We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
A person who derives quasi-sexual gratification from inflicting enormous pain upon helpless female victims has evil intentions, assuming we consider each human being to have certain natural rights. However, ‘natural rights’ are fiendishly difficult to derive from reason without swallowing unproven assumptions. John Locke had it simple: God made Adam, He gave Adam sovereignty over the world and all its contents. He said that Man shouldn’t kill another man. End of story. If He exists and if belief in His Judeo-Christian form were universal, we could literally announce that the sociopath pervert was evil because God said so. We could also say that property rights exist as a natural right because ‘Vox Dei’.
I regret that this sort of argument is not sustainable for all humans at this time. To announce that the depraved person is irrational, is both practically pointless (he wouldn’t care) and not based on reason at all. The only basis for condemning a criminal other than natural rights is utility – which is close to arguing for a ‘public good’. As I reject the notion of public goods, I can hardly claim that a public good justifies condemnation of someone’s gratification of their admittedly unpleasant (to me) hobby. After all if twelve monsters agree to inflict pain on one victim in secret (so the rest of the public is unaware of the act), it can’t be condemned by utilitarian principles: at some point the aggregate pleasure outweighs the aggregate pain.
It’s no good recoiling in horror at the activities of sadistic monsters (an emotional response), striking out at them, and then trying to justify the action by reason, when the rationale is unsubstantiated. I happen to think that Rand’s account of the identification of objective morality is as good as it gets from a libertarian natural rights point of view. N.B. Brian, who despises Randians, tries to derive morality from utilitarian principles. What he comes up with is decency, not rules for discovering ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Without a theory of natural rights I think libertarians are kidding themselves on the subject of ‘crime’, ‘deviancy’ and ‘justice’.
Alice Bachini enters the fray on the issue of altruism.
I don’t think that we need to define doing good things for other people for no clear personal gain as altruism. It just seems the rational way to go about things sometimes. Good things cause general improvement in all sorts of ways we can’t necessarily demonstrate or define, and knowing this is enough reason for doing them. If we don’t want to do them, then there must be a reason for that. But if we do want to, then presumably our egotistical desire is based on some sensible understanding of how things are. Preferences aren’t arbitrary things, they are based on reasoning to begin with (some of it inherited, or inexplicit, or too deep or fast for us to be consciously aware of it at the time).
On the other hand, irrational desires like the urge to murder someone or to chop off your own hands, are damaging precisely because they are irrational. So the fact that people’s preferences aren’t always necessarily good does not mean that they should not operate on the basis of egotism; it just means they should get more rational before doing things.
Basically, good things make sense and are morally beneficial, including me having a delicious burger for my lunch. Whereas bad things are irrational and morally detrimental. So I can’t see any need for altrusim at all. However, it can be very bad, if it means acting in a way that is contrary to one’s egotistical preferences, because a better thing exists. This is to reason out why we don’t feel like doing what we think we ought to do. Then we can change our preferences and do good things autonomously. Individual freedom is a good thing to seek out.
Alice Bachini
I am probably opening a can of worm or poking a hornet’s nest or something with equally disturbing consequences but I cannot let John Webb’s posting go without comment.
He correctly identified Paul Foot’s assumptions that enable him to spew out such blatant and primitive fallacies about capitalism in particular and economic reality in general. The bit I found unpalatable was his analysis of Paul Foots ‘motivation’ for such statements and his sin of ‘failure of morality’, which is supposed to be altruism. I have encountered this ‘belief’ before as it seems to be a staple argument among the libertarians of the Objectivist variety and I have always been taken aback by the ferocity of their insistence on ethical and psychological egoism and the corresponding denial of altruism. I shall take this opportunity to spell out my objections to what seem to me to be an irrational strain in libertarian thought.
John Webb states that ‘many people today mistakenly assume that altruism means having a regard for the well-being of others.’ Actually, one of the most common definitions of altruism is ‘concern for other people, or unselfish or helpful actions’. True, in evolutionary biology, it is defined as ‘behaviour by an animal that decreases its chances of survival or reproduction while increasing those of another member of the same species’. Needless to say, altruism in its biological sense does not imply any conscious benevolence on the part of the performer, imposition of which is what John Webb rallies against.
Then John Webb redefines altruism as meaning:
…”in practice, having a necessary hostility to others as a consequence of adopting something other than oneself as the very standard of evaluation. Though the precise standard of altruist morality varies depending on the prevailing ideology, the People, the Race, the Proletariat, the Gender, the God, the Prophet, the Environment, the Social Organism etc., the premise which always remains constant in the altruist’s world-view is the notion that there is some overriding standard, something other, something above and beyond and greater than the individual to which everyone should gratefully and enthusiastically sacrifice themselves.”
