Conjectures and Refutations, part two

Conjectures and Refutations refers, naturally. But what is so charming about Popper is the way that an idea, that in our debased times would amount to an entire book, is merely a single chapter. Although the material I'm discussing here, I am obliged to admit, is not quite up to the first two sections; ah well.

The Nature of Philosophical Problems and their Roots in Science (66-96)

Popper returns to the theme that philosophy is about solving problems not talking about philosophy; and points out that most problems in philosophy arise outside it. But that may not be obvious from the works themselves; they may have so sublimed the initial problem that is is not mentioned.

This is I think true and quite telling; it makes me pause and wonder about my reaction to certain works. Popper's examples here are Plato's theory of Forms, and Kant's Critique.

Before that, since Popper briefly discusses pseudo-problems, and since it fits my view of much of philosophy, I quote his My first thesis is that every philosophy... is liable to degenerate in such a way that its problems become practically indistinguishable from pseudo-problems, and its cant, accordingly, practically indistinguishable from meaningless babble. His second thesis is that what appears to be the prima facie method of teaching philosophy is liable to produce a philosophy which answers Wittgenstein's description [as babble]... that of giving the beginner... the works of the great philosophers to read... A new world of astonishingly subtle and vast abstractions opens itself before the reader; abstractions on an extremely high and difficult level. Thoughts and arguments are put before his mind which sometimes are not only hard to understand, but which seem to him irrelevant because he cannot find out what they may be relevant to; and so we return to the problems that provoked the philosophy.

Let's take his second example first, because I think it is simpler. Popper's contention is that Newtonian physics was so utterly successful and completely accepted by Kant's time that people had mistaken it for an absolute truth; and Kant therefore felt he needed to provide an explanation of how we could know such a thing a priori. I believe that (a) this is likely correct; (b) would not be universally accepted, because Kant is so obscure that people disagree over what he actually means, and are moreover desperate not to admit that he was wrong. My own reaction is yes: this is a nice explanation, it helps to understand Kant, but it also helps by pointing out that I really don't need to bother reading him: he is wrong.

The question of Plato's theory of forms is more complex, and also I think more speculative. Popper says that the discover of irrational numbers gets in the way of the atomisation and arithmetisation of nature, by which he means the programme - apparently that of those times - of associating numbers with things and deducing properties by counting; which assumes a smallest unit length scale, by which all other things in principle could be measured by counting (this programme is obscure and mystical, but that doesn't mean it wasn't their programme). Popper associates this with a switch to geometry; and then somehow connects this to the theory of forms. My own suspicion is that Popper is jumping backwards through hoops to rescue Plato's theory, probably from people like me who think it is silly, but I have to admit that it does perhaps help illuminate the writings.

Three Views of Human Knowledge (97-119)

This one isn't so good. It starts with a rather poor summary of "the Galileo affair" that totally misses the main point - that big G was trying to tell the Church how to interpret the Bible; and then tells us that the Gregorian calendrical reform made full use of big C, which I doubt. But leaving that aside, he is mostly discussing the status of scientific theory in the lights of what he calls Instrumentalism (theories are but tools, and don't describe an underlying reality, which most people using epicycles subscribed to) and Essentialism (theories describe "the realities behind appearances"). And his own preferred view: rejecting Instrumentalism, theories attempt to describe the real world, so not going all the way to Essentialism. All this seems to be not very interesting, and to come rather close to arguing over labels, a thing he usually disdains.

Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition (120-135)

Also not his finest; note that it was given to the Third Annual Conference of the Rationalist Press Association at Magdalen College; how delightful that such things once existed. But the ideas here are largely those of previous chapters.

Back to the Pre-Socratics (136-153)

A great deal of discussion of Pre-Socratic philosophy, doubtless very fine if you're interested in that history, but not of obvious modern relevance; he does though re-emphasise the importance of the emergence of a tradition of critical rational discussion. He does say two very strange things in the introduction to this section: (1) all science is cosmology; and (2) philosophy must return to cosmology. Admittedly he was talking in 1958 and wiki tells me that the CMB wasn't discovered until '64. Now, I would say, cosmology has almost entirely left the realm of philosophy and is part of science; that trend must have been obvious in '58. And (1) is only true if at all in the most general and useless sense.

