We do our students a disservice if we only teach them about falsification.
If you are familiar with any of Karl Popper’s philosophy, it is probably the idea of ‘falsification’. This is the claim that science is defined by its ability, in principle, to be disproven.
This idea features in every book on the history of science; it is one of the first things taught to science undergraduates up and down the country and, for many, it may be the only piece of formal philosophy of science they know.
In most cases, however, students are just told about falsification in a couple of paraphrased sentences — at most, a single slide in their very first introductory lecture. We so rarely teach where this idea derives from, nor the intellectual scaffolding that supports it, let alone any of Popper’s wider ideas about science and society.
This rather limited, secondhand approach to Popper is a huge shame, because his wider work is in fact something of an Aladdin’s cave. He has a huge amount of worth to say about a range of subjects, though all ultimately comes back to one question, his central preoccupation: What sort of person is a scientist? – what do they do and how do they think? – what is their place in society?
Conjectures and Refutations
At the tail end of last Summer I had the great pleasure of reading Popper in his own words for the first time. I picked, somewhat at random, his collection of essays ‘Conjectures and Refutations’. It was long, at times quite dry, but also one of the most eye-opening, thought-shaping books I have read in my life.
For a start, Popper’s whole approach to the definition of science, ‘the problem of demarcation’ between science and pseudoscience (Marxism and Freudianism were his particular bêtes noirs), is a great deal richer than the bare and rather reductive principle of falsification that is usually all that is presented to us.
Even just the historical detail — who knew, for example, that Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, that great triumph of science over church dogma, was in fact originally an attempt to justify Neoplatonist myths and superstitions? — suggests that there is something wrong with the naïve approach to teaching about Popper that I had previously experienced as a student.
But the reality is that the principle of falsification is only a small part of Popper’s philosophy, and is not even in my view his most important contribution to science. It is merely the most quotable.
Over the next few weeks I plan to write a series of blog posts summarising and reflecting on the essays of Popper’s that I have read so far. I hope this will serve as something of an accessible introduction to his philosophy as a whole, and a welcome corrective to the overemphasis on falsifiability as the supposed essence of his ideas. I also hope to share with you the sense of excitement and wonder that I felt on reading this book, and discovering Popper’s ideas in his own words for the first time.
Science is about creativity
What I think I most respond to in Popper’s writing is the great emphasis on creativity and imagination. It’s there in the title, Conjectures and Refutations. For Popper, science is a fundamentally creative activity, it’s about generating inventive new theories and testing whether they match reality; it has little to do with mere data collection.
The belief that we can start with pure observation alone, without anything in the nature of a theory is absurd; as may be illustrated by the story of the man who dedicated his life to natural science, wrote down everything he could observe, and bequeathed his priceless collection of observations to the Royal Society to be used as evidence. This story should show us that though beetles may profitably be collected, observations may not. — K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations
Science is also social, a continuation of our species’ long tradition of story-telling. It’s about offering an explanation for things that goes beyond the superficial, beyond what we can see with our own eyes, and instead requires us to believe in invisible subatomic particles, mysterious forces acting at a distance, or indeed the uncertain contents of others’ minds.
We have lost this sense of wonder, I think, amongst the increasing drive towards professionalism, and specialism, in science. Of course observations and experiments are important, but too many scientists these days see themselves as technicians, accumulating data and hoping this amounts to knowledge; too few regard themselves as storytellers, whose job it is, if not actually to invent*, then at least to interpret the laws of nature.
Popper teaches us a bigger, more rounded view of the work of scientists, and we would all do well to understand more of his philosophy.
(*in Kant’s words: “We impose our laws on nature”)