Some remarks about science, theory and the Catholic Church (assembled from other writings of mine)

[fpb]

During the nineteenth century, science and epistemology (the philosophy of science) were the tools of a tremendous revolution in knowledge. Darwin’s arguments for evolution are usually remembered as the turning point, but in point of fact they are pretty nearly the last of the great forward strides in knowledge that destroyed the European picture of the past (which owed as much to Classical Greco-Roman learning as to Christianity). First came tremendous advances in linguistics (the discovery of the Indo-European family of languages), which, by 1810, had plainly established that the past of all known cultures was far longer and more complicated than anyone had imagined. Linguistics and anthropology spent the rest of the century discovering further language families and cultures, and annotating their complex relationships; with each discovery extending and complicating the picture of the human race. Then, by 1830, the progress of geology started producing increasing and finally crushing evidence for the immense age of the Earth. As a by-product of this, the beginnings of modern archaeology established a huge and previously unknown past for European man. Then the eyes of scientists rose from the earth to the heavens, and the advances made in geology were used to estimate the even more inconceivable ages of stars and other planets. Darwin, in effect, did nothing but add the final part – the picture of the evolution of life – to this developing picture of a colossally ancient, unimagined universe; which is why his theory – contrary to popular legend – took so little to triumph, and triumphed so completely. Within ten years of its first statement, its great champion Huxley had been admitted to an intellectuals’ club previously reserved for Anglicans – a symbolic as well as practical acceptance. Two generations earlier, the champions of the new geology had had a much tougher time of it.

By the end of the century, in the way that revolutions do, this revolution had established its own repressive orthodoxy. Apart from a few clownish features that any educated person ought to have been able to dismantle with ease – such as the fable that mediaeval Christians believed the Earth was flat – this orthodoxy hinged on the closed post-Newtonian universe. This took time and space to be absolutes, and all its explanations depended on their absoluteness. This, more than anything else, was at the heart of the growth of nineteenth-century atheism; for the transcendent God of Christianity came to seem like an unnecessary hypothesis. The closed universe of nineteenth-century science needed no external animating force. “Nothing is made, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed.”

In the field of epistemology – the mind reflecting on itself, and in this case on the way it acquires knowledge – the first question became: how does the experimental method guarantee certain knowledge? That it did was certain, proved a million different ways by the practical applications of science – a kind of truth far more immediately tangible and appreciated than any proposed by any previous philosophy. Nineteenth-century philosophy answered this with the idea of induction, that is, generalization from acquired data. An experiment that can be repeated proves that a certain thing works in a certain way; and that can be extended to cover the functioning of this kind of thing anywhere and at any time in the universe.

There is an objection to induction which nobody seemed to notice at the time; or, at least, to give it the proper weight. Induction is profoundly illogical. Hume, a philosopher I hate, was right at least in this; but while everyone paid attention to all his pseudo-arguments against Christianity and miracles, which any moderately intelligent layman could demolish in ten minutes, nobody paid any attention to the one point where his ingrained scepticism had led him to see right. No amount of collected data can certify any hypothesis by itself; the leap from the particular to the general is logically indefensible. Karl Popper tells the joke of the scientist who spent his whole life classifying and describing white swans; only to be told, on his deathbed, of the finding of a black swan in Australia. Induction is in effect an irrational method of knowledge, founded not on logic but on intuition, and if it was held to be basically infallible, then the result would be to remove, consciously or unconsciously, the whole realm of knowledge from that of logic, into the domain of intuition and unconscious sympathy, perception not by reason and logic but by - let's call things by their names - magical consonance.

