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Distinguished professor of philosophy
Faculty of Arts,
York University
4700 Keele St. North York
Ontario, M3J1P3, Canada
icj@nexus.yorku.ca

It might indeed be said that the majority of the problems of theoretical philosophy, and the most interesting ones, can be re-interpreted...as problems of method.

Insoluble difficulties in the 'pure' logic of science led Popper to propose, in 1935, that we treat science as a social institution constituted by a set of rules, or methodology, that furthers certain aims. Popper's subsequent work is consistent with this 'social' reading, but he nowhere makes it explicit. Virtually all of his critics (and some of his followers) overlook this decisive shift from the logical to the social, and as a result simply fail to appreciate this most original feature of his thought.
Although I find a 'social turn' at the centre of Popper's thought, it needs stressing that his concerns were first and always philosophical. The epigraph of this paper makes a bold and ambitious philosophical claim. So far as I know, Popper never portrayed himself as having put forward a social view of science. This is fair enough. The social turn we shall find in his work was not followed up by empirical work. Popper never carried out empirical study of the workings of the institutions of science, nor did he write a scientific biography. Indeed, it would be fair to say that he has not even done any historical studies of science, at least ones which involved the study of primary documents. He reframes his problem as methodological, and methodology is a set of social conventions. Thus it also is to be stressed that Popper does not reduce science to being just another social institution. It is a social institution, but a very special one in both its aims (transcendent truth) and its results (universal scientific knowledge). There must be no confusion between Popper's 'sociologism' and that of "the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge". Nonetheless, the thesis of this chapter is that Popper is a major theorist of the sociology of science: The Logic of Scientific Discovery contains many profound and original ideas on the social character and constitution of science, and, more to our purpose, those social ideas on science contain the germ of his later, very influential ideas on society and politics. In other words, I shall argue that Popper did not philosophise about science and then turn to apply that philosophy to social and political thought. He was thinking socially from the beginning.

1. The Received View of Popper on Science

To begin with, it may be helpful to outline the main ideas of The Logic of Scientific Discovery as they are usually described. The work is in two parts. In Part I the ideas are sketched, in Part II they are worked out and defended in detail as a series of answers to objections.
The book focuses on two problems which are labelled 'the problem of induction' and 'the problem of demarcation'.
The problem of induction is that of how to gain general theoretical knowledge from experience. Experience always comes in particulars: we observe something about this, that or the other. Knowledge, by contrast, is general, even universal. Logic allows that no number of particular statements describing the experience of observing white swans shall permit the deduction of a general statement of scientific knowledge such as 'all swans are white'. How, then, do we get from particular experience to universal knowledge?
The problem of demarcation is that of how sharply to differentiate science from non-science, including pre-science, pseudo-science, folk wisdom, and metaphysics, as well as logic and mathematics.
Since, for Popper, knowledge presupposes language and must be formulated in statements, he is able to reformulate the two problems more crisply: the problem of induction becomes, how can we reach the general statements of scientific law when the statements reporting our experience are necessarily limited and particular; the problem of demarcation becomes, how can we demarcate scientific statements from other statements?
If we accept his autobiographical account, Popper had been engaged in thinking about these issues since 1919, when he was 17.1 The first problem he says he solved fairly quickly: the relationship of scientific statements to statements of experience was deductive, not inductive. Logic allowed particular statements of experience to refute proposed universal scientific statements, and that, it turned out, was sufficient for the task at hand. Provided one did not expect science to consist of certain, or proved, knowledge, it was enough to have general statements that had survived attempts at refutation: they were not supported or recommended by anything other than the fact that they had so far survived whatever challenges experience had thrown at them. This made them the most qualified candidates for consideration as scientific knowledge.
Popper relates that it took him some years to realise that the two problems of induction and demarcation were connected, and that the demarcation problem was the deeper of the two: induction was one solution to the demarcation problem, deduction another. The solution to the demarcation problem that Popper poses and elaborates is that scientific statements be characterised as general statements which are falsifiable. Those already falsified belong to the history of science. Those not yet falsified are current science. Statements that are not falsifiable come in more than one type: there are the statements of logic and mathematics, which are tautologous truths; there are general statements that sound empirical but which nothing could falsify, these are metaphysical.
The reason science is best characterised as consisting of falsifiable general statements has to do with the manner in which science permits us to learn from experience. Puzzled by some logical conflict between our received ideas and statements capturing the evidence of experience, we seek a resolution. Three choices confront us. Either the report of experience is faulty;if not that, then the logical claim to detect a contradiction is faulty; if neither of those, then the received ideas are faulty. Thus is science the critical engagement of ideas with experience. It is the process of culling from among the ideas we have those that are worth criticising by the check2 of experience. The check of experience is not easy to meet. We need to guard against formulating our ideas in a vague, weak or evasive manner, for these make empirical criticism difficult, even impossible. To foster the confrontation of ideas with experience Popper makes a revolutionary proposal.
Sir Francis Bacon, founder of the view that induction is what characterises scientific method, saw clearly that adoption of the correct method was not, in itself, sufficient. The impulse to find what we want, to observe what is not there, is overwhelming. The mind is filled with what he termed 'prejudices'. Bacon therefore proposed that scientists must first work on emptying their minds of all preconceptions and curbing the almost irrepressible desire to jump to conclusions. Thus, for Bacon, being a scientist involves a good deal of inner struggle to achieve a certain psychological condition, a condition where the mind is free from prejudice and thus open and receptive to the experience of Nature as it really is. Only in that purified state, Bacon thinks, will the methodological canons of inductive reasoning, patiently pursued, keep one clear of error.
There are two features of Bacon's account that are worth noting here for their contrast with what Popper proposes. One is that Bacon's account is individualistic - the budding scientist struggles alone against his prejudices. The other is that it is psychologistic: bad habits of mind are the trouble; science can only be attained after one has developed good habits of mind. Elsewhere, Bacon did envisage scientific institutions,3 but not in his account of method.

