Abstract
To my knowledge, the large literature on the rivalry between the Popperian and inductivist methodologies has not come to grips with some of the crucial issues on which the appraisal of their conflicting theses turns. And I wish to issue a new challenge to the cardinal arguments on which Popper rests his indictment of inductivism.
This contribution by Professor Grünbaum is the paper which he presented at Kronberg, with one important difference to be described in a moment. Since that time he has been working indefatigably on topics dealt with in the present paper, and much of this more recent work has already been published by him in 1976 in the following tetralogy of papers:
‘Is Falsifiability the Touchstone of Scientific Rationality? Karl Popper Versus Inductivism’, in Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 39, edited by R. S. Cohen et al., pp. 213–252, D. Reidel Publ. Co., Dordrecht, Holland.
‘Can a Theory Answer More Questions Than One of Its Rivals?’, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 27, 1–23.
Is the Method of Bold Conjectures and Attempted Refutations Justifiably the Method of Science?’, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 27, 105–136.
‘Ad Hoc Auxiliary Hypotheses and Falsificationism’, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 27, 329–362.
The first of these publications overlaps rather considerably with the present paper and Professor Grünbaum would have preferred to have provided a new piece instead of it for this volume. However, Professor Watkins’s Reply largely concentrates on Grünbaum’s present paper, which therefore needed to be included if this volume was to be self-contained. Hence Professor Grünbaum acquiesced in this inclusion at the behest of the others concerned, although he would have greatly preferred to update the present paper in various ways. Yet there is a historical interest in reprinting it in an unrevised form, since the Kronberg Conference witnessed the first direct confrontation between this leading critic of the Popperian philosophy and one of its best known defenders.
The one significant change in his paper is as follows. It originally contained a brief excursion into Freudian psychoanalysis as a test case for Popper’s methodology. This, together with some other passing references to Freud, has now been cut out. But the deleted material is available in considerably expanded form in the following very recent papers by Professor Grünbaum:
‘How Scientific is Psychoanalysis?’, in Science and Psychotherapy, edited by R. Stern, L. Horowitz and J. Lynes, pp. 219–254, Haven Press, New York 1977.
‘Is Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory Pseudo-Scientific by Karl Popper’s Criterion of Demarcation?’, American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (April 1979).
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Notes
This much larger essay is entitled ‘Is Falsifiability the Touchstone of Scientific Rationality? Karl Popper versus Inductivism’. It has appeared in Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos, R. S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky (eds.), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 39, D. Reidel Publ. Co., Dordrecht, Holland, Boston, U.S.A., 1976, pp. 213–252. And it will be cited below under the acronym ‘FT’.
I wish to thank the editors and publisher of the Lakatos Memorial Volume for their kind permission to use material from my essay FT here.
Other studies in that series of critiques are A. Grünbaum, ‘Can a Theory Answer more Questions Than One Of Its Rivals?’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 27, 1–23 (1976); ‘Is the Method of Bold Conjectures and Attempted Refutations Justifiably the Method of Science?’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 27, 105–136 (1976); and ‘Ad Hoc Auxiliary Hypotheses and Falsificationism’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 27, 329–362 (1976). Two such additional studies, published after 1976, are listed in the concluding paragraph of the Editors’ note.
Popper, K. R., Conjectures and Refutations, New York and London, Basic Books, 1962, p. 256. Hereafter this work will be cited as ‘C&R’ within the text.
Cf. Russell, B., Human Knowledge, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1948, p. 381.
Popper, K. R., The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London, Hutchinson, 1959, p. 420 (italics in original). Hereafter this work will be cited within the text as ‘LSD’.
According to Lakatos [Lakatos, I., ‘The Role of Crucial Experiments in Science’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 4, 315 (1974) and ‘Popper on Demarcation and Induction’ (hereafter PDF), The Philosophy of Karl Popper, The Library of Living Philosophers, P. A. Schilpp (ed.), LaSalle: Open Court, 1974, Book I, pp. 245–246], Popper tailored his demarcation criterion to the requirement of not according scientific status to the aforementioned four theories.