At the very moment in which Reason was most lauded and worshipped, the pedestal she was placed on was made of irrationality. This is, after all, the description of the most influential nineteenth-century philosophical systems - those of Hegel, of Schopenhauer and (with the mask of reason completely thrown off) of Nietzsche. It is simply a matter of observation, that the triumph of the nineteenth-century idea of science coincided with the greatest outburst of irrationalism and what G.K.Chesterton calls "dingy mysticism" in Western history. It is absolutely no coincidence that, contrary to many received notions, Hitler was a thoroughgoing rationalist, convinced that planetaria and science museums would eventually get rid of Christianity (Bullock, Hitler: a study in tyranny, 389-90): the science he believed in was that of the nineteenth century. As someone remarked in another context, his ideas about art had stopped about 1890, and the same might be said of his political and philosophical views. (By the same token, it is my view that the Nazi rejection of Einstein had as much to do with his deadly effect on nineteenth-century notions of science as with his Jewish origin.) Nazism was built on popularized accounts of the great nineteenth-century advances in linguistics, anthropology, biology and genetics. Anyone who denies this is blinding him/herself, pure and simple. It was a cult of science.

But Nazism is just a late and rather eccentric bloom of the enormous forest of irrationality and mysticism that had blossomed between 1870 and 1910, giving impostors and frauds one of the most fantastic fields of opportunity ever seen. Theosophy, I suppose, is probably the best-known of these fads, but a good few people who saw through Madame Blavatsky were taken in by other impostors: Christian Science, for instance, or spiritualism. The scientific criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who was in his time so much an authority that his name is quoted in Bram Stoker's Dracula, was completely taken in by the celebrated mediumistic impostor Eusapia Palladino; and we all know about poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is not even necessary to claim that all this irrationalism preluded to the horrors of the following century; while some of its members (such as Yeats) did prove sympathetic to the atmosphere and claims of Communism, Fascism and Nazism, others (such as Hermann Hesse) were its implacable opponents. Hesse’s lovely epitaph for that climate, The Journey to the East, claims for it the status of a central experience for the European mind.

Why should this be? Why should the triumph of science be attended by an explosion of shameless, confident superstition, not only sweeping the educated classes of Europe, but climbing the heights of artistic achievement? Because, I suggest, of the universal belief in the illogical notion of induction. First: science presented itself with a claim on human attention that no other object of thought since Jesus Christ had. Its immense practical success demanded that it should be seen as a source of certain knowledge. Second: a philosophical reason for this certainty had to be found. Third: induction was it. Iinduction allowed the thinkers of the time to regard the status of scientific knowledge as indeed certain. Science was understood as the most certain and safe form of knowledge; and it follows that induction, on which science was held to be based, was the foundation of the best and most useful kind of knowledge. Fourth: induction was illogical. There is therefore nothing surprising about finding irrationalism blossoming in its shadow.

As for the shape it took: psychologically at least, and, I believe it can be shown, logically as well, the union of induction and the closed post-Newtonian universe must lead to irrational intuitionism. This, in my view, is the historical background to the great turn-of-the-century outburst of mysticism.

Nobody, I think, went furthest along this intellectual path than the Russian composer Skryabin – an eccentric even among his contemporaries. Not satisfied with the general tendency of the likes of W.B.Yeats to call themselves high wizards, he decided he was God, and insisted on it till the day a tumour did its best to disabuse him. It is easy enough to dismiss him as a nutter; the trouble is that his music is really very good. But it is when one comes to the very full programme notes for his Third Symphony - or "The Divine Poem" - that one understands how natural it was for him to travel his path. His self-divinization was not a matter of insane pride, but of quite sane, almost one might say unselfish, Pantheism; and that Pantheism was a direct consequence of his rationalistic renunciation of the Christian God. It's all there in black and white in the programme notes (written by his girlfriend, for whom he had dumped his wife and children - one characteristic of the self-realized Pantheistic God being his ignorance of rules and bounds); Skryabin, like most romantic musicians, turned his music into a spiritual diary.