2. Methodology and Social Practice

Popper's revolutionary move is not just to shift the methodological emphasis from induction to deduction - although that is a standard way to put it. Popper goes further: he also rejects Bacon's individualistic and psychologistic approach to readying oneself for science. Prejudices are not to be purged by some sixteenth century version of psychotherapy, but by confrontation with experience in a social setting. Science is a creative endeavour, it is the search for new knowledge, so Bacon's emphasis on the old - psychological state of the discoverer, on how ideas are obtained - is misplaced. What counts is how those ideas stand up to various checks we carry out on them, most importantly, the check of experience (LScD,q7 2). Instead of working on the state of our minds, Popper argues for an institutional approach. As he sees it, the cooperative and social character of scientific research checks our Baconians impulses to see what we want to see, to jump to premature conclusions, and so on.4 He refers to this as the friendly-hostile cooperation of scientists, and, more abstractly, as the intersubjective nature of the scientific enterprise (LScD, p. 44-48). Scientific ideas are formulated in publicly examinable ways, open to being checked by others as well as their proposers. Those others may be motivated in various ways: to find the truth, or by envy and hatred of the authors of the ideas. But the checking takes place within institutionalised methodological rules that are the best we can devise in an imperfect world. These rules do not ensure there will be no error, but they do create incentives to discover and expose error, rather than to evade it and cover it up.
How does Popper get from an inquiry firmly centred in the logic of science to an insight into aspects of scientific method that go beyond the logical into the social? Popper early in his discussion considers three objections to his view (LScD,q7 6). The first objection is that we expect science to deliver positive information, so it is wrong-headed to characterise it in a negative way, by refutability. This objection Popper parries by asserting that he will later show that positive information has a logical connection to refutability (the promise is cashed in LScD,q7q731-46 ).The second objection is to the effect that, in the same way that inductions cannot be verified, no more can falsifications. In rebuttal Popper maintains that there is here an asymmetry in the logical relations. One contradictory evidence statement is sufficient to refute a generalisation; no number of noncontradicting evidence statements is sufficient to establish a generalisation. The third objection is said to be more serious: refutations can be handily evaded by conventionalist stratagems, such as the ad hoc introduction of auxiliary hypotheses or the redefinition of terms, or simply by refusing to look at the contrary evidence. Popper finds this objection logically insuperable as it stands. He writes:

it is impossible to decide, by analysing its logical form, whether a system of statements is a conventional system of irrefutable implicit definitions, or whether it is a system which is empirical in my sense; that is, a refutable system... Only with reference to the method applied to a theoretical system is it at all possible to ask whether we are dealing with a conventionalist or an empirical theory. The only way to avoid conventionalism is by taking a decision: the decision not to apply its methods. (LScD, p. 82.)

decisions about the way in which scientific statements are to be dealt with. These decisions will of course depend in their turn upon the aim which we choose from among a number of possible aims. The decision here proposed for laying down suitable rules for what I call the 'empirical method' is closely connected with my criterion of demarcation: I propose to adopt such rules as will ensure the testability of scientific statements; which is to say, their falsifiability (LScD, p. 49).