This is a description of collectivism (and totalitarian at that) and not altruism. The distinction is an important one, as you can have altruism without collectivism. It seems that the collapse of altruism into collectivism and vice versa for the likes of John Webb is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what psychological egoism and self-interest mean.
If we understand psychological egoism as the theory that all human actions are motivated by self-interest, this taken as a factual claim based on observation, is obviously false: people are often motivated by emotions like anger, love, or fear, by altruism or pride, by the desire for knowledge or the hatred of injustice.
Also, it is not true that everything we can be said to ‘want’ or ‘desire’ is an enhancement or fulfillment of the self. We may want to give way to irrational rage or to wayward sexual desire, to hurt another or indeed to help another – without manifesting ‘self-love’ in any of these instances. My rage or aggression may in fact be self-destructive. The beginning of altruism is the realisation that not all good and bad are good-for-me and bad-for-me: that certain others – my close friends, say – have joys and sufferings distinct from mine, but for which I have a sympathetic concern – and for their sake, not my own. I may then acknowledge that others beyond the small circle of my friends are not fundamentally different – and so reach the belief that there are objective goods and bads as such. As one self among the others I cannot claim special privileges simply for being the individual that I am! If it is neither impossible nor irrational to act simply for the sake of another, the occurrence of satisfaction or ‘good conscience’ when we have done so is not sufficient ground for the egoist to claim that it was only for these ‘rewards’ that the acts were performed.
Nor on the other hand does the possibility of altruism mean that it is a constant moral necessity: an altruist can allow that in most circumstances I can act far more effectively on my own behalf than can any other person. A simple but crucial step separates a broken-backed ethical egoism from a minimally acceptable and consistent moral theory. It involves the recognition of others as more than instrumental to my fulfillment. I may promote my own interests and personal fulfillment, so long as I do not encroach upon the pursuit by others of their fulfillment. That is to recognize other persons as limits to my action: altruism may, of course, go beyond that in seeking positively to advance their good.
I have come across one more ‘philosophical’ misunderstanding – that of Kant’s ethics – also common among some libertarians. I will comment in a later posting.
My aim today is to point out that the often-hysterical denial of altruism is rooted in a belief rather than a rational argument. Some libertarians seem to believe that it is necessary to insist that altruism is wrong or immoral in order to provide firmer grounds for conclusions that are central and essential to their world-view. This is a world-view that espouses individualism and liberty, the belief that prosperity and freedom is best achieved by pursuit of self-interest and many other conclusions that I share. It is also a world-view that often must be expounded by what amounts to an intellectual crusade, fighting the collectivist, totalitarian and socialist dark forces. I have had the ‘privilege’ of facing those at their darkest and at the peak of their powers in a communist regime. Nevertheless, I do not think you have to deny altruism in order to defend pursuit of individual good, happiness, free market and liberty.
To be continued: In Kant’s defence
John Webb, Chairman of the the United Kingdom Objectivist Association, understand the truth about paleo-socialist Paul Foot.
“Is capitalism sick?” asks Paul Foot, Cash for Chaos, Guardian, Wednesday June 12, 2002. “Yes,” he contends, “disgustingly so. Its sickness is terminal, and it urgently needs replacing.”
As evidence for this singular claim Foot relates a litany of “misdemeanours” which have recently rocked the business community and suggests that far from being an exception to the daily practise of honest commerce they serve to illustrate what he calls “the central feature of capitalism,” namely, “the division of the human race into those who profit from human endeavour and those who don’t.”
Unfortunately for Paul Foot, all the examples he cites in support of this breathless conclusion have little or nothing to do with the free exchange of goods and services within a capitalist economy, as they are, without exception, directly attributable to governmental interference within a mixed economy.
The Enron Scandal, for example, did not occur within the context of unregulated trade or unbridled competition but within a highly charged political atmosphere so beset by graft and bogus environmentalist concerns that the caprices of an 18th century mandarin would seem enlightened by comparison.
The telecoms industry, which Foot also cites, is another unfortunate example to use as it seems to have escaped his notice that the telecom industry has the distinction of being one of the most highly regulated and licensed industries on the planet and where, in the UK, the telecom regulator OFTEL is a byword for bureaucratic incompetence.
