Spookily, I'm actually listening to the on-line version of the Popper
broadcast at this very moment.

I often feel Popper was only partially understood.
Yes he boxes "true scientists" into a very purely objectively
falsifiable domain, but I don't believe from his later work that he
actually undervalues other kinds of knowledge and creative thinking
.... he just makes the distinction about what is meant by the narrow
term "science". Scientists are not excluded, we just need to be
careful not to call it science.

(Apart from "All Life is Problem Solving", most of my impression of
Popper is from second hand sources, including David Deutsch and
comparisons with Wittgenstein.)

Ian

On 2/8/07, Tom Milner-Gulland <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> In Our Time discusses Karl Popper:
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml
>
> Personally I would rather be a pseudo-scientist from the point of view of
> making conceptual advances than call myself a 'true' scientist and as such
> be apparently indistinguishable from a pseud. This critical passage illustrates:
>
> "The three consequences stemming from Einstein's theory of gravitation, that
> are usually brought forward as supporting it, are also not impressive. The
> movement of the perihelion of Mercury was known before and can be explained
> in various ways (Whittaker 1953). The 'bending of light' round the Sun had
> been suggested before, and the much advertised confirmation in the eclipse
> of 1919 involved assuming Einstein's law of 'bending' to obtain the 'scale
> constants', with the help of which the results were derived which were
> supposed to prove it. The deflections of stars that moved transversely or in
> the opposite direction to that predicted were omitted. The mean deviation
> and its direction varied from plate to plate during the eclipse, suggesting
> refraction in a turbulent diffuse 'atmosphere'. Nevertheless a mean value
> was obtained "in exact accord with the requirements of the Einstein theory"
> (Lick Observatory Bulletin 1922, No. 346). Later attempts have given
> different values. This must be one of the most extraordinary self-deceptions
> in the whole history of science (see Poor 1930)."
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/academ/whatswrongwithrelativity.html
>
> There is very little in the realm of succinctly expressed theory (political,
> physical, psychological etc.), outside of highly speculative metaphysics,
> that is not ultimately testable, and never - as Popper himself says - can
> the 'scientific' inference be deemed true, so one must be led to wonder how
> he can maintain such an exalted concept of true science. Any idealised model
> of physical interactions is immediately false, if by false one means not
> perfectly consistent with reality; Popper does not do such models justice.
>  It is when a theory has not passed the tests -- or, worse, has failed them
> (as surely has theory of relativity) -- yet is nevertheless upheld as being
> valid (as though 'innocent until *indisputably* proven guilty') that the
> complaint should be raised.
>  Surely Popper does not, himself, qualify as being a scientist or one of
> scientific methods, by his own criteria.
>
> Tom
>