3. Popper's Suggested Methodological Rules for Science

In the final section of Part I of The Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper discusses "methodological rules as conventions". He proposes a supreme or meta-rule which governs the later rules to be proposed. This reads:

(SR) "the other rules of scientific procedure must be designed in such a way that they do not protect any statement in science against falsification" (LScD, p. 54).

(R1) "The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game" (LScD, p. 53).

The second example is:

(R2) "Once a hypothesis has been proposed and tested, and has proved its mettle, it may not be allowed to drop out without 'good reason'" (LScD, p. 53-54).

(R3) "[We] are not to abandon the search for universal laws and for a coherent theoretical system, nor ever give up our attempts to explain causally any kind of event we can describe" (LScD, p. 61).

(R4) "I shall...adopt a rule not to use undefined concepts as if they were implicitly defined" (LScD, p. 75).

it is impossible to decide, by analysing its logical form, whether a system of statements is a conventional system of irrefutable implicit definitions, or whether it is a system which is empirical in my sense; that is, a refutable system...my criterion of demarcation cannot be applied immediately to a system of statements...Only with reference to the method applied to a theoretical system is it at all possible to ask whether we are dealing with a conventionalist or an empirical theory. The only way to avoid conventionalism is by taking a decision: the decision not to apply its methods (LScD, p. 82).

(R5) "[O]nly those [auxiliary hypotheses] are acceptable whose introduction does not diminish the degree of falsifiability or testability of the system in question but, on the contrary, increases it" (LScD, p. 83).

(R6) "We shall forbid surreptitious alterations of usage" (LScD, p. 84.)

(R7) "Inter-subjectively testable experiments are either to be accepted, or to be rejected in the light of counter-experiments" (LScD, p. 84).

(R8) "The bare appeal to logical derivations to be discovered in future can be disregarded" (LScD, p. 84).

(R9) "[A]fter having produced some criticism of a rival theory, we should always make a serious attempt to apply this criticism to our own theory" (LScD, p. 85n).

(R10) "[W]e should not accept stray basic statements - i.e. logically disconnected ones - but ... we should accept basic statements in the course of testing theories; or raising searching questions about these theories, to be answered by the acceptance of basic statements" (LScD, p. 106).

(R11) "This makes our methodological rule that those theories should be given preference which can be most severely tested...equivalent to a rule favouring theories with the highest possible empirical content" (LScD, p. 121).

(R12) "I propose that we take the methodological decision never to explain physical effects, i.e. reproducible regularities, as accumulations of accidents" (LScD, p. 199).

(R13) "a rule...which might demand that the agreement between basic statements and the probability estimate should conform to some minimum standard. Thus the rule might draw some arbitrary line and decree that only reasonably representative segments (or reasonably 'fair samples') are 'permitted', while a-typical or non-representative segments are 'forbidden'" (LScD, p. 204).

(R14) "[T]he rule that we should see whether we can simplify or generalise or unify our theories by employing explanatory hypotheses of the type mentioned (that is to say, hypotheses explaining observable effects as summations or integrations of micro events)" (LScD, p. 207).