As for the tax evasion “scandal” of Tyco – again it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Foot that such a “crime” could never have happened in a capitalist society – in a capitalist society property rights are inalienable and all coercive taxes would be prohibited by law.
Perhaps some people may be tempted to overlook Foot’s rather lame grasp of even the most elementary principles of politics and economics; after all, he must be so busy campaigning to clear the name convicted murderers like James Hanratty [whose guilt has recently been confirmed by new DNA evidence] that he probably has very little time to obtain an adequate grasp of current events.
And in any case, leaving the obvious factual errors aside doesn’t he make a valid point that the riches of the wealthy few are obtained at the price of the poverty of the many?
Well he would be making a worthwhile point if the Labour Theory of Value on which his argument rests had not been thoroughly refuted by the Austrian School of economics through Carl Menger’s theory of marginal utility more than a century ago.
No, the real problem with Paul Foot lies much deeper.
Paul Foot is not merely guilty of a failure of knowledge.
He is guilty of a failure of morality.
And the name of that failure is altruism.
Unfortunately, many people today mistakenly assume that altruism means having a regard for the well-being of others.
It doesn’t.
On the contrary, altruism, in practice, means having a necessary hostility to others as a consequence of adopting something other than oneself as the very standard of evaluation.
Though the precise standard of altruist morality varies depending on the prevailing ideology, the People, the Race, the Proletariat, the Gender, the God, the Prophet, the Environment, the Social Organism etc., the premise which always remains constant in the altruist’s world-view is the notion that there is some overriding standard, something other, something above and beyond and greater than the individual to which everyone should gratefully and enthusiastically sacrifice themselves.
According to altruism ANY desire, ANY benefit, ANY positive evaluation in this life or even the next, if Kant is to be believed, is immoral.
If you feed your child, or help an elderly stranger or the hapless victim of an unfortunate accident and feel even the slightest glimmer of vicarious pleasure yourself, then that pleasure counts as a benefit to yourself and whatever else you may have intended you have not committed a moral act.
By such a standard of morality any act whether beneficial to oneself or the whole of humanity is of no moral worth if it is motivated by the slightest concern for personal benefit.
That people might prosper by freely pursuing their own interests, to mutual benefit and by voluntary consent, without needing to inflict harm on others is an anathema to the likes of Foot.
Why?
Because Foot is a collectivist and for collectivists, all human endeavour, all profit, all property, all knowledge, all values, all human life, is collective.
Anyone pursuing their own interests for their own sake is necessarily at war with the “common good” – a “good” so rare and lofty that only “politically aware” people like the fabulous Foot can identify it.
In this view, company directors don’t earn their bonuses – they “steal” them.
One man’s “gain” is another man’s “loss.”
The rich grow “richer” and the poor, who have a higher standard of living than a medieval King, grow “poorer.”
Property isn’t created – it’s “ill-gotten.”
Wealth isn’t something to be earned – it’s something to be “shared.”
Individual prosperity above the level of “equality” isn’t desirable – it’s “excessive.”
The rich are “guilty” in virtue of their wealth.
And the living are guilty in virtue of dead murderers like James Hanratty.
So how does Foot get away it?
He relies on the reluctance of others – the very others that he would so earnestly make his victims – to abstain from making a moral judgement.
So now it is time to make a judgement.
For decades Paul Foot has sanctimoniously postured as a supporter of the underdog, a valiant champion of the outcast, defender of the weak, and a protector of the innocent.
In reality, however, his is one of their greatest enemies for all he has ever been is an altruist, his entire journalistic career amounting to nothing more than a demand for the glorification of force based on the cultivation of the vice of envy – an vice defined by Ayn Rand as “a hatred of the good for being the good.”
Is Paul Foot sick?
No.
He doesn’t have that excuse.
John Webb
Neel Krishnaswami writes:
Utilitarian arguments are the only arguments I have known to successfully convince anyone across ideological boundaries.
…and…
A political philosophy beyond utilitarianism is essential to avoid absurdity, but concrete utilitarian arguments are essential both to convince others and to keep ourselves honest.
I definitely agree with Neel in the sense that theoretical concepts ought to be supported by empirical evidence and facts. My dislike of utilitarianism is based on one of its consequences – ultimate disregard for the individual. Numerous amendments and elaborations of utilitarian ethics and political theories fail, in my eyes, to remedy this serious flaw. Neel is clearly aware of it and provides examples to this effect himself. If I understand his point correctly it is more about the workings of the human mind and its susceptibility to be convinced by ‘utilitarian arguments’ more successfully than by statements of ‘ideological bullshit’.
