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RC Series Bundle: Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Routledge Classics)

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This book is a collection of twenty papers and speeches that Popper has written throughout his life. The connection between these papers is that they are all loosely related to Popper's famous thesis that science progresses as a series of conjectures and refutations. Scientists build tentative theories (conjectures) to explain what they observe. Since no scientific theory can actually be proven, all a scientist can do is trying to refute it. If a theory withstands severe attempts to refute it, the conjecture becomes more credible (but not more probable, and not more true). A successful refutation of a conjecture is a breakthrough: it leads to new insights, and it can eventually lead to better conjectures. Science is a systematic way of learning from your errors, and criticism is an essential part of it.

Some of the papers in this book make a good introduction to Popper's ideas, but technical discussions of this kind are never easy to read. For instance, if you are unfamiliar with the ideas of Rudolph Carnap, you might want to skip the chapter devoted to him. I had a hard time reading it. Nevertheless, this is probably a better starting point than "The Logic of Scientific Discovery", a very difficult book.

The format of the book as a collection of papers is both a strength and a weakness. Some of the papers are a joy to read, especially when Popper writes about the presocratic philosophers and the birth of science. Popper is very good at introducing his subject, almost as if he were telling a tale. On the other hand, the many repetitions of the same theme become cumbersome after some time. This book is over 400 pages! BIG pages! Apparently, when Popper published this book, he was so famous that publishers uncritically printed anything he wrote, no matter how long-winded. Somehow, this is an ironical illustration of Popper's own thesis.

It is rare these days to read a proper treatment of science. Bookshelves in the "science" sections are filled with astronomy, biology, chemistry and such. Not to suggest their is anything wrong with these disciplines; it's just that science is a way of thinking, or if you will, a method- not a collection of beliefs.

Karl Popper has been largely misunderstood, being labeled a relativist and destroyer of objective science. To be sure, he did believe, as the reader will find in this enjoyable collection, that all theories- even well corroborated, are tentative. To give his critics more ammo, Popper considers science "reasoned myth-making." Neither of these extend to relativism. If theories are tentative- always subject to new and different tests- a theory can never be fully proved but CAN be fully falsified. This is the essence of the books essays. Whether Popper is discussing the pre-socratic philosophers, social science or demarcation, his falsification theory is the common theme here. As for the "reasoned myth-making," Popper has a bone to pick with those who think that science is purely based on observation. Any theory, by necessity, is a generality and there are no generalities in nature. Theories are made by observation + induction and induction, as Popper will add, is never logically - only psychologically - justified This is another common thread of the essays.

Two suggestions for reading this book. First, if you are a Popper critic, you NEED to read this book as he goes a long way in explaining many beliefs of his that critics get wrong. Second, do not read the book front to back. As all of these 500+ pages are on the falsification theory applied to different situations, it will get extremely repetitive. Read a few essays at a time and come back later.

The book is a collection of articles by Popper. It is easier to understand than his classic Logik der Forshung, and is much richer in content, for Popper embarks in some of these lectures on the history of philosophy and the history of science. There is also a delicious paper on self-reference and meaning in ordinary language.

I especially recommend the paper on "Scientific problems and their roots in metaphysics". Popper's conception of scientific dinamics as a sequence of big problems and answers to them makes him see continuity where experts on some particular philospher usually don't. Thus Popper sees a direct relation between Pythagoras, Plato and Euclid based on some fundamental cosmological problems. Euclid's Elements, Popper claims, were conceived by its author not as an excercise in pure geometry but as an organon of a theory of the world, designed to solve the problems of Plato's cosmology. Plato realized that Pythagoras' "arithmetical" theory of the world was in ruins after the discovery of irrational numbers, and that a new method was needed to understand the world. That is why he initiated the "gemoetrical" programme, which found its culmination in platonic Euclid's work. This way of seeing things is a bit unrealistic, a kind of free "rational reconstruction", but I think it is nevertheless a valuable view.

The fundamental lecture on philosophy of science in this collection is chapter 10, "Truth, rationality & the growth of scientific knowledge", where Popper presents his philosophy of science quite clearly and in detail. There has been a lot of water under the bridge since this paper was first published. His theory of "verisimilitude", for instance, was shown to be unmistakably wrong in the 1970s.

His approach to Tarski's theory of truth in that chapter is rather awkward: he pretends that Tarski's work showed what is meant by correspondence with the facts. To prove this, he appeals to instances of convention (T) and replacement of "is true" by "corresponds to the facts". Thus "snow is white" corresponds to the facts if and only if snow is white. But this might explain what it is for "snow is white" to correspond to the facts, but not what "correspondence with the facts" is. We cannot ascertain what that single property consists of, and surely Tarski's definiens for "truth" (i.e. "satisfaction by every infinite sequence") won't do the job.

