Episode 94: Stephen Hicks on Critical Rationalism vs Objectivism
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Hello out there. Today on the Theory of Anything podcast, we speak to professor of philosophy, Stephen Hicks. After taking a look at his work again in preparation for this podcast,

it really hit me hard that he is one of the most persuasive and influential voices out there defending liberalism and reason. In his books "Explaining Postmodernism" and "Nietzsche and the Nazis," it becomes clear that the history of bad ideas is more than just an abstract thing, but something with monumental importance for human life and prosperity.

Rather than focus on this aspect of his work, which is widely known, we thought we'd ask him questions related to critical rationalism and epistemology more generally and see where the conversation takes us. And I could not have been happier with the result, though I wish we could have gone on for many more hours.

Hello, welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast. We're here with Professor Hicks, and of course, as always, Bruce Nielsen. How are you guys doing? Good. Well, thanks for the invitation. This moment right now in my life is one of the highlights, I would say. I am thrilled for the opportunity to speak to you, Professor Hicks. Thank you so much for coming on our humble podcast.

Your stuff has gotten millions and millions of clicks, and I would expect hundreds more after today. So thank you. Just to explain my background a little bit with your work before I get into the questions about critical rationalism, I took a critical theory class in college in the 90s.

Truthfully, I did not see it as political at all at the time. I just thought it was a bunch of confusing, weird stuff that I probably wasn't smart enough to understand. Then fast forward a little bit to 2016. Jordan Peterson came out with his YouTube lectures. Heard somewhere that you were a big influence or that he got his stuff on postmodernism from you, which...

I suspect there's some truth to that, at least. That led me to your book, Explaining Postmodernism, which I just devoured and then devoured again. Reading your book now, it seems to me more than the book about obscure and kind of boring philosophers. It was to me a new way to look at history, really, a history that goes beyond

It's the history of ideas that go beyond left and right. It put enlightenment and counter enlightenment thinkers. And, you know, I just it just came alive for me. Really, it's it's such a good book. It's wonderful to hear. Thanks for that feedback. And it's just so different than what I heard in school. I find it very, very convincing. And it has really affected my worldview for what it's worth.

I had a philosopher friend recommend your book to me, and I really enjoyed it too. It was kind of in some ways my introduction to postmodernism, trying to get an understanding of it. Thanks for letting me know. That's great.

And then so before we move on to critical rationalism, I thought I could ask you, Professor Hicks, if you could vote to make your book part of the school curriculum and force every child to read it, would you vote for such a law? Because I might be tempted to. You think about all the terrible stuff, all the crap we make these kids read. Why not one good one? Yeah.

Well, force is the operative word there. So as a deep liberal guy, I'm going to have to say no on that. So what I would hope for is that enough teachers and professors think it's good and they will recommend it in a way that says this is something sexy, great for your mind, an intellectual adventure. Read this book.

I thought you might say that. Karl Popper said a rationalist is a man who would rather be unsuccessful in convincing another man by argument than successful in crushing him by force, intimidation, threats, or even persuasive propaganda.

So I think you would agree with Popper on that at least. Oh yeah, well said. Popper is one of the great liberals, so I enjoy reading him for that very much. Good, good. Okay, first question about justificationism, or the idea that there are certain kinds of ideas that are just in the true camp, and that's all there is to it.

Karl Popper, on the other hand, said that knowledge grows not from a feeling of certainty, but as we sincerely but fallibly seek to criticize our own best ideas. So truth has a direction which is really so much different than relativism. The classic example that I'm sure you've heard is about Newton's laws being replaced by general relativity. When this perspective began to sink in for me, it was a serious aha moment in my life.

But I'm curious how you, an objectivist, who is also quite familiar with Papirian epistemology, how do you think about this fallibilist idea that knowledge grows from a woven web of guesses? All right, that's a lot in there. What I would just say is we have to do some serious unpacking. Right from the beginning, you connected justificationism to truthism.

to certainty. Okay. And so certainty is perhaps a goal. To say that something is true is a statement about a proposition, and justificationism is to focus on the process by which we would reach something that we might call true or not.

So if I want to say, just to take a simple example, that it is true that you and I are talking now, right? So that's the end product, right? Or the end result, a proposition that I have made. You and I are talking. That is true. That's to take a meta stance with respect to the proposition.

So first we'd have to get sorted out what we mean by true or what are we going for when we're talking about true and then justification is to focus on the follow-up questions. Anytime you want to say something is true, the question is how do you know? So it's not focusing on the content that you're striving to believe or recommending that someone believes. You're talking about how you got there.

