Tales From The Reverend?????s Office: Why Won?????t Daniel Peterson STFU?

[_Gadianton]

"The human sciences have no method of their own. Yet one might well ask, with Helmholtz, to what extent method is significant in this case and whether the other logical presuppositions of the human sciences are not perhaps far more important than inductive logic."

Pretty devastating to the apologist use of Gadamer. Some day we should create an index of all the ideas they've misused for their cause. It doesn't matter if the idea was right or wrong, but did the apologist understand the idea in the first place?

It's not necessarily irrational of them to misuse ideas. It's all for show, none of them care about really getting to the bottom of anything, just derailing, and so taking the time to properly understand something is a waste of time.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Part 2(d): Epistle to The North African

The insufficiency of Helmholtz to the “problem of method” is rooted in his poor application of Kant:

They follow Kant in modeling the idea of science and knowledge on the natural sciences and seeking the distinctive feature of the human sciences in the artistic element (artistic feeling, artistic induction). But the picture that Helmholtz gives of work in the natural sciences is rather one-sided, seeing that he does not believe in “sudden flashes of intuition” (or in so-called “inspirations”) and regards scientific work only as the “the self-conscious work of drawing iron-clad conclusions.” (p.7)

Considering we are reading a portion of the book titled ‘The Question of Truth as it Emerges in the Experience of Art’, it becomes a bit more clear why Gadamer mentions the notion of “artistic induction”. Considerations about aesthetics actually play a critical role because it overlaps with other sorts of intellectual activity and thus gets subsumed by other concerns with epistemology. For Kant (and for Cognitive Scientists today, no less), how one thinks about art is going to be linked to how one thinks about politics, literature, and a sundry of other topics.

Now, Helmholtz knows that historical knowledge is based on a kind of experience quite different from the one that serves in investigating natural laws. Thus he seeks to determine why the inductive method in historical research proceeds under conditions different from those obtaining in the study of nature. To this end he uses the distinction between nature and freedom, which is the basis of Kantian philosophy. Historical study is different because in its domain there are no natural laws, but rather voluntarily accepted practical laws—i.e. commandments. The world of human freedom does not manifest the same absence of exceptions as natural laws.(p.7-8)

One would think the view Helmholtz espoused would actually appeal to Mormons, given how intrinsic the notion of a libertarian free will is to the worldview espoused by the Book of Mormon. Yet I must remind all that any affirmation of Gadamer in this section really cements you to a fundamental rejection of Helmholtz on that topic:

This line of thought, however, is not very convincing. Basing the inductive investigation of the human world of freedom on Kant’s distinction between nature and freedom is not true to Kant’s intentions; nor is it true to the logic of induction itself. Here Mill was more consistent, for he methodically excluded the problem of freedom. Moreover, Helmholtz’s appealing to Kant without following out the consequences of doing so bears no real fruit, for even according to Helmholtz the empiricism of the human sciences is to be regarded in the same way as that of meteorology, name with renunciation and resignation. (p.8)

This brings me to the final passage from the section entitled ‘(A) The Problem of Method’:

But in fact the human sciences are a long way from regarding themselves as simply inferior to the natural sciences. Instead, possessed of the intellectual heritage of German classicism, they carried forward the proud awareness that they were the true representatives of humanism. The period of German classicism had not only brought about a renewal of literature and aesthetic criticism, which overcame the outmoded baroque ideal of taste and of Enlightenment rationalism; it had also given the idea of humanity and the ideal of enlightened reason, a fundamentally new content. (p.8)

It serves as a segue into the next section ‘(B) The Guiding Concepts of Humanism’, but I wish to pause here. We’ve spent some time in the ‘Introduction’ to ‘Truth and Method’ and spent even more time carefully moving through the very first section of Gadamer’s book which started on page 3 and ended on page 8. A certain amount of context has been established and we’ve allowed Gadamer himself to express not only his intentions and aims, but took some time to see how he likes to develop ideas. Now seems like a good place to return to Daniel’s blog post ‘Can the Study of History Yield Genuine Knowledge?’ and look at the very first sentence:

There are those — some of them read my blog — who appear to argue that science is the only valid kind of knowledge, and that anything that isn’t scientific isn’t really knowledge.

Once again I must claim the bolding; Daniel is using “science” here in our contemporary American sense. We know from reading ‘Truth and Method’ that what got translated as “science” is not always functionally equivalent to the way Daniel is using it here. Despite reproducing an entire paragraph of Gadamer where terms like “human sciences”, “science”, and “natural sciences” are used in close proximity to each other and are essential to even understanding what Gadamer is trying to demonstrate, no mention of translation is to be had.

I find it peculiar that a man of Daniel Peterson’s education and career would commit such an oversight. Surely the former director of the ‘Middle Eastern Texts Initiative’ from 1992 to 2010 would be sensitive to issues of translation in a philosophical work composed in German and then put into English by translators who were not involved with the creation of the German original. It’s not like ‘Truth and Method’ was written in a language unknown to Daniel, the man’s German is probably ten times better than my own in every way.

