Critical rationalism is an
epistemological
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Episte ...
philosophy
Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...
advanced by
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the cl ...
on the basis that, if a statement cannot be logically deduced (from what is known), it might nevertheless be possible to logically falsify it. Following
Hume, Popper rejected any
inductive logic
Inductive reasoning is a method of reasoning in which a general principle is derived from a body of observations. It consists of making broad generalizations based on specific observations. Inductive reasoning is distinct from ''deductive'' re ...
that is
ampliative Ampliative (from Latin ''ampliare'', "to enlarge"), a term used mainly in logic, meaning "extending" or "adding to that which is already known".
This terminology was often used by medieval logicians in the analyses of the temporal content of thei ...
, i.e., any logic that can provide more knowledge than deductive logic. In other words if we cannot assert it logically, we should at the least try to logically falsify it, which led Popper to his
falsifiability criterion.
Popper wrote about critical rationalism in many works, including: ''
The Logic of Scientific Discovery
''The Logic of Scientific Discovery'' is a 1959 book about the philosophy of science by the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper rewrote his book in English from the 1934 (imprint '1935') German original, titled ''Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnisthe ...
'' (1934/1959), ''
The Open Society and its Enemies
''The Open Society and Its Enemies'' is a work on political philosophy by the philosopher Karl Popper, in which the author presents a "defence of the open society against its enemies", and offers a critique of theories of teleological historicism ...
'' (1945), ''
Conjectures and Refutations
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the cl ...
'' (1963), ''
Unended Quest
''Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography'' is a 1976 book by the philosopher Karl Popper.Karl Popper (9762002). ''Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography''Contents.London and New York: Routledge
The work first appeared with the title ...
'' (1976), and ''
The Myth of the Framework
''The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality'' is a 1994 book by the philosopher Karl Popper.Karl R. Popper (1994). ''The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality''DescriptionContents. London and New York: ...
'' (1994).
Criticism, not support
Critical rationalists hold that scientific
theories
A theory is a rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon, or the results of such thinking. The process of contemplative and rational thinking is often associated with such processes as observational study or research. Theories may be s ...
and any other claims to
knowledge
Knowledge can be defined as awareness of facts or as practical skills, and may also refer to familiarity with objects or situations. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often defined as true belief that is distinc ...
can and should be rationally criticized, and (if they have
empirical
Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and ...
content) can and should be subjected to tests which may falsify them. Thus claims to knowledge may be contrastingly and normatively evaluated. They are either falsifiable and thus empirical (in a very broad sense), or not falsifiable and thus non-empirical. Those claims to knowledge that are potentially falsifiable can then be admitted to the body of empirical science, and then further differentiated according to whether they are retained or are later actually falsified. If retained, further differentiation may be made on the basis of how much subjection to criticism they have received, how severe such criticism has been, and how probable the theory is, with the ''least'' probable theory that still withstands attempts to falsify it being the one to be preferred.
[, section 43, especially footnote *1 and *2] That it is the ''least'' probable theory that is to be preferred is one of the contrasting differences between critical rationalism and classical views on science, such as positivism, which holds that one should instead accept the ''most'' probable theory.
[ The least probable theory is preferred because it is the one with the highest information content and most open to future falsification.
Critical rationalism as a discourse positioned itself against what its proponents took to be epistemologically ]relativist
Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. Ther ...
philosophies, particularly post-modernist
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...
or sociological
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation and ...
approaches to knowledge. Critical rationalism holds that knowledge is objective (in the sense of being embodied in various substrates and in the sense of not being reducible to what humans individually "know"), and also that truth is objective (exists independently of social mediation or individual perception, but is "really real").
However, this contrastive, critical approach to objective knowledge is quite different from more traditional views that also hold knowledge to be objective. (These include the classical rationalism of the Enlightenment
Enlightenment or enlighten may refer to:
Age of Enlightenment
* Age of Enlightenment, period in Western intellectual history from the late 17th to late 18th century, centered in France but also encompassing (alphabetically by country or culture): ...
, the verificationism
Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine which maintains that only statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses) are cogniti ...
of the logical positivists
Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle (also known as the verifiability criterion o ...
, or approaches to science based on induction
Induction, Inducible or Inductive may refer to:
Biology and medicine
* Labor induction (birth/pregnancy)
* Induction chemotherapy, in medicine
* Induced stem cells, stem cells derived from somatic, reproductive, pluripotent or other cell t ...
, a supposed form of logical inference which critical rationalists reject, in line with David Hume
David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment philo ...
.) For criticism is all that can be done when attempting to differentiate claims to knowledge, according to the critical rationalist. Reason is the organon
The ''Organon'' ( grc, Ὄργανον, meaning "instrument, tool, organ") is the standard collection of Aristotle's six works on logical analysis and dialectic. The name ''Organon'' was given by Aristotle's followers, the Peripatetics.
The si ...
of criticism, not of support; of tentative refutation, not of proof.
Supposed positive evidence (such as the provision of "good reasons" for a claim, or its having been "corroborated" by making successful predictions) does nothing to bolster, support, or prove a claim, belief, or theory.
