PREFACE

The present volume is a collection of essays selected and arranged in the hope of presenting a comprehensive view of science, from three different levels of abstractness. On the factual level I suggest that no factual in­formation is final and that the authority of factual evidence can be over­ruled in diverse ways.

The point of departure of this volume is the philosophy of Sir Karl Popper. His criticisms of his predecessors, even his characterization of the various schools of thought, is largely endorsed - somewhat stream­lined, and with some inconsistencies removed. His major inconsistency, I think, is between his praise of the pre-Socratic philosophers, whose metaphysical views he erroneously takes to be scientific, and his require­ment for maximum empirical testability or refutability. This requirement he uses as the major weapon for ousting metaphysics. And though later in life his opinion of metaphysics has been much more favorable he never withdrew the requirement for maximal refutability.

The demand seems to me to be exaggerated in two ways. We do not always prefer the most refutable view; sometimes we prefer views which better conform to our metaphysics. Nor do we always know whether our views are testable or not.

This is a matter of principle concerning the onus of proof of rationality. Popper requires that we be able to prove our rationality. I think it better to indicate why we think this or that is irrational and allow all else to enjoy the benefit of doubt. The only exception, to repeat, concerns public safety, where the public demands minimum standards of examination of whatever anyone wishes to launch in the public domain.

What this amounts to is the proposal to liberalize our scholarly and scientific standards, and at least recognize that repeatedly scientists employ a laxer standard than the ones preached by rationalist philosophers. They reject the authority of facts; at times they offer ad hoc excuses with which they hope to shelve difficulties for a time; often they treat hopes as if they were fulfilled, which, in my opinion, is the hallmark of pseudo-science. Newcomers to science are bewildered by the discrepancy between strin­gent standards and lax conduct; when they realize what happens, rather than lower the standards and make them more reasonable, they blame their elders and peers for their violation of a sacred code. All this is pain­ful and quite unnecessary.

What I say may be true or not. The fact is, we do not know what is ratio­nality, and so it is advisable, I think, to take rationality always on a common­sense level, as attempts to reach given goals, including the immediate goal of scientific communication and cooperation. And any stringent require­ment of rationality may be erroneous and detrimental to cooperation.

It was my intention to finish this volume with an essay on the limits of reason, and show that reason is too limited to investigate its own limits, that we can rationally study the rational method only within limits. But I got stuck. A leading advocate of this view in our century is S. Hugo Berg­man (whose student I was privileged to be in Jerusalem before I went to London where I soon became a student of Popper), and Bergman was the student of the works of Solomon Maimon, the great skeptic and critic of Kant.

In a sense skepticism concedes too much to justificationism: the justificationist has dismissed existing standards of rationality as question­begging and sought the final and unquestionable ones. The skeptic accept­ed the dismissal but declared the justificationist’s quest hopeless. Rather, it is more reasonable to observe the existence of questionable and ques­tion-begging standards and watch them improve and try to help improve them. The final essays in this volume are but an elaboration on this pro­posal. Whether my proposal is ultra-skeptical or non-skeptical is hard for me to say. It certainly observes that there are limits to reason; it also suggests hopes for improvability of rationality. (Popper allows both the limits of reason and the progress of science - but not, to my knowledge, progress in the theory and practice of rationality as such. It was Maimon, and he alone, who ventured to take Kant’s theory of rationality as a hypothesis, and all hypotheses, even Newton’s or Kant’s, as capable of being surpassed.)

It is always an embarrassment for a philosopher to place his view within a context, since naturally he takes as his context the pillars of wisdom familiar to all, thus inviting either an unfair comparison or a conceited suggestion that the comparison becomes his standing. Yet he has to do it, one way or another, to assist his reader’s orientation. For my part, I should like to consider the following comparison - fair or scandalous - be­cause it poses a problem which I feel very strongly. Consider the following parallel:

Newton: Kant: Maimon: Einstein: Popper: Agassi

and assume, for a while, that my comparing Popper with Kant is apt. (Popper already has explained it, and the following pages will, I hope, further justify it.) The reason I compare myself with Maimon is not only that my critique of Popper is quite the same as Maimon’s just critique of Kant - skeptical and metaphysically oriented - but also that it renders my ven­ture so very Quixotic: he was a man of genius of the kind I cannot possible claim, yet he failed so utterly he was almost entirely forgotten, more re­membered as an eccentric Jew (he would not have minded that) than as a forceful critic and clear thinker (which would have struck him as disap­pointing, I suppose).