And then, as philosophers, we take a meta stance with respect to those claims about the justificatory claims. So, in this case, we might say, you and I are talking. If you ask me, how do I know that? Then I would say some things about what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, my beliefs about how the internet works and so forth. That justifies my claim

you and I are talking. If I want to then say, well, that claim is true, then that's presupposing that I've understood what the proposition is, I've understood the justification claims, and I'm making a judgment call about that entire package. Now, then the certainty concept, right, then is to say, well, the way cognition works is

Sometimes we are justified in believing various things. Sometimes we think we know things that are true, but we're not yet ready to make a claim of certainty. So the certainty claim is then often a meta claim about everything that has gone on before. So I might say, you and I are talking.

that's the claim i go through my justification process i see you i hear you etc etc

And then you might then say to me, well, how certain are you of that? And then I would step back on that whole process and I would look for doubts. I would look for weaknesses. I would consider various skeptical possibilities and then make a pronouncement. So bottom line then is to say before we can get to fallibilism,

which is one of the meta-epistemological theories, so to speak, about the whole shebang, I think we should start by talking about what do we mean by justification? What do we mean by truth? What do we mean by certainty? So actually, I would like to hear your thoughts on your own question that you just asked. So if you're talking to somebody and you're talking about justificationism or certainty,

Or fallibilism. What do those terms mean to you? What do you have in mind when you think about those concepts, I should say, instead of terms? That's great. So these are all the core epistemological concepts. So the way I would frame this is by... I always start with developmental psychology. So if we take a fresh-born child, so to speak, comes into the world...

And the child then starts perceptually interacting with the world. Now, at that point, we're not going to be using concepts like whatever's going on in the content of the child's mind. I'll just say he is he certain of anything or is he justified in whatever? So he's reaching for this or you poke him and he starts to cry. So we would have a.

an initial interaction between a human being with a cognitive set of apparatus, perceptual features and so forth, interacting with the world. So I think we would start by having some account as epistemologists of what goes on with respect to sense perception, how that all works. Then what we seem to know is as children develop,

seven, eight, nine months or so, they make a cognitive leap and they start using words and they use the words in ways that are picking out

categories of things. And we then think what goes on there is the child has formed a concept where say there are several cats in the household. The child is aware of all of them as individuals, but at the same time is now in a position to say the cats form a different group. And there is a word that I use to distinguish, to

Talk about the cats. I don't use that to talk about mommy and daddy and sister and so on. And then children start to have all sorts of words that are conceptual. As far as we know, most other animal species don't do this.

They are very sophisticated at sensing, very sophisticated at perception. Maybe, as far as we can tell, dolphins and maybe some dogs and chimpanzees have some rudimentary abstract concepts, but human beings definitely do. And that's something that then needs to be teased out. Then we know, by the time kids are, again, a year and a half, two, two and a half, they start taking individual concepts,

and putting them together in more sophisticated units that we call sentences or propositions. So I might say, you know, the kid might say, "Cat is in the kitchen." Or, "Kid's sitting at the table, knocks over the drinking glass." Okay, "I hit glass, glass fall floor, cat scared, cat run kitchen."

And already what we then have is a whole lot of perceiving that has gone on, but all of that captured in the form of a whole network of concepts that were formed individually: kitchen, cat, glass, etc. And then put together in a proposition that's now telling a little story. Now,

Then we increase the sophistication with which we can put these propositions together. By the time kids are four or five, we are reading stories to them, and that might require that they hold 20 or 30 propositions in their mind to see how it all develops. They start learning more sophisticated causal understandings about how the world works.

that would say the the whole routine to get ready for school of eating and uh um

brushing their teeth and putting their clothes on and walking out to the street and looking both ways to cross the street to wait for the school bus that's going to take them to the school. So they have an entire then causal understanding of that. And then we might just call that the getting ready for school routine, but they have that as a sort of quasi theory in their head. So it's an increasingly developmental process.

cognitive structure that we're developing. Now, when we are then starting to do epistemology and we're trying to figure out what's going on here, because all of this is open-ended, we become better perceivers and sensors, hopefully, as we get older. We start to form more concepts

and we're able to define our concepts explicitly more sophisticatedly. We're able to put concepts into increasingly complicated propositional structures, and we have an understanding of grammar and how all of that aids us to put our propositions together in these structures. We're then going on to put

a lot of propositions together in narratives and put a lot of propositions together in logical structures that we call then causal theories about the world. So as epistemologists then, what we are interested in doing is, following this developmental story, is working out what's going on in sensation.

