Young radicals all over the world are calling out for the reorganisation of society and particularly of the education system. As strange as it may seem, the most powerful weapons at their disposal have been forged by Sir Karl Popper, who is a liberal and a humanist, certainly not a Marxist revolutionary. He is written off as a reactionary by the New Left but he has fought as hard as anyone for the open society and the rights of the individual. He has also pointed out that to protect freedom and improve the human condition we need advances in sociology so that we can hope to obtain the desired results from social reforms and political experiments.
He is opposed to tyranny and he is also opposed to irrationalism, which may alienate him from those who reject reason. Our social problems persist despite the triumph of science (which is the epitome of reason), and so, the argument runs, what is the use of science and reason?
Science : Saviour or Tyrant?
Our religion, even among the devout, enters less into our daily lives than the results and influences of scientific investigations. Politically, science is so important that scientists, very much against their will, and to their almost complete moral embarrassment, have become the hostages of the powers of the State. The world of the literary imagination is now, and has been from the early eighteenth century, increasingly affected and at times even intimidated by science. (B Ifor Evans).
It is commonly accepted that there is something about science which sets it apart and creates an inevitable division from the humanities. At times this division is expressed as a running battle between the members of the 'two cultures' but more often there is no communication at all. Meanwhile, at the other extreme we find disciplines making frantic efforts to bring their methods into line with their idea of scientific method.
Most of us are excited or at least passively amazed by the vistas opened up by science and there has been a spate of books telling us about 'The Nature of Science' and how good it is. Others find spiritual consolation from the gaps in knowledge at the frontiers of knowledge in esoteric fields such as quantum physics. Yet other voices are raised in strident complaint that scientific rationality has crippled imagination and the spontaneous life of the human spirit, technology is ruining the environment, and in any case, science is useless so we should return to divine truths which transcend the purely materialistic findings of science.
These reactions indicate that 'science' means very different things to different people. Since the Wyndham scheme made science a central part of secondary education in New South Wales it is imperative to clarify our views on the subject by turning to the best advice that can be found. Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel prizewinner in medicine, wrote:
I shall argue that the ideas of the educated lay public on the nature of scientific inquiry and the intellectual character of those who carry it out are in a state of dignified but yet utter confusion. Most of these misconceptions are harmless enough, but some are mischievous, and all help to estrange the sciences from the humanities and the so-called "pure" sciences from the "applied".
Some of this confusion arises from the clash to two antagonistic notions of scientific activity which may be called the romantic and the rational or the poetic and the analytical. This clash involves the opposition of activities which are in fact complementary and it is resolved by the mode of thought which travels under the unfortunately cumbersome title of the 'hypothetico-deductive' model of scientific activity. Popper has called this the method of conjecture and refutation, a high-falutin' name attached to the old-fashioned method of trial and error. This is not entirely original and it can be traced in the work of thinkers such as Whewell, Peirce and the French physiologist Bernard. The leading modern exponent is Popper who has added some wrinkles of his own, notably in rejecting 'justified belief' as the terminus of scientific or philosophical activity.
It can be very difficult to understand philosophical ideas without understanding the problem that the ideas were supposed to solve. Often these problems arise outside philosophy itself, in science, religion, politics, art etc. Popper's first major problem was 'When should a theory be ranked as scientific?' or 'Is there a criterion for the scientific status of a theory?'
We can understand how this arose by a study of Popper's biography. He was born in 1902 and he grew up in Vienna with the air full of the exciting ideas of Freud, Adler and Marx. These men formulated impressive schemes that appeared to explain anything and everything that happened. There was an explanation for everything, albeit different explanations. It seemed that nothing could contradict them and in this respect Popper noted that Einstein had a very different attitude to his equally revolutionary theory. This was put to the test by Edington's eclipse observations in 1919 and Einstein had announced that a negative result would suggest a need to reconsider his theory. In this way Einstein provided Popper with the hint for his falsification criterion for science. This scenario provides a rational explanation for Popper's motivation in formulating his criterion, unlike the suggestion that he embraced falsificationism in the reckless and irrational spirit of the Jazz Age.
The Line of Demarcation
A statement may be considered to be scientific if it is conceivable that publicly available evidence maybe produced to show that it is false. In other words we have to be able to look for some kind of evidence that would clash with our statement or our theory. For example the statement "There are no students in the library" can be refuted by the discovery of a student in the library. Similarly, the laws of science, formulated in universal terms along the lines 'All ravens are black' can be refuted by the discovery of a white raven. The point is, to make progress we need to locate weak spots in our theories in order to stimulate the production of new ideas. This means we have to take the risk of being wrong by making assertions that can be checked against evidence.