I suppose I should say, first, we all do what best we can, in the duty of hope; and second, that my chances are objectively much brighter than his, since the dogmatism of Newton has largely been replaced by Einstein’s toleration and skepticism, and since the romantic gush of the nineteenth century has been checked with the result that irrationalism today is not that rampant. This lucky streak, the objective advantages I have, may make up, I hope, for the obvious defects of the present volume.

Boston, Massachusetts, Thanksgiving, 1974

Tel Aviv, Israel, Passover, 1975

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Most of the material in this volume has been published elsewhere, as follows:

Chapter 1: Previously unpublished.

Chapter 2: Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (ed.), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 3, Reidel and Humanities, Dordrecht and New York, 1968, pp. 293-323.

Appendix: Australasian Journal of Philosophy 39 (1961), 8-91.

Chapter 3: International Philosophical Quarterly 8 (1968), 442-63. Appendix: Impulse 10 (1959), 1-3.

Chapter 4: American Philosophical Quarterly. Special Monograph Series, No. 3 (1969), 162-170.

Appendix: Philosophical Studies 14 (1963), 85-86.

Chapter 5: Mind 75 (1966), 1-24.

Appendix: Inquiry 12 (1969), 420-426.

Chapter 6: Ratio 15 (1973), 183-205.

Appendix: Ratio 15 (1973), 111-113.

Chapter 7: Zeitschrift fur allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 4 (1973), 1-25. Appendix: Philosophy of Science 3 (1968), 287-290.

Chapter 8: Previously unpublished.

Appendix: Previously unpublished.

Chapter 9: in Mario Bunge (ed.), The Critical Approach, Essays in Honor of Karl Popper, Free Press and Macmillan, New York and London, 1964, pp. 189-211.

Appendix: Studium Generale 24 (1971), 1051-1056.

Chapter 10: Paper read at the Canadian Philosophical Association an­nual meeting in 1969; to be published in Philosophical Forum.

Chapter 11 and the Appendix: H. Guerlac (ed.), Ithaca, 1962: Proceedings of the Xth International Congress for History ofScience, Hermann, Paris, 1964, pp. 231-238, and 249-250.

Chapter 12: Technology and Culture 7 (1966), pp. 348-366.

Appendix: Ibid. 8 (1967), 78-81.

Chapter 13: Philosophy of Science 37 (1970), 261-270.

Appendix: Ratio 12 (1970), 148-150.

Chapter 14: Philosophia, Israel 1 (1970), 261-270.

Appendix: Akten des XIV. Internationalen Kongresses fur Philosophic, vol. 2, Herder, Vienna, 1968, pp. 134-137.

Chapter 15: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 32 (1972), 465- 477.

Chapter 16: Mind S3 (1974), 406-416.

Appendix: Philosophical Studies 22 (1971), 49-50.

Chapter 17: An extract of three pages was published in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Sir Karl Popper, Open Court, La Salle, Illinois, 1974, pp. 693-96.

Appendix: Previously unpublished.

Chapter 18: Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (eds.), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 4, Reidel and Humanities, Dordrecht and New York, 1969, pp. 463-522.

Appendix: Previously unpublished.

Chapter 19: Zygon 4 (1969), 128-168.

Appendix: Previously unpublished.

Chapter 20: Paper read at the Philosophy of Science Association biennial meeting in 1974; to be published in PSA 1974 (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 32), Reidel, Dordrecht and Boston, 1975.

