Any Good Criticism of Karl Popper's Epistemology?

Public announcement: the author already posted quite a lot about the same topic on Less Wrong:

• Bayesian Epistemology vs Popper (April 2011)
• Popperian Decision making (April 2011)
• reply to benelliott about Popper issues (April 2011)
• Do people think in a Bayesian or Popperian way? (April 2011)
• The Conjunction Fallacy Does Not Exist (April 2011)
• David Deutsch on How To Think About The Future (April 2011)
• [Link] Reason and Morality: Philosophy Outline with Links for Details (October 2017)
• [Link] Simple refutation of the ‘Bayesian’ philosophy of science (November 2017)
• Less Wrong Lacks Representatives and Paths Forward (November 2017)
• [Link] Open Letter to MIRI + Tons of Interesting Discussion (November 2017)
• ...and this (November 2017)

The posts from April 2011 are all in negative karma, except for the link to the David Deutsch video (which is a link to a lecture, without a description). The posts from October/November 2017 are currently at 0 or 1 karma points, because downvoting is disabled.

I think that reading the information above already tells a lot.

I am posting this here, because I have myself not noticed the April 2011 articles, so I was under a mistaken impression that this was a new user, completely unfamiliar with local common knowledge. I engaged in a debate... and it had a completely predictable trajectory, that could have been obvious from reading similar debates under the older articles.

That means, during the previous 6 years, this interaction provided zero benefit to both sides. I think we do not need another dozen articles of the same kind.

Some more context: The author is selling a $400 course about (his interpretation of) Popper.

Can you suggest a good statement by Popper of his final position? He seemed to be a) forever railing that people misunderstood him b) frequently changing his positions. So it is hard to know what to criticize.

And given he seems to be in low repute among professional philosophers (that I have spoken to) it would be good to hear the elevator pitch as to why understanding his ideas in detail is a good use of our time.

You could start with the criticisms in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry.

(simplified)

a) Refutation requires acceptance of the theory underlying the experiment that refuted the theory. E.g. Think of all the theory that needs to be accepted to agree that the Michelson-Morley experiment refuted absolute space-time. So if you cannot prove any theory refutation also fails.

b) All critical tests are actually repairable and are not fatal even if failed. Also all tests are probabilistic - you never have a 100% refutation. The way anomalies are actually dealt with is way beyond the scope of Popper's theory.

c) The importance of auxiliary hypotheses in any test. It is argued that Popper, in dealing with this issue, greatly reduced the scope of his theory, and made it far weaker and more subjective.

> This doesn't solve the problem of figuring out which ideas are good, it just gives an arbitrary answer (shorter doesn't mean truer).

It taken literally this suggests you don't understand SI. Which says that shorter explanations are preferred all else being equal. A short hypothesis that strongly contradicts the data is not preferred to something consistent with the data in various ways.

I have ordered his response to critics and will read it. But I find the contrast bettwen his claimed disproof of induction and the no free lunch theorems reflects quite poorly on Popper.

What the NFL theorems say, roughly, is that to learn from inducation you need a prior on hypothesis. With that, you can learn. So example, a bias towards simplicity is a prior, as are spatial and temporal locality. No-one knows why these priors work but they do so far. Popper seems to say (like many philosphers he maintains plausible deniability) is that it us just am anazing fluke that it has worked so far.

What does Popper really offer? A room full of philosphers to work it out? Vague formulations like that we "prefer" certain hypothesis?

I don't see anything of value so far but I will read his response.

On the other hand I wish more people woudl listen to him on the open society and the value of free discourse.

Popper didn't change views significantly but LScD is harder to understand, and philosophy is more than hard enough to understand in general. Popper is in low repute because he disagreed with people, and advocated some things (e.g. that induction is imposisble) that they consider ridiculous (which isn't an answer to him). Plus most people go by secondary sources. My colleague surveyed over 100 textbooks and found none of them accurately represented Popper's views – they're broadly similar to the SEP.