The point is that if a scientist can understand the inner structure of any one object by intuitive sympathy, then a different kind of intellectual, philosopher or artist, can understand this whole universe by a higher instance of that same kind of intuition; and as the universe is closed, and there is nothing more and nothing else that is knowable except itself, the mind that is capable of such a cosmic perception becomes itself divine. This is what Skryabin meant, and that is the reason why a viewpoint such as his, which in most other periods of history could only have been understood as a symptom of insanity, was thoroughly logical and even sane, and never prevented him from making magnificent music - which madness certainly would have.

To the best of my knowledge, the first cannonade against the roots of irrationality in this flawed nineteenth-century epistemology, was fired by Gilbert K. Chesterton, in his great chapter Ethics of Elfland, in Orthodoxy (1908). This demolishes the logical status of induction, consigning it to the realm of irrationality where it belongs; and, by the way, Orthodoxy's strictures against "narrow and cramped eternities" in "modern religions" show that the great man had understood the intellectual impasse of his age. But GKC's revolutionary insight went largely unnoticed, due at least in part to his sloppy habits of mind, and a man who was in fact at the forefront of the intellectual movements of the age was consigned to the history books as a caricature reactionary. (It's perhaps significant that Popper also wound up with the same reputation.)

Meanwhile, in Switzerland, a German Jew with a walrus moustache was pulling down the other great pillar of nineteenth-century rationalism, the closed post-Newtonian universe. Unlike GKC's masterpiece, known only to a few mostly Christian GKC fans, the world did realize the central importance of the theory of relativity just as soon as it heard of it; and when, in 1919, it received public experimental confirmation, the altars of nineteenth-century science really shook and crumbled. Time and space are not absolutes. The universe is not closed. It has a shape, even. It was possible to see it as an individual object, and therefore to postulate something that exists outside of it.

It was left to the philosopher Karl R. Popper to achieve what GKC had failed to, and smash to smithereens the whole intuitionist notion of inductive science. A lot of philosophers haven't been able to forgive Popper the bashing of induction, nor his memorable assault on Marx and Hegel - and, worst of all, on Plato – nor is withering dismissal of analytic/language philosophy. There is an almost inconceivably bitchy and reductive entry, taking barely one column, in my guide to philosophy, The Oxford companion to philosophy; and indeed Popper is one of the many great scholars who did not go to Oxford or Cambridge - and not because there was no vacant chair. Indeed, my own enormous admiration for Popper does not exclude a number of severe criticisms. He largely misunderstood Plato's religion - due to, of all things, a hangover of unrealized Christian ideas about God! - and his attack on Plato’s social ideas, while justified, includes a number of misapplications of modern categories, especially in the area of the nature of man. I can't help thinking that it is a tragedy that Chesterton didn't live to read Popper’s masterpiece The open society and its enemies, which came out in 1944; he could have drawn so much from it. And, by the way, a meeting would have done Popper himself a world of good, blowing away the silly views of the Church and of such things as the Middle Ages that went with his classic “progressive” upbringing. And I never, until I began to work on this, understood, let alone sympathized with, his distaste for "mysticism"; by which, it is now clear to me, he meant not the likes of John of the Cross, but the "mysticism" of his time, that is the "narrow and cramped eternities" of Chesterton's "modern religions", with their restricted post-Newtonian cosmology. It always puzzled me why he first accepted a definition of "the mystical experience" as "a sense of the universe as a limited whole" and then attacked that, when it seemed to me to correspond to nothing I knew about mysticism; now, of course, I understand that the irrationalistic "advanced" cults of his time were certainly steeped in such an experience. I heartily approve of his attack on such things, but I wish he hadn't been misled into taking such things to be "mysticism" as such. (Incidentally, a remote descendant of these "mystical" currents is the recent fad-word "holistic" - as well as the fascination exerted for a while by "totalitarian" regimes encompassing every aspect of life.)

