Bold added to both quotes.
In my copies it is:
In other words, an attempt to justify the practice of induction by an appeal to experience must lead to an infinite regress.
My physical copy is from Hassell Street Press. In the copyright and title pages both say Basic Books and 1962.
Otherwise I found your C&R quotes to match mine exactly. I haven’t checked anything other than C&R.
I only have a .pdf version and it’s not great to search in. I found the quote by searching the keyword “rudimentary”. I had ebook versions of all the others except for Realism and The Aim of Science.
Interesting. I checked my physical copy (Routledge, bought new maybe 5-6 years ago) and my quote is correct for that edition as well as my ebook version. The most recent copyright date on my physical copy is 2002, the same as my ebook.
Afaik the book was first released in 1962 by Basic Books. You may have a first edition? My editions have three prefaces for the first three editions. The prefaces to both the second and third editions mention revisions to the text.
Some of the missing quotes could well be from earlier editions?
Do you have an ebook copy of C&R that agrees with your physical copy’s version of the quote?
Yes.
Hassell Street Press seems to do reprints. So I think mine is a reprint of the first edition. There’s only one preface for mine.
Could be.
“The true rationalist is the man who tries to reach the truth by arguing; but he does not think that he is infallible. He holds that the other man has a right to criticize him, and that if he is wise he will give way to criticism.”
— The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“The rationalist attitude is characterized by the importance it attaches to argument and experience, and to the opinion of others; and by the readiness to correct one’s own opinions. It therefore involves the recognition that nobody is exempt from error, that we must all be on the watch for our mistakes, and that we must learn from them as much as possible.”
— The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2 (1945)
Of course Popper differs from classical rationalism, empiricist rationalism and dogmatic rationalism but still is within the rationalist label as defined by Rand due to his rejection of induction. This is evidenced in the quote from her that you posted.
I am not sure of the meaning of a “huge” supporter but she definitely identified induction as the tool of concept formation. So I am inclined to answer “yes” to your question as the. conceptual nature of humans is the essential, differentiating characteristic of our identity.
Always contextually. There is nothing that is context free.
I have been very busy. I don’t mean to ignore anyone but I sometimes need to prioritize given my time constraints.
Good to know. I think this discussion is good for identifying exactly what a potential debate would be about. So let’s continue.
Popper’s similarity to Kant comes from his belief that theory precedes observation.
Concept formation starts with the validity of our sense-data. But it then needs to be integrated into concepts using induction. Concepts creation cannot be deduced but deduction can logically invalidate some concepts. Like phlogiston, for example.
“Manifest” sounds mystical and I wouldn’t use it to explain anything. There needs to be an integration of sense-data (perception) and concepts. This is done through abstraction using both induction and deduction.
Oh shit. I did get them from secondary sources but they were scattered and I don’t know exactly where. Sorry. They could have been from Binswanger but I don’t think so. I didn’t mean to post anything false. Sorry again.
Neither of these quotes matches my book.
Do you think I’m a rationalist?
Going forward, please either quote from primary sources or cite the secondary source you used in addition to citing the primary source. Also please use secondary sources that you think are reliable (not random webpages that come up when googling a quote to try to find a source for it). Everyone else should also do this too, please.
If you don’t know the secondary source for a quote in your notes, please check it in a primary source, find a good secondary source, or don’t use the quote.
(I made contractions to the quotes, Elliot made none)
My shortcut for a priori is “before observation”, although I don’t think Popper believed in a priori. My fuller understanding is that it means “before and completely without observation”. So something that can be reasoned about purely logically without any use of physical reality. Although it can later be connected to physical reality and can be our foundation for understanding physical reality.
A priori thinkers usually say we can know somethings a priori and those things are absolutely 100% certain and serves as a secure foundation. That’s completely antithetical to Popper!
(I was supposed to lookup what a priori actually means, but I have to go right now and I think what I thought before is relevant either way.)
I recognized a priori was problematic to apply to Popper but I didn’t give it that much thought. I wanted more to explain what I thought Popper thought about ‘theory first’, although I have actually read little of what Popper himself said, so it was lots of influence from both you and DD and also what I believe to be true myself. I was hoping the reader could see what I wrote is different from a priori, but it would definitely have been better to address a priori.