What's going on in perception? What's going on in conception? What's going on when we form propositions? What's going on when we put together narratives? And what's going on when we put together

logical structures or when we are doing logic. So that is to say, now I've got a six fingered hand here, right? There are six sub big questions that we have to talk about first before we're going to talk about more sophisticated things like what we are doing as mature adult scientists

with very sophisticated mathematics, very sophisticated experimental structures, and already many, many years of building up a causal understanding of the world, plus hearing lots of competing understandings of the world. And I think it's at that point where more pointedly questions about justification and truth, and when we are certain or not, start to have some traction.

So that's already a lot just to put out there. So let me just pause there for reactions. What you said, I think, leads right into my next question, which is about theory-ladenness. And maybe you kind of already addressed it, but this idea that our observations are essentially interpretations informed by our theories. So I think that would mean that

empiricism is false and that Karl Popper argued that observations alone cannot confirm a theory. Maybe I can just ask, how does this concept of theory-ladenness relate to what you're saying here?

Yeah, again, I say the issue of theory-ladenness comes much later in the developmental cognitive story. And as you say, one version of theory-ladenness is, as you put it, that, so to speak, we have prior theories that are in-built. This is going to be the hardcore rationalist version, the way philosophers use rationalism technically, that we have either innate ideas or

that are already a theory or we have innate structures in a more Kantian way that set us up for having certain theories about the world and that then when we are observing the world those dictate what we are going to see and how we're going to see in strong form or they shape in some way what we are going to see.

And then this becomes important because if we have a sophisticated

philosophy of science that says our theories are telling us about reality and the question then is how do we come to know reality if we start with the empiricist story and say well we observe reality and then build up conceptual structures and propositional structures and so on then we are trapped in a kind of circle that we cannot get out of and

And that is going to lead us to reject empiricism. So what we then need to do is, I think we need to go back to the developmental issue before we start talking about theories. And theories are logically connected networks of propositions. First, we have to already have talked about logic and we have to have talked about propositions. So where does logic come from? Where do propositions come from?

And unless you want to believe that we are born with full-blown sets of propositions in our head or entirely kind of network structures that predispose us to believe a certain causal understanding of reality,

uh then you have to go back and say the propositions come from integrating concepts the concepts come from integrating percepts and those are based on sensory contact with the world that initially is not theory laden so that's a long way of saying that before we talk about theory ladeness in that robust sense we need to go back and talk about the basic theories of

sensation and perception, and that's where there's a big divide between the empiricists and the rationalists at that level. But also, where do we get our initial abstract concepts from? And the different theories of concepts also divide empiricists and rationalists and sets them up for giving different accounts of where propositions, logic, and narrative theories come from.

If we go back to, say, the child fresh from the womb, the initial question is going to be, what do we make of the content of that child's cognitive apparatus? And what do we make of the cognitive apparatus itself? So do we say, initially, there are innate ideas there, or is the child cognitively a blank slate? That's one issue.

And then we know that we have a brain and that the brain of the human being is different from the brain of other animals. So there are some sort of cognitive capacities there. What is the nature of those cognitive capacities? Are they capacities that respond to reality or are they capacities that when activated structure and shape reality? Those I think are the two basic questions.

So before we start talking about critical rationalism, we have to get back to those basic rationalism versus empiricism issues. So in your answer, not the one you just gave, but the one before that, it seemed like you emphasized linguistics or language quite a bit.

Do you like what's the connection between, in your opinion, I guess, what's the connection between the questions we're asking here and the human ability to have language? And do you to any degree buy into the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis? Yeah, so I think when we're talking about language, that's an umbrella term for everything that is conceptual and beyond. So I think as soon as the child is forming language,

and demonstrably able to use words from the initial word, dada, mama, doggy, or whatever it is, the child is entering into the language realm. And that's the first question. What is going on conceptually or inside the child's cognitive apparatus that enables them to do so? And right off the bat,

We have a debate here between those who say that the child is aware perceptually, this is now the empiricist position, of entities and the actions that those entities are engaging in and perform some form of abstraction and forms a new mental unit that we call a concept and applies a label to it. The other side wants to say that there are

pre-installed, so to speak, in the cognitive apparatus, right? Ways of grouping perceptual inputs. And then what is going on there is perceptual inputs are coming in and this innate structure, that we will call an abstract structure, is being imposed on that, and that's what is then presented to the mind. So that's the basic issue. Then as you scale up,

children have any number of individual concepts, they start to put them together. Then we're doing more sophisticated language, but still language. Then the children start learning and automating what we call grammatical rules, subject, predicate, what modifies subjects, what modifies predicates and so forth. So grammar as a discipline or as a science becomes important.

