Theme: Agency

ON STATING POPPER SCIENTIFICALLY: AS ACTION

Popper, like most Jewish philosophers, is overly fascinated by words, and under fascinated by actions. I haven’t quite figured out the cultural fascination with pseudoscience in that community, but I’ll leave that to others who hypothesize that the Talmudic discipline of memorizing meaningless nonsense

Popper tries to give us categories of thinking without solving the problem of acting. We do not require additional modes of platonic thought, whether Popperian (verbal), Platonic (imaginary), or Religious (Supernatural). We have a mode of thought: action, which we call ‘science’: demonstrated correspondence with reality.

As such, theories are recipes for actions that produce outcomes. These sets of ACTIONS (recipes) help us IMAGINE what are IMAGINARY causes, relations and properties , that we might further attempt to reduce to actions by theory and test.

This categorization as actions (operations) prohibits platonic ideas from clouding discourse, and divides theories into imaginary recipes that we must test and falsify and those which we have tested the outcome, (reproduced) and falsified (tested the internal statements).

I would clarify the Popper quote above saying INSTEAD that:

“Theories are recipes consisting of actions that we duplicate by the use of instrumentation to determine correspondence between imagination and reality. Those forms of instrumentation that test correspondence are:

0) narrative (sequences in time)

1) logic (words),

2) numbers (counts),

3) measures (relations)

3) math (ratios),

4) physics (causes),

5) economics (cooperation)

6) praxeology (rational incentives and actions).”

Each additional recipe reduces to analogy to experience, the external world which we cannot sense, perceive, count, measure, determine the causes of, and act upon without such instrumentation. As such each recipe extends our perception.

Unfortunately, these recipes are socially constructed organically in a network of dependent assumptions both conscious, unconscious and metaphysical, almost entirely dependent upon the forms of instrumentation used to extend perception and calculation. And we must reassemble entire networks of objects, causes, relations and properties, when we improve our instruments. This is why we construct and destruct paradigms.

And the fantasy that we hold ‘beliefs’ is verbal and arbitrary, when what we hold are ‘incentives’, investments and opportunities that are not arbitrary or easily disposed of. This difference between verbal and platonic ‘belief’ and praxeological incentives in objective reality is another influential factor in failing to grasp the ‘stickiness’ of paradigms, being even greater than the stickiness of prices, contracts, careers, and Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade.

Also unfortunately, given that learning stresses individuals, and that such paradigmatic shifts impose high costs on adherents, all people, in all walks of life, from professors to ordinary laborers, fight paradigmatic change whenever possible since it will of necessity reduce the value of their current paradigmatic mastery. People Will Not Change Ever by Means of Argument. EVER on any sufficient investment that they have made, whether material or intellectual. This applies in every walk of life from the moral to the philosophical to the political, to the scientific, and entrepreneurial. Although the entrepreneurial leaves them less choice.

This is why science only advances with the death of prior paradigmatic advocates. Just as our political theory and institutions will only advance upon the death (none too soon) of the boomer generation.

But, that does not eliminate the fact, that our knowledge does increase and our correspondence with reality increases along with it, and we adapt our actions more closely to a more expansive reality.

At some point, the MARGINAL INDIFFERENCE of further knowledge (recipes) means that no further benefit can be gained from any available action, and as such, it is possible to CHOOSE BETWEEN THEORIES. Meaning that at any given point the number of available theories open to exploitation given instrumentation available, and the marginal difference in value, DOES give us reasons to choose between theories. Which is precisely why we are apparently, so good at choosing them. And the errors we do make, (mysticism in the 20th century in science and philosophy) can be prevented by adhering to scientific discipline: expression in operational language: the language of science. Of RECIPES for actions that with any given set of instrumentation, allow us to test the correspondence of our imaginations with reality, and without which we cannot test or even conceive of such a reality as exists.

I think this description of actions, is more accurate than the verbal and allegorical description of the imaginary that Popper gives us.

There is a very clear relationship between our inability to introspect upon our own mental processes, and imagination, platonism, and spiritualism. And this relationship tends to force us in philosophy to reduce all philosophical statements to an infinitely recursive discourse on norms. Introspection and intuition are cheap. Reason is more expensive, and instrumentalism is vastly more expensive. However, science: cataloguing sequences of actions using instrumentation that limits the distortion between our imagination and objective reality by extending our ability to sense, perceive, remember, and calculate, is, as in all sciences, a method for the prevention of error.

Popper himself did not solve this problem. He just solved enough of it to tell us how to solve it for him.

The distinction may appear subtle, but it is not. Mathematical platonism, which we falsely use as the gold standard for reason, has infected pretty much all of analytic philosophy, and I’m not sure it hasn’t infected physics. And my argument, like Hayek’s is that the 20th century was an age of mysticism because of the return to platonic analogy and loss of an emphasis on action.

(I know I tend to aggravate you with these comments, but there is a method to my strategy. And I appreciate your ideas even if my thoughts annoy you. 🙂 )