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Opinion on Popper: it’s not good and the number of swear words in my answer depends on the company.
Falsifiability has it’s uses but imo only to the extent that it’s compatible with dialectical and historical materialism. In Popper’s hands it is not.
Popper seems to have been motivated by anti-communism/Marxism as much as anything else. His work should be evaluated in this light. He didn’t necessarily start with sound principles and follow the logic or start by asking scientists how they did science and deriving a theory therefrom. He was starting with the question, How can I show that the Marxists are wrong? He doesn’t necessarily make this clear. This is… ironic, considering what he’s known for.
This doesn’t really answer your question as I don’t feel overly qualified to give a fuller, direct answer but maybe it will provide some food for thought when hearing other answers or looking him up.
Maurice Cornforth wrote a scathing critique of Popper in The Open Philosophy and the Open Society. If you search on here for Cornforth and put redtea as the user, you’ll find some quotes that I previously posted. The quotes focus on formal logic and Popper’s misunderstanding of the dialectical materialist conception of contradiction (rather than falsifiability).
I know that he was an anti-communist, but another commenter said that marxism is completely falsifiable, how does that fit? Did he shoot himself in the leg or what was going on there?
Good question and I don’t want to worm out of it but it could be four or more things.
- I’m wrong
- The other user is wrong.
- The other user and/or I distinguished between falsifiability and Popper’s falsifiability, which means we could be talking about different things and so both be right (or both be wrong) at the same time.
- The other user and I are in agreement but we expressed our points in different ways.
Popper’s argument was that scientific progress rests on deduction. Specifically, he proposed a hypothetico-deductive methodology. Essentially, the scientist begins with a hypothesis and tries to disprove it. Whatever the result, they next create a more accurate hypothesis and try to disprove it. And so on.
In this set up, a few points follow. The hypothesis must be falsifiable. The method of reasoning must be deductive. This assumes a model of deductive knowledge. (Or deductive ‘epistemology’, which refers to a theory of knowledge—Popper’s was anti-Marxist, anti-working class.) There isn’t much if any room for inductive or abductive reasoning, here.
There is no room in this for dialectical materialist epistemology (Marxist theory of knowledge). I’m not qualified enough to say much about the relationship between dialectical materialism and deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning. I’m only saying that Popper insisted on deductive reasoning, to the exclusion of inductive, abductive, and dialectical materialist (regardless of any overlap/relationship between the latter).
Falsifiability at is most basic simply means that something can be disproved. Popper argues that scientific knowledge cannot be proved true. To him, we can only becoming increasingly confident that something is ‘not incorrect’. The more times that a theory is not disproved, the more confident we can be in relying on the hypothesis.
He got to this point by criticising historicism. The idea that if something has happened in the past, it is a reliable indicator that it will happen again. This is the kind of reasoning on which e.g. astrology is based. It’s faulty. Popper equated historical materialism with historicism to discredit the scientific basis of Marxism.
This is why Popper insists that knowledge accumulates not by proving lots of facts/theories but by failing to disprove facts/theories. Ultimately, he was trying to find a way to stop people from looking at the past to predict the future. Popper’s version of falsifiability implies that as we cannot falsify past events, they have little to no role in science.
E.g. it’s not possible to conduct an experiment to disprove that conditions in nineteenth century France would always lead to the Paris Commune. There are too many variables. A critic could always say, yes but if Pierre Secondname didn’t do XYZ, the whole thing would have been different. The hypothesis cannot be put in falsifiable terms, so it has little to no scientific value.
This summary should make it clear that for Popper, scientific knowledge can only advance in tiny, tiny, steps, because there is little room for variables. There can be no scientific theory that includes variables that make it difficult/impossible to disprove the central thesis. (See the Michael Patenti bot text in the auto reply to see how the bourgeois ignore Popper when it suits them.)
But Marxism is scientific. Just not in the way that Popper narrowly defines science. If a Marxist theory, etc, is falsified, disproved, etc, the claim must be abandoned.
The difference is that Marxists aren’t starting with the hypothetico-deductive methodology. They start (and end) with dialectical materialism: Marxists analyse the process of change within contradictory internal relations. Then they make predictions. If the prediction/theory/analysis is shown to be nonsense, it is falsified and we need to take another look.
Marxists are working with a very different set of epistemological assumptions to Popper, meaning the way that we decide whether something is falsified is different.
Popper’s falsifiability implies we must abandon the Marxist project because it’s impossible to disprove the theory of revolution (that capitalism will lead to communism by virtue of its own contradictions). That is, we cannot unequivocally say that revolution is inevitable. It might not happen or it might take another 300 years.
Piketty makes a similar, bizarre comment at the start of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Something like, Marx was wrong because he said there would be a revolution and we haven’t had it yet (in the west, but I won’t focus on the chauvinism, here). Key word: yet. We could prove revolution is possible when one happens, but Popper says that proof isn’t enough for a scientific theory.