None of these things, however, prevented some of the stoutest Catholic thinkers I know, such as the fighting Jesuit Guido Sommavilla, from finding Popper’s work not only compatible with, but a welcome addition to, Catholic philosophy. His intellectual achievement is based on the principle of falsification - that what the scientist is testing is not the universal validity of some theory, but its falsifiability. An experiment which disproves a theory is just as valuable as one which proves one, and valid theories are those which are experimentally shown not to be false. In other words, the state of our knowledge is always provisional; and we know best - in the same words, but in a deeper sense, as Socrates - what we do not know, that is, what we know to be false. He proves irrefutably that the conventional notion of science, whose flaws Chesterton had so memorably exposed, was groundless, and that it could be discarded to the great advantage of scientific method and rational thinking. What Chesterton (in common with everyone else in his time) called "science" was in fact a false view of science, and Chesterton had had the insight to attack it, though not to propose, like Popper, an alternative view. But an alternative view could be constructed from his conclusions. Two great men, two great thinkers, starting from completely different premises, in search of the answer to quite different problems, came to solutions that, while not the same, fit each other like the pieces of a puzzle: a remarkable sight.

But that is not the only case in which Popper, though no sort of Christian (amazingly for a practicing philosopher of scholarly bent, he knows next to nothing about St.Thomas Aquinas, who is mentioned only once, and then not much to the point, in one of The open society's weakest passages), has struck such blows for Catholic philosophy that he may well turn out to have been, like one of Kipling's characters, "a priest in spite of himself". The most important is his demolition of logical positivism. This doctrine, which still has, thanks to Wittgenstein's influence, great influence especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, attacks metaphysics as meaningless. Popper's answer is too long (again!) to set out, but one passage of Bryan Magee's summary deserves notice: "Not only can a metaphysical theory be meaningful, it may actually be true, [though] if we have no way of testing it there can be no empirical evidence for it, and therefore it cannot be held to be scientific. Even so, theories which cannot be tested may still be critically discussed, and have the arguments for an against them compared, as a result of which one of them may appear preferable to another..." (Bryan Magee, Popper, Fontana Modern Masters).

Now, this is what the famous writer-priest Ronald Knox (following an encyclical by Pius XII) has to say about the process of developing Catholic dogma (The development of doctrine, in The Hidden Stream, 1952): "Is any development of theology possible? ...at first sight... it seems not. Because St.Jude tells us that we have to do battle for the faith once delivered to the saints... the answer to that is... that Catholic doctrine does not grow, but does develop [in the sense of being] fuller... more explicit, more accurately stated, clearer in [its] outline...

"...in the course of centuries, various clever fools have tried to explain what the Church meant, and have got it wrong. It doesn't do to say that heresy produces the development of doctrine, because that annoys the theologians. But it is true to say that as a matter of history the development of doctrine has been largely a reaction on the Church's part to the attacks of heresy... The revelation which our Lord made to his Apostles was full of mysteries. Some of the things he told us appeared to contradict other things he told us, or even...the evidence of our own senses... In the earliest days of the Christian Church, men were prepared to leave it at that" (here Knox is being much too optimistic, to judge from the evidence of the Epistles of Paul, John and Jude) "...it was only when people tried to be clever about it that the need arose for further precision of statement. The Sabellians would try to make out that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost were only three different manifestations of the same God. Then there would be a reaction, and indignant Tritheists would explain that there were really three Gods who had no more than the Divine Name in common. And the Church had to find a way of defining the matter more closely, to avoid the error of either extreme: the Godhead was a Godhead of three Persons in one Substance... you reached a formula that would make it impossible to fall into those precise errors again."