Then, but this is still part of language. Then we take those propositions and we start to put it in

Logical structures. If this, then that. Well, that didn't happen, so the first thing can't be true. There's a logical operation that's built in there. Or either this or that, and then I can see that didn't happen, so it must be this. That disjunctive operation is there. Then the question is, where do we get that disjunctive operation from? That ability to structure propositions

that way and reach a conclusion. So to answer your question is then to say language is concepts and the theory of definition that goes with that.

proposition formation and the theory of grammar that goes with that, and then beyond that, networks of propositions that are either fictional, the theory of narrative, or they're claiming to be factual, which is then theory of logic. So language then is the whole shebang beyond the perceptual level.

So I was actually going to ask, so the way you're using the term language, you said that that starts maybe even, I guess you didn't actually say this, but I was kind of maybe reading in that it starts before the child can even speak. So let's say you had an adult who didn't learn language. They would probably still have concepts. Would you still consider them having a kind of internal language or do they not form concepts in your mind unless they can actually speak?

So, well, no, someone who is mute. Oh, sorry. I mean, they didn't learn a language. Someone who did not learn a language. What do you mean? Like a wolf boy raised out in the forest and then reintegrated into society at age 25? Or whatever. Something like that. You know, I don't know. I think so. But I think they would have a private language. I don't think language is fundamentally social. Language is about...

my mind or my cognitive apparatus responding to reality. It has a huge social component. It enables us to communicate with us, and in many cases we learn language socially, but that well done is teachers and parents pointing to reality such that the child can make the connection between the word or the concept and reality itself. But as a

thought experiment, the specific example, wolf boy raised with a pack of wolves until age 25, then reintegrates, we meet some human beings, would that person spontaneously generate concepts and propositions and so forth? I don't know. I think so, but I think that would be something that would have to be put to the experimental test. Okay.

I came across a book on Amazon about a man who did not learn language. So that was actually what came to my mind. And I also – there's another thing we haven't gotten to yet, but I do think part of it – and this is also why all the questions about justification and probability and certainty and truth and so forth become important – is that –

Once we get to that conceptual level or start doing the conceptual I don't think that's an automatic process in human beings I think that's a volitional process and

When we are bombarded by sensory and perceptual stimuli, our sensory faculties respond automatically. And I think a certain amount of integration happens automatically there. But I think it takes work to look at things, look at this thing, look at that thing, attend to the ways in which they are similar and different from other things. I think that takes volitional effort. So one reason why someone might not ever

develop their own language absent social interaction and social encouragement might just be that they are they're lazy or they just never think to do that. They just develop a certain number of more or less automatic basic level cognitive routines.

and they never need to do so. I think there's a huge amount of encouragement that parents do with the infant, you know, to try to get the infant to focus on their face because they want to interact with the child and to verbalize in various ways and to present things to the children, all of which incentivizes the children to start using their cognitive apparatus in a more sophisticated way

So I don't know that it would happen. Well, it wouldn't happen automatically, but I do want to leave open the possibility that someone just might never start doing that. Okay. Well, let me ask you this.

a more general question then about critical rationalism. Obviously, you've read Popper and it sounds like you're sympathetic to a lot of his ideas. But where do you feel that Popperian epistemology goes wrong? Where does it go off the rails in your view? Good question.

Yeah, good question indeed. I think of Popper as one of the good guys in setting aside political philosophy. So we just focus on philosophy of science. I think he's pro-science. He's pro-reason. He's pro-logic up to a certain point. He thinks of science as a progressive philosophy.

project, right, and one that's been enormously successful and a whole lot better than, shall we say, the competing epistemologies that have been developed. So I think of him as, you know, 80 to 90 percent good guy. And I love reading Popper and have learned a huge amount from him.

So where I think Popper goes wrong is on these issues that we started to get to. It's at the fundamentals. To put it in history of philosophy terms, in the debate between the empiricists and the rationalists, Popper has absorbed enough David Hume

In his own words, he is partly Humean, and Hume's version of empiricism we call sensationalism, which I think is a faulty theory of sensation. But that leads you to have a certain understanding of what concepts are that we call nominalism.