(a) Simply ignores Popper's appraoch to fallibilism and conjectural knowledge. It's saying CR doesn't work given infallibilist premises that Popper disputes. (Note the demand for proof.) CR accepts fallibility (which has very compelling logical arguments) and then takes it seriously by e.g. developing a fallibilist theory of knowledge rather than demanding certainty of refutation (which is impossible).

(b) Yes you can repair criticism by modifying an idea or by criticizing the criticism (which is essentially modifying the idea by adding a footnote to address the criticism, which adds content that wasn't there previously). How is that a criticism? Also I don't know why you think fallibilism = probability. Uncertainty frequently isn't numeric. "We may be mistaken in some way we haven't thought of" isn't a probability, the future growth of knowledge is *unpredictable*.

(c) Again there's no understanding of Popper's views here. The thing you're complaining about is somethign Popper emphasized, explained, and addressed. And you don't say what about Popper's position on the matter is weak or subjective (neither of which are part of Popper's own account, and "weak" sounds suspiciously like "fallibile", while "subjective" sounds suspiciously contrary to Popper's theory of Objective Knowledge, which FYI is one of his book titles. I didn't find the weakness or subjectivism when I read Popper, and you haven't told me where to look with any specificity.)

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Elevator pitch:

CR solves the fundamental problems of epistemology, like how knowledge can be created, which induction failed to solve. It's a very hard problem: the only solution ever devised is evolution (literally, not analogously – evolution is about replicators, not just genes). In terms of ideas, evolution takes the form of guesses and criticism. CR develops much better criticisms of induction than came before, which are decisive. CR challenges the conventional, infallibilist conception of knowledge – justified, true belief – and replaces it with a non-skeptical, non-authoritarian conception of knowledge: problem-solving information (information adapted to a purpose). Although we expect to learn better ideas in the future, that doesn't prevent our knoweldge from having value and solving problems in the current context. This epistemology is fully general purpose – it works with e.g. moral philosophy, aesthetics and explanations, not just science/observation/prediction. The underlying reason CR works to create knowledge is the same reason evolution works – it's a process of error correction. Rather than trying to positively justify ideas, we must accept they are tentative guesses and work to correct errors to improve them.

This position should not be judged by how nice or strong it sounds; it logically works OK unlike every rival. Decisive issues for why something can't work at all, like induction faces, have priority over how intuitive you find something or whether it does everything you'd like it to do (for example, CR is difficult to translate into computer code or math, which you may not like, but that doesn't matter if no rival epistemology works at all).

I expect someone to bring up Solomonoff Induction so I'll speak briefly to that. It attempts to answer the "infinite general patterns fit the data set" problem of induction (in other words, which idea should you induce from the many contradictory possibilities?) problem with a form of Occam's Razor: favor the ideas with shorter computer code in some language. This doesn't solve the problem of figuring out which ideas are good, it just gives an arbitrary answer (shorter doesn't mean truer). Shorter ideas are often worse because you can get shortness by omitting explanation, reasoning, background knowledge, answers to critics, generality that isn't necessary to the current issue, etc. This approach also, as with induction in general, ignores critical argument. And it's focused on prediction and doesn't address explanation. And, perhaps worst of all: how do you know Occam's Razor is any good? With epistemology we're trying to start at the beginning and address the foundations of thinking, so you can't just assume common sense intuitions in our culture. If we learn by induction, then we have to learn and argue for Occam's Razor itself by induction. But inductivists never argue with me by induction, they always write standard English explanatory arguments on philosophical topics like induction. So they need some prior epistemology to govern the use of the arguments for their epistemology, and then need to very carefully analyze what the prior epistemology is and how much of the work it's doing. (Perhaps the prior epistemology is CR and is doing 100% of the work? Or perhaps not, but that needs to be specified instead of ignored.) CR, by contrast, is an epistemology suitable for discussing epistemology, and doesn't need something else to get off the ground.

(If you'd like more detail, see the reading recommendations linked at the bottom of my post.)

Why is this so downvoted. This is good, we need more of this. It's exercises like this that push Epistemology forward. Upvoted.

I don't currently have the time to participate in this exercise, but I would follow this thread.