I also think “conceptual structures” is very significant and not at all something I would expect Popper to have said. I think @actually_thinking is referring to Kant’s categories. So here goes my probably flawed understanding of what Kant said about that:
There are a priori structures/categories in our brains/minds that have to apply to any object of thought for us to understand them. Time, space, causality and identity are such categories. I’m not clear whether Kant thought objects actually had any of these things in reality, but at least the mind applies them for us. I’m also not clear whether Kant thought the mind changes the actual reality to make the objects conform to these categories.
Again, I don’t think Popper thought anything of the sort.
No problem.
When I said Popper was a rationalist I really wasn’t expecting any pushback. With his philosophy being called Critical Rationalism and him explaining what a rationalist is while describing himself, it seemed pretty clear to me that, yes, Popper is a rationalist. And by extension, yes, you too are a rationalist. You both deny the validity of induction, with this trait being a cornerstone of even classical rationalists such as Descartes, Leibniz and such. I know Popper and you reject (at least most) innate ideas because this would imply a foundation of sorts. Foundations are built by induction, so this is another piece that makes you a rationalist. Popper talks about his agreement with Hume here on page 381 and 382 in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. What am I missing? Are you and Popper both not rationalists? Or is Popper a rationalist and you aren’t?
It is obviously absolutely wrong to think that Popper agreed with Kant about (most) a priori categories. When I applied the term a priori to Popper I was focused more on his skipping over the foundational necessity of the validity of sense-data when forming conceptions. I accept tabula rasa, and to believe that there is something in the mind that precedes perception is a kind of a priori. He believes in some theory preceding observation, minimally math. He even describes his belief as a priori.
"It is thus essential, after all, that the function, or rather the class of functions, should be offered to us, a priori, by mathematics because of its mathematical simplicity. It should
be noted that this class of functions must not depend upon as many parameters as the number of observations to be satisfied.’ Weyl’s remark that ‘the class of functions should be offered to us a priori, by mathematics, because of its mathematical simplicity’, and his reference to the number of parameters agree with my view."
He did, as evidenced by the quote above.
Popper often used ‘rationalism’ to mean pro-reason as opposed to types of irrationalism. I guess you would know that Rand would have chosen ‘rationalism’ instead of ‘objectivism’, because she was pro-reason, if the name wasn’t already taken.
All quotes are from C&R.
What Objectivism calls “rationalism” Popper usually prefaces with “Cartesian” and he would rather prefer to call it “intellectualism”. And from what I’ve read, when he speaks of “intellectualism” he’s against it:
This, in brief outline, is the theory which the history of philosophy has called ‘rationalism’. (A better name would be ‘intellectualism’.)
A major issue in the history of modern philosophy is the struggle between Cartesian rationalism (mainly continental) on the one hand, and empiricism (mainly British) on the other.
Sometimes he contrasts “rationalism” with traditionalism:
The contrast between epistemological pessimism and optimism may be said to be fundamentally the same as that between epistemological traditionalism and rationalism. (I am using the latter term in its wider sense in which it is opposed to irrationalism, and in which it covers not only Cartesian intellectualism but empiricism also.)
He says he’s a rationalist, pro-reason, as opposed to traditionalists who are anti-reason or skeptical of reason:
I am a rationalist of sorts. […] Undoubtedly there is a traditional hostility between rationalism and traditionalism. Rationalists are inclined to adopt the attitude: ‘I am not interested in tradition. I want to judge everything on its own merits; I want to find out its merits and demerits, and I want to do this quite independently of any tradition. I want to judge it with my own brain, and not with the brains of other people who lived long ago.’
The proper answer to my question ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’ is, I believe, ‘By criticizing the theories or guesses of others and–if we can train ourselves to do so–by criticizing our own theories or guesses.’ (The latter point is highly desirable, but not indispensable; for if we fail to criticize our own theories, there may be others to do it for us.) This answer sums up a position which I propose to call ‘critical rationalism’. It is a view, an attitude, and a tradition, which we owe to the Greeks. It is very different from the ‘rationalism’ or ‘intellectualism’ of Descartes and his school, and very different even from the epistemology of Kant.
