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Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult

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by Dr. Scott Campbell, Philosophy Programme, School of Advanced Study, University of London

The late David Stove was one Australia's greatest ever intellectuals, writers, polemicists and wits, and one of the two or three best philosophers this country has ever produced. However, because of his distaste for self-promotion, he is not well-known outside a small circle of fans, and what's more, he is actively disliked by many of those in the intelligentsia who know of him. The re-release of this classic book by Sydney's Macleay Press may begin to change all that.

This book was originally released in 1982, when it was called Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists. It gained a small cult following amongst the more irreverent philosophers of science, but it was also roundly condemned by some of the more pompous for its disrespectful attitude towards twentieth-century philosophy of science, as well as for its polemical style.

What Stove did in the first part of this book (which he entitled 'Philosophy and the English Language: How Irrationalism About Science Is Made Credible'), was to brilliantly and hilariously analyse the means by which four of the most famous philosophers of science of the century, Sir Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, managed to sound convincing whilst putting forward doctrines that entailed that scientific knowledge was impossible.

Stove's analysis here is masterful, and is compulsory reading for any student of the philosophy of science. Using impeccable philosophical reasoning, he rescues common-sense from the depths of philosophical nonsense. His wit is breathtaking, quite literally so - during some passages I found myself holding my breath - and his bon mots are a constant delight.[6] You can see why Michael Levin wrote 'Reading Stove is like watching Fred Astaire dance. You don't wish you were Fred Astaire, you are just glad to have been around to see him in action'.

Popper reacted to Stove's criticisms by insisting that he is a defender of science. But while Popper himself may well believe in science, the problem is that his philosophy entails that science cannot produce knowledge. According to Popper's view, induction (the making of claims about the unobserved on the basis of what has so far been observed), which is ordinarily supposed to underpin science, is irrational. Popper holds that scientific knowledge can only proceed from logical deductions made on the basis of basic observation statements.

As Popper points out, though, no scientific laws, and no universal statements, such as 'All unimpeded objects above a certain weight fall to the ground', can be deductively derived from basic observation statements. And this is true: no amount of observation of unimpeded objects above a certain weight falling to the ground will logically entail the statement 'All unimpeded objects above a certain weight fall to the ground', because there's always the logical possibility that some day one such object won't fall down.

So all science can tell us, says Popper, is which scientific laws and theories have been shown to be false (because they have been refuted by at least one basic observation statement). Science provides us with no basis for taking any scientific laws or theories to be true, though. Nor is there any such thing, he thinks, as the evidence providing some support for a scientific theory, and there is certainly no such thing as one theory having more support from the evidence than another theory. Despite these claims, Popper nevertheless thought that we can still say that those scientific theories and claims that have not been refuted are in some sense 'better' than those which have.

However, critics have long pointed out that Popper's 'deductivist' view of science leads to absurdity. Among other fatal problems, it entails that the probability of any scientific statement being true is zero, the same as a self-contradictory statement. It also makes it impossible for scientists to justifiably make perfectly ordinary probability claims, such as that the probability of a new-born baby being female is 50%, claims which Popper admits are scientific. And his belief that his view allows that some scientific theories can be 'better' than others is simply not consistent with other implications of his theory. Popper spent decades trying to worm his way out of such contradictions and absurdities, and Stove is particularly devastating and hilarious in his discussion of the illegitimate methods Popper uses here.[1]

Many philosophers of science since the 1950's were schooled in Popperism. Many of them gradually became aware of the impossibility of scientific knowledge on the Popperian model. You'd think that this would have resulted in them simply throwing Popper out as a bad mistake.[2] What in fact happened, though, was that they either became some sort of relativist, like Kuhn, or they resorted to even more desperate methods to patch up Popper's views, like Lakatos, or they become 'epistemological anarchists' like Feyerabend, who claimed that science was just another myth among many.

Such views are still the orthodoxy in philosophy of science.[3] Part of the value of Stove's work in the first part of Anything Goes is that he identifies the linguistic devices which are used to disguise their absurdity. One of the simplest such devices was to place words like 'knowledge', 'discovery', 'fact', 'prove', 'explanation', 'confirm', 'objective', 'truth' in scare quotes. A Popperian, for example, might say that through science we have come to 'know' that the 'law' of gravity is a 'fact'. Popper's philosophy, though, entails that we do not and cannot possibly know any such thing. But the presence of the words 'know' and 'fact' (despite the fact that they are in scare quotes), deflects attention away from this fact.[4] Stove points out, though, that once the implications of Popper's views are presented non-evasively, no-one will take them seriously for a moment, as they are clearly ridiculous.