In my experience utilitarian arguments that focus strictly on consequences or plain facts and numbers create one of two reactions in the opposing party – either attempts to discredit the source of the information and/or desire to go forth and collect similar ‘statistics’ supporting their views.
My second reservation about utilitarian methods of a debate is that they don’t work. How else do you explain the fact that the vast regiments of lefties (apologies to Perry for using the term out of meta-context) are still polluting the media and public life with their incandescently idiotic convictions about socialism, communism and current authoritarian regimes? No statistics, facts and numbers about Stalin and other communists and the atrocities they committed on the Russian and surrounding nations managed to eliminate communism as an ideology and barely forced its metamorphosis into a ‘benign’ socialism. The facts are dismissed as inconvenient and unconvincing if they clash with fundamental beliefs. Some are happy to use utilitarian arguments to defend communism even in its original guise – I have come across people who argue that Stalin may have done some naughty things but he also turned Russia into an industrial nation. ’nuff said.
I find that the best strategy, and perhaps the most difficult, is one of exposing inconsistencies in the opponent’s ideas and hope to identify the beliefs that get in the way of a rational discourse. Beliefs are notoriously difficult to change. As one of the characters in my favourite film points out:
You can’t change people’s beliefs but you can change their ideas.
If however by utilitarian we mean anything relating to the specific, concrete and non-theoretical then we are simply using the term in different ways. Let me explain what I believe, that is, what my idea of a sound theory is and why I find utilitarianism pitifully inadequate in dealing with reality’s bigger picture. My judgement of a theory depends on three elements:
1. its content, that is its premises, logical consistency and order, its relation to reality
2. the motivation of its author and propagators
3. consequences of the theory when tested or put into practice.
To me consequences are secondary elements of a theory. They contribute to increasing or diminishing the theory’s credibility and its popularity. They can also influence the motivation of its supporters and their responsibility in upholding it. However, consequences in themselves cannot change the correctness of a theory itself; they can make neither true nor false a theory that is in itself flawed.
Neel Krishnaswami points out that we all hate it… or do we?
It’s true. Everybody hates utilitarianism. The Left hates it(1), The Right hates it(2), Libertarians hate it(3), and Adriana Cronin(4) hates it.
And we all hate it for good reason, too. It sounds so reasonable –“maximize the total happiness of society”. But it leads to such stupid conclusions. That small-town America is justified in banning Lady Chatterley’s Lover, because it offends more Baptists than turns on smut-addicted book-lovers.(5). Oops; there goes freedom of speech. That proper social policy involves enslaving 5% of the population to grow opium to keep the other 95% in a drug-induced delirium. Utility must be maximized. And finally, in a mathematical coup de grace, economists armed with the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference have shown that individual utility functions are not commensurable. This means we can’t even define “total happiness” in a sensible fashion, because one individual’s utility function is not on the same scale as anyone else’s.
But. (You knew that a “but” was coming, didn’t you?)
Utilitarian arguments are the only arguments I have known to successfully convince anyone across ideological boundaries. No libertarian rights-based argument I have ever constructed has ever convinced my social democrat (and outright socialist) friends of anything at all. Nor have I ever seen a libertarian react to a plea for social justice with anything other than tired sighs. But start wonking out with per-capita GDPs, life expectancies, crime rates, and accident figures, and suddenly bystanders start paying attention.
A concrete example. A couple of years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine about third world poverty. He complained that the government should do something about it. I pointed out that indeed the government did do something about poverty: mainly, it caused it. He regarded my objections to large-scale government intervention as the usual quixotic libertarianism until I offered the example of microcredit programs as an example of how to bootstrap a market and improve the lot of the poor(6). At this point my friend got really excited, because now he had a concrete charity to try and send money to.
It wasn’t a rights-based argument about why government intervention is harmful that energized him: it was a concrete, utilitarian example (and an avenue for positive action). What he cared about was people not going hungry. He also knew that in political debate, people tend to use abstractions to paper over the difficulties in their program(7). Most notorious are various leftists’ use of euphemism to justify things like the Cultural Revolution, but it’s a universal sin. He, like anyone with healthy political antibodies, narrows his eyes when vague slogans — whether “worker’s paradise”, “but it’s for the children” or even “spontaneous order” — enter the discussion. So any attempt to convince my friend had to get past his suspicion that the political jargon was just bafflegab aimed at preserving the status quo.