4. Assessment

What then is to be made of this list of 15 rules ((SR) + (R1)-(R14))? First and foremost to reiterate: it is incomplete. A Constitution for the Republic of Science would need many more rules, and some specification of their institutional embodiment, including rules for dispute settlement. Popper makes no effort to organise the rules systematically and lay them out in a table so that they can be checked against one another and debated in relation to one another and the aims. This may explain why they are an aspect of his philosophy that is seldom discussed. The occasional challenge to one or another rule is seldom framed in a manner that suggests appreciation of the innovative brilliance of the idea. What seems to be at work is that both Popper and his critics suffer from a blindness to the institutional turn. Let us re-frame the rules by spelling this out.
What Popper's rules amount to is this. The demarcation between science and non-science cannot be stated in an abstract way, only in a practical way. Science is an activity carried on in a select community and this community is obedient to a set of rules which guide its activities. The community is both real and partial. Real because it consists of actual human beings, partial because their participation in this community is only one of the roles they play as social actors, and by and large their other roles are played in distinct, but overlapping communities. All scientists are, for example, citizens of nation states; virtually all scientists belong to families of orientation (their natal family), and the majority also to families of procreation. Most scientists belong to communities and groups in civil society (political, religious, voluntary, recreational). The vast majority of scientists belong to some one or other large institution that provides them with a livelihood: government departments, universities, laboratories, museums, business corporations, etc.
In none of these "outside" involvements is it necessarily the case that they conduct themselves by the same set of rules of procedure that Popper has been sketching out. Notoriously, there are critical and open-minded scientists who cleave to dogmatic religious beliefs and raise their children with a much stronger expectation they will also cleave to the religion than that they might in turn become scientists. The social institution of science and its constitutive rules are, then, a special niche in the overall social life of its members.
What kind of a social institution is it? Popper nowhere says anything about its internal organisation. The rules give us no guidance to the manner in which it is governed, or to whether there is established leadership. Indeed, although many rules are put forward for discussion, the issues of how these discussion are to be conducted and how decisions about amending the rules are to be made are not entered. Thus it is a stretch to see these rules as a Constitution for the Republic of Science or even as a proto-constitution. They are more like a proposed set of procedural rules for discussion by a body already in place.
Now of course science was at the time Popper wrote well and truly established in its place in society. It was in many ways unique among social institutions. Its acitivities tended to centre around the subinstitutions of the learned society, associated journals, universities, laboratories, and international conferences. Physics was understood by physicists to be a far-flung invisible college uniting colleagues from around the globe in common endeavours. But to point this out is also immediately to point out that there was a leadership. To be the senior professor at certain institutions, or the head of a learned society, was a concrete kind of leadership for which there was fierce competition. There was also intellectual leadership, independent of such posts, which turned solely on the esteem directed at the work of a particular person, regardless of formal post. And, without a doubt, there were some elements of charismatic leadership - scientists who could energise others with a vision, regardless of whether their own work was important.
Concrete leadership resided mostly in prestige institutions that themselves had constitutional means of selecting those position-holders. Election to professorships, elections in learned societies, the selection of journal editors, were all conducted by sets of rules bearing no relation to Popper's methodological or procedural rules. It is not at all clear that the weight of these offices and rules was brought to bear to move science in the direction Popper intended (especially if Kuhn is to be believed). Institutions and office-holders develop vested interests, some of an intellectual character. Thus, for example, the injunction to prefer the most severely tested theory, or always to apply a new criticism of the theory one opposes to one's own theory might not at all conform to institutional pressure and so be ignored.
Because his set of methodological rules is free-floating, not attached to any institutional framework, the task of defending them, and of debating them in a responsible way, is left up in the air. Popper has not provided a constitution for science, not even a declaration or charter of rights (and responsibilities) which the constitution is trying to embody in a system of governance. Perhaps that is as well. For the methodological rules Popper proposed are not intended for this or that university, this or that physics laboratory, nor are they intended for some kind of United Nations Organisation of physics. They are directed to science conceived of as a general and abstract republic. They enjoin: here, if you want to respect and advance these aims, is a set of proposed procedures. But "you" is unspecified, and what "you" are to do if you have what you think is a better idea is also unspecified. These proposals being published by a philosopher of science you thereby elect a kind of specialism of that name to debate these proposals. Yet since they are proposals to guide the practice of research in its most general aspect their testing and debate might seem to be most appropriately carried out by the community of scientists proper.
Another way to think of science is not as a series of concrete institutions but as an invisible college, an abstract institution rather like language. We might see Popper's rules as addressed to this wider community of science, one that has to do with self-identification and not with institutional gatekeepers. Popper's arguments and rules are then seen as directed to men and women of good will who want to advance the project of science. This could explain why individual scientists, in their autonomy, often pledge allegiance to Popper's vision of science, while the institutions to which they belong seldom do so. And parasitic institutions like those of the philosophy of science are even harder pressed to find any role for appreciative incorporation of Popper's ideas. Popper's lack of attention to the concrete institutional embodiments of science, and his efforts to formulate rules outside such constraints, betrays, I believe, a fundamental mistrust of existing institutions and practices. They were and are hierarchical and authoritarian and no longer welcoming to the man or woman of good will, as well as being subject to the corruptions of power and wealth. Later in his career, commenting on Thomas Kuhn's notion of "normal science", i.e. its concrete institutional embodiment, Popper declared that:

'Normal' science, in Kuhn's sense, exists. It is the activity of the non-revolutionary, or more precisely, the not-too-critical professional: of the science student who accepts the ruling dogma of the day; who does not wish to challenge it; and who accepts a revolutionary theory only if almost everybody else is ready to accept it -- if it becomes fashionable by a kind of bandwagon effect. To resist a new fashion needs perhaps as much courage as was needed to bring it about...
I admit that this kind of attitude exists; and it exists not only among engineers, but among people trained as scientists. I can only say that I see a very great danger in it and in the possibility of its becoming normal (just as I see a great danger in the increase of specialisation, which also is an undeniable historical fact): a danger to science and, indeed, to our civilization (Popper 1968, pp. 52-53).

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