And that also leads to very deep fundamental problems. And that's what leads Popper, even though he thinks that if empiricism is true, it ultimately has to be a kind of Humean empiricism that leads him to adopt the rationalist side of the equation. And again, to put it in history of philosophy terms, the answer to Hume in the 18th century was Immanuel Kant.

And again, in Popper's own words, he says, enough of a Kantian to accept that our basic perceptual interaction with the world cannot be as the empiricist habit, has to be in a more updated, rationalistic form. And that is what leads him then to start seeing concepts

as, it's hard to put the language to it here, but as barriers between us and reality that somehow we need to try to work our way around or as obstacles

So then immediately we are trying to be rational and conceptual and logical and all of the stuff that comes out as good Kantianism does, but we're never going to be able to get back to reality. So short answer is to say there is enough

in Popper to set him up for Kant. And I think Kant is the big disaster. He's got, he's got, he's got elements of Kantianism. And when those pop up, those lead him into trouble. Those are the ones that, uh,

not to put it in so much historical philosophy terms, but in his own generation. It is the Kantian elements in his philosophy that the Kuhnians and the Feyerabendians go after and exploit, and then take in increasingly skeptical directions. And so what Popper is doing is fighting a kind of rear guard defensive maneuver at that point, trying to

say, yes, I am bare bones Kantian on these conceptual structures, but I think we can still save the day for a pro-reason understanding of science. So that's one thing. The other thing is

Now we're not talking about concepts and perception, but we're talking about logic, and we haven't gotten there yet. But his falsifiability is a negative program, and I think that falsifiability is part of a mature philosophy of science. But Popper goes very strongly into denying that there's any logic of confirmation.

There's no, so to speak, positive epistemology. There's only a negative epistemology worked out, and that's what falsifiability ends up being. And then if you ask why there's no logic of confirmation, then he has an account of induction, and his account of induction comes from David Hume, and again,

There's a skepticism in Hume's account of induction that's based on his sensationalism and his nominalism but Popper adopts that significantly enough and so

those elements lead him to have, I would say he has half an epistemology there, even though that half of the epistemology is true. So to do that, again, we would have to go back and be talking about Kant and the divide between the empiricists and the rationalists and whether really it comes down to a battle between Hume and Kant. So, um,

I actually have mixed feelings on, I've, I suppose I'm completely in the pauper camp of falsificationism, but I don't really like that term much. And I kind of avoid using it mostly. But when we talk about positive epistemology,

I actually would maybe even to some degree agree with you that Popper seems like he goes a little bit too far. But what do you have in mind when you talk about positive epistemology that you feel is missing from Popper? So I think at this point we can take up the first question that Peter raised, and the first big concept was justification.

So what do we mean by justification? Because we know we come up with all sorts of abstract concepts and propositions and so on. We also know, right, at some point, some of them are just products of our imagination. I'm not trying to understand reality. I'm just making stuff up.

I also know that sometimes I am trying to understand reality, but I make mistakes. I come to places where I think something must be false or something that cannot be true. So at that point, we realize that whatever is in the contents of our consciousness, we just can't take it as justified or take it as true.

And so we then start asking ourselves, well, why is it sometimes that when I use my cognitive apparatus, I am out of touch with reality. And sometimes when I use my cognitive apparatus, I stay in touch with reality. So that then requires some introspection and study and guidance from other people about different ways in which I can use my cognitive apparatus. And at that point,

what we're looking for is what ways of using my cognitive apparatus when I am attending to it keeps me in contact with reality and what ways of using my cognitive apparatus take me away from reality. So we start to sort ways of using our cognitive apparatus. Then what we then say is the ones that we don't like, those are the ones that lead you in the direction of falsehood. The ones that we do like, those are the ones that lead you in the direction of truth.

and we're trying in principle to figure out what those ways are. And those ways then we call the justificatory methods, that is to say, ways of using your cognitive apparatus such that if you use them, you are, I don't want to just use the word justified here, but you are, it's legitimate for you to believe the end product.

because that method is a good method or it's a method of justification.

So what that then means though, I think is we need to have a good theory of sensation. So if you're going to be justified, we know that sometimes our senses are differently conditioned, you know, if I'm sick or if I'm not sick or if the light conditions are whatever. So if I am going to pay attention to my senses, then I am looking for those things. If I have looked for those things that can mislead my senses and,

and not found any, then I am justified. If I am using words, when am I justified to use a concept? Then I say, well, where does this concept come from? What facts of reality give rise to it? Do I have a clear definition of this word or am I just throwing the word out there because I've kind of heard it in various ways? Because we know sometimes words can be used equivocally,

Fuzzily in various misleading ways. So one of the things we learn is pay attention to the definitions of words. And if you have done that and you can define your terms clearly, then you are justified in using that word in this context.