Conjectures and Refutations

This is a great book by Karl Popper; you should read it. You can even do that online as rosenfels.org/Popper.pdf. The overall theme is the title; he explains it well in the preface:

... a theory of reason that assigns to rational arguments the... role of criticizing our often mistaken attempts to solve our problems. And it is a theory of experience that assigns to our observations the... role of tests which may help us in the discovery of our mistakes. Though it stresses our fallibility it does not resign itself to scepticism, for it also stresses the fact that knowledge can grow, and that science can progress - just because we can learn from our mistakes.

The way in which knowledge progresses, and especially our scientific knowledge, is by... conjectures... controlled by... attempted refutations, which include severely critical tests. They may survive these tests; but they can never be positively justified: they can neither be established as certainly true... Criticism of our conjectures is of decisive importance: by bringing out our mistakes it makes us understand the difficulties of the problem which we are trying to solve. This is how we become better acquainted with our problem, and able to propose more mature solutions: the very refutation of a theory... is always a step forward that takes us nearer to the truth. And this is how we can learn from our mistakes.

As we learn from our mistakes our knowledge grows, even though we may never know that is, know for certain. Since our knowledge can grow, there can be no reason here for despair of reason. And since we can never know for certain, there can be no authority here for any claim to authority...

Those among our theories which turn out to be highly resistant to criticism... may be described, together with the reports of their tests, as 'the science' of that time. Since none of them can be positively justified, it is essentially their critical and progressive character - the fact that we can argue about their claim to solve our problems better than their competitors - which constitutes the rationality of science.

Popper's work is dense, which makes summarising it difficult; I contrast that with The Righteous Mind, or fluff like The Tyranny of Merit which is easy to review. I really do recommend that you read him yourself. I will content myself with pulling out some pieces. FWIW, I agree with essentially all that Popper says. Having sat on this post for a bit, I think I shall let it out into the world with only the first two sections covered; I may get round to the rest later.

Introduction: On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance 

Popper's main objectives in this tome are scientific but it turns out that politics gets mixed in: The belief of a liberal... in the possibility of a rule of law, of equal justice, of fundamental rights, and a free society - can easily survive the recognition that judges are not omniscient and may make mistakes about facts and that, in practice, absolute justice is hardly ever realized in any particular legal case. But this belief... can hardly survive the acceptance of an epistemology which teaches that there are no objective facts... and that the judge cannot have made a factual mistake because he can no more be wrong about the facts than he can be right. And we agree that there are objective facts (see-also my review of Why Materialism is Baloney).

There is a view - which Popper attributes to the the Renaissance, to Bacon and Descartes - that truth is manifest¹. Not that it is easy to see, but that once it is declared, it can be seen to be true. Thus there is no need for authority; although this isn't really true: Descartes has God as his authority, Bacon has Nature. This he regards as an optimistic doctrine; its opposite is a lack of belief in human reason, which demands an unliberal authority. But if you adopt the optimistic view, you need a theory of error or ignorance to explain why this manifest truth is not believed; and this is often a conspiracy view: priests² or capitalists or whatever conspire to confuse the good folk; or in a worse case, fanatics insist you must be evil if you cannot see their truth. But all this is not necessary, because the doctrine is false: truth is not manifest; it is hard to come by and easy to lose.

Another tempting source of authority is definitions. But considered carefully, we realise that definitions never provide factual knowledge of the world.

Popper again finding congruence between the political and the epistemic: The traditional systems of epistemology may be said to result from yes-answers or no-answers to questions about the sources of knowledge. They never challenge these questions [but] these questions are clearly authoritarian in spirit. They can be compared with that traditional question of political theory, 'Who should rule?', which begs for an authoritarian answer such as 'the best', or 'the wisest'... It should be replaced by a completely different question such as 'How can we organize our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers... cannot do too much damage?'... The question about the sources of our knowledge can be replaced in a similar way... I propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist... to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: 'How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?' The question of the sources of our knowledge, like so many authoritarian questions, is a genetic one. It asks for the origin of our knowledge, in the belief that knowledge may legitimize itself by its pedigree... The proper answer to my question [is] 'By criticizing the theories or guesses of others and - if we can train ourselves to do so -by criticizing our own theories or guesses.'