David Papineau, a leading philosopher of science, has written, 'Stove has got Sir Karl Popper exactly right... Popper and After will serve as an excellent antidote for the many philosophical innocents who are still in danger of being bewitched by Popper'.

In the second half of Anything Goes (which Stove entitled 'How Irrationalism About Science Began'), Stove traces the origins of such views back, through Popper, to Hume's famous argument to show that induction is circular. Stove closely analyzes this argument, and shows that it does not support the view that induction is circular and irrational.[5]

This part is aimed more at those who have some background in philosophy, but it's an extremely lucid piece of writing nonetheless, as well as being a sublime and important piece of philosophical analysis. Anyway, the book is worth buying for the first part alone, which can be read by any non-philosopher with a passing acquaintance of Popper et al.

Stove also has some other classic books that I highly recommend, and which are readable by non-philosophers. In The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), he sticks the boot into the persistent tendency of certain types of philosophers over the ages (especially those with religious leanings) to deny the reality of the external physical world. This is again done in his brilliantly witty and inimitable style, and in addition contains valuable and unique arguments against philosophical idealism. It also displays his vast knowledge of 19th century writings.

Darwinian Fairytales (Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1995) is one of the few anti-Darwinian books that is worth reading. When I say 'anti-Darwinian', though, I should stress that Stove, who admired Darwin greatly, does not deny that natural selection is overwhelmingly likely to be the true explanation of our origins. What he mainly argues against in this book are the claims made about human behaviour by ultra-Darwinists (unfortunately one of the more famous contributors to the Skeptic, Richard Dawkins, gets the Stove treatment here). He also argues against simplistic Darwinian analyses of human populations (Julian Simon has made similar points in recent times), and he points out serious deficiencies in W. D. Hamilton's influential 'inclusive fitness' theory.

Cricket versus Republicanism and Other Essays (ed. J. Franklin & R. J. Stove, Sydney: Quakers Hill Press, 1995) is a collection of Stove's essays on various topics. Stove is very unusual amongst modern philosophers in that he can write well on non-philosophical topics. But to put it like this is to massively understate the case. Stove is one of the greatest essayists this country has ever produced, and perhaps one of the best essayists of the century. It is these essays, though, that have made him so unfashionable, especially in academic circles, because of his conservative political views, and his witty assault on all that the average modern academic holds dear. This is not a book that will be found on 'Recommended reading' lists in sociology departments.

Even an admirer like myself can find plenty to disagree with

I've re-read this book, now, I think six times. Each time I find myself busting out laughing. David Stove is so withering, so dry, and so damn incisive, that a few months after I've finished, I feel like reading the whole thing again. I don't think I've ever quite come across another philosophy book like it. Fodor's funny, as well as Hobbes in a sadistic sort of way, but Stove is in a class by himself.

I first became aware of Stove and this book through Keith Windschuttle, who mentioned it in his "The Killing of History". By that time, I owned, I think, every book ever written by Karl Popper, including the later Routledge compilations, and I have to admit, I thought he was on to something in many instances. Yet, in the back of my mind, I did have the odd nagging doubt...some of his word usages did seem suspect...but all in all, I thought he might really be on to something. Why, he'd even "solved the problem of induction!" (groan)

Well, budding Popperian as I was, reading the Stove book hurt - but it "hurt so good". It was excruciating - no sooner had I read the words, than that I could see that Stove was exactly right, and that I (and Popper) had been exactly wrong; and yet, it was so hilarious, all I could do was keep reading, laughing at the whole silly mess. (I think Stove's sarcasm is especially funny here because Popper was so unbelievably humourless about his whole project...and Kuhn seemed to have the personality of a dead halibut).

Anyway, Stove makes a few key points in this little book. One is that Popper's (and his disciples's) philosophy of science, taken on its own terms, is patently ridiculous. Another is to show its source (Popper's uncritical acceptance of Hume's arguments against the rationality of induction). And maybe, in some sense, the most important point, is to show how Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos managed to render their spectacularly implausible accounts of science plausible. This is done, shows Stove, by the extreme violence each wreaks upon the English language.