Popper would criticize some of the terminology, though hallowed by centuries of use: from his point of view, the argument was not about definitions (which are a verbal convenience) but about theories about matter of fact. But the actual fact is that there is absolutely no difference, once we disregard (in true Popperian style) certain problems of nomenclature, between the Catholic approach to metaphysics and that to which the greatest philosopher of knowledge of our century and perhaps of all time arrived purely by reasoning about science. And therefore the tradition of Catholic theology, with its definitions and condemnations, which has so often been portrayed as the enemy of science and of free thought, has in fact the blessing of a man whom the Nobel prizewinner Peter Medawar "incomparably the greatest philosopher of science there has ever been" and of whom sir Hermann Bondi said "there is no more to science than its method, and there is no more to its method than what Popper has said." If this attitude strikes you as idolatrous, what about sir John Eccles, another Nobel prizewinner, who described his encounter with Popper as a "conversion"? And it is really easy to understand: for many of us (and that includes me) the encounter with Popper was one of those epiphanic moments in which you come for the first time across the truth you had subconsciously known all your life, when the poverty of all alternative views is made manifest. The man has his faults, but stands as a giant above all the competing philosophies of our time, and his stature will only increase as time goes on.

The notion of knowledge as being ever-provisional might seem to oppose the Catholic view of the Magisterium of the Church as being infallible; but the truth is quite different. First, even as seen from outside, Catholic doctrine is not changeless. Indeed, this is one of the famous Protestant charges against the Church: “you keep adding to the Faith, stuff that was not there in the beginning.” Indeed, the intellectual apparatus of the Church exists to discuss, accept or reject new views and ideas. This is very much in opposition not only to Protestantism, but to Islam, which claims that “the gates of interpretation” were closed after the first few generations of believers, and that all that needs to be done now is to read and understand the heritage of past Muslim ideas; and to a lesser extent, to Eastern Orthodoxy, which claims that the Faith was essentially settled by a variable number of early Councils – seven to the Greek Orthodox, three to the non-Calcedonians – although in practice all these Churches, especially the Greek, have accepted a great deal of change and addition.

But more to the point, acceptance of the Magisterium is itself an act of the will, which Christian teaching, from the beginning, understands as accepting a hypothesis. We have to take a certain view of certain historical events, which might be interpreted otherwise. The evidence is on our side: all attempts to disprove the historicity of the Gospels have failed ignominiously. But it is evidence that by itself goes against certain basic habits of mind and assumptions – such as that dead bodies do not just get up and walk, let alone roll away big stones and turn up in locked rooms to eat an odd meal of “a fish and a piece of honeycomb”. Christianity presents itself to the mind and to the imagination as a challenge. This is why we take Faith to be a virtue, one of the greatest virtues; because in accepting this view of reality, we have to make that act of the will which is called Faith, accept the belief that the documents demand but instinct rejects. St.Paul knew it: “if Jesus had not really risen from the dead, we would be the most wretched and deluded of mortals” (1Cor.14.19); and, to prove the opposite, he resorts not to syllogism or argument, but to the testimony of men who were then living and whom his addressees had met (1Cor.14.3-8). We start, not with syllogism or assumptions or word handed down from on high, but with history – which we are free to believe or not. Christian knowledge is in this sense ever-provisional. We cannot doubt that two and two make four; that is an eternal truth. But we can doubt that Jesus rose from the dead, in spite of the wealth of first-rate historical evidence for the fact, by the same token whereby we can doubt that Julius Caesar’s account of his own wars in De Bello Gallico and De Bello Ciuili are truthful. Nonetheless, Caesar’s writings, like the Gospels, are historical documents, such things as we build our picture of the past on.

The Magisterium is the sum of conclusions to which the Church has arrived down the centuries with respect to these events and documents. The doctrine of its infallibility depends not on its content, but on the belief that the Church will be kept from teaching error by the will of God; and the arguments by which acceptable interpretations are defended and unacceptable ones are rejected are the instrument of this ongoing defence. The will is God’s, the act the Church’s and its members’. For 2000 years, the Church has debated every possible view of God, Christ and man, accepting some, refusing others, using every instrument of logic and debate to decide between opposing propositions (or to decide that they were not really opposing). In that sense, the doctrine of the infallibility of Church teaching (infallibility means to be unable to go wrong) is both irrelevant to a Popperian interpretation of the growth of doctrine, and wholly acceptable to it. Irrelevant, because the process of debate, acceptance, and exclusion, of theories, is both sociologically and intellectually fully Popperian; and wholly acceptable, because at the heart of Popperian epistemology lies a belief that an open debate in control of facts and ideas will enable the majority of competent persons to choose the right notion. And this is exactly the assumption at the core of the process of Catholic development of doctrine.

