I am revisiting David Stove‘s Popper and Beyond: Four Modern Irrationalists. There is something “off” about it, which is captured in a review at Amazon:

Stove’s primary target was the idea that there might be a problem about inductive inferences, one dating to Hume who was the first to notice it and try to solve it. His secondary target was Popper, whose solution to Hume’s problem was to develop a deductivist account of scientific rationality (critical rationalism, as an alternative to logical empiricism)–naively attempting to change the philosophy of science to address a problem which, in Stove’s opinion, doesn’t exist. His tertiary targets were “historicist” philosophers of science such as Kuhn and Feyerabend….

One does not learn the actual positions of any of these folks from Stove’s book, unfortunately, much less any of their actual errors or excesses. Stove’s own position seems to be a kind of “naive realism” about scientific change and progress: almost as if there were no questions worth asking on the subject. I’ve encountered secondary literature on Kuhn and Feyerabend before that utterly failed to understand them, but Stove doesn’t even make the attempt.

Here is Stove’s argument, reduced to its essence:

• Scientific knowledge has progressed.
• Some philosophers of science hold the view that scientific knowledge is provisional because what is believed to be true can always be falsified by new knowledge.
• Saying that scientific knowledge is provisional is tantamount to saying that scientific knowledge has not progressed.
• The philosophers of science who hold that scientific knowledge is provisional are therefore irrational because they effectively deny that scientific knowledge has progressed.

Stove assumes that which he seeks to prove. His reasoning is therefore circular. His book is a waste of ink, paper, and pixels (depending on the format in which it is published).

Stove, nevertheless (unwittingly) poses a question that demands an answer: If scientific knowledge is provisional (as it always is), is it possible to say that scientific knowledge has progressed; that is, more is known about the universe and its contents than was known in the past?

The provisional answer is “yes”. Human knowledge of the universe progresses, in general, but it is never certain knowledge and some of it is false knowledge (error). Witness the not-so-settled science of cosmology, which has been in flux for eons.

There is broad but not universal agreement that the universe (or at least the part of the universe which is observable to human beings) originated in a Big Bang. Expansion followed. But the rate of expansion of the universe and the cause(s) of that expansion remain beyond the ken of science. The knowledge that the universe is expanding — and expanding at an ever-increasing rate — is an advance on prior knowledge (or belief), which held that the universe is contracting or that it is neither contracting nor expanding. But the knowledge of an accelerating expansion must be provisional because new observations may yield a different description of the universe.

That example brings us to the essential dichotomy of science: observation vs. explanation. What is observed is observed with varying degrees of certainty. The variations depend on the limitations of our instruments, sensory organs, and brains (which may be conditioned to misperceive some phenomena). Where things often go awry is in explaining that which is perceived, especially if the perception is wrong.

A classic case of misperception is the once-dominant belief that the Sun circles Earth. It’s easy to see how that misperception arose. But having arisen, it led to erroneous explanations. One erroneous explanation was that the Sun is embedded in a “sky dome” that surrounds Earth at some distance and rotates around it.

A current case of misperception is the deliberately inculcated belief that the general rise in observed temperatures on Earth from the late 1970s to late 1990s is due almost entirely to an increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 caused by human activity. The dominance of that theory — which objective observers know to be incomplete and unsubstantiated — may well lead to the impoverishment of vast numbers of persons in North America and Western Europe because the leaders of those countries seem to be virtue-signaling CO2-reduction race to limit and eventually ban the use of fossil fuels.

If David Stove were still with us, he would probably say what I have just said about the current misperception, given his penchant for iconoclasm. But where would that leave his “naive realism” about scientific progress? He would have to reject it. In fact, knowing (as he undoubtedly did) of the erroneous belief in and explanation a geocentric universe, he should have rejected his “naive realism” about scientific progress before taking Popper et al. to task for their skepticism about the validity of new scientific knowledge.

Yes, scientific knowledge accrues. It accrues because knowledge (to a scientist) is ineluctably incomplete; there is always a deeper or more detailed explanation of phenomena to be found. The search for the deeper or more detailed explanation usually turns up new facts (or surmises) about physical existence.

But scientific knowledge actually accrues only when new “knowledge” is treated as provisional and tested rigorously. Even then, it may still prove to be wrong. That which isn’t disproved (falsified) adds to the store of (provisional) scientific knowledge. But, as Stove fails to acknowledge, much old “knowledge” hasn’t survived, and some current “knowledge” shouldn’t survive (e.g., the CO2-driven theory of “climate change”).

Here is the argument that Stove should have made:

• Scientific knowledge has progressed on many fronts, but not to the exclusion of error.
• Some philosophers of science hold the view that scientific knowledge is provisional because what is believed to be true can always be falsified by new knowledge.
• Given the track record of science, those philosophers are correct to say that scientific knowledge is provisional.
• It is possible for scientific knowledge to accrue, and to be provisional at the same time.

Think of all of the ink, paper, and pixels that could been saved if Stove had thought more carefully about science and issued a PowerPoint slide instead of a book.

Related post: Deduction, Induction, and Knowledge