On this last point, take Popper on "knowledge" for example. One upset Stove reviewer on here has mentioned that Popper wrote entire books on knowledge. Indeed he did - but what he means by the word "knowledge", as Stove shows, is something very different than what others mean. Popper, in just "Conjectures and Refutations" alone, draws equivalence in meaning between "knowledge", and words like "conjecture", "hypothesis", "theory", and....(drum roll please....)...."GUESS"! And any "philosophy of science" which relies on equating "guessing" with "knowing" is, as Stove shows, and as will be obvious to most, just not really a philosophy of science at all. Or is it only just a "guess" that an atomic bomb can be built, or that hearts - not earlobes or fingernails - pump blood?. (Popper even sums up his philosophy in his autobiography, "Unended Quest", in this way: "we never know what we are talking about").

In any case, Popper and the other three discussed by Stove, are four of the most influential philosophers of science of the last half of the twentieth century. (In fact, I just read a few days ago that "The Arts and Humanities Index" shows Kuhn's fairly execrable "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to be the most cited book in academic papers, of all time!). And Stove skewers them, quoting them at length to show just how untenable their claims really are.

I only wish that Popper would have responded to Stove prior to his death. What an exchange that would have been!

I hope this review has helped someone.

Stove starts this book by observing that a philosophy of science which rules out any possibility of the accumulation of knowledge, while giving birth to a misbegotten relativism, must appear very implausible (naturally this is a trivial point to the philosophically sophisticated). How, Stove persists in asking, could such a thing have been made 'acceptable to readers who would reject it out of hand if it were presented to them without equivocation?' Then he shows how, with Helps to Young Authors on how to denature language and sabotage logic 'after the manner of the best authorities'. This part is dedicated to George Orwell. Read it, and 'scare' quotes will never 'look' the 'same' again. The great and good were not amused. Sir Karl an irrationalist? The sainted Thomas an obfuscator? It's true Stove can be unfair, and many readers will think that not all four of his bogeymen - Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend - are equally culpable. Nevertheless, they have more in common than you might think. According to Stove they have good reason, or rather unreason, to write that way. (But for a Popperian rejoinder, see the next review.)

The second half of the book traces modern irrationalism back (insofar as it has an intellectual origin in the Anglo-Saxon tradition) to an unacknowledged premise of Hume's inductive skepticism. Whether that premise can bear the weight that rests on it is debatable. To follow the argument you won't need any great knowledge of analytic philosophy, but it may take some mental effort. Don't let that stop you; when Stove is being serious he's a master expositor. Far from being the Idiot's Guide to inductivism, this part is as demanding as anything in Kuhn or Feyerabend, only much better written. Remember, when you read some of the other reviews, that Stove treats Hume with the highest respect.

Taking the book as a whole, it seems that readers either like it or loathe it. Apart from the obvious consideration that people don't like having their idols smashed, the probable reason is that Stove writes with too much clarity, wit and forthrightness for postmodern sensibilities. If you think, as some do, that the ponderous perverseness of Feyerabend's 'Against Method' is 'fun' and 'humorous', you won't appreciate this at all.

Twenty years on, a kind of academic shanty-town sprawls on foundations of make-believe, for which at least some of Stove's 'four irrationalists' inspired the architecture and signed the building permit (they claimed later it was forged). To question the wisdom of this development is 'naive'; one must be 'half-educated' or 'an unwitting positivist' - witness reactions to Sokal & Bricmont's critique or the ecstatic praise still heaped on Kuhn's 'Structure'. (To be fair, some of the latter enthusiasts may not have understood the implications. One reader even persuades himself that Kuhn's ideas lend support to hard-core creationism. Kuhn is all things to all men.) Is it just a strangely persistent fad rooted in muddle, or a symptom of a deeper sickness? Some say that one Stove was enough; I think we need an Aga.

"This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise" - Bertrand Russell.

Formerly entitled "Anything Goes : origins of the cult of scientific irrationalism"*, this is a wonderful book. It is rare to find intellectual honesty in the field of philosophy; but Stove was that rare bird: a seeker after truth rather than a seeker of a sinecure.

The book lambasts Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend, quite justifiably in my opinion. These four authors suggest that science is not cumulative; they are the godfathers of the idea that science is merely a social construct. Kuhn, as is well known, talks of paradigms--first there was the Newtonian one and then the Einstein paradigm. There is the suggestion that no paradigm can be superior to another. It is hard to believe that these authors were sincere in what they wrote; surely they cannot be serious in implying that the medical science of the twenty-first century is not superior to that of the Dark Ages. No doubt their acts belied their purported beliefs. ("No antibiotics for me; rabbit's foot boiled with cloves will cure my bacterial infection.")