This is why utilitarian arguments are so useful. Focusing single-mindedly on making actual individuals better off enables one to avoid getting (correctly) killed by the “that’s ideological bullshit” reaction. A political philosophy beyond utilitarianism is essential to avoid absurdity, but concrete utilitarian arguments are essential both to convince others and to keep ourselves honest.
(1)= Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. The best attempt ever to offer a solid theoretical grounding for the social democratic program. Amartya Sen smashed it with a brief, elegant article that identified a critical algebra error in the setup. Oops.
(2)= Kass, Leon R. The Ethics of Human Cloning. Yes, this Luddite idiot is the chair of the US Bioethics Commission. It is to weep.
(3)= Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Of course you know about this.
(4)= Cronin, Adriana.“EU and e-commerce, or does Bad plus Good equal a greater Good?”, Samizdata.net March 14, 2002
(5)= Sen, Amartya. “On the Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal”. This man is depressingly smart.
(6)= see http://www.villagebanking.org/home.php3
(7)= Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language“. Yeah, he’s every conservative’s favorite socialist and every socialist’s favorite conservative, but what can you do?
From each as they chose, to each as they are chosen.
As one of the most influential libertarian thinkers of the 20th century, Robert Nozick certainly deserves a tip of the hat from Libertarian Samizdata. His book Anarchy, State and Utopia is an excellent debunking of coercive statism generally and John Rawls’ book Theory of Justice in particular. Although I must confess I have never been a fan of Nozick’s essentially intuitive approach to rights theory, it would nevertheless be churlish not to recognize his enormous influence in stemming the intellectual tide of statism. He had a key role in widely propagating libertarian memes and adding hugely to the developing libertarian meta-context.
Robert Nozick, philosopher, born November 16 1938; died January 23 2002
Rafe Champion puts the intellectual boot in one again in the latest round of the Interblog Popper WarsTM
The debate between Karl Popper and his opponents has not advanced very far in seven decades and it is tempting to conclude that it is a waste of time to argue with philosophers about these things. In my view the fault lies entirely with Popper’s opponents who clearly demonstrate that “true belief” theories of knowlege produce “true believers” who persist in their beliefs regardless of effective counter-arguments. Because most of the evils in the world can be attributed to the activities of fanatics (people who are not prepared to reconsider any of their “true beliefs”) I am prepared to persist for a few more rounds of this debate in the hope of explaining how some ideas from Popper and his colleague Bill Bartley can help us to move on. In the meantime, I think that those “rationalists” like Will who persist in defending “true belief” theories of knowledge are in fact “selling the other guy’s product” (that is, irrationalism).
Recall my previous contribution where I explained that critical rationalism is concerned with forming and testing “critical preferences” for scientific theories or social policies (or anything else) so that our preferences can change in an orderly fashion in the light of new evidence or new arguments. For this reason I do not agree with Will’s insistence:
that Popperianism is at bottom a skeptical philosophy of darkness, which, despite the enthusiastic rationalist rhetoric of Popperian advocates, shares more with Rorty-like post-modern pragmatism than pro-reason philosophies of light.
He wrote (in criticism of the Popper’s view that we cannot achieve certainty):
For my part, I have not been made to see what is wrong with being certain in seeing mugs on desks, nor in the problem of a proposition becoming more likely true in light of new evidence
By all means be certain (in your own mind) about mugs on desks and anything else, but bear in mind that our senses are fallible as proved by optical illusions, hallucinations and bad calls by referees and commentators in fast-moving sports. Subjective certainty proves nothing, certainly it does not prove the truth of any general scientific or moral principle. So much for that oft repeated criticism of Popper.
As for a proposition becoming “more likely true” or more probable in light of new evidence, the problem for Will and his mates is to produce the formula to indicate the supposed increase in likelihood or probability. Popperians have no argument with the proposition that there are true propositions, the problem is to know whether any particular (contested) proposition is true or false.
Will wrote:
Popper is wrong that positive instances don’t raise the probability of a hypothesis. According to Popper and Champion, the probability of Newton’s theory being true, even after all its success, was the same as the probability of cats giving birth to elephants. And that’s absurd
There are two ways of talking about probability. One is when we say that Team A will probably beat Team B in a forthcoming football game. We usually mean that we have formed a critical preference for Team A, given what we know about the game and the two teams. We may sensibly add provisos regarding dud decisions by the referee, injuries to key players etc etc. and the possibility of an upset. That is Popperian and it has nothing to do with a formula that provides a numerical value (p) attached to the proposition “Team A will win”.