The criterion of testability is not a criterion of truth, meaning or even of importance, and it shows that we should not take the word 'science' too seriously. On the science side of the line we have descriptive statements which say something about the world. They may be true or false and they may be refuted by evidence. They may also be supported by evidence but this is a great deal more problematic because for some theories, everything that happens counts as supporting evidence (as Popper found with the followers of Marx and Freud).
On the 'non-science' side of the line are several categories of statements, among them the statements of pseudosciences such as astrology, which claim to be based on evidence but can never be refuted; the 'ought' statements of morals and ethics; theories of method (such as the falsification criterion); and also, incidentally, nonsense statements.
Some more needs to be said about morals, values, ethics and political ideals. These can be formulated as proposals for various kinds of behaviour or action. In this way they can be contrasted with propositions which state matters of fact (this is the language used by Popper in Chapter 5 of The Open Society and its Enemies). We may argue about the truth or falsity of propositions but we cannot claim that proposals are true or false. Our acceptance or rejection of proposals is a matter of decision, though matters of fact (and hence considerations of truth and falsity) will arise in considering the consequences. The element of decision in relation to moral 'oughts' and political proposals has been interpreted to mean that these decisions are irrational or arbitrary, as indeed they may be, especially if they are made under the influence of a theory that these matters cannot be subjected to reasonable discussion. As indicated in Critical Preference in Science and Ethics we can critically examine alternative moral or political codes and we can form critical preferences that can be modified in the light of evidence and new arguments.
Attempts to derive values from facts cannot be achieved logically, though there have been many efforts to do so in the belief that such a derivation would produce rational or scientific ethics. This was considered to be a defence against unreason at a time when rationality was supposed to apply in science but not on the other side of the line of demarcation, for example in religion, morals and aesthetics. However, attempts to provide a 'positive' basis for morals are likely to lead to dogmatism, quite likely linked to conservatism by appealing to the official or prevailing laws or morals at the time.
Popper's line of demarcation should affect the way the way we look at science in relation to other subjects because it cuts across the bounds that are supposed to exist between 'the sciences' and 'the rest'. Statements in any subject such as history or literary criticism may be considered to be scientific if they can be supported or refuted by evidence. The convention applies to statements, not to areas of activity.
It should not matter how a student defines the subject, because it is very much more important to be clear about the problem that is being investigated. A serious attempt to work on a problem should drive the student into a whole range of subjects or disciplines, thereby making nonsense of the narrow definition of subjects and over-specialisation. Too much focus on subjects and examinations can make the problems and themes invisible, but problems and themes should provide the backbone and the organising principles amidst the mass of information that confronts the student and the researcher.
If we lost sight of genuine problems, or never find them, it is virtually impossible to contribute to the growth of knowledge. This brings us to another philosophical problem - how does our knowledge grow?Popper has suggested that our knowledge grows as a result of our attempts to solve problems by trial and error, a process that he has compared with the evolution of life on earth. If we are going to talk about the growth of knowledge, we seem to imply that there is something to grow towards, presumably the truth. But how does this come about, and what is the truth?
The Non Authoritarian Theory of Knowledge
Traditionally the basic problem in the theory of knowledge has been - which of our sources of knowledge is the Authority, the criterion of truth, the basis of Justified Belief. For some, Truth is revealed to those who penetrate into the real nature of things, perhaps by revelation or by pure reason. In contrast, there is a theory which claims that our knowledge comes from evidence that we collect from the world around us, from the accumulated evidence of our senses, so that the Truth emerges as we gather more information about the world. These two theories are flatly opposed, and neither is quite satisfactory.
Popper reformulated the problem by splitting it into two parts:
What are our sources of knowledge?
Is any one of these an Authority, or Criterion, of Truth?
His answer to the first question is that we have several sources of knowledge. His answer to the second question is that none of them can quality as an Authority or Criterion.
This does not mean that there is no such thing as truth, it simply means that we can never be certain that we have found it, at least not in the case of general theories that purport to explain how the world works. Much the same applies to the truth about historical events, or those that occur at high speed in complicated situations, like a crime, a car accident or a football score in the absence of a video replay.
How do we learn then, and how does our knowledge grow? Our most important source of information is tradition - that which is already known, in some sense. Of course if we adopt a critical attitude towards our tradition we can reject parts of it once we have become aware of them. The bundle of traditions which we inherit contains intellectual, legal and cultural components, and we can be critical of parts of them all, though not all at once.
In a given field our intellectual heritage consists of a body of hypotheses along with an account of the arguments for and against them. Our legal heritage is the set of rules and regulations which we find in force and our cultural heritage is the complex of myths, customary practices, institutions and conventions which we find around us (and to some extent internalised within us). We can adopt a critical attitude in all these fields, although this can only be consistent and effective if the criticism is guided by regulative standards which in their turn can be subjected to criticism in the light of higher-order standards. This critical attitude, and the notion of unlimited criticism expounded by Popper's follower, William W Bartley, resolves the problem of the misleading alternatives offered by those who are afraid of open-ended critical discussion, who suggest that we either have to leave things the way they are, or lapse into anarchy. There is a third alternative, the free and open discussion of traditions with the intention of replacing those which are harmful or redundant.