Then when I'm putting words together in various structures, I know that if I do just to take some logical examples, if I do denying the consequent, that is a good method of putting propositions together. If I use denying the antecedent, that's a misleading way of putting propositions together. So anytime I'm doing things that involve several logical operations,

What I need to do, since I know some of them are good and some of them are bad, pay attention to which methods I am using. If I find I've been consistently using the ones that we've identified as the good ones, then I am justified in believing the output. So,

Justification then is a process of self-consciously attending to everything we've done in a given cooperation, given cognitive operation from the observational base to forming the core concepts to checking and double checking the logical network that puts all the concepts together. Then we say, if you've done that, you are justified. If you have not done that, then you are not yet justified in doing so.

So, um, Hopper, um, at least my take on Popper's, let me just admit that this is my interpretation. Although I, I can show quotes from Popper that where he says these things, he doesn't like most Popperians I talked to are completely against justification ism of any kind.

But when I read Popper, I see him as shifting justificationism from justification of certainty that the theory is true to justification of why I would prefer this theory over a different theory.

And I feel like that's a very subtle difference, but like a really big difference because this gets back to fallibilism. The outcome would be that you never actually justify the theory itself. It's always just conjectural, but you could be justified to prefer one theory over another, perhaps even for the reasons that you just outlined because –

One was based on a logical apparatus and one wasn't or something along those lines. There's probably many, many reasons for why you might prefer one theory over another. No, I think that's right. That there's a kind of a hard popper and a soft popper interpretation. Yeah. Is does it work?

So does falsificationism come down to saying, we've tried our damnedest to falsify this hypothesis, and we've failed at falsifying it ever, so therefore we can find ourselves justified in preferring that hypothesis. Right. And I'm not making any sort of a strong claim. Now, the hard part of Hopper thesis, though, is that

on the other side of the falsificationism, whether there is a kind of smuggling in of a positive logic of confirmation, because so as we've said, I have a hypothesis and we've tried our damnedest to falsify it. So we're being good scientists. We have the right mindset. And then we run some experiment and it goes against what the hypothesis predicts. So we're considering it.

as a falsified candidate. And then we say, well, can we modify the theory? Can we double check the experiment and so forth? And we go through all of that again and we say, no, there's no way to save the theory. There's no way to save the experimental because the experiments were all done right. So therefore we have to consider the theory falsified. And that's a hard conclusion. The theory's out. We reject it and we go off and look for some other theory and some sort of hypothesis.

And then the hard question for the hard-Paperian falsification interpretation there is to say, well, you did all of those experiments, say, yesterday or last week or last year or whatever, and now it's a year later. Is that hypothesis still falsified? And if your answer is yes, it is still falsified, one good falsification shoots the whole thing out.

then there is the danger of running into a kind of circle again, because if you want to say we falsified it once and double checked everything, but we are going to consider it falsified a year later or two years later or falsified for all time, that is a kind of positive generalization. That then is to say we think or we know that if we

did the same experiments in the same circumstances, we would get the same results. And that's a positive claim about the causal nature of the world. And that is either a circle or it's a violation of a strong falsifiability hypothesis. So David Deutsch wrote a paper that was specifically about Karl Popper's epistemology with some adaptions on his part.

And the way he tried to address exactly what you just raised is he claimed that you can't actually falsify a theory until there is a new replacement theory in place that allows you to explain why the previous theory worked but it was wrong.

So maybe sound off on that a little, because that is definitely maybe different than what I read in Popper, but it at least fits well within Popperian critical rationalist approach to epistemology.

but at first blush it sounds like the first option where we would say we're not going for a hard pauperianism rather we're going to say we've tried to falsify this theory and we think we have succeeded at doing so or maybe we haven't succeeded at doing so but uh it's the best thing we have going compared to everything else historically so we're just going to hang on to it until we're looking or until we find some other some other theory down the road

So then the question is going to be in the early stages of the new theory, what's going to make that one preferable? And the only thing that it would have going for it would be that it has not yet been falsified, absent having done anything right at that point. So here I think is where Thomas Kuhn would start to have some traction on this version of a false viability.

because uh coon wants to say well yeah the the old theory runs into problems and we we think it's falsifiable but the old guard doesn't want to let it go and even the new guard doesn't quite want to let it go because they don't have anything else to go back on uh but then a new paradigm or a new hypothesis comes along and