Science: Conjectures and Refutations

Popper begins his considerations of what makes a theory scientific with his usual examples: relativity, psycho-analysis, and the Marxist theory of history. And finds the latter two lacking, in that they are able to accomodate anything: they cannot be falsified; there is nothing that they rule out³.

Popper solves the Humean problem of induction by discovering that scientific theories are not deduced by induction from observations; rather they are conjectures that are tested by attempted refutations. This is both charming and correct. A theory is any old wild-eyed idea⁵; a scientific theory is one open to refutation by some conceivable experiment. The antient Greek's "planetary orbits are perfect circles because circles are perfect and the heavens are perfect" was a theory; the simple version was gradually falsified by observations and grew epicycles; these too were eventually contradicted by observations. Along the dark centuries the theory lost most of its scientific character by fossilising into dogma and being resistant to criticism; eventually this crumbled. But Kepler's ellipses were not "deduced" from observations; instead, they were the last thing he tried after a long series of other guesses were falsified by observations⁴.

There may be - this is my thought, not Popper's - some relation here to Kuhn's ideas in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Wherein "normal" science does look rather like the process of finding lots of observations that concur with existing theories; only tiny amount of work is paradigm-shifting, the finding of new wild-eyed ideas.

Popper rather wistfully notes that the problem of induction is solved. But nothing seems less wanted than a simple solution to an age-old philosophical problem. And that rings true; philosophy has lost heart, and is more interested in endless talk around old problems, and commentary on what others wrote, and endlessly recursive commentary-on-commentary, than it is on solutions.

Notes

1. I'm a touch dubious about this myself; in Descartes case, he needs the "anything clearly and distinctly perceived is true" to get him out of his pit of doubt; see-also my scathing review. And as for Bacon, where in Popper's view the "authority" guaranteeing correctness is Nature rather than God, see here.

2. See-also Hobbes: Of the Kingdom of Darkness.

3. Or, in the Marxist case, the original version had been falsified by experience but the theory proved sufficiiently flexible to evade this.

4. Incidentally... nowadays, we of course think of planetary positions in 3-D, and we have observations of wondrous accuracy. But in those days all they had were angular bearings from a moving platform, viz the Earth; even had you thought of it you couldn't just plot them out and go "oh yeah, that's an ellipse". And sweeping out equal areas in equal times is similar: this too was a conjecture, which wasn't falsified.

5. This I think leads to Popper being more generous that I would be to a number of the Antient Greek ideas. See-also Après ma mort, je ferai tomber une pluie de roses

Refs

* Science.

* Why do people believe true things?

Global cereal production has grown much faster than population in the last half-century

Every now and again one reads a paper saying something along the lines of "ZOMG we're all going to die of starvation". Perhaps not literally that, but it will say something like crop yields decline under global warming. And totally fail to mention that other factors - better farming, fertilisers, and so on - are increasing yields faster. So this is just a page for me to tag with the obvious rebuttals, and link to some of my old posts. My pic is from ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-production.

Searching, I find Crop yields have increased dramatically in recent decades, but crops like maize would have improved more without climate change, but that too is from Our World in Data, rather than the breathless academic press.

* How overfed are we? [2008]

* How overfed are we? (part 2) [2009]

* Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization? [2009]

* Mass starvation is humanity’s fate if we keep flogging the land to death? [2017]

* Citing Climate Change, BlackRock Will Start Moving Away from Fossil Fuels [2020]

* How to assess the multiple interacting risks of climate change? [2021]

Refs

* Conservatism as an Oppositional Culture.

Red Team wins again

A follow up to Red team rows over, though I seem to have skipped 2024 (see here for the 2024 playlist). Not to spoil the suspense, but the Red Team rowed over head again; and on the women's side the arguably-red Jesus also rowed over unchallenged. But don't fear, behind those there was plenty of action (Caius bumping the hapless-this-year Madgalene to go second despite a fine charge from Downing, who got their revenge on Friday but still couldn't touch LMBC); see here for the playlist. This year's best chaos was Friday M2 when Caius II and Girton failed to take Grassy, and then Corpus ploughed into them; but no-one was injured.