I am grateful to all the editors and publishers concerned for their per­mission to republish.

A number of colleagues, friends, and students, have helped me writing the following essays - in discussion about the topics and about the presen­tations, and in reading and correcting the manuscripts extensively. I can only mention here those who did it at great length, namely, my wife Judith, W. W. Bartley III, R. S. Cohen, I. C. Jarvie, Tom Settle, Kenneth Topley and J. W. N. Watkins. I am grateful to them all. Though my long and close association with Sir Karl Popper was over by the time I wrote these essays, I think I owe him special gratitude for all his help.

A PROLOGUE: ON STABILITY AND FLUX

When addressing the question of stability and of instability a philosopher may be talking on two very different planes or levels, as it were. The deep and the superficial, or common-sense. (Strictly, the superficial may be different from the common-sense, but let us ignore this.) He may speak superficially or common-sensically of relative stability and instability, and he may speak metaphysically of stability inherent in things he con­siders, of ultimate stability, as it were, or of ultimate instability. It is my wish to stress that when I speak of the stable and the unstable in science I speak on the superficial or common-sense level, not on the metaphysical level. The metaphysical situation concerning science is rather obvious - or at least has been so since Einstein: science, like all human endeavour, is essentially or inherently unstable; and this makes the discussion of its possible stability on the metaphysical level rather a bore. It is much more interesting to ignore these inherent qualities on the metaphysical level and speak superficially on the common-sense level of what is more stable and what is more ephemeral in science, and why.

We have here a classical question, concerning the stability inherent in the universe, in things in general, inanimate or animate. And we have here a new question, concerning the stability inherent in science, in a specific product of the human mind, perhaps also a specific social institu­tion. Of course the question of stability in general is deeply linked with the question of stability in science - both because science is a part of the universe and because science is intended to mirror the universe in some sense or another. Yet the two questions, of stability in things and of stability in science, are quite different. The question, is the world of science stable? - is metaphysically uninteresting and common-sensically very interesting. The question, is the world of things stable? - is meta­physically very interesting indeed, and there is a vast interesting literature dealing with it. Common-sensically it is not interesting in its generality: some things are more stable than others and that is all there is to it. Only by making the common-sense question more specific, e.g., why is chalk more stable than cheese? can we render it more interesting and proceed with scientific investigations into it.

Let us, then, glance first at the metaphysical question, is the world of things stable? and then move to the common-sense question, is the world of science stable?

On the metaphysical level it may be claimed that everything in the universe radiates stability, is imbued with stability; that reality and stability are one. The opposite metaphysics sees in reality one and only one characteristic, instability, change, flux. And there is the middle view, or myriads of middle views, of inherent stability interplay with inherent flux which together keep the world going.¹

Let us consider then, these three views: the one of utter permanence, shared by Parmenides, Spinoza, Einstein, and Schrodinger, which I shall call the Parmenidean; and the one of utter flux, shared by Heraclitus, Hegel, Marx, and (the young) Wittgenstein, which I shall call the Heraclitean; and the moderate view. The moderate view may have a great many variants, such as Plato’s view of the world of permanence (the Ideas) and the (observable) world in flux, and such as Laplace’s, which distinguishes between permanent laws and initial conditions which depend on no law (though not contingent since they depend on laws and previous initial conditions, of course). The moderate view is not to be confused, however, with the common-sense everyday unthoughtful attitude, which, like the moderate view, assumes certain things to be more ephemeral and others more permanent. For, it can be easily shown that the healthy common-sense view does not and need not distinguish between the- permanent-as-far-as-we-are-concerned and the permanent-proper, the common-sensically permanent such as the sun and the metaphysically permanent such as Democritus’s atom. Moreover, it is not to be supposed for one moment that even the most ardent advocate of one or the other of the two extreme views, who opposes the moderate view proper, ever doubted the common-sense moderate view. Yet, one may not conclude from the previous statement that the disagreement between the two extremes and the moderates proper have no relevance to the moderate common-sense view. Let us take this point slowly.

