has picked up that once trusty but now discarded weapon of linguistic philosophers, the argument from a "paradigm usage" of a word—in this case, the word "rational." The argument proves nothing. As Popper himself has said many times, words do not matter so long as we are not misled by them. Popper's argument is no better than Strawson's claim that induction is valid because inductive reasoning is a paradigm of what we mean by "valid" reasoning. In fact Popper's identification of a "well-conducted critical discussion" with the idea of rationality is doubly unhelpful, since until we know how to establish which theory is more likely to hold in the future we have not the faintest idea how to conduct a "well-conducted critical discussion" that has any bearing on the question we want answered.

More fundamental still is the question how, even in theory, we can possibly prefer one hypothesis to another, or take one as a nearer approximation to truth than the other, if past corroboration has no implications for the future. Without the inductive assumption, the fact that a theory was refuted yesterday is quite irrelevant to its truth-status today. Indeed, in the time it takes to say: "This result corroborates Einstein's theory but not Newton's," all the significance of the remark vanishes, and we cannot go on to say that therefore Einstein's theory is nearer to the truth. So jettisoning the inductive assumption makes nonsense of Popper's own theory of the growth of scientific knowledge. While it is true that on Popper's view induction is not a means of scientific discovery, as it was for Bacon, it remains indispensable, and the logical problem of induction is no nearer to solution than it was before Popper tackled it.

[edit] Talk about jealousy!!

"Martin Gardner claimns that Popper was egotictial and jeaolous of Carnap."

This is a great honor for Carnap, if true, I should think. Enormous fame and recognition carries that sort if thing with it in philosophy. But Popper has far surpassed Carnap in those terms. Proof: The criticism section is longer than the article itself!! Does any philosopher have anything positive to say about old Carl??----Francesco Franco 17:17, 17 July 2006 (UTC) 09:11, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] =References section is an abomination

I'll work on some of this, but I only wrote a small part of this article. I doubt I can find all the sources,. Thanks to Seth Mahoney for highlighting this problem. I'm using the standard ref format for Wikipedia, if I can rememeber how it works (;. --Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 08:24, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Oh my shirt

Even the Popper photo has been taken down. Good 'eavens!! What can be done about these "image" problems? --Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 14:51, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New photo

The article does not discuss the book in question. Also, you need to provide an explicit fair use rationale. --Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 17:02, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Excelelnt review of the Self and Its Brain

following is an excellent review of The Self and Its Brain, which as the culminating work of Popper's career should certainly play a larger role in the article about him. As I have never edited any Wiki articles, I provide this review for more knowledgeable veterans to incorporate. (note, I am not John Gray)

Reason Papers No. 7 (Spring 1981) 121-124. Copyright O 1981 by the Reason Foundation. JOHN N . GRAY Jesus College, Oxford