To say that revolution hasn’t happened yet wouldn’t convince Popper that it’s a scientific prediction. He would say that if you can emphasise the ‘yet’, the theory isn’t falsifiable because there is no way for him to disprove it (within a single human lifetime). Unless it happened, but then we’re back to square one, with trying to prove a theory to be true rather than trying to disprove it.
Historical materialism (which is dialectical materialism applied to human social relations) is not the same kind of science as the type that’s involved in putting a plane in the air, treating an infection, or growing crops. Different types of science require different concepts and standards of falsifiability.
Popper says there’s only one standard, and his standard is an anti-Marxist one. Popper was a mere scribe for the bourgeois world outlook. So he’s not the source of so many problems. But that outlook is the source of so many problems. E.g. treating (neo)liberal economics as a science until someone points out it’s non-falsifiability, at which point it becomes, ‘Well your sociology and “social sciences” aren’t science either, so there’ and they pull a face at the worker wondering why they’re poor.
As Maurice Cornforth opens in Dialectical Materialism vol 1, all theory, all science, is class theory, class science. Popper pretends, like a good little liberal, that his is universal. That doesn’t mean we throw away all bourgeois scientific concepts, such as falsifiability. It means we need to proletarianise them.
If a theory is falsified and shown to not help liberate the working class, it must be abandoned. Brutally and swiftly. Incidentally, that’s why I’m a Marxist-Leninist and not a left-com, anarchist, Trotskyist, etc, etc. Marxism-Leninism is the path taken by the Marxists who have been consistently proved correct (not falsified) or who have been wrong but abandoned their erroneous theory along the way. (Which also explains why MLs should take Juche and some other ‘unorthodox’ ideas seriously, but I digress.)
(Happy for a better scientist to spot any flaws in my explanation!)
I feel like you shouldn’t conflate Popper (the man himself) and falsificationism.
Marxism is completely falsifiable.
I’m not sure about that. Look up theory-ladenness of observation, or see modulus’ and my response for an ahistorical critique of falsificationism. Nowadays falsificationism isn’t that well regarded anymore. Regardless, Marxism can still be considered scientific. There are better metrics to demarcate between science and pseudoscience than falsificationism. I don’t like how (at least in the West) they still teach flavours of this shit in school (including hypothesis testing).
On Popper (the man himself), he was motivated in his work to introduce chauvinist and conservative ideas to gatekeep economic and social science from being considered a “science”, both from his anti-communist beliefs but also because the logical positivists were too easy to dunk on.
I won’t delete my comment because it took ages to write lol but this is a simpler and clearer way of saying what I was trying to say.
Thank you both for taking the time to respond at all, much appreciated
The concept of falsification is a really good one, and we should apply it and other scientifically rigorous tests to our materialist analyses of history, and tactics. Marxism is a science, dedicated to uplifting the working class, and we should take inspiration from scientific concepts and methods to acheive that aim.
But hilariously Popper was so completely blinded by western-supremacy and cold-war propaganda, that you can ignore and easily debunk everything he says about socialism and the USSR. Pretty much every major Marxist tenet (class struggle, surplus value, TRPF) is falsifiable, so he has to do some incredible logic-twisting to get around that fact. Goes to show that even very smart people can be blinded by ideology.
Tangentially related, but I also recently watched a documentary about Oppenheimer called “the day after trinity”. Oppenheimer, despite being politically literate (he read das Kapital, as well as everything Lenin ever wrote), still thought that the US regime wouldn’t use weapons in a nefarious way, and thought he could use his scientific status and brilliance to influence US leaders to change the system from the inside. That also had to take some incredible logic-twisting to reach that conclusion given the US’s history, which he wasn’t ignorant of.
He got a dose of reality when he learned after the fact that they used the labor of him and hundreds of others to murder a bunch of innocent civilians.
Popper is often celebrated by libs, but he is just a racist western chauvinist (like most of the libs themselves).
Here’s a quote from Domenico Losurdo’s book, War and Revolution:
An explicit rehabilitation of colonialism is ventured by the theoretician of the ‘open society’ himself. Popper seems to offer an unequivocally positive assessment of the centuries-long domination of the rest of humanity by the great European and Western powers: ‘We freed these states too quickly and too simplistically.’
To look at this issue we have to consider what Popper was trying to do with falsificationism, and the current of thought he was embedded in (logical positivism). The reason of being of a notion like falsificationism is the so-called problem of demarcation: i.e., how can we distinguish science from non-science? And, even more particularly, how can we distinguish science from science-looking or science-claiming things (pseudoscience)?
Falsificationism has the virtue of giving a simple answer to the problem of demarcation. Science happens when theory offers hypotheses that can be subjected to empirical tests, and, upon disconfirming data, the hypotheses are abandoned. The problem is, this is not how science works, but also, this is not how science ought to work.
An example: Newtonian physics. This is an especially good example, because the Vienna Circle were clear that, if there was something worth being called science, it was physics. So, a demarcation criterion that tells us Newtonian mechanics is pseudoscience is very much off.
