Karl Popper's Rejection of Induction | Mike Mazza

How does science work, and how does it differ from religion or pseudo-science? According to Karl Popper’s “falsificationism,” science, unlike religion and pseudo-science, doesn’t claim certainty; it aims only to disprove its hypotheses, and this is the source of its rationality. Popper proposed his theory as an alternative to the view that science distinguishes itself by proving its conclusions inductively. In this lecture, Mike Mazza discuss the reasons behind Popper’s anti-inductivism and falsificationism and how they undercut the rationality of science.

Recorded live on June 16th in Anaheim, CA as part of OCON 2024

Subscribe to ARI’s YouTube channel to make sure you never miss a video:
Download or stream free courses on Ayn Rand’s works and ideas with the Ayn Rand University app:

******

******

[davidb]

Hey, ARI, don't you think you should mention the name of the presenter of the talk in the title and/or the description?

[economicfreedom]

>>>"Popper claims the search for principles of induction entails a circular argument."

Actually, no he doesn't. He states in LOSD that the search for principles of induction entails an *infinite regress.* Not quite the same as circular reasoning.

[TeaParty]

What about Peikoff's theory of induction? And Harriman's applications of it? How can you understand Popper w/o their ideas? Popper has a "rational" rheory of tradition, so "reason" is valid.

[MikeDial]

I have always been an inductive reasoner. This fact allowed me to outproduce my fellow foreign-intelligence analysts. I tried to mentor other people in it, but many seem to resist this kind of thinking.

[DaleBolender-msjl]

Ayn Rand was not a scientist, she was a literary person!

[DaleBolender-msjl]

Scientists do not look for concepts, they attempt to formulate explanatory theories!

[economicfreedom]

So far, I don't understand Mazza's argument.

At ~16:50 he lists the premises to what he claims is Popper's conclusion regarding the circularity of arguments for Induction. Mazza's presentation is a bit messy because Premise 1 is a hypothetical (If X, then Y), while the others are indicative propositions (All X is Y). They don't mix very well.

Mazza presents the following syllogism as representing Popper's argument:

(A) Any generalization is arrived at thru induction; [major premise]
(A) Any inductive-principle is a generalization; [minor premise]
(A) ergo, Any inductive-principle is arrived at thru induction.

This First Figure syllogism in BARBARA (A, A, A) is valid in a purely formal, deductive sense. But I don't believe Popper actually could've written that in "Logic of Scientific Discovery" or anywhere else because the Major Premise is untrue, thus making the conclusion untrue, and Popper would've realized that immediately.

Popper could not have made, or suggested, a universal statement like "All generalizations are arrived at through induction" because the axioms of logic and mathematics are generalizations but they weren't arrived at through induction. That the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is always a constant, i.e., the transcendental number "pi", was not arrived at by observing lots of actual circles, taking lots of actual measurements of circumferences and diameters, calculating lots of ratios of C/D, and then averaging the results for convenience. "Pi" was arrived at strictly through acts of intellect.

[austinmorris]

So, you are saying the the "hypothesis" has to be more than just a guess. It has to come from an understanding of the underlying principles or premises?

[sjambler]

I think this is a bit of a chicken vs. egg problem. I can think of (almost?) no hypothesis which is not based at least to some extent on prior observation. To do a random sample of birds means having some rudimentary idea (theory?) of what constitutes a bird, i.e. not a two-ton pachyderm. Such prior "theorising" can be fairly rudimentary. I think it is also evolutionary: humans are for evolutionary reasons a pattern-recognising animal. Humans who could distinguish between the sound of a gazelle and the sound of a lion on the savanna were on average more successful in passing on their genes.

[abramgaller]

In duction is largely what is in the observable world.

[WolvesOfApollo]

I've not found a better defender of knowledge than Aristotle. His works are still the superior defense (OPAR is mostly his works repackaged). From The Analytics, Posterior and Prior, my paraphrase; Induction is art, deduction is science. Art comes first. The traditional arrangement of the Organon has these works out of order.