Scientists use that kind of “probability” talk when they compare the relative merits of competing scientific theories. We know that Newton’s theory is not true, despite its immense improvement on earlier theories, so it is doubly absurd to think in terms of the (numerical) probability of its truth. What century is Will living in?
The other type of probability is an academic industry that has been around for some hundreds of years, devoted to producing a formula that assigns a numerical value (p) to propositions (h), in the light of various bits of evidence (e). Because no usable formula has yet been obtained for that purpose, one can only conclude that this line of thought has failed, by its own standards. I know that highly learned “Bayesians” can produce formulas but equally learned critics point out that they do not work. Sorry fellas. Thanks for refraining from talk about prior probabilities. That will only land you in a regress that takes you further away from useful talk about the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories (and football teams). That is the direction of induction and attempts to justify “true beliefs”. It does not help working scientists or anyone else. It is worth noting that Popper is the only philosopher of science who has been taken seriously by any considerable number of scientists who are sensitive to the philosophical dimensions of their work (instances are Einstein, Medaware, Eccles and Monod).
Rafe Champion (Australia)
Samizdata.net wheels out another of our ‘mercenary independent scholars’ in the Interblog Popper Wars. Alan Forrester!
Karl Popper‘s epistemology is about how to solve problems and find better theories, and as such observations do not have the grossly overrated importance given to them by inductivism. The whole notion of probability in this context is irrelevant, since a theory is either true or false and no number of confirming instances allow us to distinguish between them. On Thursday, Will Wilkinson wrote:
It is daunting indeed to debate a man named “Rafe Champion”, a name that evokes race car-driving secret agents, or dangerous, seething, family-wrecking hunks from a “daytime drama”.
Damn straight he is. He does all that, eats broken glass for breakfast and, most excitingly of all – he’s a critical rationalist!
First, I am keen to know what knowledge is, if not a kind of belief. If I know that water is H2O (a scientific proposition), don’t I also believe it?
Not in the sense you mean, i.e.- the sense that it is definitely or probably correct. We tentatively accept that a theory is better than its rival on the basis of things such as whether they provide good explanations and whether the other theories have been refuted by observations.
Next, I find that I’m able to decisively justify all sorts of beliefs on the basis of experience. For instance, that there is a mug on my desk. I see the mug on my desk, and I thereby know that it is there. Science is rather more complex than looking at mugs on desks, but one surely can derive certain beliefs from the evidence of the senses. It’s not clear to me what bind Popper is getting us out of.
So it’s totally impossible that you are hallucinating the mug? Also, why are you so obsessed about whether there is a mug on your desk or not? It’s not a very interesting question. I would sooner debate about something substantial like a meaty scientific or philosophical problem, which brings us back to the main point. Leaving quibbles like that aside, there are actually two quite different issues here. One is whether one can derive theories from observations, the other is if not what role do observations play?
It is impossible to derive theories for observations. To take but one counterexample, up until the late 19th century every observation was compatible with Newton’s theory of gravity. All these observations are also compatible with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Two quite different theories were compatible with the same set of observations, therefore one cannot derive theories from observations. Next we have to ask why you made those particular observations, rather than observations of, say, the exact weight of all the dust under your bed. Before the theories come along that differ in their predictions about the motion of the planets or whatever, there is no particular reason to watch their motion so theories can hardly be derived from observations. The problem is much worse than this though. Even if one could confirm, say, an equation of motion on the basis of observations, one could not derive the explanation provided by the theory from observations. For example, one could explain the motion of the planets by saying that they are pushed round the Sun by invisible pixies that just happen to obey Einstein’s equations. This explanation is rubbish on a truly epic scale compared to the explanation in terms of curved spacetime, but as the observations do not allow us to distinguish between them, the pixie theory of planetary motion must be criticised on other grounds. The role of observations is to distinguish between rival theories. Each prediction of a theory is either true or false, and each theory is either true or false, no number of confirming instances can change that, and hence they cannot prove it to be true, but if we see a refuting instance, then the theory is false.
Last, I said nothing about limiting science to collecting confirming instances. All I was saying is that Popper is wrong that positive instances don’t raise the probability of a hypothesis. According to Popper and Champion, the probability of Newton’s theory being true, even after all its success, was the same as the probability of cats giving birth to elephants.
Newton’s theory was false, so as it turns out the probability was indeed the same :-). However, all this talk of probability ignores the real issue of why, before it was refuted, it was reasonable to hold Newton’s theory, but not the theory that cats give birth to elephants, or why it is reasonable to prefer General Relativity or whatever to such a theory now. It is a good idea to prefer General Relativity to its rival because its rivals are poorer at solving problems.