In this sense, critical rationalism turns the normal understanding of a traditional rationalist, and a realist, on its head. Especially the view that a theory is better if it is less likely to be true is in direct opposition to the traditional positivistic view, which holds that one should seek theories that have a high probability.[ Popper notes that this "may illustrate Schopenhauer's remark that the solution of a problem often first looks like a paradox and later like a truism". Even a highly unlikely theory that conflicts with a current observation (and is thus false, like "all swans are white") must be considered to be better than one which fits observations perfectly, but is highly probable (like "all swans have a color"). This insight is the crucial difference between naive falsificationism and critical rationalism. The lower probability theory is favoured by critical rationalism because the greater the informative content of a theory the lower will be its probability, for the more information a statement contains, the greater will be the number of ways in which it may turn out to be false. The rationale behind this is simply to make it as easy as possible to find out whether the theory is false so that it can be replaced by one that is closer to the truth. It is not meant as a concession to justificatory epistemology, like assuming a theory to be "justifiable" by asserting that it is highly unlikely and yet fits observation.
Critical rationalism rejects the classical position that knowledge is ]justified true belief
Definitions of knowledge try to determine the essential features of knowledge. Closely related terms are conception of knowledge, theory of knowledge, and analysis of knowledge. Some general features of knowledge are widely accepted among philoso ...
; it instead holds the exact opposite: that, in general, knowledge is unjustified untrue unbelief. It is unjustified because of the non-existence of good reasons. It is untrue, because it usually contains errors that sometimes remain unnoticed for hundreds of years. And it is not belief either, because scientific knowledge, or the knowledge needed to, for example, build an airplane, is contained in no single person's mind. It is only what is recorded in artifacts such as books.
Non-justificationism
William Warren Bartley
William Warren Bartley III (October 2, 1934 – February 5, 1990), known as W. W. Bartley III, was an American philosopher specializing in 20th century philosophy, language and logic, and the Vienna Circle.
Early life and education
Born in Wilk ...
compared critical rationalism to the very general philosophical approach to knowledge which he called justificationism, the view that scientific theories can be justified. Most justificationists do not know that they are justificationists. Justificationism is what Popper called a "subjectivist" view of truth, in which the question of whether some statement is true is confused with the question of whether it can be justified (established, proven, verified, warranted, made well-founded, made reliable, grounded, supported, legitimated, based on evidence) in some way.
According to Bartley, some justificationists are positive about this mistake. They are naïve rationalists, and thinking that their knowledge can indeed be founded, in principle, it may be deemed certain to some degree, and rational.
Other justificationists are negative about these mistakes. They are epistemological relativists, and think (rightly, according to the critical rationalist) that you cannot ''find'' knowledge, that there is no source of epistemological absolutism. But they conclude (wrongly, according to the critical rationalist) that there is therefore no rationality, and no objective distinction to be made between the true and the false.
By dissolving justificationism itself, the critical rationalist (a proponent of non-justificationism) regards knowledge and rationality, reason and science, as neither foundational nor infallible, but nevertheless does not think we must therefore all be relativists. Knowledge and truth still exist, just not in the way we thought.
Non-justificationism is also accepted by David Miller and Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the cl ...
. However, not all proponents of critical rationalism oppose justificationism; it is supported most prominently by John W. N. Watkins
John William Nevill Watkins (31 July 1924 – 26 July 1999) was an English philosopher, a professor at the London School of Economics from 1966 until his retirement in 1989 and a prominent proponent of critical rationalism.
Life
In 1952, Wat ...
. In justificationism, criticism consists of trying to show that a claim cannot be reduced to the authority or criteria that it appeals to. That is, it regards the justification of a claim as primary, while the claim itself is secondary. By contrast, non-justificational criticism works towards attacking claims themselves.
The pitfalls of justificationism and positivism
The rejection of "positivist" approaches to knowledge occurs due to various pitfalls that positivism falls into.
1. The naïve empiricism
In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological theory that holds that knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empir ...
of induction
Induction, Inducible or Inductive may refer to:
Biology and medicine
* Labor induction (birth/pregnancy)
* Induction chemotherapy, in medicine
* Induced stem cells, stem cells derived from somatic, reproductive, pluripotent or other cell t ...
was shown to be illogical by Hume. A thousand observations of some event A coinciding with some event B does not allow one to logically infer that all A events coincide with B events. According to the critical rationalist, if there is a sense in which humans accrue knowledge positively by experience, it is only by pivoting observations off existing conjectural theories pertinent to the observations, or off underlying cognitive schemas which unconsciously handle perceptions and use them to generate new theories. But these new theories advanced in response to perceived particulars are not ''logically'' "induced" from them. These new theories may be wrong. The myth that we ''induce'' theories from particulars is persistent because ''when'' we do this we are often successful, but this is due to the advanced state of our evolved tendencies. If we were really "inducting" theories from particulars, it would be inductively logical to claim that the sun sets ''because'' I get up in the morning, or that all buses must have drivers in them (if you've never seen an empty bus).