Popper using “rationalism” as pro-reason:
This is how the critical attitude of the Presocratics foreshadowed and prepared for, the ethical rationalism of Socrates: his belief that the search for truth through critical discussion was a way of life–the best he knew.
Verificationists, I admit, are eager to uphold that most important tradition of rationalism–the fight of reason against superstition and arbitrary authority.
I could only match the first sentence:
Fifth edition 2011 publication:
The rationalist attitude is characterized by the importance it attaches to argument and experience. But neither logical argument nor experience can establish the rationalist attitude; for only those who are ready to consider argument or experience, and who have therefore adopted this attitude already, will be impressed by them. That is to say, a rationalist attitude must be first adopted if any argument or experience is to be effective, and it cannot therefore be based upon argument or experience.
Also in the same chapter Popper explains how he will use the term “rationalism” for that chapter (bold added for emphasis):
Since the terms ‘reason’ and ‘rationalism’ are vague, it will be necessary to explain roughly the way in which they are used here. First, they are used in a wide sense; they are used to cover not only intellectual activity but also observation and experiment. It is necessary to keep this remark in mind, since ‘reason’ and ‘rationalism’ are often used in a different and more narrow sense, in opposition not to ‘irrationalism’ but to ‘empiricism’; if used in this way, rationalism extols intelligence above observation and experiment, and might therefore be better described as ‘intellectualism’. But when I speak here of ‘rationalism’, I use the word always in a sense which includes ‘empiricism’ as well as ‘intellectualism’; just as science makes use of experiments as well as of thought. Secondly, I use the word ‘rationalism’ in order to indicate, roughly, an attitude that seeks to solve as many problems as possible by an appeal to reason, i.e. to clear thought and experience, rather than by an appeal to emotions and passions.
It seems you’ve been misinformed by whatever secondary source you read. I think you also ought to mistrust their philosophical analysis of Popper. If their scholarship is this bad and sloppy I suspect their philosophical analysis is too.
I used “manifest” because I was writing for myself and because that’s the terminology Popper used in On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance. I checked the dictionary and this is how I used “manifest” and the way I understood Popper used it:
New Ox:
clear or obvious to the eye or mind: the system’s manifest failings.
Webster’s Third International Dictionary:
**a.: capable of being readily and instantly perceived by the senses and especially by the sight : not hidden or concealed : open to view
the earth’s convexity had now become strikingly manifest — E.A.Poe
**b.: capable of being easily understood or recognized at once by the mind : not obscure :obvious
If I had written for you I would’ve used “obvious”. I don’t think “obvious” captures it entirely because “manifest” also means “appearing” or “becoming”. Like here in New Ox as verb:
- [no object] (of an ailment) become apparent through the appearance of symptoms: a disorder that usually manifests in middle age.
- [no object] (of a ghost or spirit) appear: one deity manifested in the form of a bird.
That would fit how I used it to explain induction because you would do many observations and then the pattern would appear in the mind.
C&R:
At the heart of this new optimistic view of the possibility of knowledge lies the doctrine that truth is manifest. Truth may perhaps be veiled. But it may reveal itself.
I think just using “truth is obvious” would be confusing because it also says “Truth may perhaps be veiled.”
I think you can approximately use “obvious” instead of “manifest” for my writing though. Especially when I write “becomes manifest.”
Thanks for getting all the words right which is the main important thing for quotes. When it’s not the end of a sentence, please end a quote with no punctuation (or an ellipsis), not a period.
The quote starts in the middle of Popper quoting Weyl, what do you think is the best convention for handling such cases? The way actually_thinking did it seems fine. The problem is just that I start off reading the quote as if those were Popper’s words, and then I have to change my reading when I see '.