The first two chapters of the book explore the literary devices that these authors use to peddle their irrationalist theses. For more detail read some of the other reviews. Stove describes the four authors' writings as deceptive. In the Introduction you will read the following pertinent fact concerning the British Humanities Citation Index. In the 1980s the most frequently cited author was Lenin and the most frequently cited title was "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." What does this say about our culture, this reverence given to a murderer and an intellectual charlatan? Kuhn is perhaps the most cunning of the four, writing a long boring book full of contradictions so you cannot pin down what he really thinks--a device commonly used by contemporary philosophers who want to earn a bob or two. The contradictions are intentional. He knows a critic will say 'On page such-and-such you say this which does not make sense', so he puts the opposing view on another page in the book. Philosophers call such intellectual sloth 'fostering debate.' Another cunning device of Kuhn's is to make a distinction between 'fundamental science' and science that 'merely solves problems.' Aeronautical engineering of course is in the latter category. No one would dare say that aeronautical engineering is 'incommensurable' with the equivalent in Ancient Greece; Kuhn no doubt was as happy to fly as anyone else. But he won't tell you that aeronautical engineering is merely a logical extension of the physics of Newton.

The book is full of wit, for example : "Popper's most influential act of sabotage occurs in a part of the Logic of Scientific Discovery which is seldom read, or at any rate remembered, by any but adepts."

The first half of this book constitutes, in my opinion, one of the best examples of philosophical writing of the twentieth century. It is the tightness and honesty of the arguments that impress. This book should be required reading in any undergraduate philosophy course, indeed there would be few students in the arts and humanities who would not benefit by studying it.

The four authors appear ignorant of the physics they write about. Physicist Neils Bohr formulated the Correspondence Principle which states that the equations of relativity and quantum mechanics must reduce to those of Newtonian mechanics at everyday speeds and dimensions. The Correspondence Principle epitomises the cumulative nature of physics that the four authors deny. I can illustrate the Correspondence Principle for special relativity. To get the equations for special relativity some terms in the equations of Newtonian mechanics are multiplied by the factor 1/sqrt( 1-v*v/c*c) where c is the speed of light and v is the speed of the particle or object. Of course at everyday speeds v*v/c*c is negligible so the factor reduces to 1 and you have the Newtonian equations. This will all be found in textbooks for first year undergraduates in physics. One surmises that the four authors must have been wilful in their ignorance. Certainly Kuhn and Popper knew enough about science to choose their illustrations to deceive those ignorant of science--Popper later taught himself quantum mechanics. These authors knew there was a market for books belittling science and they were not about to let a Principle set out by a mere Nobel laureate stand in their way. One wonders what the Royal Society was thinking of when it admitted Popper.

I can't resist finishing without quoting the following acid pirouette magnifique, from page 37 of the "Anything Goes..." version :
"All our authors except Popper, it should be understood, not only exercise but more or less openly claim the right to talk nonsense. Feyerabend would exclude no one from this right. (But then he is all heart and "would not hurt a fly.") He thinks that talking nonsense is just good for you, like many other things which are familiar to us all, and the value of which no well-disposed person denies : like rotation of crops, state control of scientists, and turning yourself into a wolf and back again. Lakatos is far more exclusive. Talking nonsense, when it is done by people he approves of, he calls "language breaking", and he hints that all the very best people do it. Certain great scientists, he implies, have possessed this gift for language-breaking, and it would be a dull reader indeed who could not name one other person that Lakatos thinks is gifted in the same way. Kuhn in his more demure style merely warns us in his Introduction that what he says "strains customary usage" which, when you think about it, is at any rate not more than the truth."

Now that's philosophical writing for you!

*and before that "Popper and After : Four Modern Irrationalists", yes three titles in all believe it or not!

Stove is critical of philosophers of the scientific method, the Authors [Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos]. Stove accuses the Authors of corrupting truth, confusing the logic of science with the history of science, and permitting the expression of scientific irrationality.

Stove (chapter 1) blames the Authors of "neutralizing success words," for example, by putting the word "proof" in quotations to bring ambiguity to a declaration of proof. Equivocation provides an additional avenue to neutralize success words, removing the commutative success of science as Kuhn seemed to do and seemed not to do. And Stove is right that any composer of words ought to use clear language, minimizing confusion. Nevertheless, if the Authors made mistakes they are likely to be unconscious mistakes; bringing the Authors back to life and they might reconstruct their opinions in better words. Moreover, it is possible to neutralize success words because a subject demands exploration at the level of language; e.g., where we find that the neutralities are talked about either in the negative sense as Stove demonstrates, or in the positive sense to describe a character of communication that is auxiliary to most language. There can be no a-priori restriction placed on language to guard against the impurities that Stove fears.

