Failure: Why Science Is So Successful by Stuart Firestein

Author:Stuart Firestein [Firestein, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Philosopher of Failure

Fools give you reasons,

Wise men never try.

—Some Enchanted Evening, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, 1949

Once upon a time, actually one day in 1919, the philosopher Karl Popper met up with the psychiatrist Alfred Adler in Vienna. “I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. ‘Because of my thousand-fold experience,’ he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: ‘And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.’” This event, when Popper was only an apparently precocious 17-year-old, seemed to have had a lifelong effect on him and led to the development of his most well known, if often misinterpreted, principle of falsifiability as the only dependable marker of a legitimate scientific hypothesis.

Popper arguably has had a greater effect on working scientists than any other modern philosopher of science. And among scientists he reigns as probably the best-known name in the philosophy of science—with Thomas Kuhn running a close second, mostly because of his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which gained popularity among nonprofessional audiences and made the phrase “paradigm shift” part of colloquial language. But Kuhn’s book and ideas would not be credited by most scientists as changing the way they performed or thought about experiments, whereas many would claim that to be the case for Popper.

In the realm of the curiously contrary, many, perhaps most, philosophers of science now regard Popper’s work as seriously flawed and of lesser value (Kuhn, by the way, remains in generally high regard). So the scientists see it one way, and the philosophers another. Not surprising. Without throwing Popper out completely, I’m inclined to go with the philosophers on this one since they are the professionals. Still, whatever you may think of Popper today, his project was an important one and he was successful at framing a question that remains current and troubling.

Popper’s original motivation was to answer a simple but dogged question: how can you reliably tell the difference between real science and pseudoscience? How can you know which science stories to trust and which seemingly scientific ideas are nonsense? How do you avoid being taken in by imposters, magicians, con artists, charlatans, and worst of all, well-meaning, devoted practitioners of marginal pseudoscience? If this seems at first trivial, I might point out that this question has not yet been answered satisfactorily, even in our technologically advanced Western cultures, let alone in cultures that remain dominated by so-called folk wisdom and various magical “explanations” about how things work. Based on recent history—from the fiasco over vaccines and autism to the conspiracy theories about the causes of AIDS, it seems that otherwise intelligent people cannot reliably tell the difference between scientifically valid explanations and pseudoscientific malarkey. Part of the problem, as Popper realized, is that legitimate science is sometimes wrong and pseudoscience occasionally stumbles onto something true.

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