THE SELF AND ITS BRAIN Though it has had an immense influence outside of philosophy, the thought of Karl Popper continues to be neglected and misunderstood by most professional philosophers. Nor do we need to look far for an explana- tion of the fact that Popper's philosophy has received more serious atten- tion from social theorists, working scientists, historians of art, and practic- ing politicians, for example, than from the main body of academic philosophers. Popper's conception of the proper approach to philosophy has put him in permanent opposition to the dominant schools of our age, whose view of the subject he has ceaselessly criticized. Popper has always denied that there is an esoteric method peculiarly ap- propriate to philosophy, and he has always insisted that philosophical problems grow naturally from difficulties in other areas of inquiry. Against both logical positivism and linguistic philosophy, whose major exponents he knew personally when the seeds of these movements were sown in the Vienna Circle during the interwar years, Popper claims that the problems of philosophy are to do with the world and our knowledge of the world. They are not pseudoproblems, to be dissolved by some method of linguistic or conceptual analysis that shows them to be devoid of significance, but genuine questions to which a diversity of meaningful answers may be proposed. Philosophy is, in fact, simply a critical investiga- tion, at a high level of abstraction, of our commonsense beliefs. In the theory of knowledge, Popper's distinctive contribution is his sug- gestion that what distinguishes science from myth, metaphysics, and pseudoscience is the falsifiability of its claims about the world. In sharp contrast to popular conceptions of science derived from the works of Bacon and Descartes, Popper asserts that science has no foundation of cer- tainty either in observation or in the order of our ideas and that no formula can be found that guarantees scientific discovery or the growth of knowledge. According to Popper, science is a creatively conjectural enter- prise, in which bold hypotheses (themselves often stumbled upon unawares, or grasped in a flash of intuitive insight) are propagated and then subjected to severe testing by attempted refutation. Similarly, in philosophy we consider questions suggested by our circumstances as reflec- tive creatures who find themselves in a largely unknowable world, and the appropriate procedure is to adopt a critical approach in which rival views are scrutinized as to their adequacy to the demands of the current problem situation. In The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977, 597 pages), Popper has col- laborated with his friend, the Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles, to produce a book of the first importance in which this approach to philosophy is well exemplified. In it the ancient problem of the relation of body to mind is treated, not as a result of a linguistic or concep- tual confusion, but as a real difficulty in our thought about ourselves. The rival accounts of this relation-the various sorts of materialism and of dualism, for example-are all canvassed as more or less satisfactory responses to this difficulty. At one level, the book may be seen as a sus- tained polemic against reductionism. According to Popper and Eccles, the conception of man as "nothing but" a physico-chemical mechanism is at once scientifically unsupported, philosophically-inadequate, and morally pernicious. Their aim is to reinstate "the ghost in the machine," that troublesome wraith of Cartesian philosophy, which it has been the pas- sionate concern of several generations of materialists to exorcise. At another level, the book may be seen as an application to the mind-body problem of Popper's theory of a three-tiered world, comprising not only material objects and states of mind (which he calls "World 1" and "World 2," respectively) but also a domain of intelligibles, virtual objects or abstract entities (which he calls "World 3"). The book-which is a handsomely produced and remarkably inexpensive volume-has three parts. In the first part, written by Popper, a philosophical refutation of materialism is attempted in an argument of un- paralleled erudition and clarity. In the second part, Eccles gives an absorb- ing account of the neurophysiology of consciousness, proposing the hypothesis that the mind is an independent entity active in causal interac- tions with the "liaison areas" of the dominant cerebral hemisphere. The third section is based on twelve conversations between the two men, re- corded in late September of 1974 at the Villa Serbelloni on Lago di Como, and brings out clearly some important differences in view between them. Popper's contribution contains many very good things. He contends that nothing can show a priori the superiority of the materialist position, and, in a fascinating section on the self-transcendence of materialism in modern science, he shows how at least some versions of materialism belong to a phase of scientific thought now long obsolete. He adduces some important and, in my view, wholly conclusive arguments against the doctrines of parallelism and epiphenomenalism, which deny to mind the causal potency it is thought to possess in ordinary thought and language. He gives us a marvelously fresh account of the history of the mind-body problem, rightly giving special attention to the theories of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. His contribution also contains what is in many respects the most pro- vocative and constructive section of the book, a chapter on the self in which an evolutionary approach to the phenomenon of selfhood is espoused. Undoubtedly the most controversial part of Popper's argument against materialism, however, is that which appeals to his theory of a Third World of abstract entities. Popper shares with Plato, the logician Frege, and the influential contemporary American philosopher W. V. Quine, the belief that a domain of objective structures must be postulated that is indepen- dent of the realms of matter and mind and that can interact causally with them. His "World 3" differs in several important respects from Plato's realm of essences, from Frege's third realm sf thoughts, and from the do- main of classes, or sets, postulated by Quine (who, interestingly, combines the commitment to abstract entities with a rejection of mentalism), but it has in common with these accounts the fundamental commitment to a pluralist view of the world. If I am not mistaken, it is his appeal to the real- ity of the Third World, which Popper invokes partly in order to account for certain features of evolution by natural selection, that constitutes his crucial argument against the most powerful contemporary variant of materialism, the so-called identity theory. This very influential view pro- poses the theoretical identity of mental and physical events: as a matter of fact, rather than of logic, the mind is claimed to be identical with the ner- vous system (or certain aspects thereof). While the identity theory has the advantage over other doctrines of-allowing for the causal potency of the mind, argues Popper, it involves a view of the world that neglects the emergence in it of life, mind, and abstract objects. Thus Popper reveals that his argument against this most attractive form of contemporary materialism presupposes the truth of the "Three Worlds" doctrine. If we can avoid postulating World Three, there is every reason to suppose we can do without World Two, as well. Some of the weaknesses of Popper's argument for World Three have been identified by Paul Feyerabend in his masterly review of Popper's Ob- jective Knowledge (Inquiry 17 [1974]: 475-507). Feyerabend notes correctly that none of Popper's arguments for the autonomy of abstract objects establishes their irreducibility in terms of mental or physical states and processes. Pointing out, as Popper does, that such things as numbers, arguments, and theories exert a causal influence in the mental and physical realms cannot by itself show that such things do not themselves belong to those realms: to show a causal connection is not to mark an ontological distinction. Too often, as Feyerabend remarks, Popper proceeds by ex- cluding certain things from the physical and mental realms and then trium- phantly discovers them in World Three. He even elevates this game of hide- and-seek into a methodological principle, stipulating (bizarrely) that we are to resort to Occam's razor only after we have decided which entities are ir- reducible. Where Popper abjures this procedure, his arguments often take him on unfortunate excursions into the philosophy of mathematics. The present reviewer is even more reluctant than Feyerabend to follow Popper into what has become a forbiddingly technical area of inquiry. Three points may be worth making, however. First, it is far from clear that the advantages of Platonism in mathematics can be purchased by Popper unless he forgoes the Hegelian satisfaction of allowing error and progress into the Third World. Secondly, Wittgenstein's far more adequate and fruitful work in the philosophy of mathematics may remind us of a point that Popper has neglected and that is of fundamental importance for all areas of philosophy: there is an indispensable place for the notion of the in- dependently real even in a philosophy that adopts a radically constructivist or conventionalist view of mathematical knowledge. One may allow that mathematical theorems and calculations, like moral judgments, may be publicly testable and defeasible without allowing that (in mathematics or in morals) there is knowledge of any realm outside of human practices and conventions. And since acknowledgement of the public character of mathematical notions involves no ontological commitment, it is compatible with a physicalist ontology. Thirdly, and finally, Popper's philosophy con- tains no resources to resist physicalism, since his only arguments for World Two are arguments that invoke World Three. If, as I have argued, Popper's postulated World Three is unnecessary, he has no reason to move beyond the First World of physical objects and laws. It is their common commitment to a pluralist theory of what the world contains that motivates Popper and Eccles in their argument for interac- tionism. Their views diverge in other areas, with Eccles displaying a strong concern to preserve the theoretical possibility of the survival of human per- sonality beyond bodily death, to which Popper is comparatively indifferent and which is in any case uncongenial to his evolutionary mode of thought about man's place in the universe. Popper and Eccles both believe that the currency of a mechanistic view of man has contributed to the modern disrespect for human life and dignity-a belief that may be contested by those who, like the present reviewer, see no logical or empirical connection between materialist positions in the philosophy of mind and contemporary inhumanity. Their most important shared commitment, however, is to a conception of the task of philosophers as self-critical conjectural thought about man's relation to the world-a view that sets them apart from the mainstream of current philosophical opinion. It is because this book ex- emplifies the virtues of such a conception of philosophy that all philosophers should read it-even though few will find its argument finally persuasive.