Burtt, E. A. (ed.), The English Philosophers From Bacon to Mill, New York, Random House (Modern Library Series), 1939.
Cf. R. Giere’s illuminating discussion [‘An Orthodox Statistical Resolution of the Paradox of Confirmation’, Philosophy of Science 37, 354–362 (1970)] of the resolution of Hempel’s paradox of confirmation in statistical theory by means of rejecting a certain version of the instantiation condition. But note the caveat in note 17 below concerning the difference between our concept of ‘positive instance’ and the corresponding concept relevant to Giere’s analysis.
In Section 3 below, we shall consider to what extent, if any, Popper’s own methodology entitles him to claim that mere repetitions of an initially corroborating type of instance increases the corroboration of a hypothesis only very little, if at all.
Mill, J. S., A System of Logic, 8th ed., New York, Harper & Bros., 1887, p. 313.
Rebuttals to Popper’s arguments for p(a) = 0 are given in Colin Howson’s paper ‘Must the Logical Probability of Laws be Zero?’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 24, 153–160 (1973). And on pp. 161–162, he offers a counterexample to Popper’s p(a) = 0. See also J. Hintikka, ‘Carnap and Essler Versus Inductive Generalization’, Erkenntnis 9, 235–244 (1975).
I am indebted to Noretta Koertge for some of these references.
Popper, K. R., Objective Knowledge, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 51. Hereafter this work will be cited as ‘OK’.
That D is indeed equivalent to C becomes intuitive by reference to Tarskian logical contents as follows: The logical content of a disjunction is the intersection of the respective contents of the disjuncts. And the intersection of the contents of the infinitude of disjuncts in D will be just the content of C. To illustrate, take the entire infinitude of pairwise different curves, all of which go through or contain each of a finite set S of points in the xy plane. This totality T of curves or point sets will have exactly the set S as its set-theoretical intersection. For no point outside of S can belong to ALL of the curves in T. The points in S play the role of ‘data points’ in analogy to the observation statement C. And the curves in T play the role of the hypotheses in D each one of which entails C.
Salmon, W. C., The Foundations of Scientific Inference, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966, p. 119.
Quotations from Musgrave here are from his article “Popper and ‘Diminishing Returns from Repeated Tests’”, which appears in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy 53, 250–251 (1975).
Ibid., p. 251.
Good, I. J., [British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 17, 322 (1966–67)] has given a perhaps far-fetched example having the following features: C states that a randomly selected bird is a black raven, H states that ‘all ravens are black’, and P(B&H, C) << 1 (i.e., 102/106). Good takes a black raven to be a ‘case’ (positive instance) of H in a sense DIFFERENT from our above sense, since his B does not assume the initial condition that the randomly selected bird is a raven ! And despite the universality of H, the special feature of Good’s example then is that not only is P(B&H, C) << 1, but also P(B&H, C)<P(B, C), so that the ratio on the rhs is less than 1. But this means that the ‘case’ C of the hypothesis yields a posterior probability of H which is smaller than its prior probability: A perhaps somewhat far-fetched but even more resounding repudiation of the instantiation condition than the case of equal prior and posterior probabilities of H.
The need to distinguish the factor of probability increase from the amount was overlooked in this context in Salmon’s The Foundations of Scientific Inference, op. cit., pp. 118–120.
Glymour, C., ‘Relevant Evidence’, The Journal of Philosophy LXXII, 403–426 (1975).
Hilpinnen, R., ‘On the Information Provided by Observations’, J. Hintikka and P. Suppes (eds.), Information and Inference, D. Reidel Publ. Co., Dordrecht, Holland, 1970, Section II, esp. pp. 100–101. I am indebted to Teddy Seidenfeld not only for this reference but also for very clarifying comments on Allan Gibbard’s results, which I mentioned above.
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Grünbaum, A. (1978). Popper vs Inductivism. In: Radnitzky, G., Andersson, G. (eds) Progress and Rationality in Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9866-7_6
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