Aristotle invented deduction. He had to in order to train and teach others how to deny the sophists. No one understood or explained induction and deduction better than him and that is still true today. If interested in learning from the Master [Still Today] of Them That Know, the only translations I recommend are The Oxford Revised Edition edited by Jonathan Barnes. Barnes's 1976 translation of Posterior Analytics renders the 1925 Geoffrey Mure translation obsolete. Barnes's translation is the best thing to happen to understanding, and defending, of knowledge since Aristotle.

[kipling]

Having read Popper I never saw him once rejecting induction.

[giobd]

All men are mortal. How can we test that proposition following Popper?

[cas]

Been wanting to hear an Objectivist position on Karl Popper. I get the feeling I know what it will be however lol...

[economicfreedom]

Mazza has an ARI interview with Aaron Smith on why other philosophers can't get Ayn Rand's philosophy right. Yet here he is in this video NOT getting Karl Popper right — there are no direct citations from Popper's works, and Mazza's summaries and paraphrases are often incorrect.

Years ago in his lectures on Objectivism, Peikoff told the live audience that he would occasionally reference other philosophies only in order to "brush away a few flies." Not exactly an example of scholarly integrity that invites other philosophers to engage with Objectivism after studying closely. It's more like, "We're right; you're wrong!"

The main reason academic philosophers of various schools of thought don't engage with Mazza, Binswanger, Peikoff, and Rand herself, is that they find it to be a combination of truisms (elements of older philosophies with which they already agree, so there's no pressing need to re-argue them) + arbitrary assertions that support a-prior biases ("ideological priors'), which are not scrutinized closely by Rand's acolytes, such as Objectivism's assumptions that the material universe necessarily existed before the appearance of non-material consciousness (in other words, basically just garden-variety, 19th-century-style, naive materialism), or that the concept of "number", which most professional mathematicians and physicists concede does NOT have a fully-accepted definition (nor does it need to have one) necessarily refers to the "measurement of the quantity of something" with the putative "units of measurement" abstracted away. Objectivism then takes an arbitrary assertion about "number" and expands it into a theory of concepts in its epistemology. The idea that the concept "chair" is some sort of measurement of a quantity known as "chair, " with the "unit of such measurement" being dropped, is simply incoherent, and has been both studied and criticized even long ago by people such as academic philosopher William F. O'Neill who wrote "With Charity Toward None: An Analysis of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand" (1972). To my knowledge, neither Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, nor any member of Rand's NYC inner circle commented on the book; and the few hardcore, serious "Students of Objectivism" back in the day who read the book merely dismissed it with the excuse that the author simply "misunderstood Objectivism, so there's no need to reply."

And ARI actually believes that other philosophers "simply can't get Ayn Rand right." Hmmm. Might be a case of "denial" combined with "Pot, Kettle, Black."

[waneagony]

“Popper’s Alternative to Induction: Falsification” This is mistaken. Conjecture and refutation, or evolution of ideas is Popper’s alternative. Falsification is just one particular example of conjecture and refutation that applies very well to science.

[alexanderx]

idk if I really care about induction. My epistomology has no need of that particular principle. It's couched in different terms. You could think of it as a small scale and big scale interdependancy of ideas. A network or pyrimid or strutural approach to epistomology. At the small scale ideas have to avoid fallacy and at the large scale they must interconnect with all other relevant ideas. Predictive power being the gold standard for certainty of their validity. They are not just repeatable, but that they can be used to predict elements of knowledge that have hitherto been unexplored.

[bartvanderhaegen]

Not a single actual quote from Popper ...

[DaleBolender-msjl]

Tell me how a principle of science, say the conservation of energy is arrived at through induction? you will not be able to do so!

[EstuardoAlmavarez]

Rand was the last Aristotelian whose principal flaw was her rejection of Hume.

She derives an ought (very naughtily) from an is (of human rationality). She made a new categorical imperative while condemning Kant's to the netherworld.