Oh I didn’t notice. I just checked the words without looking at the meaning yet. That’s a problem. Something should be done to indicate a quote starts within a quote, at minimum adding an open quotation mark then an ellipsis on the front. A good thing to do is generally to explain it in your own quote introduction or quote some the quote introduction in the text that says who is being quoted. So e.g.:
LScD:
Weyl discusses and rejects a very interesting attempt to base simplicity on probability. '[…] It is thus essential, after all, that the function, or rather the class of functions, should be offered to us, a priori, by mathematics because of its mathematical simplicity. It should be noted that this class of functions must not depend upon as many parameters as the number of observations to be satisfied.'7 Weyl’s remark that ‘the class of functions should be offered to us a priori, by mathematics, because of its mathematical simplicity’, and his reference to the number of parameters agree with my view (to be developed in section 43).
I didn’t notice on my first reading either. I’m not sure whether I caught it while reading the article or not.
Popper says he agrees with a quote from Weyl which includes “a priori”, but the subject matter for Popper and Weyl is about a non-standard definition of “simplicity”. And Popper says “simplicity” can be explained as “degree of testability” which I think would involve observation. So it’s hard to know what Popper actually thought of a priori here. I have a draft for a post about this.
Yeah I just looked at it and some surrounding text a bit and it’s hard to tell what Popper is actually saying without reading significantly more. The quote is not self-explanatory.
Would it be bad to convert quote marks into block quotes? Like:
LScD:
It is thus essential, after all, that the function, or rather the class of functions, should be offered to us, a priori , by mathematics because of its mathematical simplicity. It should be noted that this class of functions must not depend upon as many parameters as the number of observations to be satisfied.
Weyl’s remark that
the class of functions should be offered to us a priori , by mathematics, because of its mathematical simplicity,
and his reference to the number of parameters agree with my view (to be developed in section 43).
That’s the best reader experience at least.
Yeah that’s more readable to me. It’s fine if you mention you reformatted it. Though you left out the introduction to the first block quote indicating it’s from Weyl which could be confusing, and I think starting with an ellipsis would be nice in this case because there’s significant truncation and there’s double truncation (you’re starting in the middle of both Popper and Weyl) which is more confusing than truncating text from just one person.
Be careful though. Popper put the comma after “simplicity” outside the quotation, not inside it like you have it. Also, even if it was inside it, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s part of the quote; people often put ending punctuation inside quotation marks that is actually part of their own sentence outside of the quotes, which is a stylistic convention that I have issues with (and Popper may too considering he put his comma after the end quote here). If you convert inline quotes to block quotes, then you have to figure out where to put ending punctuation because putting it inside a blockquote is different than putting it inside an inline quote.
PS you have an extra space after “a priori” twice. I think Discourse has a bug that causes that sometimes.
Yeah, I wondered about what to do with the comma. I thought about doing a hybrid where only the first quote is a block quote but the inconsistency would be confusing.
It seems to happen, only in Discourse, because they’re italics. Maybe something about the formatting of the ebook I’m copying from. I’ll try to remember that.
Either this:
Weyl’s remark that
the class of functions should be offered to us a priori, by mathematics, because of its mathematical simplicity
, and his reference to the number of parameters agree with my view (to be developed in section 43).
Or delete it and call that part of the conversion process. I wouldn’t put any punctuation there (beside the newlines) if I was writing a forum post which commented on a mid-sentence block quote like that.
Popper and I both are not (Cartesian or Objectivist) rationalists. ActiveMind gave an explanation about the terminology.
Accepting induction isn’t required to avoid rationalism. What’s required in short is a knowledge creation method that uses evidence. Popper’s method isn’t induction but does use evidence. You don’t seem to be analyzing the properties of what we replaced induction with to see if it’s rationalist, just assuming that anyone who rejects induction must have certain sorts of ideas.
I know Popper and you reject (at least most) innate ideas because this would imply a foundation of sorts. Foundations are built by induction, so this is another piece that makes you a rationalist.
You try to guess what people think based on your attempts at logical analysis and knowing their premises, but it isn’t working very well. Popper and I don’t reject innate (inborn) ideas (but we do say it’s possible to change them). You don’t understand our views on foundations. Your logical analysis that tries to use some things you think are our premises is not close to how we actually think.
I was going to say this too. I’m taking a long time posting things though. I could post smaller pieces at a time.
He also claims Popper is a skeptic without having criticized or analyzed evolutionary epistemology: