commonalities and divergences between positivist and popperien philosophy of science. of science

Shoeb Ahmed Ilyas /Shoeb Ahmed

[1]

“Commonalities and Divergences between the Positivist and Popperien

Philosophies of Science”.

Shoeb Ahmed PhD Scholar

CENTRE FOR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL STUDIES,

Hyderabad


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INTRODUCTION

We gain our knowledge from our sensory experience of the world and our interface with it

(empiricism). Knowledge-claims are only feasible about objects that can be observed (empirical

ontology). Genuine knowledge-claims are testable by experience (in the course of observation or

experiment).Objectivity rests on a obvious separation of testable (factual) statements from theory

or values. Empirical science is the study of human mental and social life, to establish these

disciplines as social sciences (positivism) and is valued as the highest or even the only genuine

form of knowledge (scientism).

Positivist Philosophy of Science:

Positivism doctrine was developed in mid-19th Century by the French sociologist and

philosopher Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857) and his epistemology affirms that only authentic

knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only come from positive1

verification of theories through strict scientific method i.e. investigating phenomena based on

gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence, subject to specific principles

of reasoning.

Auguste Comte viewed that the scientific method was overcome Metaphysics in the history of

thought and in Philosophy of Science. In the early 20th Century, Positivism gave rise to the

stricter and more radical doctrine of Logical Positivism. Positivism maintains that observations

are theory-independent and therefore are indubitable. Positivists recognize that only the

foundational basic truths could conceivably be so verified. Laws and theories erected on this

foundation could not be reduced to purely particular observational statements, and so the best

one could get for such statements was "confirmation," not "verification." Nevertheless they

retained the basic idea that meaningful non-analytic statements about the world must rest on

empirical support and that statements which lie beyond the reach of any empirical evidence are

meaningless "metaphysical" nonsense.

1 The term "positive" in the epistemological sense indicates a "value-free" or objective approach to the study of

humanity that shares much in common with methods employed in the natural sciences, as contrasted

with "normative", which is indicative of how things should or ought to be.


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There are five main principles behind Positivism:

The logic of inquiry is the same across all sciences (both social and natural).

The goal of inquiry is to explain and predict, and thereby to discover necessary and

sufficient conditions for any phenomenon.

Research should be empirically observable with human senses, and should use inductive

logic to develop statements that can be tested.

Science is not the same as common sense, and researchers must be careful not to let

common sense bias their research.

Science should be judged by logic, and should be as value-free as possible. The ultimate

goal of science is to produce knowledge, regardless of politics, morals, values, etc.

Essential Tenets of positivist philosophy of science are:

Scientism, Methodologism, Methodological monism, Inductivism, Verification, Theory frees

observations, Anti-realism, Deductive-Nomologism and Rationalism.

Karl Popper’s philosophy of science

Popper viewed science as a deeply dynamic process. In philosophy of science, Popper emerges

as objectivist and realist. Popper’s philosophy is inherently value-driven, while defending the

objective characteristics of scientific truth. For Popper, science was a community dedicated to

conjectures and refutations. Scientific truths were falsifiable. This aspect distinguished science

from other intellectual activities. Popper’s falsification’s doctrine that scientists should attempt to

falsify, rather than, verify scientific hypotheses, is probably one of the most influential ideas

from the philosophy of science of the twentieth century. For Popper, real science is falsifiable.

This does not mean that it is false. The best kind of science yields objective knowledge. It is the

kind of knowledge that he describes as “knowledge without knower”.

Popper assumes that the aim of scientists is “to find theories which, in the light of critical

dialogue, get nearer to the truth.” A theory T1 outdated by T2 means that the latter appears to

correspond better to the facts than the former. Although Popper agrees that there is no such thing


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as an objective criterion for truth, and holds that truth plays the role of a regulative idea, though

science cannot attain truth, science can set for itself the goal of achieving superior and higher

degrees of Verisimilitude, that is, they can progressively near to Truth. The criterion of the

Verisimilitude of a theory is nothing but truth content minus the falsity content of a theory. In the

actual history of science, one can see that theories being replaced by better theories, that is,

theories with higher Verisimilitude. If there are two successive theories, at any time in the

history of science, one can find the successor theory possesses greater Verisimilitude and is

therefore better than its predecessor.