Also, Popper's answer to the challenge that Duhem's problem posed on his philosophy is disappointing, the answer being something like "there exists a logical method of proving independence from axioms, so we might hopefully see from which axiomS the falied prediction depended; and even so, I admit that this method is usually difficult to apply; therefore holism is an untenable dogma."

The thesis of the book, says Popper, can be put like this: we can learn from our mistakes. This is held together with this other thesis: there is no ground for believeing any empirical statement to be true. The reader might wonder how Popper managed to believe in these two thesis at one and the same time. In Popper's view, science is this: conjecturing a theory to be true; subjecting this theory to criticism (empirical testing); this testing is done after experiment, but experiments are not reliable, we have no warrant that our perceptual apparatus is not deceiving us; if the theory fails the test, we reject it; but "it" is a whole system of related theories, even observational theories (even logic and mathematics, says Quine); and then we have to guess which of these we have to reject. The risk of taking a true theory to be false is certainly very high, as high as that of taking a false theory to be true. So I don't see how Popper can be so confident that we can learn from mistakes. Perhaps if we purged Popper's methodology of things like truth (not to mention verisimilitude), we could get a methodology of science conceived as a canon of critical procedure, with no claims as to what we are achieving when we abide by it.

The article on hegelian Dialectics is amusing. It tries the impossible task of explaining dialectics in a simple language, and then to refute it. The dialectician's typical reply to this kind of criticism is: you used clear language, so that is NOT Hegel's diatectics.

As I said, this is a highly stimulating and clearly written book, which deserves to be read even if many things in it must to be corrected or complemented.

This book is divided into two sections - "Conjectures" and "Refutations". Roughly, or not so roughly, these titles refer to the basic aim of the essays divided under them. Moreover, the process of conjecture and refutation is itself the primary theory threading these various essays together. The first division consists of Popper's own conjectures about the nature of scientific method, human knowledge, the nature of metaphysics, a theory of tradition, etc. The latter section: refutations of commonly held theories on the mind-body problem, the demarcation between science and metaphysics, language, and social philosophy. In this Routledge Classics edition there is a third section of addenda pertaining to just a few of the individual essays in the text.
For those who are unfamiliar Popper Conjectures and Refutations is probably one of the best ways to get to know him. Being a collection of essays originally published elsewhere, they are on varied themes. These themes are often inspired by a conference or publication, but despite the occasional aspect of these writings they all generally further the the falsifiability thesis of scientific theories. For Popper, this means that all theories, though they can not be "proved" by "experience" or "observation", that is empirically, they can be falsified by empirical means. This is the truly empirical nature of scientific thought and the scientific method. This empirical-ness of theories (or statements) is what makes them scientific. Unlike the early positivists argued, the empirical nature of the scientific method is not its ability to establish universal laws by the appeal to experience and the use of inductive reasoning. The appeal to observation and experience work to corroborate theoretical claims, but can never "prove" a theory once and for all.
Along the same lines, Popper's demarcation between science and metaphysics figures heavily in these essays. While science consists of testable theories/statements to be corroborated or falsified by experience, metaphysics is constituted by un-testable, non-falsifiable theories/statements. The un-testable, un-observable nature of metaphysical statements does not make them meaningless as Wittgenstein, Ayer, and others have argued - a universal claim about the nature of gravity is no way more meaningful - it simply makes them untestable, unfalsifiable, and unscientific.
The philosophy of science and scientific method are not all that is important to Popper. They do not even exhaust the topics discussed in this book. I could write (and have written elsewhere) pages and pages on Popper's polical philosophy, his critiques of historicism and scienticism, and his epistemology. If you want a proper introduction buy Conjectures and Refutations. You might want to consider his Poverty of Historicism as well.

Nothing is the same for a student after this book. It helps you understand what can be called and what can't be called "scientific" and the sometimes, narrow line between. This is the one of the most thought-provoking books of the XXth. century. It started one of the most interesting discussions of the history of ideas. Re-read it if you read it, or discover it if you missed it.

This collection was first published in 1963. It includes a number of seminal papers which were delivered as talks to bodies such as the British Rationalist (Humanist) Association and the Mont Pelerin Society. There is also Popper's first paper written in English "What is Dialectic", delivered at a seminar in 1937 soon after he arrived in New Zealand.

Possibly the most important offering is the Introduction "On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance" which explored the common roots of authoritarian thinking in western epistemology and politics. In each case the fundamental issues have been skewed by asking the wrong questions: "What is the authority for our beliefs?" And "Who should rule?" Thus attention has focused on unanswerable questions in both epistemology and politics, diverting attention from the real and practical issues of criticism in epistemology and the limitation and control of power in politics and public administration. This paper also prompted William W Bartley's seminal thinking on rationality and the limits of criticism.

