Popper,+Karl

=Popper, Karl= toc Read here pertinent facts about someone whose work is critical to a proper comprehension of scale.

=Overview= This research project into scale holds as an aim to conform with Popper's definition of a "research programme," as refined by his student Lakatos. These lofty, formal ideas help guide our practical objectives to bring to the study of scale good names, good numbers, and hypotheses testable by their falsifiability.

=Biography= Sir Karl Raimund Popper, (1902 –1994) was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century.

=Relevant Ideas to "Research Programme"= In All Life is Problem Solving, Popper sought to explain the apparent progress of scientific knowledge—how it is that our understanding of the universe seems to improve over time. This problem arises from his position that the truth content of our theories, even the best of them, cannot be verified by scientific testing, but can only be falsified. Again, in this context the word 'falsified' does not refer to something being 'fake'; rather, that something can be (i.e., is capable of being) shown to be false by observation or experiment. Some things simply do not lend themselves to being shown to be false, and therefore are not falsifiable. If so, then how is it that the growth of science appears to result in a growth in knowledge? In Popper's view, the advance of scientific knowledge is an evolutionary process characterized by his formula: PS1 --> TT1 --> EE1 --> PS2

In response to a given problem situation (PS1), a number of competing conjectures, or tentative theories (TT), are systematically subjected to the most rigorous attempts at falsification possible. This process, error elimination (EE), performs a similar function for science that natural selection performs for biological evolution. Theories that better survive the process of refutation are not more true, but rather, more "fit"—in other words, more applicable to the problem situation at hand (PS1). Consequently, just as a species' biological fitness does not ensure continued survival, neither does rigorous testing protect a scientific theory from refutation in the future. Yet, as it appears that the engine of biological evolution has produced, over time, adaptive traits equipped to deal with more and more complex problems of survival, likewise, the evolution of theories through the scientific method may, in Popper's view, reflect a certain type of progress: toward more and more interesting problems (PS2). For Popper, it is in the interplay between the tentative theories (conjectures) and error elimination (refutation) that scientific knowledge advances toward greater and greater problems; in a process very much akin to the interplay between genetic variation and natural selection. Popper's principle of falsifiability runs into prima facie difficulties when the epistemological status of mathematics is considered. It is difficult to conceive how simple statement of arithmetic, such as 2 + 2 = 4, could ever be shown to be false. If they are not open to falsification they can not be scientific. If they are not scientific, it needs to be explained how they can be informative about real world objects and events. Popper's solution was an original contribution in the philosophy of mathematics. His idea was that a number statement such as "2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples" can be taken in two senses. In one sense it is irrefutable and logically true, in the second sense it is factually true and falsifiable. Concisely, the pure mathematics "2 + 2 = 4" is always true, but, when the formula is applied to real world apples, it is open to falsification. For Popper, theories are accepted or rejected via a sort of selection process. Theories that say more about the way things appear are to be preferred over those that do not; the more generally applicable a theory is, the greater its value. Thus Newton’s laws, with their wide general application, are to be preferred over the much more specific “the solar system has seven planets”.

=Truthlikeness= Popper's ideas of falsifiability were critical to his contribution to the philosophy of the scientific method, and it has some applicability to this research effort into scale.

Popper contended that the intuitive idea behind verisimilitude is that the assertions or hypotheses of scientific theories can be objectively measured with respect to the amount of truth and falsity that they imply. And, in this way, one theory can be evaluated as more or less true than another on a quantitative basis which, Popper emphasizes forcefully, has nothing to do with "subjective probabilities" or other merely "epistemic" considerations.

Knowledge, for Popper, was objective, both in the sense that it is objectively true (or truthlike), and also in the sense that knowledge has an ontological status (i.e., knowledge as object) independent of the knowing subject (Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972). He proposed three worlds (see Popperian cosmology): World One, being the physical world, or physical states; World Two, being the world of mind, or mental states, ideas, and perceptions; and World Three, being the body of human knowledge expressed in its manifold forms, or the products of the second world made manifest in the materials of the first world (i.e.–books, papers, paintings, symphonies, and all the products of the human mind). World Three, he argued, was the product of individual human beings in exactly the same sense that an animal path is the product of individual animals, and that, as such, has an existence and evolution independent of any individual knowing subjects. The influence of World Three, in his view, on the individual human mind (World Two) is at least as strong as the influence of World One. In other words, the knowledge held by a given individual mind owes at least as much to the total accumulated wealth of human knowledge, made manifest, as to the world of direct experience. As such, the growth of human knowledge could be said to be a function of the independent evolution of World Three. Many contemporary philosophers have not embraced Popper's Three World conjecture, due mostly, it seems, to its resemblance to Cartesian dualism.

=Critique Of Darwin= Popper's critique of Darwin helps explain the idea of a "research programme."

Karl Popper famously stated "Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program." He continued: > And yet, the theory is invaluable. I do not see how, without it, our knowledge could have grown as it has done since Darwin. In trying to explain experiments with bacteria which become adapted to, say, penicillin, it is quite clear that we are greatly helped by the theory of natural selection. Although it is metaphysical, it sheds much light upon very concrete and very practical researches. It allows us to study adaptation to a new environment (such as a penicillin-infested environment) in a rational way: it suggests the existence of a mechanism of adaptation, and it allows us even to study in detail the mechanism at work.

Popper explained that the difficulty of testing had led some people to describe natural selection as a tautology, and that he too had in the past described the theory as 'almost tautological', and had tried to explain how the theory could be untestable (as is a tautology) and yet of great scientific interest.

> My solution was that the doctrine of natural selection is a most successful metaphysical research programme. It raises detailed problems in many fields, and it tells us what we would expect of an acceptable solution of these problems. I still believe that natural selection works in this way as a research programme.

Popper modified his view somewhat and conceded that some of its forms were falsifiable, and indeed were proved wrong, like most biological theories—“not all phenomena of evolution are explained by natural selection alone. Yet in every particular case it is a challenging research program to show how far natural selection can possibly be held responsible for the evolution of a particular organ or behavioral program.”