If you've got no idea what I'm talking about, see cucbc.org/lents.

I took no photos this year, being busy with the drone; so here's an image from 120m up of M1 on Saturday; the closest two sticks-in-a-distance are Christ's not quite catching King's despite being agonisingly close all the way from Ditton.

Addendum

From Rowbridge:

BOATS BEHAVING BADLY: THE DEFINITIVE FINE ANALYSIS (LENTS 2K25)

It’s Boat Race weekend and OUBC are feeling smug. Their “alumni” have successfully banned every single CUBC athlete from competing. Sitting on the start line, though, the OUBC crews’ eyes widen in shock, quickly turning to fear, as they spot the replacement Cambridge crew spannering their way towards the start. Surely not… it can’t be? Murmurs of disbelief now amongst the hapless OUBC athletes as their worst fears are realised: it’s Corpus M1.

Ignoring the rules entirely, the Corpus cox calls for a big 10 straight through the line without bothering to wait for the flag. A nervy Oxford set off in hot pursuit, and overtake Corpus quickly. Jitters beginning to subside, Oxford’s rhythm returns as they approach the bend under Hammersmith Bridge. But panic soon returns as behind them, Corpus make zero effort to make the bend and instead bore a hole straight through the abutments, immediately destroying the whole bridge.

Dread sets in as Oxford’s stroke yells: “WE’RE DONE FOR! THEY’VE NOT GOT A RUDDER! THEY’RE COMING STRAIGHT FOR US!” In desperation, stroke tries to bail out of the boat but Jesus have bike-locked their leg to the footplate with some passive-aggressive note about it being “their” footplate actually. The OUBC cox, true terror in their eyes, swivels around in their seat just in time to hear the Corpus cox shout “yeah, nice corner there boys, bump in 20” before Corpus’s Jannie’s indestructible bow ploughs straight through Oxford’s stern, vaporising the entire boat’s superstructure instantly.

Corpus go on to win the race by 300 lengths. They are fined £50 by CUCBC for boating without a lifejacket.

~ TOTALS ~

Tues: 495

Weds: 510

Thurs: 540

Fri: 555

Sat: 690

TOTAL: £2790

~ MOST DASTARDLY COLLEGES ~

Sidney: £275 (Moneyball. Rocky. Shrek. Time to write another chapter in the book of all-time great underdog stories as one of the Cam’s pretty chill guys rockets into Boats Behaving Badly stardom. The first Lent Bumps since 2020 where Emma haven’t reigned supreme as the most-fined college. Take. A. Bow.)

Jesus: £190 (The Cam’s princes and princesses of darkness relish playing their panto villain role and this week was no exception with particularly noteworthy performances from their lower boats. Late to marshalling? Check. Extremely late to marshalling? Check (again). Blissfully ignorantly rowing on through a checkmate? Check(mate).)

Clare: £180 (the yellow submarine sends a torpedo into Emma’s hopes of a top three finish this bumps. It’s colder than a polar bear’s toenails stuff from their men’s side on the final day, with ruthless examples of how not to clear helping them secure bronze over ducks and laundry college.)

Emma: £165 (heads must surely be rolling in Emma’s Fine Department after this. Most colleges would pop the champagne after a sparkling fourth-place finish like this, but the bubbles will have been decidedly flat for Emma at this week’s BCD. It’s just not the standards they hold themselves to at that college and they’ll be gutted to lose out on an event they’ve had a stranglehold on for so many years now. If you know anyone at Emma, check in with them. Make sure they’re ok.)

Downing: £155 (a big hand for Downing this week, who rarely crack the big leagues at the top of the fine game. A cultured performance, with expert deployment of classic fines like “pointlessly handheld filming a rowover” really showing Downing’s class this weeks. Big foundations laid for Mays.)