Perhaps for psychological reasons, perhaps for social reasons, perhaps for intellectual reasons, we all seek the more stable in our environment; I think this is essential to the struggle for survival. It is also a part of the struggle for survival that a certain stability is assumed or taken for granted or treated unquestioningly. The child trusts his parent, the bread­winner trusts the forces of nature, the voter his social milieu. Well, not quite: the child has neurotic fears, the farmer and hunter alike perform rituals to secure the return of spring, and the voter may consider going to the barricades. These expressions of fear and anxiety may cause a breakdown or a breakdown may give rise to them. And the struggle for survival may be lost. At such junctures the Heracliteans begin to be heard by the public; all of a sudden their fantastic un-common-sense view starts sounding frighteningly common-sensical; the conviction concerning their insanity is insanely shaken. At such times Heracliteans may, as they did, influence common-sense profoundly and irreversibly. At precisely such moments, Parmenideanism may be heard too, and sound deliciously com­forting, and similarly have a profound and irreversible influence on common-sense. Its effect may be Utopian and Platonist, or, to the con­trary, resigned and Hindu; but it then becomes a part of the common man’s heritage, and thus a part or an aspect of his common-sense.

All this is said within a rather common-sense framework. Within that framework, we tend to agree, there is the recommendation not to judge things in moments of stress. It is much better to deliberate questions before they become pressing, before we are psychologically tuned to certain kinds of solutions to them to the extent that our judgement gets limited and clouded, not to say blinkered and prejudiced. Now, if we want to view matters in common lights and in cool temper, what we would want to know first is, how do the three schools, and especially the two extreme ones, account for the common phenomenon of relative stability in some spots and of relative flux in other spots? The fact is that they cannot. But it is equally a fact for all three schools: the world presents us with too many unexplained phenomena, so that even the very best view we have of it is no more than a very rough and sketchy program of explanation, with only a very minor part of it actually executed, not any real explanation of the world. Nevertheless, we may insist, at least the moderates have a rough sketch of explanation. Is it not the fact that the extremes are barred even from the hope of ever being able to offer even a sketch of an explanation? This, we remember, is the link between the question of stability in the world and that of stability in science.

It so happens that the extremists did offer programs, and ones which did develop into important ideas in spots. It was Emile Meyerson who claimed, in his Identity and Reality, that all physical science stems from a Parmenidean impulse. Even Stuart Hampshire, who once followed Wittgenstein in considering metaphysics nonsense, admitted at that period that Spinoza’s Parmenideanism was very fruitful in the development of the sciences. Similarly, Russell has confessed that he was attracted to mathematics out of a Parmenidean impulse, and that he is a Spinozist at heart. (Aren’t we all?)

Now it may be claimed, and with much justice, that there is a world of difference between Parmenideanism proper and the Parmenidean impulse: it is one thing, fairly within common-sense, to search for stability, and quite another, crazy idea, to claim that everything in the world reflects stability and no flux whatsoever. Also, it may be claimed, and again with much justice, that the motive of the search, even the search itself, may be quite irrelevant to our valuation of the finding. Heraclitus called Pytha­goras a charlatan and an ass; unable to dismiss this charge, we try to ignore it: we merely divorce his philosophy from his mathematics and ignore the former. We likewise divorce Russell’s motives from our admiration of the Principia Mathematica. Indeed, motives come in only as either a historical curiosity (Russell) or as an explanation for people’s dogmatism (Pythagoras). But once we call someone a dogmatist it matters little how we explain his dogmatism - at least in comparison with our (right or not, but) tragic decision to have no intellectual commerce with him.