"The Nature of Philosophical Problems and their Roots in Science" suggested that the prima facie method of teaching philosophy denied access to the roots of philosophical problems and produced students who are either narrowly specialized in technical fields or are trained to reproduce material recycled form their teachers. He suggested that philosophy would die if its extra-philosophical roots decayed and he backed his case with a sketch of Plato's response to the crisis in early Greek atomism and the more modern example of Kant's response to Newton. This essay produced an echo in the form of Agassi's subsequent paper on the roots of scientific problems in metaphysics.

On the topic of metaphysics, this collection contains Popper's "coming out" as a metaphysician in "On the Status of Science and of Metaphysics", heralding a development that culminated in the Metaphysical Epilogue to "The Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery".

"Back to the Presocratics" was delivered to the Aristotelian Society in 1958, an occasion that has been immortalised by Byran Magee in his memoires. He described the paper as a fundamental challenge to the ruling doctrines of empiricism but the assembled multitude missed this point and devoted the discussion time to fine points of disagreement with Popper's reading of his Greek sources.

We guess. We make up a story that explains the phenomena we observe. Why is there night and day? Because the sun rises from the east and sets itself down in the west. Aha! Let's check that. Let's go east. After a while we realize that we're living on a sphere and so we know our story is wrong. The sun does not rise up and set. So what does it do? We're on a ball and the sun is above and it moves around us! Great! Problem solved. But wait! Let's check that. The stars also move. Let's plot their course, and then... and so on and so forth.

For Popper, this is how we've built up our picture of the world. We make bold conjectures to explain what we see see and then we check, or rather we establish a failure test. If the test is true, then our guess is false. But if we only test to see if a guess is false, rather than to try and prove that it's true, then how do we know our guess is true? Popper answers that we do not and cannot ever know that. Knowledge lies beyond our grasp, we can only seek knowledge without ever hoping to attain it.

This is the central theme of Conjectures and Refutations, which itself is a comprehensive overview of Popper's epistemological thought. The book is divided in two parts titled, you guessed it, I-Conjectures and II-Refutations.

Part I, Conjectures, comprises the first ten chapters. Popper begins with an overview of his thesis, then explores the nature of the problems that face people who think about the world and who act in it (chapter 2), he presents three other views of what we mean by knowledge (ch. 3), he describes tradition and the history of thought (chapters 4 to 6) and then turns to a critique of Kant, and of the effect that Newton's astonishingly successful theory of gravity, unrefuted for over 200 years, had on the development of western science (chapter 7). Popper then closes part I with discussions on what the difference is between science and metaphysics, on why mathematics works so well in describing the world, and finally on the nature of scientific knowledge, i.e. what do we mean by "knowledge".

In part II, Refutations, Popper does not present anything, he destroys existing theories which he feels are wrong. He returns to metaphysics and because it deals in existential statements that are irrefutable (e.g. you can't prove the Devil's existence or non-existence) he seeks to separate its pursuits from that of science. Science deals only in refutable statements.

Then Popper attacks other theories and problems. He gives a succinct summary of his attack on historicism, his name for the belief that History follows laws (e.g. Marxism) and that historians should be able to predict the future course of mankind.

In short, Conjectures and Refutations is a complete introduction to Popper's thinking. It sketches out all his thoughts on the social sciences and describes in fair detail his thinking on the development of science. He ends on a positive note. It may seem depressing that we can never obtain true knowledge, but we can certainly find sufficiently rich rewards in the pursuit of it.

From the late 1960's to the mid 1970's I was a young person grappling with the question of what constituted truth. On the one hand, the conservative religious outlook of my rural upbringing was clearly ill-equipped to address the modern world. On the other hand, the Marxist views espoused by many of my peers were ridiculous. This book, however, and other books written by Karl Popper, cut though both of these views like so much paper. This book goes way beyond the high school notion of the scientific method. It exposes the intellectual poverty of approaches like astrology, Marxism, and Freudian Psychology, which offer an explanation for anything--but shrink from really putting themselves out there and daring to make a prediction whose failure will expose their shortcomings. Painful as it was at the time for me to realize that Christianity also fell into the same category as these other untestable conjectures, it showed me the way to a world view that respected no authority other than ideas that could be rigorously tested.

I enjoyed reading this book for my philosophy class. I did not have previous experience in this subject (philosophy of science). This book was the first book I read in this subject field. It truly made me question how science actually grows and everything pertaining to how knowledge is accumulated and what it means. Popper claimed that we learn through posing conjectures and attempting at refuting them. This leads into a constant path of conjectures and refutations.

Any college level degree in any discipline is undeserved unless the student has understood the thesis of this book. It is long, sometimes difficult, and not always on the mark, but it is a must read to understand the nature of scientific knowledge. The gems are disperesed throughout, so one must be patient in discovering them.
The philosophy of science has been placed on a firm footing, and all pretenses to the notion that Science can discover Truth have been destroyed.