[HN Gopher] The Logical Writings of Karl Popper
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The Logical Writings of Karl Popper
Author : Schiphol
Score : 34 points
Date : 2022-07-29 22:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (link.springer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (link.springer.com)
| leto_ii wrote:
| With the risk of being unpopular I have to admit I have found
| what I've read of Popper to be seriously overrated. So far I have
| gone through The Open Society... and the better part of The Logic
| of Scientific Discovery.
|
| Open Society to me read mostly like a critique of the political
| philosophy of Plato, Hegel and Marx, with brief mentions of what
| the open society is actually supposed to be (I recall some
| mentions of social engineering and other such things). At best it
| felt like a grounding for the currently dominant neo-liberal
| social order.
|
| The Logic... on the other hand does seem to bring novel content,
| but I feel the core of his endeavor is hopeless. Science
| definitely doesn't and can't work in a perfectly coherent
| algorithmic way. Science is a human social process that can't be
| subjected to a strict methodology. On this front I think Lakatos
| or even Kuhn are much closer to how things can/do work.
| domenicrosati wrote:
| Ya... those are not great places to start with him... as far as
| philosophy of science essays in conjectures and criticisms and
| objective knowledge are really great and much more mature than
| the logic for the reasons you mentioned. Plus he develops some
| of the logical tools like content theory and verisimilitude in
| really cool ways.
| tmaly wrote:
| I picked up two of his books a few months back.
|
| Learning Rust is far easier than groking some of his writings.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Thats surprising, from my experience his clarity is what sets
| him apart from most other german philosophers of the time. The
| open society and its enemies takes a really long breath to read
| but his shorter essay-style booklets are very good.
| [deleted]
| ogogmad wrote:
| (I like mathematical logic).
|
| Continental philosophy eschews formal logic and focuses more on
| literature and the arts as the source of philosophical truth.
| Some insights from Emmanuel Kant are used to justify this ([1]).
| Can someone explain this stance better than [1] does?
|
| _While there has been a great deal of sympathetic interest among
| analytic philosophers in the idea that philosophy should be
| continuous in method and subject-matter with the natural sciences
| -- what is commonly referred to as "positivism" -- Continental
| philosophy has generally dismissed such ideas as no more than a
| reversion to a pre-Kantian conception of the philosophical
| enterprise._
|
| [1] -
| https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/michaelrosen/files/contine...
| Archelaos wrote:
| In the mid 1990s I wrote my Master's thesis about the
| difference between Analytical and Continental philosophy. To
| summarise it: The difference is more sociological (who quotes
| whom), historical (which are the classics you refer to, such as
| Kant vs. Hume, etc.) and a matter of style (a tendency (not
| more) to use formal logical to make something explicit or do
| without it) than actual philosophical differences.
|
| For every content criterion that people have brought up to mark
| the difference between Analytical and Continental philosophy,
| one could usually find a prominent philosopher in either camp
| who match or does not match it:
|
| Analytical philosophy: Formal logic? -- The early Wittgenstein
| is fond of it, but the late Wittgenstein moves away from it.
|
| Analytical philosophy: Problems of philosophy as language
| problems? -- But Nietzsche and his fans (such as Mauthner).
|
| Analytical philosophy: Importance of natural sciences for
| philosophy? -- But Cassirer.
|
| Continental philosophy: Focus on hermeneutics? -- But Rorty.
|
| Continental philosophy: Organic thinking (Hegel, etc.)? -- But
| Quine's holism.
|
| Continental philosophy: Existentialism -- But many on the
| continent were not convinced. But many in the USA were
| interested. But Wittgensteins's mysticism.
|
| ...
| 6AA4FD wrote:
| I can give it a shot. I don't want to butcher it, but I feel
| like attention spans on here are pretty short for philosophy so
| here's the short version. Many continental philosophers appear
| to be skeptical of the separation of form and content necessary
| for logic to "work" in the context of another subject of study
| (Deleuze), interested in presenting tensions between ideas that
| do not clearly adapt themselves to exclusive truth or falsity
| (Derrida), or interested in presenting things that do not
| pretend to be particularly abstract or logical (Levinas).
|
| On a personal note, I want to say that I drifted to continental
| philosophy in my undergrad after studying and appreciating
| formal logic. I realized that mainstream analytical philosophy
| had a lot less to do with logic than I had imagined (no
| symbolization, no commonly agreed upon rules of deduction), and
| at a certain point the question of "why logic" presented
| itself. I haven't found many opportunities in my writing to use
| the more technical concepts of modality or nth-orders, let
| alone anything from category theory.
|
| e: Replaced induction with deduction, a typo
| bodhiandpysics1 wrote:
| The irony is that "why logic" has been definitely answered...
| all sorts of highly technical formal logic found use in
| computer science!
| 6AA4FD wrote:
| I believe it! But I was talking about my philosophy
| research, in value theory and art history. I don't see the
| irony.
| bodhiandpysics1 wrote:
| I think the irony is that all those weird logics turned
| out to not just be useful for logic... but literally
| actually really useful! Like people make lots of money
| based off of them
| ogogmad wrote:
| Intuitionistic and linear logics are good examples of
| "weird" logics that have had some relevance to computing.
|
| Intuitionistic: Curry-Howard, Dependent Type Theory, formal
| methods.
|
| Linear logic: Rust.
| lotw_dot_site wrote:
| Skimming this, I was interested whether Popper tried to do any
| work in the logic of Quantum Theory, and yes he did:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_experiment
|
| While I also advocate a more realist/Bohm-like theory above
| standard statistical "interpretations", I _would_ differ with
| Popper in that I find the principle of non-locality to be just
| fine indeed. My own "theory of everything" operates under the
| assumption that the fundamental objects of reality are
| universally defined (ie, over the entire mathematical domain that
| cosmologists call "the universe"). The big question then becomes
| how such spread out objects can appear to us a tiny things like
| hydrogen atoms and electrons. I think the geometric paradigm of
| Conformal Field Theory is the way to think about that question.
| Things start entering into the domain of String Theory at that
| point.
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