Reason and logic are not sources of knowledge in the way that tradition and our senses can be. Reason and logic (and mathematics) can be used to examine our theories to find if they are internally consistent and to tease out the consequences and implications of our theories. These consequences can be very remote from the original starting point of the theory; they can be used as tests of the theory and they can be used for practical applications in technology. If the tests yield negative results (which themselves withstand counter-arguments) or if the theory has internal inconsistencies, or clashes with other well-tested theories, then we know that something is wrong somewhere (even if it can be difficult to locate the source of error). In this situation new ideas are required, or a radical reinterpretation of old ideas.
Our new theories arise as risky guesses and there is no reasonable or logical way of producing them. This puts the poetic or artistic type of flight of imagination back into science, whence it should never have been banished. Science and imagination were separated by some disastrous ideas about induction that will be examined in the next paragraph. Reason and logic, along with evidence and experimental tests, can be used to evaluate the hypotheses that are thrown up by the imagination in response to a problem. Then the most robust theory may be selected by its capacity to stand up to criticism where others fail. Falsified hypotheses do not need to be discarded, they are a part of the history of ideas, also they may have instrumental value, they may persist as a part of a larger structure, and they may even stage a revival if they are revised or reformulated.
A powerful school of thought maintains that scientific laws or theories are obtained by a process of induction from observations of individual facts and this doctrine was taught to every child in New South Wales. It was recorded in the massive Messell text 'Science advances in a definite pattern. First and foremost scientists must make observations. These observations must be careful and accurate; and the results of more and more observations accumulate'. It is painfully true that more and more observations accumulate but it does not follow that we are leaning anything by that process and the belief that we are learning by the accumulation of information is not only false but dangerous. It is logically and psychologically impossible to make any useful observation without reference to theories and problems, and apart from being impossible, attempts to achieve this 'ideal' procedure, this 'advance in a definite pattern', call for the repression of the imaginative and critical faculties so that the scientist is reduced to the level of a recording machine. Popper wrote
The advance of science is not due to the fact that more and more perceptual experiences accumulate in the course of time. Nor is it due to the fact that we are making ever better use of our senses...Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature, our only instruments for grasping her, and we must hazard them to win our prize.
A fierce battle has raged over the problem of induction which is closely related to the matter of the line of demarcation because it is sometimes suggested that the criterion of science is its inductive, or maybe its experimental method, as against the speculative or creative or expressionistic method of the arts, the intuitive method of psychology, the sociological imagination, the historical method etc. Everything depends on what is meant by induction, and if it is used to mean the guess or the imaginative leap, then this does not distinguish science from any other activity that involves thinking. However it usually refers to a methodical or logical process for proceeding from the particular to the general, or from the observation of facts to the formulation of laws. This type of induction is not logically or psychologically defensible and it cannot be retrieved by the use of the probability calculus to assign numerical probabilities to theories.
Conclusions
Scientific knowledge is capable of growing by the detection and correction or error, though its growth can never be completed. It does not grow in a disciplined, orderly or predictable way, but rather by unjustified leaps of imagination, controlled by the use of logic, critical analysis and experimental tests.
Our knowledge in a given field does not consist of a mass of facts or a set of verified laws, it consists of a body of hypotheses along with an account of the tests and other arguments that have been used in attempts to refute them. There is no opposition between imagination and reason because they have different (and complementary) roles to play. There is no antagonism between theorising and fact finding provided that we have a clearly formulated problem in mind when we start looking for facts.
This theory of knowledge has some political implications. The positivist-empiricist-inductivist may have thought that he did not need to actively make decisions about his subject matter. The task of the scientist was to collect and collate information to steadily record the tale told by the book of nature. However, this idea of the passive observer-collector cannot be sustained. If the scientist wants to advance the frontier of knowledge, even to the smallest degree that the average honours student should aspire to achieve, he has to make an effort and bring into action both the imagination and the critical faculties. There is also the consideration that the findings are quite likely to be used and the scientist (or at least the community of scientists) is morally responsible for warning of potential dangers and monitoring any dubious applications.
Scientists can only approach the truth by conjectures and by critical tests, and if they accept their social responsibilities they will carry their critical attitude out of the laboratory, to participate, like everyone else, in a continuous process of non-violent cultural revolution.
Note: People who wish to explore Popper's views on education will find a compilation of his scattered comments here. hese are grouped under three heads: moral education, the role of public education and education in science. A comment on the deficiences of liberal education in its traditional form can be found here (note 9 to Chapter 11 OSE).