Oh, believe me,I'm a great admirere of Karl Popper.

But, the fact is, his bizarre dualistic views in philosophy of mind are not among his most admirable acheivements. Sorry, I'm not going to add mention of "Self and Brain" with the conseuqnce of having to post about 15,000 merited criticisms of it. It would actually worsen the article. Please read "the Logic o Scientific Discovery, "Conjectites abd Refutsations", "on the Poverty of Historicism", "The Open Society and its Enemies", "All the world is problem solving" etc.. instead of that other nonsense about three worlds.--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 07:24, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Goodness gracious...if ever Notturno was right... Regardless of whether you personally think it is 'nonsense', and whether the '15,000 merited criticisms' (are you sure it isn't 20,000 or 30,000, how about 50,000?) are really merited, Popper's 'three worlds' concept is an important component of his philosophy and some mention of it needs to be made, preferably by someone who hasn't so severe an allergic reaction to any mention of it.--Calamus, 1119 EDT, 3 September 2006

You must simply take my word on this matter. I have it from Sir Karl himself that he had formally renounced this notion of six or seven worlds back in the early may of 1972 but that this was never made known to anyone. Later that evening, he was taken out of his home and brough to a unspecified detention camp by memebers of the KGB. He was shot and replace by a doppleganger which had been consrtucetd to resemeble Popper in every partcualr, except that the Popper2 version had not recounced the doctine of three worlds. Thus it is to Popper2 that the notion should be attrinbted and a new page started for Popper2. --Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 15:45, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Rejecting his conclusions is no justification for not including this material in the Wiki about him!