It must be clear that the defence I am making in terms of Popperian epistemology, is not a defence of Christianity in general (as far as such a thing exists) but of the Catholic Church; of its intellectual apparatus and its doctrine. In this there is a great difference between the Church and other Christian bodies, with the possible exception of the Greek Orthodox. The Catholic Church is the body out of which all of these Christian and non-Christian bodies came, the place they left. Again with the exception of the Greek Orthodox, this always happened over matters of doctrine, when a certain doctrinal proposal was defeated in the community of the Church, generally at a General Council. (The Anglican body was erected for reasons and in ways that do not bear examination, but in so far as it has any autonomy, its being is rooted in the Lutheran and Calvinist schisms.) Not every General Council in Church history was the occasion of a schism, but many were, and a number of others – First Constantinople, Second Nicaea, Florence, Trento – had as their main business to effectively recognize a schism and draw the conclusions. The Church represents the historical continuity from which all these bodies separated, and, in terms of the Popperian theory of knowledge I tried to summarize, it represents the central body.

This can be borne out in many ways; the Church is much the largest body of Christians – every second Christian is Catholic; it is the most international; it is the one from which the most important schisms have issued. What I am going to say now is going to be deeply offensive to very many people; but, in terms of theory of knowledge, the churches that broke away from Rome over matters of doctrine are in the same position as the cranks and “alternative” practitioners with respect to real science. They revolted against the condemnation of the teachings of Eutyches, Leo Isauricus, or John Calvin, in the same way as creationists rebel against the teachings of Darwin and geology: against the standard interpretation of the facts accepted by most sensible people. There is a major difference in that, while science deals with universally accepted facts, the Church deals with the interpretation of a small group of writings and traditions dealing with certain specific historical events. It is difficult to maintain a creationist stand against the mass of evidence for the age of the Earth, and against the effective success of science in every feature of ordinary life; it is much easier to defend a logically challenged and defeated teaching about Christianity, when only a comparatively small number of people have the intellectual competence to decide what adds up and what does not, and the effective success can only be measured after you are dead and God explained to you exactly where you went wrong.

The most important feature of the Catholic body is that it does not stand or fall by anyone’s teaching. Almost every schismatic church – again with the exception of the Greek Orthodox – depends on the teaching of one or a few individuals, and broke away from the Church in order to defend it. Often they are named for these individuals – Montanists, Donatists, Arians, Nestorians, Pelagians, Jacobites, Waldensians, Hussites, Lutherans, Calvinists, Hutterites, Mennonites. But not even the greatest of our saints may be said to sum up or describe what being Catholic amounts to; not Augustine of Hippo, not John Chrisostomos, not Thomas Aquinas, not Suarez or Newman or G.K.Chesterton. Indeed, I just found out that a member of my f-list, adeodatus, dislikes Thomist philosophy as much as I favour it – and we both are Catholic. Such is the intellectual freedom of a Catholic, and the variety of views we can legitimately take. The Church cannot be compared to any other Christian body in this sense. To say that we are Catholic is not the same as to say that we are Methodist; we do not look to any Founder like the Methodists look to the Wesleys, the Lutherans to Luther and Melanchthon, the Assyrians to Nestorius of Constantinople. The bodies that correspond to schismatic churches in the Catholic world are not the Church itself, but the single religious orders, many of which are indeed dedicated to the teaching of one or a few major figures. If you are a Thomist, you are apt to become a Dominican; if you are a disciple of Rosmini, a Rosminian; of Suarez, a Jesuit – and so on. This is one of the ways in which the Catholicity of the Church is made manifest. The teaching of the Church is not that of any individual, including the Pope: it is the deposit of faith – or, to make it clearer, the result of 2,000 years of arguments won. And it is the only body that has an automatic internal mechanism to accommodate growth, and reject alteration, in doctrine. Can anyone point to an Anglican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to a Calvinist General Council defining dogma, to a Coptic Tribunal for doctrinal causes? Obviously not. Only the Catholic Church expects doctrine to grow, and only the Catholic Church is concerned with separating growth from mere change, accepting the one, rejecting the other.