The totality of the best implications of hypothesis constitutes, what Popper calls, the empirical

content of the hypotheses. The totality of the test implications, which is borne out, constitutes the

truth content of the hypothesis, and the totality of the test implications, which is not borne out, is

called the false content of the hypothesis. Falsifiability, according to Popper, is the criterion of

demarcation between science, or the 'empirical sciences' and the non-science. There are, though,

degrees of falsifiability exist. The more information a statement contains, the larger it’s body of

observational statements and therefore, the higher its degree of falsification. According to

Popper, scientists should aim at well refutable theories instead of reasonably falsifiable ones. It is

preferable for the theory to be bold, precise and simple as their empirical content will be greater

and therefore there will be a superior body of potential falsifiers.

COMMONALITIES BETWEEN POSITIVISTS Vs KARL POPPER

Most of philosophers united under the "Empiricist Consensus" were robustly influenced by the

development of positivism, but followers of the philosophy of science of Karl R. Popper, well presented

in literature as "falsificationism."

Popper seems to share in common with positivist philosophers within the empiricist consensus but

however Popper philosophy was opposite of positivism and he distanced himself from positivist. So it is

important to understand not only how much popper shares with the positivists, but also in his opinion,

why his view was so very different.

Like the positivists, Popper also accepts basically the deductive-nomological model of explanation i.e.

LI…….. Ln is a set of laws, II…….In, is a set of statements describing initial conditions and E is the

statement describing phenomenon to be explained and the hypothetico-deductivist approach to


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justification. Thus he regards the business of science as deducing from the conjunction of statements of

laws and theories and initial conditions certain observational or "basic" statements which are in effect

outstanding statements about the empirically ascertained "facts." He agrees with the consensus that the

"context of discovery," which is concerned with the origin of hypotheses, is correctly a subject for

psychology and that it answers to no particular "logic". Like the positivists, he regards only the "context

of justification" as properly of concern to the epistemology of science. Both positivist and popper

believed in scientism, methodologism and Methodological Monism. Popper agrees with Positivist view

that science is uniquely progressive, objective and rational.

DIVERGENCES BETWEEN POSITIVIST Vs KARL POPPER

Karl Popper thought that scientists should adopt an important attitude, willing to continuously

test their views with empirical evidence and rational discussion which the Vienna Circle had so

ardently promoted. Popper opposed positivism, especially with logical positivism. These were, in

particular, its commitment to the principles of 'inductivism' and 'verificationism'.

Positivists regarded empirical observation at large of preconceptions as the means by which facts

were obtained and explained may they are subjective, fallible and thus unreliable. It is this initial

displeasure with positivism, especially with logical positivism which prompted Karl Popper to

develop his Theory of Falsifiability, a theory which relies on deduction, and which accepts that

truth is not attainable and which casts theories aside which have been refuted by only a single

piece of empirical evidence. Falsification is also a demarcation between science and non-science.

Popper's deduction was meant to eliminate induction by refutation, bringing science closer to an

ideal that is independent of the fallibility of scientists.

Positivist claim that via induction, any one is able to obtain secure scientific knowledge and that

the inference is legitimate if a 'significant number of observational statements are gathered under

a wide range of circumstances'. In order to maintain the empirical certainty of inferences

obtained through the deductive method, 'the universal law premise must be empirically certain'.

However, as Popper pointed out, one has no assurance that any universal empirical proposition is

certain. For Popper, the 'problem of induction' was intractable, contesting that if science is

empirical 'its [...] laws must be treated as tentative hypotheses.'

Popper in order to stay away from statements allowing empirical evidence to confirm false

theories believed that induction could be replaced by deduction. Deduction 'draws inferences


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about the grounds from the observed falsity of the conclusion'. To justify this, Popper argued that

though even with a body of empirical evidence, one can by no means be absolutely convinced

about the validity of a theory, it takes only one empirical denial to determine the falsity of a

theory. Popper denominated this 'the asymmetry between verifiability and falsifiability, a

difference which became the pride and joy of his philosophy of science.

Popper's explicit split with logical positivism appears with search of certainty: the positivists are

aimed to 'specify methods that would produce definite knowledge’, whilst in Popper's view, one

can only 'hope to improve what must always remain imperfect' as future tests could cast doubt

over what was previously thought of as true. If we capture Popper's approach to the search for

truth, it would originally appear that there are a never-ending number of possible true theories.