Popper himself told you this? It is curious then, that the he didn't strike the appropriate material from the 2nd addition of his 'Objective Knowledge', and didn't object to the publication of 'Knowledge and Body-Mind Problem' (which I think was published while he was still alive, and even if it wasn't, 'The Myth of the Framework' was, as I recall, and it too makes reference to objective knowledge). I haven't read 'A World of Propensities' in a while, but I think he still mentions it there, too. Why didn't he recant in public? Even his philosophical allies would have been happy to see it and reassured that Popper had not become a senile old fool. No one else seems to be aware of his mysterious recantation, either. Herbert Keuth, e.g., in his recent treatment of Popper's philosophy, considers the 'three worlds' to be as worthy of discussion as anything else (he doesn't like it either, though). I am afraid your word, which I reject without trying to denigrate it, is just not enough for me (and wouldn't be enough for any good Popperian), and I still say that a succinct overview of this aspect of Popper's metaphysics should be included in this article. Even if he rejected this view later on, it should still be covered here (other thinkers who have Wiki pages have sections dealing with ideas that they abandoned).--Calamus, 1406 EDT, 16 September 2006

I agree completely with Calamus on this issue, based on my comprehensive knowledge of Popper around the time of my 1982 In Pursuit of Truth: Essays on the Philosophy of Karl Popper (edited anthology). PaulLev 21:29, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Alright, alright!! It was a bad attempt at humor. Go ahead and add something on it, already. This is Wikipedia!! Do I have to do everything myself?--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 07:07, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Lacatosias said further up: We have a serious problem here, folks. Listen up, listen up....I don't understand why I'm being almost compltely ignored in this place!! This is VERY IMPORTANT. Popper does not discuss "evolutionary epistemology" in his "Conjectures and Refutations." Not AT ALL: I hav the book right here in front of me. Where is it?? Anyone??

Reply: Popper discusses evolutionary epistemolgy directly in at least two chapters of the book _All LIfe is Problem Solving_. Also see Popper's reply to Donald's Campbells paper "Evolutionary Epsitemology" in the Schilpp volume The Philosophy of Karl Popper. It boggles the mind why some people think one or two books by an author is the final word by the author. No wonder some people around here are "almost completely ignored."

Typical phenomenon exclusive to Wikipedia I'm afraid. But easy to clear up. The context for that comment no longer exists!! If you had looked back into the history, you would have found that the article, at one point, stated (or implied) that evolutionary epistemlogy was discussed specifically in "Conjectures and Refutations". I corrected that and left a note on the talk page to note the error that I was correcting. Nothing more. Of course, Popper discusses evolutionary epistemology in other works. That was not the context. I hope that's clear now.--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 07:36, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] GA Re-Review and In-line citations

Note: This article has a small number of in-line citations for an article of its size and currently would not pass criteria 2b.
Members of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles are in the process of doing a re-review of current Good Article listings to ensure compliance with the standards of the Good Article Criteria. (Discussion of the changes and re-review can be found here). A significant change to the GA criteria is the mandatory use of some sort of in-line citation (In accordance to WP:CITE) to be used in order for an article to pass the verification and reference criteria. It is recommended that the article's editors take a look at the inclusion of in-line citations as well as how the article stacks up against the rest of the Good Article criteria. GA reviewers will give you at least a week's time from the date of this notice to work on the in-line citations before doing a full re-review and deciding if the article still merits being considered a Good Article or would need to be de-listed. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us on the Good Article project talk page or you may contact me personally. On behalf of the Good Articles Project, I want to thank you for all the time and effort that you have put into working on this article and improving the overall quality of the Wikipedia project. Agne 01:46, 26 September 2006 (UTC)