Stove (chapter 2) blames the Authors for "sabotaging logical expressions," for example, by "epistemic embedding" where logic becomes a conjecture dependent on the history of science. Logical purity requires consistency, and Stove (page 65) did catch Popper in an inconsistency, for Popper maintained that: "(1) that some such propositions are scientific; (2) that none of them are falsifiable; while [Popper] also maintained that only falsifiable propositions are scientific." This was revealed to be a round-about way for Popper to introduce his falsification principle, which on the surface is a very reasonable principle. Nevertheless, Stove goes too far. Logical consistency does not tell us where truth comes from, nor does it lead to a truth that is discovered beyond the initial premisses. Logical consistency only provides small slivers of truth, and the Authors were interested in a bigger picture of reality. They were giving their accounts of science, which is necessarily contentious because science (as Stove's ideal) cannot be separated from scientists. If the Authors made errors, Stove might have asked them to return to consistency and to provide a better articulation. But like Stove, they are gone. And Stove misses the point that there is truth beyond logical consistency; for example, coming from Bayesian decision theory where subjectivity impacts both utility and prior probabilities, and this subjectivity necessarily involves volition. Stove (page 81) is silly when he writes: "That our Authors embed a logical expression in a volitional context, we have yet another instance in their writings of a logical expression being deprived of its implication about the logical relation between propositions."

Stove sores a major victory in chapter 3, showing the weakness in Popper's thinking. Stove (page 95) writes: "Popper endorses the notorious skeptical thesis of Hume concerning the inductive arguments, or arguments from the observed to the unobserved. This is the thesis that no proposition about the observed is a reason to believe any contingent proposition about the unobserved; or in other words, that the premise of an inductive argument is never a reason to believe its conclusion." Stove (page 96) tells us that Popper's irrationality is amplified when it is combined with the thesis of empiricism, "for then it follows at once (since inductive skepticism says there can be no reason from experience) that there can be no reason at all, to believe any contingent propositions about the unobserved; which class of propositions includes, of course, all scientific theories." Stove (page 103) writes, "The irrationalism of Popper about scientific theories has turned out to be no other than the skepticism of Hume concerning contingent propositions about the unobserved." As for Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos, well Stove contends that they inherited this weakness in thinking from Popper, leaving us with Hume as the source of this monumental blunder. Logic and language being what they are (noted in chapters 1 and 2) and we can see now how unpromising it is to return in a time machine and ask the Authors for revision; this conflicts goes deep.

In chapter 4, Stove digs into Hume. And we see the biggest mistake of them all. Even today, logicians may claim that induction is invalid, and they might reference Hume. However, as Stove shows, Hume's evaluation of induction is based on deductive arguments, and this is a nonsense approach. Induction cannot be reduced by deduction because induction implies something auxiliary. And Stove (page 128) corrects Hume's logic, revealing what deduction does show: "Any inductive argument [minus a Resemblance Thesis] is invalid, and the validator [or the Resemblance Thesis] of it is neither a necessary truth nor a proposition about the observed." In other words, Stove deduced that induction cannot be validated by deduction alone, or from empiricism. Nevertheless, inductive skepticism can only be a preference or a revulsion, its is an abduction and what gives its support to induction can only be something other beyond the reasons we concern ourselves with; we must discover something sufficiently sense-certain to have faith, we must feel though Stove does not say this. Given these implications, Stove's chapter 4 deserves a very close read.

Stove figured that inductive skepticism emerged from an overly aggressive deductivism, and he identified this weakness in Hume, a weakness then passed to Popper and the rest of the Authors. And in chapter 5, Stove returns to his literary assault on irrationality and the Authors. The reading is again as contentions as it was in chapters 1 and 2. However, it is clear that Stove is not himself the deductivist I thought him to be. It is only that Stove is hypersensitive to extreme deductivism, and Stove appreciates induction and reveals himself to be a Bayesian in temperament. Nevertheless, his point has already been made. And regarding Popper, I can't figure how any scientific theory can even be tested if not for some expectation that embraces the validity of induction. The requirement of falsification is itself conflicted with inductive skepticism.