2. Popper and David Miller showed in 1983 that evidence supposed to partly support a hypothesis can, in fact, only be neutral to, or even be counter-supportive of the hypothesis.
3. Related to the point above, David Miller, attacks the use of "good reasons" in general (including evidence supposed to support the excess content of a hypothesis). He argues that good reasons are neither attainable, nor even desirable. Basically, Miller asserts that all arguments purporting to give valid support for a claim are either circular or question-begging. That is, if one provides a valid deductive argument (an inference from premises to a conclusion) for a given claim, then the content of the claim must already be contained within the premises of the argument (if it is not, then the argument is ampliative Ampliative (from Latin ''ampliare'', "to enlarge"), a term used mainly in logic, meaning "extending" or "adding to that which is already known".
This terminology was often used by medieval logicians in the analyses of the temporal content of thei ...
and so is invalid). Therefore, the claim is already presupposed by the premises, and is no more "supported" than are the assumptions upon which the claim rests, i.e. begging the question.
Variations
William Warren Bartley
William Warren Bartley III (October 2, 1934 – February 5, 1990), known as W. W. Bartley III, was an American philosopher specializing in 20th century philosophy, language and logic, and the Vienna Circle.
Early life and education
Born in Wilk ...
developed a variation of critical rationalism that he called pancritical rationalism
Pancritical rationalism (literally "criticism of all things", from pan-, "all", also known as PCR), also called comprehensively critical rationalism (CCR), is a development of critical rationalism and panrationalism originated by William Warren B ...
.
Argentine-Canadian philosopher of science Mario Bunge
Mario Augusto Bunge (; ; September 21, 1919 – February 24, 2020) was an Argentine-Canadian philosopher and physicist. His philosophical writings combined scientific realism, systemism, materialism, emergentism, and other principles.
He was ...
, who edited a book dedicated to Popper in 1964 that included a paper by Bartley, appreciated critical rationalism but found it insufficient as a comprehensive philosophy of science, so he built upon it (and many other ideas) to formulate his own account of scientific realism
Scientific realism is the view that the universe described by science is real regardless of how it may be interpreted.
Within philosophy of science, this view is often an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" Th ...
in his many publications.[See, for example, among secondary sources:
*
*
* ]
See also
*Münchhausen trilemma
In epistemology, the Münchhausen trilemma, also commonly known as the Agrippan trilemma, is a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the theoretical impossibility of proving any truth, even in the fields of logic and mathematics, without a ...
*Positivism dispute
The positivism dispute (german: Positivismusstreit, links=no) was a political-philosophical dispute between the critical rationalists (Karl Popper, Hans Albert) and the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas) in 1961, about the methodo ...
People
*Hans Albert
Hans Albert (born 8 February 1921) is a German philosopher. Born in Cologne, he lives in Heidelberg.
His fields of research are Social Sciences and General Studies of Methods. He is a critical rationalist, paying special attention to rational h ...
*David Deutsch
David Elieser Deutsch ( ; born 18 May 1953) is a British physicist at the University of Oxford. He is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation (CQC) in the Clarendon Laboratory of ...
* John Eccles
*Ernest Gellner
Ernest André Gellner FRAI (9 December 1925 – 5 November 1995) was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist described by ''The Daily Telegraph'', when he died, as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals, and by ''The Ind ...
*Hans Adolf Krebs
Sir Hans Adolf Krebs, FRS (, ; 25 August 1900 – 22 November 1981) was a German-born British biologist, physician and biochemist. He was a pioneer scientist in the study of cellular respiration, a biochemical process in living cells that ex ...
*Reinhold Zippelius
Reinhold Zippelius (born 19 May 1928) is a German jurist and law scholar. Now retired, he was formerly the professor of the Philosophy of law and Public law at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Life and career
Reinhold Walter Zippelius was ...
References
Further reading
*Maxwell, Nicholas
Nicholas Maxwell (born 3 July 1937) is a British philosopher.
Maxwell taught philosophy of science at University College London, where he is now Emeritus Reader. In 2003 he founded Friends of Wisdom. He has published fifteen books. He has pub ...
(2017
Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment
UCL Press, London. Free online.
* Niemann, Hans-Joachim. ''Lexikon des Kritischen Rationalismus'', (Encyclopaedia of Critical Rationalism), Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 2004, . More than a thousand headwords about critical rationalism, the most important arguments of K.R. Popper and H. Albert, quotations of the original wording. Edition for students in 2006, .
* Parusniková, Zuzana & Robert S. Cohen (2009). ''Rethinking Popper''
Description
an
contents.
Springer.
* Reinhold Zippelius
Reinhold Zippelius (born 19 May 1928) is a German jurist and law scholar. Now retired, he was formerly the professor of the Philosophy of law and Public law at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Life and career
Reinhold Walter Zippelius was ...
. ''Die experimentierende Methode im Recht'' (trial and error in jurisprudence), (Academy of Science, Mainz) 1991,
External links
Critical Rationalism: a personal account
Critical Rationalism Blog
Discusses critical rationalism from a libertarianist political point of view
*
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Rationalism
Epistemological theories
Epistemology of science
Karl Popper
Metatheory of science