It is reasonable to prefer the theory that elephants give birth to elephants rather than cats because the former solves problems and the latter does not, indeed it raises new ones. To be a bit more explicit, the theory of evolution, which is better than its rivals (although I don’t think there are any really serious rivals at the moment), gives us reason to think that elephants give birth to more elephants as a way of spreading elephant genes. The theory that cats give birth to elephants not only fails to solve any problems, it ruins theories that do solve problems. It makes absolutely no sense from an evolutionary perspective why would cat genes want to propagate elephants genes? Where did the cat get the elephant genes in the first place? Furthermore, no matter how you try to solve these problems, you just raise more and worse problems, so we can reject the theory that cats give birth to elephants out of hand. To summarize, good theories solve problems better than their rivals, but raise problems themselves, which will be solved by their successors and so we don’t consider that observations and so on confirm a theory.
Alan Forrester
In response to Will Willkinson on the The Fly Bottle taking our esteemed generalissimo Perry de Havilland to task for supporting the conjectural objective epistemology of Karl Popper, the Samizdata Team decided that we should wheel up the big guns for our response. Rafe Champion a noted Australian independent scholar of Popper replies to Will.
Will Wilkinson has invoked a number of weary and worn out arguments against Popper’s theory of inquiry and his theory of knowledge. First of all it is helpful to understand that Popper is concerned with understanding the way the world works, with learning by imaginative problem solving and making the best use of our critical faculties. It is also helpful to understand how Popper has emancipated us from some dead ends in philosophy, and not just the philosophy of science. Many of these dead ends arise from the theory that scientific knowledge is a form of belief, to wit, justified true belief. The source of justification in the empiricist tradition is supposed to be the evidence of our senses. In the Continental rationalist tradition the source of justification is the intuition of clear and distinct ideas. In each case the same fatal flaw arises: there is no way to decisively (certainly) justify the beliefs that are supposed to be true.
Popper has provided an alternative to the failed theories of justified true belief. The alternative is a theory of conjectural objective knowledge. This does not mean giving up on truth, or the search for it. Truth is a regulative standard for statements. A true statement corresponds to the facts. In our search for the truth we form critical preferences for the theory (or the social policy) which best solves its problems and stands up to all kinds of tests (the test of internal consistency, consistency with other well tested theories, and experimental or observational tests). Our preferences can change in a rational and controlled manner in the light of new evidence or new arguments. Our knowledge grows through our creative response to problems, including the problems that are created by effective criticism.
The Popperian scientists is like a free market entrepreneur, seeking opportunities (unsolved problems) in the marketplace. The scientist forms a conjectural solution to the problem (invests or offers a product in the marketplace) and it is then subjected to critical appraisal, including experimental tests (the product is tested by the market). All this goes on in the flux of time and is subject to radical uncertainty due to the inherently open-ended nature of theoretical knowledge (and the dynamic marketplace).
All of this is simple common sense until David Stove and the proponents of justified true beliefs confuse the picture.
Will wrote:
“Popper argues that one can only disconfirm a theory–prove that it is false”.
In logic, that is the simple truth. A general or universal theory, stated in the form “All swans are white” is falsified by a single (true) report of a black swan.
“But then what do you say of a theory that has been subjected to huge numbers of potentially falsifying tests, but has passed with flying colors? Isn’t not being falsified by many tests a lot like being confirmed?”
That was the case with Newton’s theory which passed many tests and explained so many things that many people thought that the final truth had been found. But it was not so, even before Einstein offered a viable alternative there were known to be problems with Newton’s theory. If you want to limit confirmation to repeatable observations, like sunrises and falling apples, then that is scientifically trivial and uninteresting because science is concerned with general explanatory theories, (which apply to both apples and sunrises).
“Pace Popper, induction works just fine, and it works pretty much the way people intuitively think it does (i.e., The more horses you encounter, the surer your knowledge about horses in general.)”
Not really. To learn about horses you need to approach them in a receptive, inquisitive or problem-solving way. If you merely encounter them “in passing” you may learn nothing more than to get out of their way. Learning is an active process of sifting and evaluating ideas and evidence, that is why so many people can go through school and higher education and learn next to nothing (exept about things that they really find interesting, which may be horses and not their academic studies). When you understand where Popper is coming from, David Stove is just a bore, despite his wit and his verbal pyrotechnics. Stove and his fellow inductivists apparently think there is some way to attach a numerical probability to general theories, but it has not yet been done despite being an academic industry for about a hundred years. This renders their position absurd by their own standards.