What are the implications of Stove's remarkable book? I will summarize my observations. Induction is not the poison that Popper made it out to be. Moreover, science need not be restricted to negative declarations as Popper demanded, but may also seek evidence that affirms. Popper's falsification principle continues to be important to promote error recognition, but it is very partial. Popper's own failure in deductive reasoning shows his limitation. Induction and deduction as a two-piece logic system is still too restrictive for proper error recognition, in my view. Charles S. Peirce developed a three-piece system involving abduction (hypothesis formation), deduction and induction, and error recognition is necessary on all three levels, in my view. Abductive error recognition relates to emotionality, something you can't miss if you read Stove. Without proper error recognition on all three levels, Popper's demarcation between science and pseudoscience fails while generating the irrationality that Stove hates (chapters 1, 2, and 5 come to mind). Stove missed the tension between Kuhn and Popper (noted in Fuller's "Kuhn vs. Popper"), lumping the two together while confusing some irrationality with what Ken Wilber calls the transrational. This tension can find a better accounting with Peirce's three-piece system.

Disclosure: My agenda is declared in my profile.

Stove dismantles Liberal anti-West postmodernists crowding our university humanities with unrelenting sense, humor and insult. Berkley's Feyerabend, MIT's Kuhn, U of London's Popper and Lakatos take a whipping so stinging, their institutions of "higher learning" should be smoldering (and ashamed) for the length of their existence.

Chapter 1 reveals their overused technique of quoting success-words like "knowledge", "truth", "proof", implying the opposite of what these words mean just as done above with "higher learning". Chapter 2 is so dry it reads like a math text but does give examples of word games played. Reminiscent of art historians trying to explain art by telling us who the artists were, Stove reveals postmodern philosophers and sociologists expressing a similar inability to separate what science is from what scientists do. Appendices following chapter 1 & 2 summarize how funny and farcical postmodernism ("cultural studies" or whatever they call themselves this afternoon) really is.

So ends the first two, occasionally laborious chapters with chapter 3 (and little of the text is a cruise), showing us not how irrationalists ply their trade but how such silliness got started and why its sustained. In a riveting passage we find Einstein doing psychological damage to Newton (as far as the public and philosophers are concerned) and what was believed to be his concrete truths. (With no mention of the affects from non-intuitive quantum mechanics around the same time.) So there seems some embarrassment from the philosophers of science with an enduring determination not to be bitten by certainty again, adopting the easy and now popular method of avoiding certainty rather than striving to be correct. Thus Hume, forgotten for 150 years, is resurrected to service in the 20th century for a movement "of retreat from confidence in science which was so high, and constantly rising, in the two preceding centuries", writes Stove. Oddly, Stove fails to note overreaction to Einstein by the philosophers like Kuhn who claim one theory completely replaces another. Newton has never been used more than today by every aircraft, missile, satellite, automobile and tricycle maker in the world. Apparently Newton is doing just fine on earth, though he has a perilous time near stars, black holes and quasars.

If, as postmoderns promote, there is no accumulation of knowledge and generalizations of specifics through inductive reasoning are wrong, Stoves reader is faced with simpler questions outside labyrinthine logic arguments. Given these postmodern rules, has the knowledge of say, driving a car, always been known to humanity - since Homo erectus perhaps? Or was it later acquired adding to our overall knowledge? Each time Feyerabend bought a new car, assuming he did, did he have to learn to drive all over again, since experience of one specific case cannot be generalized to other cases? Or maybe, as Stove notes, Feyerabend didn't drive, but simply turned himself into a bird. As to Feyerabend that is just as likely and as reasonable to believe as our ability to justifiably and accurately apply induction. Stoves example that "all fires are hot" further clarifies the obvious. Postmodern designs try desperately to convince us that we can never know if fires "will be hot", or if fires we never saw or experienced were hot. Despite clear violations of physics - which philosophers don't grasp - this kind of mental acrobatics is what makes the whole movement so inane, and so incomprehensibly dominant in academia. But if we remember it doesn't have to make reasoned sense to serve political extremes - discounting all certainty and Western-style knowledge for insertion of other preferences - then what Stove has done is reveal the transparent nature of the Emperors elaborate clothes.

I have not read the book, but a quick refutation of Kenneth Hopf's aggresively negative reivew. Much of his points depend on painful misundertandings and falsities. my 5 star review is a guess from reading stove's other work.