Here, however, there is one very practical common-sense point. Parmenides may have been utterly crazy, but it was well known in antiquity that he and his school were master-dialecticians, the last people to be called dogmatic. Indeed, unlike the Pythagoreans, the Parmenideans had no tribalist school and when their master’s doctrines were effectively criticized they did not try, as the Pythagoreans did, to retain the school by a semblance of a doctrine. To generalize: however extremist one’s views or impulses, rationality need not be damaged as a result. Indeed, even a moderate view may become dogmatic. Even the advocacy of dialectics may become a school’s dogma.²

The contemporary view of science as anchored in stable empirical evidence, is a paradigm of a common-sense moderate view. Its Parmen­idean impulse is well checked; indeed, most of its advocates are avowed opponents of all metaphysics, extremist metaphysics in particular. Yet I fear I see no way of avoiding the conclusion that the post-Einsteinian followers of this doctrine - inductivism - are plainly dogmatists. Speaking within the common-sense moderate view or within the metaphysical moderate view, as you wish, we cannot deny that the Parmenidean im­pulse plays a great role, that the search for the stable is valuable. But whereas science searches for the stable in the world, the inductivist philosophers search for the stable in science; they cannot find it, but no rational argument will dissuade them from continuing the search.

The inductivist view of Man resembles those faintly ludicrous statues of the Stalin era, of a man standing, legs slightly apart, knees locked, shoulders stretched backward, chin slightly up, and gaze fixed on the horizon. To me mankind seems, especially on the common-sense level, to be much more of a clown walking blindfolded on a tightrope - with the difference that the clown is exceptionally aware of his predicament. The world may be stable - our environment (social as well as physical) is plainly unstable, even hostile.

If the Parmenidean impulse is so very essential for survival, and especial­ly for a balanced childhood, the Heraclitean impulse is equally valuable, especially for the adult who has to create for his youngsters the necessary security. Particularly when a philosopher comes searching for stability in science, he may be disillusioned in the face of a major scientific revolution and become panicky and anti-scientific, and even anti-rational. To me, the fact that science is in flux is so obvious that it is hard to take seriously the inductivist - whose main aim is to explain the relative stability and steady growth of science - ‘facts’ which he considers equally obvious.

This is not to say that there are no elements in science that reveal a greater degree of stability than others. And the interesting task of identifying those elements and explaining their relative stability seems to me to be extremely interesting. This is the task undertaken, and hopefully executed in some small measure, in the various essays in the present volume. I do not here take sides in the metaphysical controversy con­cerning stability; rather, at the common-sense level I view science as in flux, though with some elements in it less stable and some more stable. So, from the start, I take it for granted that induction is not serious, and try to explore the picture of science in somewhat more detail from a non- inductivist, common-sense, moderate viewpoint. The best non-inductivist view seems to me to be that of my teacher, Sir Karl Popper, which I take as my point of departure.

The stabilizing, the relatively stable, factors in science seem to me to be both the metaphysical foundations of science and the social institutions of science, especially of scientific opinion. And, of course, the metaphysi­cal foundation of science is itself an institution. I shall discuss here an in­stance which I avoid elsewhere in this volume - the institution of the mathematical tools of science.

The traditional literature considers mathematical statements as true beyond any shadow of doubt. There was an older skeptical tradition which raised arguments from computational errors, lapses of memory, etc. Traditional epistemology as well as its critics systematically ignore these arguments, viewing them as outside the universe of discourse of traditional epistemology. I do not think this was an error or a lapse into dogmatism. Nevertheless, let us consider what universe of discourse such funny arguments might belong to.

What book, will you declare, contains only truths? If you are a trained philosopher you may, after some hesitations, to be sure, accept a volume of elementary mathematical tables as such. The volume contains thousands of statements on every page, and it is to be doubted that any user can check more than a fraction of these. Even if all users of the same texts came together to compare notes, the checking would not amount to much. One might think of a fiendish enemy having replaced all the mathematical tables in a given metropolis by slightly erroneous ones. The reader can easily imagine a science-fiction book hinged on such a story, and the reader familiar with the rules and conventions of science-fiction can write such a book within a few days. This science-fiction work will remain science-fiction as long as the social conventions and the situation it describes differ from ours; we can also write a science-fiction work about situations similar to ours, but cast in a different set of conventions; we doubt, however, that we can alter our situation, stick to our conventions, yet obtain a science-fiction work: we expect that the story will show how our conventions will readjust the situation, and the story will then qualify as fiction, not as science-fiction. Hence, when I trust my mathematical tables I am implicitly trusting certain social institutions: I assume that they are stable enough to eliminate wrong tables. If you do not like this argument as it is not prosaic enough, think of all possible misprints which may occur in one slim volume and of the enormity of the task of proof­reading and checking a book. Consider the fact that you trust your volume to contain no misprints because it has been published by a reputable firm, and my argument concerning stable institutions is trans­lated from science-fiction to a much more prosaic context.