And some people say this is great, this is sexy, it's going to be able to solve all of the problems, but we don't really know yet because we haven't really tested it out. So the move from abandoning the old theory and jumping into the new theory, Kuhn wants to say that's really a kind of act of faith, right, at that point, or at least that it's not

rational or it's not logical at any point that all you could do is jump into the new theory and see how it goes and

Okay. So yeah, that's actually the way I would read and interpret Kuhn too. He does seem like to me, like he is, that is what he is saying. Let me just say one more thing, if we don't mind, because I think this takes us back to one of our earlier questions, because part of the Kuhnian package then is to say, when you jump into the new theory, the core concepts of

that then get built into the theoretical formulations and the logical structures are incommensurable or cannot be mapped on to the old ones. So it's not a matter of a rational linguistic translation from one to the other. And so what that then is to say is the Papyrians, if they're going to save themselves from this Kuhnian criticism, have to be able to say no

we can define the concepts in a way that is objective or is universal or properly grounded and do translations across different theories. That means we have to go back and have a very good theory of concepts. So, you know, I don't really have a disagreement with Kuhn at a kind of rough rule of thumb level. I think it's rather obvious that

There are sometimes in science something like revolutions. There is sometimes in science something like incommensurability. But it's not too hard to think of examples that don't seem to fit his mold. And just a straightforward one might be Newtonian physics versus general relativity and how we switched from coming to accept Newtonian physics as false compared to general relativity. Yeah.

Um, I, you know, maybe you know more about this than I do, but I guess I don't really see a strong problem with incommensurability with how that, uh, took place. There was definitely a social element to it. I think Kuhn gets, you know, nails that, um, completely that it took a while for, um, the repeats of the tests to finally kind of get people to give up on Newtonian physics and realize that there really was something to general relativity. Um,

But I would struggle to point to any true strong, or at least...

There's probably always some incommensurability, but a strong case of incommensurability there. What would be your thoughts on that? Is this a counterexample to Kuhn? Or do you feel like maybe Kuhn still has this nailed, even in a case like Newtonian physics to general relativity? No, I don't think Kuhn has it nailed at all. I'm just speaking hypothetically as a Kuhnian in reaction to the Popperian claim. No, I think...

Kuhn is great often as a sociologist of science, but I think he's a disaster as a philosopher of science. Yeah. Okay. I'm with you on that. And I get a lot out of his book, but I definitely cannot...

Yes. Signed on to his epistemology.

So then the question would be to take the philosophies of science, Popper's and Kuhn's, and try to map them onto the key history of science examples. So transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, or going from kind of special creation theories of human origins to evolutionary theories

theory origins and then within the evolutionary theory origins transitions from kind of Lamarckian accounts to more Darwinian accounts and so on. So I think that would be fun. And on my view, I don't think that the Kuhnian incommensurability account is true. I think the scientists are very well able to conceptualize and reconceptualize and state

there is a relativity issue there in the early stages of trying to form new scientific concepts. But I think they know what they are doing. The issue with respect to Kuhn is that he comes in with a heavily Kantian/Sapir-Whorf understanding of language in general, but certainly concepts in particular.

And I think also there's, just to take another strain that's feeding in, broadly pragmatic philosophy approaches coming out of John Dewey, and then in the next generation, Quine, and the Quine-Duhem thesis about language and incommensurability of translations.

I think that's also, which was developed in the 40s and 50s, is also in Kuhn's thinking. And that then, I think, is what sets him up for his strong version of the incommensurability thesis. So, I think, again, the only way to attack that, though, is to go back to the fundamental issues of language. Where do word slash concepts come from?

Where do we get our capacity for propositional structure comes from? Where does grammar come from? Is it an innate structure or is it an abstraction from relationships that we're observing in reality? So those core epistemological issues have to be addressed

and how you address those is going to determine how things play out when you are doing very high-level philosophy of science like Kuhn and Popper are doing. Okay. Thank you. So, you know, at least to me,

an average dude. I'm not a philosopher or a scientist. Critical rationalism seems to fit more into my life as something like an attitude towards life rather than a methodology. I think that maybe Bruce has a little bit different take on that, but that's kind of... And maybe they're interrelated concepts, to be fair. But once I started getting into critical rationalism, I started seeing

conversations, even with my family, even at work, that's something more like a search for truth than a, uh, than just something to, I don't know,

Philip time or something. And the popper quote that I think most personifies this attitude is I may be wrong and you may be right, but by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth. I think about that all the time. I'm curious, is there an Ayn Rand quote that sticks out in your mind as something that best that resonates with you as promoting the right attitude towards this life?