1. Firstly, "There is, for instance, nothing whatever anywhere in Popper's work that suggests "induction is irrational""

To counter:

I agree with Hume's opinion that induction is invalid and in no sense justified." The philosophy of karl Popper ed Schlipp, Open court, lasalle, 1974. p1015
Again "Are we rationally justified in reaosning from repeated instances of which we have experience to instances of which we have had no experience? Hume's unrelenting answer is: No, we are not justified... My own view is that hume's answer to this problem is right..." ibid p1018-1019

The claim occurs frequently in Popper's work. Almost everyone recognises it. As Such Mr Hopf's assertion is utterly bizarre.

So that is my Hopf's first point successfully quashed.

2. "For instance, we have one of Stove's apostles here claiming that, given some basic statements, one may not derive 'All unimpeded objects above a certain weight fall to the ground'. Why can we not make this deduction? Because there's always the logical possibility that some day one such object won't fall down! This is astonishing. Since when does the possibility of logical entailment depend upon an empirical contingency? It is preposterous statements like this which make one realize that Stove and his sycophants cannot be taken seriously."

Erm well. Given that as we have seen Popper denies the validity of induction, (and more importantly the rationality of induciton) Popper would have to disagree with this point of mr Hopf. I don't think anyoen thinks induction is deductively valid.

3. "Rather, Popper has merely agreed with most philosophers since Hume that induction cannot possibly do what its defenders claim for it."

The defenders of induction do not claim that it an inductive inference is deductively valid. This is what Hume established. But we can have almost no knowledge without the rationality of induction. POpper denies the rationality of induction. Induction is fallible, but this should worry absolutely no-one. Almost everyone is a fallibilist about knowledge.

Further, how can we rest content with falsification without belief in the induction? If an observation has falsified a theory, according to an inductive sceptic like Popper, why not try again? We have no reason to think it will or won't happen again. Thus, there cannot be decisive moments of falsification.

4. "Like almost all philosophical subjectivists, Stove was unable to distinguish clearly between the claim that a scientific theory is true and the claim that we have some reason to take a scientific theory as true. Thus he cannot understand Popper's perfectly reasonable assertion that, while a great many scientific theories may indeed be true, the reasons we have for believing them true invariably fall short of providing certainty. This is hardly what one would call irrational. Rather, it is commonly understood among scientists and a great many other people as well. Indeed, Popper's work was always remarkably popular with scientists, and this trend continues today (see, for instance, David Deutsch's excellent book, _The Fabric of Reality_)."

Stove was not a philosophical subjectivist. This is a laughable claim. Popper's view of truth is widely discredited.

In general, contra mr Hopf, popper's philosophy of science is widely discredited now and on closer exmination totally absurd

The main problem with this book is that the author evidently didn't understand those he attacked well enough even to make credible comments about their views, much less criticize their philosophies. And ironically, it is precisely the sort rationalism espoused by Stove that is largely responsible for the modern cult of irrationalism, which Stove muddle-headedly claims to be criticizing. "Masterful" is exactly what Stove is NOT, and this is nowhere more evident than in Stove's wholly misguided view of Popper.

For instance, Popper's philosophy clearly does not entail that science cannot produce knowledge. On the contrary, Popper wrote whole books about how science does produce knowledge. The real issue here is that a great many philosophers, not only Popper, definitively demolished the notion of knowledge to which Stove and his bewildered disciples naively cling (and half of them are probably also admirers of the quack Ayn Rand). But neither Stove nor his true believers have the philosophical acumen to understand that criticism or to convincingly answer it. So instead they claim that Popper is merely deceitful, which is itself a lie.

In fact, what we get from Stove and his followers is nothing more than a cavalcade of mendacious rubbish (one expects to find Stovians wearing capes with rhinestone dollar signs on them, and to have their jaws jutting heroically as they imagined John Galt must have done). There is, for instance, nothing whatever anywhere in Popper's work that suggests "induction is irrational". The claim that Popper said this is pure fabrication. Rather, Popper has merely agreed with most philosophers since Hume that induction cannot possibly do what its defenders claim for it (Stove seems to have missed the last 200 years of Western philosophy). Popper's achievement was that he showed how science produces knowledge quite well without induction.

One gets the impression from Stove and his followers that they gleaned their meagre awareness of Popper from the back of a cereal box. In fact, the caricature they present doesn't come from Popper at all, but from Popper's critics. It consists of little more than popular myths about Popperian philosophy. A nice example of this is the claim, rejected by Popper throughout his career, that unrefuted theories are in some sense better than refuted theories. Nor is Popper's view that there is no such thing as evidence providing some support for a scientific theory. Popper was well aware that some scientific theories are existential in their logical form, and that while universal statements can be logically falsified but not verified, their negations, i.e., existential statements, can be logically verified but not falsified. This is now generally understood by logicians. But it is all too much for Stove and his nachzuglers to understand.