~ GOOD AS GOLD ~

Stop press, stop press… yeah yeah the usual nerds and grandparents are in the “lame as hell” list here (Clare Hall, St Edmunds), but so are… Pembroke? And King’s? Are you guys ok? This is the first time in our data that either of these colleges have failed to donate to Umpires’ Dinner, and must be a really concerning place to find yourself so close to Mays. You have to ask: did Pembroke focus too hard on producing ruthless blade-train after ruthless blade-train, and not hard enough on the actual aim of bumps (being choppers)?

~ DISOBEDIENT RASCALS: THIS YEAR’S NAUGHTIEST BOATS ~

Sidney W1: £140 (it’s the Sidney show this week. Absolute smash and grab stuff from these ladies. Go in for a korma, end up with a vindaloo type job. Every day just saw brutal performance after brutal performance from this crew, as they duked it out bumping back and forth with Catz. Sure, Catz may have ended the week +2 to Sidney’s -2, but I don’t see them on this list and that’s what matters.)

Sidney M2: £135 (just pipped by their women to the top spot, this crew has the unusual honour of being fined for delightfully dreadful clearing twice on a single day. But they took their W1 right to the line, stretching them like spandex on the beaches of Benidorm. That kind of close competition can only be good for the sport.)

Darwin M1: £105 (merciless bumping strategy this week from the boys, who continued drilling their bowball into bumped coxes’ backs long after they should’ve held it up on several occasions. The only crew this week to smilingly donate blankets to chilly umpires one minute, and then hurl foul abuse downrange the next. Confusing, but effective.)

~ GENDER FINE GAP ~

Fascinating one this week. We’re delighted to report that the fine gap has remained narrow since last Mays: men’s boats were responsible for 50.7% of fines by value vs. 47.5% for women’s boats (the remainder are generic college fines for marshals not turning up etc).

Fine analysts everywhere are rejoicing, but let’s not be too hasty to declare the fibreglass ceiling smashed: because men tend to get overexcited and pee themselves during the warm Mays week, they often rack up hefty public urination fines. On your toes for Mays then, please, ladies.

~ INSIGHTS & TRENDS ~

First off, big up ARU. Welcome back. Always grinning like Cheshire Cats when we see you lot enter bumps. Guaranteed mayhem. We know you’re too cool for bumps, but hope to see you back for Mays (bring more people next time. We reckon you can smash the “all-time largest illegal bank party” record).

It goes without saying we need to call out Corpus M1, who made that rare ascent of Bumps Fines Olympus this week. They attained the highest accolade in our sport (the cox ban) after making a stellar contribution to bankside erosion by repeatedly slamming themselves into Grassy. Remember: blades are temporary, but bans are (CUCBC have firmly informed us) forever.

Average fine value this week was low, at £28.76 (or just £23.25 per boat entered). Indeed, this is the second-lowest average fine value in our records (only surpassed by last Lents). Not that gassed about it which is why we’ve put this way down here in para 3 tbh. Concerning, but we’re confident that getting a few pints of fizzy pop down the beer/champers boat divs before this Mays will reverse this worrying trend towards safe, clean racing.

We were fascinated by Lucy W2 somehow getting a towpath ban for “abusive behaviour.” This is the first time we’ve seen this in our data, and a noble new slopping of sick into the vomit bucket that is “abusing volunteer umpires giving up their time to put races on for your benefit”. We can only speculate what they said. “OUBC did nothing wrong”?

Finally, it does feel like the vibe has been slightly off lately. Caius proving yet again that they take this too seriously by spending the GDP of a small nation on a new boathouse, which they’ll use almost exclusively to train for two sets of meme races per year; Jesus locking random people’s bikes up; and Oxford… well, ironically, they’re gonna get schooled in a few weeks. But bumps is always a wonderfully bizarre moment of total nonsense in amongst all of that, and thanks again to everyone at CUCBC for putting it on, despite everything. Oh, and shoutout to William “BNOC” Connolley for finally getting the recognition he deserves. BNOC today, Chancellor of the University tomorrow. He’s got our vote.

(Boats Behaving Badly Back Catalogue: #RowbridgeReborn10247, #RowbridgeReborn8304, #RowbridgeReborn5403, #RowbridgeReborn3010, #Rowbridge12496, #Rowbridge11158, #Rowbridge7498, #Rowbridge5474, #Rowbridge5151, #Rowbridge3325)