In fact I’m reminded of a story Daniel tells often from his mission in the German speaking canton of Bern in Switzerland. The version I’ll reproduce comes from his 2004 FAIRMormon presentation ‘Autobiographical Notes on My Testimony’:

One experience, in particular; I remember tracting out a woman in Beatenberg, just above the Thunersee, Lake Thun, in Switzerland. A beautiful place up on a mountainside there and there’s a Protestant Bible home there, an evangelical biblical college there. Tracted this woman and the woman said, ‘My husband isn’t home yet but he should be home in about five minutes and then he’ll tell you where you’re wrong.’

I thought, ‘Oh this sounds interesting. Let’s stay around.’

Well he came in and he sat us at a big seminar table in his home and he brought out a stack of books, including Greek lexicons and all this sort of thing, and then he looked at us and sort of smirked and laughed, and said, ‘Well, you don’t know Greek do you? Ha-ha-ha!’ You know, going to nail these ignorant Mormon missionaries.

Well, I had by then transferred to a Greek major and so I pulled my little Greek New Testament out of my pocket which I just happened to have with me and I said, ‘Well it’s my specialty at the university.’

And I wish that I had had a camera because the smile faded from his face, he never brought up the Greek lexicons, no manner of Greek ever came up. Now he probably could’ve killed me because I’d only had, I think, first year Greek at that point. He probably was a lot better than I was but the thing was he didn’t know that he could kill me and that was what it was all about. It was about intimidation and bluffing. And I bluffed back (feeling quite nervous) and he folded.

Well I’ve learned since then that bluffing is a great deal of anti-Mormonism. People claiming to know things they don’t know, people trying to intimidate the yokel Mormons and sometimes you just have to stand up to them.

I have to say, this theme of Daniel boldly presenting a book and “bluffing” in a way that always leads to avoiding the activity of actually reading carefully the words written inside the book fascinates me. Perhaps, dearest Blixa, the Right Reverend might admonish me for insisting that Daniel never reads any of the books or authors he so consistently name. Am I being unfair?

Daniel wasn’t just being sloppy about neglecting the issues surrounding the translation of “science” from German into English, he also failed to mention that he fundamentally disagrees with an extremely important premise of Gadamer’s section ‘The Problem of Method’.

Take a look at a blog post written by Daniel in October of 2018 called ‘Might You be a Brain in a Vat?’ and you’ll see the following (bolding mine):

This blog’s resident scientistic ideologue, who comments pseudonymously, posted a remark a few hours ago that caught my attention:

“Creationism,” he opined, “is not scientifically valid because it is an unfalsifiable idea.”

Now, this fellow operates on the basis of a very broad definition of creationism. For most folks, the term typically but rather sloppily refers to “young-earth creationism.” Some extend it to refer to “intelligent design.” He, on the other hand, effectively uses it for anybody who believes in a non-deistic God.

But I’m not particularly interested right now in the specific issue of “creationism.” Nor am I really interested in arguing about the nature of science, which, I agree, generally does rest on the concept of “falsifiability.” (I’ve read my Karl Popper, after all.) And I’m certainly not claiming that evidence, proof, and justification are irrelevant where they’re available, or that absolutely anything goes.

This actually poses quite a problem, yet I would understand Blixa if, unlike Daniel Peterson, you had not “read” your “Karl Popper, after all” my observation might be lost on you. If we go to Popper’s works though and spend just a little time actually looking at what he said, we’ll find some interesting comparisons between Popper and Gadamer in addition to seeing a rather tough contradiction Daniel has put himself in.

I understand my dear Blixa. I can already hear your cries of protest at having to read the words of Karl Popper and thus be burdened with two German philosophers you care so little for, but I feel as if I have no choice. Mormon Apologists are far from the most rigorous group of partisans out there and we are always at risk of taking on their habits. Not imitating Daniel Peterson’s atrocious heuristic and lackadaisical manner is of paramount import to me.

I consider it a matter of basic intellectual hygiene.

[_Kishkumen]

Wonderful! Please keep it up. I read with great interest, even if I have little to add.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Back on 8 September 2020, I posted a brief blog entry (“Can the study of history yield genuine knowledge?”) in which, even more briefly, I cited a passage from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., rev., translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 4. I used that passage as a jumping-off point for a point of my own; I wasn’t attempting an exposition of Gadamerian aesthetics or of Gadamer’s overall position on the human sciences.

My point was, simply, that disciplines such as history can and do furnish genuine knowledge, even if they neither yield nor flow from universal laws like those of the physical sciences.

That’s all. The point seems to me so obvious as to be undeniable.

So I was surprised, just now, to see a very lengthy and quite ponderous series of comments elsewhere that seem to have been intended to demonstrate that my reading of Gadamer — a reading that, so far as I can tell, I’ve never offered here or anywhere else — is superficial and false.