Why are such discussions outside the universe of discourse of tradi­tional epistemology? Because they introduce sociological factors. The universe of discourse of traditional epistemology is not sociological but psychological. The skeptical criticism of the traditional view of mathemati­cal certainty is likewise psychological, but it makes psychological as­sumptions very different from those of the traditional epistemologist. Personal errors, forgetfulness, etc., the traditional epistemologist as­sumes, can in principle be rectified and hence cause no problems of principle. For the skeptical criticism to cut through this dismissal, the skeptic needs a better psychology, not a new sociology; or else he needs attack the psychologistic framework within which epistemology is couched and replace it with a sociologistic framework.

In this volume I follow the traditional attack on traditional episte­mology on these lines: it has been shown that the psychological assump­tions incorporated in traditional epistemology are erroneous. It has been shown that a scientist depends on his society, that the new epistemology has to be sociological rather than psychological. This much is in the universe of discourse of the traditional criticism of traditional episte­mology. And in this respect it is to this tradition that the present essays belong. But this volume is not another contribution in the same vein. Rather, I wish to stop the trend: we have wasted too much time and effort criticizing traditional epistemology, and merely on the sociological as­sumption that as long as a thesis is popular it deserves further criticism. This thesis can be refuted by evidence from the social history of science. We need a social set to help us study our problems, but a small set who know the errors of the old view and the new problems, who are ready to push ahead amongst themselves, will do a better job of ousting the error than hundreds of critics-proselytizers. The thinkers of the Enlightenment went too far in suggesting that we ignore error altogether and merely let new light dispel old darkness; but the opposite view seems to be an extremist error too. One may ask where exactly is the happy middle? I do not know, but clearly, it is where enough stability exists to insure continuity of investigation. There are many new problems to be discussed in a new sociologically oriented method, which may lead to new ideas. Incidentally, the new ideas may attract the multitude much better than a wide front of criticism. For instance, why do we trust our standard mathematical tables? Do these contain errors to any serious degree? Presumably not, and this is no mean achievement; how was it made? Can we hope to introduce it to other, and much poorer branches, such as chemistry and biology (not to say philosophy)? More important, what determines a universe pf discourse? Who decides what is a good question? How?

Such questions will be in the centre of the epistemology of the future from whose viewpoint this volume will be an obsolete curio, a mere adumbration.

The present volume, then, has an in-built obsolescence. This can be shown in a few ways. Let me use one more. The position of this volume is allegedly a purist Popperian. But Purist Popperism is a contradiction in terms: purism is an instrument of stagnation, and quick and rapid change leave no time for much purification. I think Popper has trained his disciples to preach purified Popperism, and I think this is unhealthy. I try to make my purism as critical of the doctrine originally presented as possible. But enough of that. More interesting problems lie ahead.

NOTES

¹ See Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London and New York, 1963 and 1964, Chapters 2 and 5. Popper’s views are repeated in Stephen Toulmin, ‘The End of the Parmenidean Era’, in Y. Elkana (ed.), The Interaction Between Science and Philos­ophy, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlinds, N.J., 1974, pp. 171-184. See also my com­ments there, 191-3.

² See Daniel E. Gershenson and Daniel A. Greenberg, ‘The “Physics” of the Eleatic School: A Reevaluation’ in The Natural Philosopher, Vol. 3, 1964, pp. 99-111. A most remarkable paper.