Welcome to stellar parallax. Parallax is the apparently shift of position of an object (in this case a star) because of the movement of the observer (in this case, Earth). Newtonian mechanics and the heliocentric model predicted stellar parallax, but until the 1830s it had been impossible to detect:
Stellar parallax is so small that it was unobservable until the 19th century, and its apparent absence was used as a scientific argument against heliocentrism during the early modern age. It is clear from Euclid’s geometry that the effect would be undetectable if the stars were far enough away, but for various reasons, such gigantic distances involved seemed entirely implausible: it was one of Tycho Brahe’s principal objections to Copernican heliocentrism that for it to be compatible with the lack of observable stellar parallax, there would have to be an enormous and unlikely void between the orbit of Saturn and the eighth sphere (the fixed stars).
So here we have a hypothesis: stars will appear to shift due to the movement of the Earth. We have an observation, in fact lots of observations through about two centuries: stars appear fixed. And yet neither the Copernican hypothesis nor Newtonian mechanics were abandoned (nor should they have been!).
So does that mean science should be immune to disconfirmation? Don’t we learn anything from data? Obviously not. But we need a bit more of a sophisticated view than falsificationism. A clue is given us in Quine’s essay, Two dogmas of empiricism. In this essay, Quine points out that when we speak of confirmation (this was earlier than the notion of falsification) we shouldn’t so much think of a given predicate or hypothesis, but to the whole system (this is what’s usually called, for this reason, confirmation holism).
The point here is, a single datum shouldn’t make us throw away an entire theory that is otherwise predicting a lot of other data. In fact, a priori, we don’t know necessarily what’s going on. The parallax of stars wasn’t observed because stars were a lot further away than it was commonly believed, but the instruments, experimental technique and grounding theory were broadly correct.
Both general mechanics and quantum mechanics are just as false as Newtonian mechanics, in a certain sense. QM fails to predict gravitational lensing, and GR fails to predict interference patterns in the double slit experiment.
Yet we don’t throw them away, wisely.
Sometimes when we have a very strong theory and a datum that contradicts it, what we should do is throw it away. Example: if we get measurements that suggest speeds greater than light, we’re probably having measurement error somewhere.
It’s better to look at this issue through the lens of Lakatos’ notion of a research programme, that has certain core commitments, and auxiliary or compensatory hypotheses. In Lakatos’ terms, a programme is productive if it still makes non-trivial, novel predictions, and becomes degenerate if the auxiliary hypotheses grow too numerous and difficult to sustain, on the face of new data.
All models are (probably) wrong, but some are more useful than others. Science requires us to consider whether our theory generates accurate predictions in advance, without having to create endless numbers of special cases every time we make new observations. If several theories exist, they probably all have holes, and should be judged in terms of whether they are still useful to predict and understand new things.
Marxism is completely falsifiable and it’s why I like it. I don’t know if that’s relevant here.
It would only be non-falsifiable if Marx said that it would be impossible to measure or predict the mechanisms of social change. We can totally measure social habits and most of our measurements tend towards Marx being correct.
Bear with me here :P
In its naive form, i.e. “In light of recalcitrant evidence, a theory is falsified and therefore must be revised or discarded completely”, I think falsificationism is quite dogmatic, it doesn’t take into account auxiliary hypotheses (e.g. the instruments failed or were not calibrated, background effects, there were implicit assumptions in the experiment that were not considered in the theory, etc.). I don’t think any scientist takes this form of falsificationism seriously.
Ever since Kuhn and Lakatos (among others) came around, history of science was introduced into philosophy of science to improve our depiction of the scientific enterprise. It turns out that the kind of critical rationalism Popper hoped to see doesn’t model how we do science at all. How so?
Humans and our degrees of belief happen to vary a lot more. Having experienced academia, I would say this is the case. The sigma threshold for a discovery in different fields of physics differ. The use of Bayesian statistical analysis also differs. The absolute “strength” of a justification of a method, theory or model is often judged arbitrarily, even though we do have good intuition on relative strengths between different methods of theory-justification. On another note, theories on rationality using statistics work better and are less controversial than falsificationism.
Perhaps it is an ought/is problem. Popper said we ought to be critical rationalists. But most scientists aren’t. So maybe he still has a point. But does it matter? We still make the same predictions at the end of the day. Science isn’t maths, science is vastly more social than maths. It’s better modelled with ideas that scientists work in groups called paradigms or research programmes; we have some dogmatic beliefs about our theories, we often let politics influence it, or influence politics ourselves. One might want to uphold strong critical rationalist princples, but might find themself deviating from it once they join a PhD programme where they adopt the “culture” there.
So no, I don’t think it’s a tenable position. I think it’s noble what Popper tried to formulate, but it was quite conservative; on the other hand, his contemporaries made important revisions and adjustments to it and their positions are more appealing in my opinion.