However, Popper addresses that by illumination of his notion of 'verisimilitude', scientific

process of trial and error which Popper advocates creates a greater estimate of the truth, or

increases the 'verisimilitude' of the theory.

According to the positivists’ own criterion, all universal laws of science are meaningless. Popper

turned the positivist doctrine on its head by arguing that what characterizes a universal law of

science is that it forbids certain events. Should those events occur, the law is refuted. Popper tells

us that “The game of science is, in principle, without end. He, who decides one day that

scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally

verified, retires from the game.”

Popper says that science does not progress by the accumulation of facts. He does not believe that

there are rules for inducing correct theories from facts and regard theories as imaginative posits.

Popper insists on the revolutionary aspect by which an older theory is rejected and replaced by a

better one. It is clear that the problems of the rationality of scientific change, the nature of

scientific progress and the status of scientific knowledge-claims were dominant themes in the

thought and work of Karl Popper.

Popper demarcation or of distinguishing science from pseudoscience, and it is from that task that

his theory follows, but he rejects the positivists' concern with separating meaningful scientific

discourse from meaningless "metaphysical" discourse as an absurd and pointless strategy. Popper

demarcates pseudo-science from genuine science is that the pseudo-scientist does everything to


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make his "theory" immune to any potential refutation, whereas the genuine scientists is willing,

even eager, to take valiant risks in advocating theories that have the potential to be refuted by

observational evidence. It is this willingness to take risks that accounts for the growth of genuine

scientific knowledge; its absence in the pseudo-sciences makes these bodies of belief stagnate.

Unlike the positivists, Popper makes no assert to describe a "rationally reconstructed" science;

what he claims to describe is genuine historical science. The tale of the growth of knowledge, he

thinks, is the narrative of putting forward "bold,"or "risky"conjectures, and then testing them by

making empirical predictions from them, until they are refuted. Then a new hypothesis is

conjectured (often a modification of the old refuted one) and the testing begins all over again.

The growth of knowledge is not a matter of "construction" upon a firm foundation (as depicted in

the "pyramid model") but of "criticism" of speculative, but testable, conjectures. New hypotheses

come from criticisms made of discarded old hypotheses rather than the accumulation of

empirical data.

Popper's observation avoids the dilemma of foundationalism which confronted the

confirmationist logic protected by the typical positivists. Because the positivists assumed a

verifiability criterion of meaning, they had to explain how theoretical statements which could not

be directly verified could be "reduced to" the observation statements which could be directly

verified. In order to make such statements a secure basis, positivists took the typical empiricist

line that our awareness of our own sensations is "incorrigible" (one cannot be incorrect about

what one is sensing) and so unable of being in error. Popper disdains this view as

"psychologism" which is unsupportive in securing any firm foundation for scientific knowledge.

Which philosophy we accept and why?

I support Popper Philosophy of science, even though it suffers from few setbacks such as:

1. Popperian falsificationist model of science face problem "holism." According to the

thesis of holism, by appropriate modification of the proper supporting hypotheses, any

theory can always be "saved" from potential refutation. Popper theories cannot be

definitively refuted any more than they can be verified or proved.

2. Popper claims his analysis describes real historical science. Nevertheless, real historical

science reveals over and over again that knowledge advances by protecting hypotheses

from refutation by ad hoc modifications that Popper would forbid.


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3. Popper's claim to have "solved Hume's problem”. One cannot deny that the accumulation

of observational evidence ever leads to the formation of hypotheses. If we question that

‘where does a hypothesis come from (the question of the context of discovery), Popper

may reply from the refutation of a prior hypothesis, not from the collection of

observational evidence. Then, one has to think does Popper really found an account of

science which eliminates the problem of induction?

Conclusion

One can rightly be argue that the real difference between Popper and Positivism is not about the

prospect of falsification or inductivism. It is about the role of truth, the value of criticism and the

nature of the knot that unites scientists into a community. Popper see eye to eye that there is no

objective criterion for truth, Popper maintains that truth plays the role of a regulative thought, On

his account, we are able to move from the awareness of our fallibility to criticism of our theories

only if we are consciously aiming at the truth. Truth is still the regulative thought of scientific

inquiry and balanced discussion. Popper believes that only truth and the critical approach enable

a scientific community to be an open society. Popper held that reality is always ‘magnificent’ of

the community of inquirers. The nature of scientific advancement and the prudence of scientific

change lie at the centre of Karl Popper’s.