No, I think the sentiment that you've described personally in the Popperian sentiment is beautiful. I think Rand would agree entirely with it. Rand liked to quote Aristotle or at least an account of Aristotle in his methodology as the passionate quest for passionless truth. So the idea is that there is a truth.

And reality is what reality is. Facts are facts, and that's fundamental for her. That's an axiomatic thing in her philosophy and how she justifies that's another side issue. But our fundamental then obligation is to orient our value, our cognitive structure, and make the top value coming to know reality as it is.

So that small objective orientation is in part a set of epistemological strictures once we work them out, and a set of epistemological enablers once we work them out. The tools of rationality, tools of scientific method are enormously empowering in our individual lives and in our social lives, supposing we're sharing those.

And so they then become also normative principles that we adopt in our lives. And they stopped simply being a bunch of abstract prescriptions, but the way you put it, I think was the word attitude. Once you make them part of who you are,

It is your attitudes toward the world. It is how you function individually in relation to reality and then since other people we live in the same reality We want to navigate that reality together. Sometimes we need to be on the same page so to speak using those same epistemological tools together as in that case a joint quest to to understand reality and live better in it so

That's why I think Rand is great on the epistemological issues that she addressed. Popper spent more time working on more epistemological issues than Rand ever did, but there was a huge overlap between the two of them.

Just in closing, I would say that while they are both pro-science, pro-reason, pro-logic, it is on those issues of the fundamental status of sense perception and concepts where there is a divergence. Rand is a kind of more sophisticated empiricist, and I think Popper is fundamentally a kind of rationalist.

and I still like the critical rationalist label for describing him, but those differences need to be teased out. One more yes/no question, if that's okay. One of the things that Deutsch emphasizes is that knowledge is infinite, we'll never know the last thing that's ever

could be known that, so presumably our descendants will, you know, everything that we believe now will seem like

primitive superstition to our descendants. So there is no theory of everything. This concept that there's a theory of everything is just wrong. Does that seem right to you? Or is objectivism something like a theory of everything? I mean, do you think in... Yeah, you understand where I'm going with that. I think that's an interesting thing to think about.

The proposition or the assertion I think is still a little ambiguous to me. So do we say that there are some individual things that are just unknowable? Or is in principle every individual thing that exists or any individual event knowable? So then I would say I think in principle everything is knowable. There's nothing that exists that cannot come to be known.

The more interesting question though, the other side of that ambiguity would be to say when we are doing our philosophy or our science and what we're trying to do is in a more principled way, right? In an abstract way, say here are say the 10, 20 or 30 principles about the way the world works and everything that exists in the universe operates according to those principles that we've discovered.

Are all of those knowable? And there I would have to say, I don't know, because I don't know enough about the science to be able to say there are such, you know, 20 such governing principles or everything can be reduced to four fundamental forces or ultimately it's going to be 150,000 different kinds of forces out there. I think I'd have to be agnostic on that. That's me as an individual.

But what I think I then would say is I don't think any one individual can ever come to know everything because I do take that complexity argument just that any number of combinations that are out there are beyond the capacity of any individual mind right now, even with the amount of time that we would have to spend on it. So I would leave it as an agnostic split decision on that question. Okay.

Well, maybe when we go post-biological on the Dyson sphere or something. All right. Yeah, I think I'm enough of a humanist that I'm interested in the human answer to that question. Okay. Can I just ask one really quick question? I know we're out of time. To what degree do you consider yourself an objectivist? That's a good question. Interestingly, I am an objectivist.

But I don't think of myself fundamentally as an objector. I think the right way for scientists or philosophers or anybody who's serious is to say that first and foremost, I'm a philosopher. And these are the theories that I think are the best philosophers. I think if you try to reverse that order, you go into intellectual life saying I am a Popperian or I'm an objectivist.

uh i think that limits you that you're more interested in living up to the label rather than pursuing the truth so what i would say though is as a as a philosopher uh on the issues that rand wrote uh she's great there are some things that i've not thought through all the way so i would remain slightly agnostic on those issues

But maybe I would say the same thing about Popper, but I would say I am more objectivist than Popperian, as great as I think both of them are.

All right. Thank you. That's a great answer. And I cannot wait to edit this and listen to it again and most likely again and again. So thank you. He's not lying when he says that. Nice amount of territory. Yeah. Great questions, guys. I really appreciate that. Yes. You coming on here. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Okay. Pleasure. Hello again.

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