For instance, we have one of Stove's apostles here claiming that, given some basic statements, one may not derive 'All unimpeded objects above a certain weight fall to the ground'. Why can we not make this deduction? Because there's always the logical possibility that some day one such object won't fall down! This is astonishing. Since when does the possibility of logical entailment depend upon an empirical contingency? It is preposterous statements like this which make one realize that Stove and his sycophants cannot be taken seriously.

Like almost all philosophical subjectivists, Stove was unable to distinguish clearly between the claim that a scientific theory is true and the claim that we have some reason to take a scientific theory as true. Thus he cannot understand Popper's perfectly reasonable assertion that, while a great many scientific theories may indeed be true, the reasons we have for believing them true invariably fall short of providing certainty. This is hardly what one would call irrational. Rather, it is commonly understood among scientists and a great many other people as well. Indeed, Popper's work was always remarkably popular with scientists, and this trend continues today (see, for instance, David Deutsch's excellent book, _The Fabric of Reality_).

Finally, Stovians talk about the absurdity of Popper's 'deductivist' view of science when in fact it is their own view which leads to absurdity. They are bound to say, for example, that multiple universe theories must be a product of inductive observation. Do they think that scientists just pop their heads into a parallel universe and proclaim "Yep! There it is!' This is idiotic. Nor is there any evidence in this world which entails the existence of parallel universes. So how did scientists get hold of this theory? Clearly, they did so in precisely the manner suggested by Popper: they made a guess which, if true, would explain why things behave as they do. These conjectures may also be true, according to Popper, but there is no logical basis for them in the sense imagined by inductivists. Most of the scientific community is well aware of this, i.e., they agree with what Popper has said (for instance, see the popular works of Hawking, Feynman, and Prigogine). In fact, it is Stove, not Popper, whose view would be rejected by most scientists, and who is promoting a view which ultimately leads to disillusion and irrationality.

All in all, the book is little more than a manifesto for some cult of Reason, so-called. It is a waste of time and money.

David Stove has posthumously achieved celebrity status with this book. This status is not well earned because Stove and his claque have completely missed the point of Popper's philosophy and the way that it has sidelined the long-running and pointless academic obsession with knowledge as "justified true belief".

Popper has provided a viable alternative to the "justified true belief" theory of knowledge. He has propounded a theory of conjectural objective knowledge which grows by conjecture and criticism of various kinds, including the criticism of empirical tests. This is a matter of commonsense and it is not hard to explain to scientists and other practical people who have not had their brains addled by academic philosophy and its fruitless quest for the non-achievable - verified theories or "truly justified beliefs" or merely theories with a specified numerical probability. Those, like Stove, who think that inductive probabilities can be assigned to theories, have yet to provide the formula after some centuries of effort.

The fruitless and boring quest for inductive probabilities has driven many students from the pursuit of rationalist philosophy in search of more interesting and exciting fare, hence the rise of the deconstructionists and post-modernists and other related fads and cults. Stove and others have blamed this tendency on Popper's "irrationalism" but this is precisely the reverse of the true situation. It is the failure of the positivists and the inductivists to deliver the magic formula which has wrecked their credibility.

Popper has provided the antidote to irrationalism but he has been so thoroughly sidelined in academic philosophy that students can only find out about his ideas by accident, apart from the garbled and miseading misconceptions of his thoughts that are perpetuated by his opponents.

For a more enlightening introduction to Popper's ideas, in the context of the main postwar philosophical developments, read Bryan Magee "Confession of a Philosopher".

Postmodernism, so-called, deserves to be exposed for the vacuous pseudo-intellectual pastime that it is. Moreover, it is true that the sociologists of science and other anti-rational types expropriated the work of knowledgeable and rational thinkers like Popper, Lakatos and Kuhn and used them as an excuse for their nihilist attack on science. (Only the later Feyerabend is justifiably to be classified as "postmodern".)

The point is: these "postmoderns" neither read nor understood Kuhn or Popper. So, for a philosopher whose specialty is obviously not phil of science, to jump into the middle of an ongoing, highly technical debate is risky. This is not the place to expound these technical issues in the philosophy of science, nor would it be of interest to most readers attracted by the title of this book. They want to read about exactly what's wrong with postmodern thinkers and how it all came about. For this purpose, I recommend The Rape of Alma Mater.

I'm afraid, therefore, that I have to say that to read this book would be to waste your time.