It is not by a coincidence that science was born in the Catholic West; it arose in the monasteries and the universities, as a part of this same ongoing work of re-thinking and re-stating doctrine that was the intellectual life of the Church. The Universities were originally Church bodies, entitled to rule on Church doctrine (one of the earliest rulings of the University of Oxford was a condemnation of Thomas Aquinas, which has never been reversed, and which may have been the first of the many wrong-headed decisions that gave the beautiful city on the Isis the name of “home of lost causes”). It was in this environment of laborious but regulated intellectual investigation that, centuries before Galileo, the body of “natural philosophy” and the experimental method were built up. The nineteenth-century invention of a supposed “conflict between science and religion” is not only nonsense on stilts, but an act of intellectual parricide worthy of the century that invented the “complex of Oedypus”. Luckily, anyone who knows any history these days knows that; unfortunately, the idea is still spread in popular culture by ignorant scribblers repeating their grandpappies’ stupid superstitions.

Comments

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we know logical positivism was misguided. On the other hand, it's demolishment owes as much to analytic philosophers like Quine, Kuhn, and so on (indeed, it was already largely dead by the time of the publication of Two Dogmas) as it does to Popper. Rumors of the death of analytic philosophy as a whole, on the other hand, have been greatly exaggerated, methinks.

Incidentally, as I commented earlier to you, I'm generally of the (dominant) view that Kuhn has put Popperian falsificationism to rest. I'm surprised you didn't address him here, since his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is generally considered a seminal work in philosophy of science.

And the problem of induction has been greatly overblown. It seems to me to only be a problem if one subscribes to some sort of moderate empiricist view, and I don't see how anyone can justify that. There are plenty of responses to the problem of induction, from "ordinary language" philosophers (Strawson) to rationalists (BonJour) to Quineans, whom I find really difficult to actually take seriously.

Induction is boring. Phil of lang is where it's at.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

"I am of the view that apples have put oranges to rest." My understanding of Kuhn's view is that it is wholly sociological, that is, that it does not give any logical reason why any theory should be better than any other. Popper takes sociological factors into account - in fact, the contemporary insistence on peer review is Popperian - but is based on principles of logic and reason. If we assume that "scientific revolutions" - whatever the Heck those may be, and I do not think there have ever been any - are motivated purely by climates of opinion, then there is no reason why the rise of Nazism in Germany should not be called a scientific revolution. After all, it involves a major paradigm shift.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

The general criterion is the relative puzzle-solving power of the competing paradigms. The new idea should account for most or all of the anomalies that led to the breakdown of the previous paradigm, while minimizing so-called "Kuhn-loss" (usually to be found in the new ideas having less explanatory power). Generally, the factors that lead to the adoption of the new theory come from within the scientific community, not without. I think most readers of Kuhn would agree that this is a fair assessment of Kuhn's position.

So Kuhn did admit that science progressively increases in its puzzle-solving ability. He does deny that the concept of science becoming progressively "nearer to the truth" is coherent (and there I disagree).

