Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence

by David Miller

Critical Rationalism, Popper's revolutionary approach to epistemology and scientific method, conceives human knowledge as consisting of unsupported guesses or conjectures. Investigation is therefore concerned, not with conclusively justifying our ideas - a hopeless endeavor - but with inventing new unjustified ideas and ejecting faulty ideas from the corpus of knowledge by criticism and refutation. The critical rationalist approach has been attacked by those who contend that it is little better than pure skepticism or irrationalism, or that it surreptitiously smuggles in the notion of inductive support. David Miller elegantly and provocatively reformulates critical rationalism by answering all its important critics. He presents a full defence of Popper's solution to the problem of induction, especially in the form which relates to practical decision-making. All known attempts to impeach Popper's solution as skeptical, irrationalist, or implicitly inductivist, are carefully considered and refuted. Critical Rationalism includes a detailed discussion of the role of probability in scientific method. Dr. Miller critically dissects the claims of Bayesianism, argues that objective probabilities do exist in the world, and proposes a new objectivist interpretation that makes sense of objective single-case probabilities even in a deterministic universe.

Genres: Philosophy, Science

277 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 1998

About the author

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mi...

Reviews

[Rory Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the central questions of philosophy is the (epistemological) question about what it is appropriate to believe. The philosophical mainstream has typically taken that as an invitation to come up with theories about what ‘justifies’ beliefs. A minority approach has taken the opposite view and focused upon what bars beliefs, and thus the appropriateness of belief is based upon what survives rigorous attempts to evaluate.

Karl Popper’s falsification is perhaps the most well known version of the minority approach, and this book is a ‘restatement and defence’ of core aspects of it.

The book is actually two books, as the second half focuses upon issues of probability, and it is the first half that is dealing with the specifics of falsification and ‘critical rationality.’

What makes the book interesting is that it presses questions about the foundations of thinking that many philosophers gloss over, especially when it comes to Scepticism. If there is no solid argument to rationally justify rejecting scepticism, then how can philosophers think that anything is justified?

To use an analogy, the author asks us whether we would be more interested in knowing the winner of tomorrow’s races, or the favourite. Most people would rather know the winner. The winner is the truth, the favourite is what we would be justified in suggesting as a potential winner. In reality the favourite is completely irrelevant to the question of who is the winner.

And so the author presses the point, that philosophical (or rational) justification is completely irrelevant to truth. It is a distraction which philosophers tie themselves up with.

But if its so irrelevant, then why do so many philosophers write so many books about justifying beliefs? In the absence of truth, they settle for justification, but they have no justification for doing so, and that is the irony which the author repeatedly presses.

It might be tempting to conclude that the author is a sceptic, but he rejects that. He is convinced that people can have knowledge and truth, but he is less clear that people can know they have truth. What we know is justification of our beliefs, but that is subjective and truth itself is objective, and so why do we conflate them. A cat has true information when it pounces on a mouse, but there is (as far as we know) no justification of beliefs occurring in a cat. So why are we looking for that in humans?

The author’s proposal is that we should be using our rationality to rule out beliefs, not trying to rule them in. So the purpose of rationality is to admit empirically falsifiable claims to our hypotheses, and then test them.

This sounds like a prudent and plausible process, and it does indeed describe much of what scientists think they are doing. But it has a few philosophical problems of its own. Is the claim that we should only accept falsifiable claims, falsifiable? Or is the author in fact smuggling a metaphysical agenda setting claim, to justify rejecting any other similar claim?

Even so, does it matter? Is Critical Rationalism any ‘worse’ than rational justification? The author thinks not, and thus recommends it as a methodology.

This is written for professional philosophers, but it is largely accessible to general readers if they are willing to give it some time and concentration. In places it uses mathematical and logical notation which may be off-putting to some readers.

Overall its an enjoyable reminder that there were serious reasons for Karl Popper taking the approach he did, and those reasons are worth reflecting upon.

[Craig Bolton]

Critical Rationalism by David Miller (2003)