First, what are you actually left with if you rule out induction and replace it with falsifiability? That seems close to knowledge, but how do you bridge the gap, good intentions?

I’m not sure I see a gap to be bridged. One might come to a hypothesis through induction and validate it through testing (falsification). If it isn’t subject to the latter, one might reasonably exclude it from “science” which is, after all, empirical.

The most simplistic view of the scientific method contains both things in harmony: Observation, Hypothesis (induction), Experiment (falsification), Conclusion.

Sorry, I added a few words to my narrative from yesterday. You can find them.

As to Popper replacing Marxism with the myth of progress, I really do think he does that, and surely pomo solipsism and authoritarian supernaturalism aren’t progresssivism’s only rivals.

I’d like to see some other choices.

And I basically have two problems with Popper. First, what are you actually left with if you rule out induction and replace it with falsifiability?

I’m not going to speak for Popper, here. But it seems to me that induction and falsifiability play different roles – one isn’t replaced with the other.

Secondly, as we progress from myth to criticism of myth to observation and an institutionalized methodology based on a critical attitude[...].

I don’t subscribe to this narrative of progress. I don’t think it is that we, as humans, continue to progress in our ways of understanding truth. I think we stumbled along until we came to experimental science, and at that point we had arrived. It is not going to be replaced by the next great thing, even if it is augmented by developments in mathematics or simulations.

And I don’t think “IQ” is a good model for the kinds of things that science handles. How exactly do you expect to understand mass except as the stuff that behaves like mass? In a scientific context, that is sufficient – that is all. Of course, we like to try to connect it to our pre-scientific minds, so we, as humans, make metaphors that relate it to our received sense of the world. But that isn’t the science part of things. And I’m not sure what is circular about it, either – any more than any definition is circular. (What does it mean for something to be circular – why, just what we mean when we say something is circular….seems to me the humanities have it worse. At least I can point to something that has mass whether you and I are there or not.)

Except that you’ve left something out. Kepler observed that the paths of the planets swept out equal angles in equal times.

But that is not a scientific theory. It is an observation. It was left for Newton to give us the narrative that this was because of an attractive force GmM/r2[...].

It was this narrative, this theory, that Einstein’s narrative of general relativity fixed.

I’m not sure where you are going with this. I agree that what Kepler made was an observation. I don’t agree that what Newton gave us or Einstein gave us was a narrative. What Newton and Einstein gave us were rules. They aren’t tendencies, they aren’t just-so stories, there are no morals, there is no intentionality, no oughts or shoulds.

Secondly, as we progress from myth to criticism of myth to observation and an institutionalized methodology based on a critical attitude (and then what? but that’s a different question) — we have the same problem I worried about in Baier’s The Moral Point of View: circularity. Is a critical attitude defined as the attitude scientists take in the sense that IQ could be reduced to “whatever it is that IQ tests measure” — a definition with reliability, but not validity – a kind of argumentum ad populum

Theories of the other than physical law sort are, when misused in the “hardcore X-ist” sense, a lot like slogans, a lot like truthiness. It’s much safer and more honest (and harder work) to deal in particulars.

Except that you’ve left something out. Kepler observed that the paths of the planets swept out equal angles in equal times.

But that is not a scientific theory. It is an observation. It was left for Newton to give us the narrative that this was because of an attractive force GmM/r², not just between planetary bodies, but between all bodies. The bodies supply the mass, while the universe supplies the distance.

It was this narrative, this theory, that Einstein’s narrative of general relativity fixed. The universe doesn’t have passive, well behaved spacetime that serves as a mere geometric frame and doesn’t care about the bodies with mass that reside in it .

I suppose you could satisfy the observations with a different narrative, just as you could satisfy the observations of planetary motions with epicycles – I dimly recall Gauss did the latter one day just for giggles.

Not that Gauss believed epicycles were a scientifically productive narrative. It was just for fun. You and I download p0rn, Gauss calculated epicycles.

Your wish is my command:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/ThreeTieredUniverse_files/image006.gif&imgrefurl=http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/ThreeTieredUniverse.htm&h=535&w=494&sz=22&hl=en&start=15&sig2=Zj0jiQ1_5hkuET0J_DnmTA&um=1&tbnid=HvePv82-nUHAtM:&tbnh=132&tbnw=122&ei=_JEGSNWnMKLGgwK52aDOAw&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfirmament%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN

It’s no coincidence that the naked eye visible celestial objects have Latin, Greek, and Arabic names, not Hebrew names.

One can distinguish theories of the sort that are like physical laws, and theories of the sort that are like ideologies. The first type is true (or nearly true) whether we like it or not. The second sort is likely not true, but adopted because it is convenient or gratifying or simple enough to be within grasp.

To be a “hardcore Popperian” (or a hardcore Libertarian or a hardcore Deconstructionist) is to indulge in the latter kind of theory. And I promise that you are wrong. (Even if only tautologically so.) Not to say that it isn’t worth knowing those things and extracting what truth is in them. Just to say that the hardcore part is a guarantee that you will be in error. And, I’d say, an admission of intellectual laziness or an embarrassing credulity.

On the other hand, would anyone ever call themselves a “hardcore geometric optician” or a “hardcore General Relativist”? It defies common sense – no one adheres to those kinds of theories, they just use them so long as they work.

Which, I guess, is the point.

I treat theories, physical or metaphysical, in the latter way. Use them when they work. And I’ve got a lot more faith in General Relativity (to pick an example) than I do in Popper, as much as I think he was a pretty smart guy.

Maybe it all comes back to my hobby horse – which I don’t think I’ve trotted out in a while. Theories of the other than physical law sort are, when misused in the “hardcore X-ist” sense, a lot like slogans, a lot like truthiness. It’s much safer and more honest (and harder work) to deal in particulars.

Or did you rather want me to say what I thought qualified as science?

So, can I conclude you’re a hardcore Popperian? I don’t understand it (and the alternatives) well enough.

Obw, the <cite> tag works. I’ve left a suggestion on the WordPress cite (yuck yuck), and perhaps in the fullness of time we might get it. I wrote some pushbuttons for the HTML mode editor, so I’ll probably install them soon. But adding buttons to the visual editor isn’t nearly as easy.