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that there is one great big gap in this summary, namely the assumption that visible mistakes in a theory will lead to its "breakdown." I think this is expecting too much of human nature. Unless a social structure, indeed a profession, is present in society for the purpose of debating theories, with a professional bias in favour of challenge, the most untenable theories will be preserved; indeed, formidable amounts of intelligence will be used to shore them up.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's a centerpoint of Kuhn's theory that it's impossible to predict what anomalies, or how many, will lead to a theory's breakdown. Generally, he holds that anomalies will be ignored or explained away, and that only a speculative puzzles are subject to falsification. It's only when the anomalies start becoming really fundamental—like the ultraviolet catastrophe, or the revelation that some crucial piece of instrumentation that produced many of the results the current theory depends on is flawed—that "normal science" ends and "crisis" begins.

This was precisely his argument against the more naive forms of falsificationism.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Um, let me note that I don't buy everything Kuhn says. Rather, I think he demonstrated that descriptive theories of reference entail a non-realist view of science. This, anyway, is an interesting topic; as you may know, I've done some work on reference.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I did not know and I notice that you probably know a lot more than I do on these matters. Point me to any Internet source (right now I do not even know your name) and I may deal with topics you raise in greater depth.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

The Stanford Encyclopdia of Philosophy has an excellent article on scientific realism, in spite of the fact that it's, you know, Stanfurd.

And you know, as an analytic philosopher (defined broadly as Anglophone philosophy), I can't really be expected to agree with your assessment of analytic philosophy. ;-)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The problem of induction may not seem a big thing to you in 2005, but I assure you that it was a major matter in 1905, when Chesterton had to attack what he described as the common idea that "induction has replaced deduction". There is a reason why real practising scientists have found Popper's work so enlightening, and indeed liberating.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, may I congratulate you on your excellent taste in comics?

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'm actually mainly into BDs, Les cités obscures, Joost Swart's stuff, Ulysse, and so on.

I've actually been wondering whether or not I should get a paid account just to make some icons of some of Moebius's amazing, amazing work. Have you read anything he's illustrated? (L'Incal is especially good; he's not as good a writer as he is an artist.)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am a former cartoonist. To ask me whether I have read Moebius is roughly like asking whether I know a writer called Shakespeare. (I hope that does not sound snitty, it is not, just a statement of fact - I love the comics artform and am fairly well educated in it.)

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had no idea. So do you have any recommendations for me? :P

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know what you expect. In my view, Hayao Miyazaki and Jack Kirby are the two greatest cartoonists who ever lived. Behind them, the list is enormous and ever increasing: Bill Watterson, Sergio Toppi, Hugo Pratt, Benito Iacovitti, Giorgio Cavazzano, Alan Moore, Alan Davis, Charles M.Schulz, Walt Kelly, Robert Crumb, Eisner, Art Spiegelmann, Elzie Chrysler Segar, Alex Raymond, George Herriman, Hal Foster, Goscinny-Uderzo, Alberto Breccia, Enrique Breccia, Carl Barks, Floyd Gottfredson, Mort Walker, Carla Speed McNeill, Denny Derbyshire, Winsor MacKay, and so on and so forth and so following...

For a Muse barely a hundred years old, ours has been exceptionally fertile.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Oh, and that analytical philosophy is not dead is unfortunately all too clear to anyone who had the depressing experience of studying in a British university - meaning a place where A.J.Ayer is still taken seriously. Yours truly once meditated offering a paper titled Babble, lies and illogic, but then I decided I was in bad enough with the college authorities as it was. But then, what do you expect from a nation which voted for Karl Marx as its favourite philosopher, with David Hume (whom I loathe worse than Popper ever hated Hegel) as the second?

I have a small irrelevant question ...

[ajat.livejournal.com]

What's yr icon ?

Re: I have a small irrelevant question ...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Athena (goddess of practical reason and achievement, and also of reason at war - which is my interpretation of her). I think this particular one is called the Athena of Pireus; she was discovered in Pireus (the harbour of Athens) in 1959.

[ajat.livejournal.com]

Athena.

Right.

Have you read 'White Goddess' by Robert Graves ?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am a student of comparative mythology (published), and I regard it as almost entirely valueless. Sorry.