Rafe Champion
Recommended reading for insomniacs with enquiring minds
We have received a few e-mails asking what books we would recommend for aspiring (or even perspiring) libertarians:
Dale Amon recommends for essential reading:
David Bergland “Libertarianism in One Lesson”
Frederick Hayek “The Road to Serfdom”
Murray Rothbard “For a New Liberty”
Bob Poole “Defending a Free Society”
Carl Hess “Capitalism for Kids”
Wendy McElroy “Freedom, Feminism and the State”
Thomas Sowell “The Economics and Politics of Race”
Perry de Havilland recommends for essential reading:
Murray Rothbard “The Ethics of Liberty”
Frederick Hayek “The Fatal Conceit”
Karl Popper “Open Society and its Enemies”
Virginia Postrel “The Future and its Enemies”
Also well worth a read:
Ayn Rand “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”
David Deutsch “The Fabric of Reality”
Murray Rothbard “Man, Economy and State”
Edmund Burke “Reflections on the Revolution in France”
Karl Marx “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (know thine enemy)
Jean Monnet “Memoirs” (know thine enemy, part deux)
However if you like tracts on political economy served up as more bite sized morsels, you would be hard pressed to find a more varied body of works than the pamphlets of the Libertarian Alliance. Browse through the huge number of works on the Libertarian Alliance website, all available for free on-line in pdf format pertaining to all manner of topics (html format coming in the not-to-distant future).
The Libertarian Alliance website is undergoing a bit of an overhaul so it might look a bit strange in some platform/browser combinations. Feel free to complain to the Libertarian Alliance webmaster there and urge them to get it fixed 🙂
PC meaning Peikoffian Crap.
Okay, I realise it is actually Boxing Day now, but ‘Merry Christmas’ anyway. That’s Christ-mas… as in Christ. Son of God and all that stuff. It does not matter if you believe in Christ or not, because it does not change what Christmas actually is.
Although I am an extremely secular person, I do not hesitate to extend those sentiments to Samizdata‘s Christian readers in spite of the fact religion does not loom large in my life. Yet I think it is important to remember that Christmas is a Christian festival and thus I shall not hedge my Christian greeting with anything like ‘and you have a nice holiday too for those who are Atheists, Agnostics, Hindus, Satanists…’
Don’t get me wrong, I actually do hope any Atheists, Agnostics, Hindus, Satanists, Druids, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddists, Jews, Druse, Shinto, Pagans, etc. etc. who read the Samizdata have a really great and entirely secular couple days off… but then as that is all Christmas is to them, I do not feel any special need to be ‘inclusive’ if they are just hitching a perfectly reasonable cultural ride on someone else’s wagon. I often partake of bhangra-and-booze excesses during Diwali but I certainly don’t expect special ‘Diwali greetings’ from my Hindu friends because I am not Hindu. To me Diwali is just an excuse to eat good Indian food. Likewise I would hope that many atheist (or whatever) libertarians would have no problem with the idea of Christians (libertarian or otherwise) regarding Christmas as ‘their’ day. Yet some people do indeed seem to disagree.
Although I have been much influenced by objectivism, I do not actually call myself an objectivist as Karl Popper looms just as large in my philosophical views, probably more so in fact. I have nothing against objectivism per se, which I like to describe as a sub-set of libertarian thought because I know it will annoy certain people. However I do regard the ‘organised’ objectivism of Leonard Peikoff, of the Ayn Rand Institute, as essentially irrational and pathologically intolerant. Peikoff’s historical error riddled article about Christmas did nothing to change my views on the fatal justificationist structural flaw in his brand of dogmatic objectivism (yeah, yeah, send hate e-mail pointing out my ‘errors’ to the usual address). Let Peikoff pick any day he likes to celebrate the adulation of St. Leonard, Intellectual Heir to the Blessed Ayn… but to fail to understand that Christmas without a reference to Christianity is just another Disney theme event, is culturally illiterate and needlessly insulting.
However objectivism without Leonard Peikoff…ah, now that would be something worthy of a festival of its own! For precisely that, go to The Objectivist Center for Peikoff-free objectivism that includes tolerance and ideas that survive contact with reality. Go read what they have to say.
As for me, once I have finished reading the lyrical Sufic work ‘The Rose Garden‘, I shall be re-reading Popper‘s ‘Open Society and it’s Enemies‘.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