I skimmed through them pretty rapidly, but it appears that one of my alleged problems is my supposed failure to grasp the distinction between the English word science and the German term Wissenschaft. However, I’ve known the difference between those two words for, literally, most of my life. Here, for instance, is something (by no means complete or exhaustive) that I posted regarding the topic back in August 2019, on this very blog...

Sauce

Similar energy:

[_MrStakhanovite]

Part 2(e): Epistle to The North African

As a student of Mopologetics one must ask, blessed Blixa, what is it that draws Daniel Peterson to the likes of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Popper? Both men could not have been more different in temperament or in the content of their beliefs, belonging to rival schools of thought whose intellectual mores and style of expression sharply contrast with one another. It is my contention that despite their differences, Gadamer and Popper still have certain things in common that attracts Daniel to their projects, though he doesn’t grasp the particulars. In short, I believe Daniel seeks to enlist the reputation and authority of both Gadamer’s and Popper’s celebrated works in his mopologetic labors against modern atheism.

In 2015 Daniel gave a presentation at the exalted FairMormon conference with the jazzy title
‘The Reasonable Leap into Light: A Barebones Secular Argument for the Gospel’:

All right, I want to talk about a topic that I’ve been thinking about for a long, long time and I called it — the title that has been in my mind for a long time has been The Reasonable Leap into Light. It’s an allusion to the concept of a leap of faith. The subtitle – A Bare-bones Secular Argument for the Gospel – I don’t know, that just came to me. I probably won’t use it again, but I wanted to address an issue that has bothered me for a long, long time. I hear people say things like, “I know it’s not rational, I know it’s not logical, but I choose to believe.” And what I want to argue is that belief is not irrational. It is not illogical. You’re not crucifying your mind in order to believe. I’m not going to argue that you can prove religious claims true or specifically Latter-day Saint claims true. But I am going to argue that they’re reasonable. And I think in some cases, on some specific issues, we can get pretty strong security.

I should say immediately that I agree with Daniel that to be a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints doesn’t require anyone to sacrifice their intellect or embrace irrationality to simply affirm the beliefs held by the brethren in Salt Lake City. Just because there are some pretty bad apologetic arguments being floated by Mopologists doesn't mean there aren't good arguments or that there somehow can’t be.

Somehow I suspect that the above declarations about the commensurate nature of contemporary Mormon beliefs with rational viability will fall on deaf ears in Daniel’s case. Because I don’t expressly affirm his ability to be rational and instead find the viability of the positions he articulates to be untenable and blatantly contradictory in nature, he will simply equivocate this as an attack on his religious community writ large.

In the above passage you can detect the indignation of Daniel’s at others not considering him to be rational and logical and in the following paragraph you can witness his response of reasserting his own preeminence in rationality by way of his apologetic writings. In fact, he is accumulating confidence in the Church at such an impressive clip that he’ll need multiple books just to have enough space to present them all:

I started off – and I may have mentioned this before — but I started off wanting to write a book. I was involved with a young man who wanted to leave the church. He wanted to have his name removed from the records and I began trying to formulate arguments that might help him out. And eventually I thought, you know, some of these are pretty good. Maybe they should be written up into a short book. So I began tinkering with a short book and then it became a big book, and then I broke it into two books. And now I’ve broken it into four books. I’m splitting off a fifth book. And now just today, the thought occurred to me, maybe there’s a sixth book that really needs to be written as sort of a preface to this. So the fact is I’m probably going to die before I publish any of them. That’s the only way they’ll get published. They’ll have to rip them out of my cold fingers. But it’s a big project and it frustrates me sometimes because I think there are things that – they’re already out there. I’m not claiming much of this to be original with me — but there are things that I’d like to put together in maybe an original way or a way that many Latter-day Saints, at least, haven’t seen and that it might be helpful to some people. I’m frustrated by how long it takes. I just don’t get to it. Or, rather, I’m getting to it in bits and pieces but it’s such a big project it’s going to take a long while to get to. But I’d love to get it out there and the sooner I can the better, I suppose.

Once again Daniel invokes an unknown and unnamed person that acts as a catalyst, motivating him into action. For Daniel, the modern challenge of atheism for Mormonism consumes a great deal of his energy and attention. I think this is actually an understandable set of circumstances and that there is a great deal in contemporary atheism that deserves criticism and ought to be challenged. I don’t even have a high bar of entry for people who want to opine either, anyone who has spent time thinking about these issues and has come to honest conclusions should have an opportunity to express those conclusions, even if it is only on obscure corners of social media.

I’m unsure if Daniel agrees with my sentiments, but I’m very sure he puts forth an effort to establish a narrative that these issues have been churning away in his mind for the better part of his life. A great example is this blog post from May 2018 in which Daniel describes going to “Education Week” events in the late 60s where he once had a “transformative experience” and even got to enjoy an “intellectual feast”. The post is a tribute to Truman G. Madsen and comes across like a shallow middle-class Rosebud experience; but instead is directed by a person devoid of any creativity, sporting proud aliteracy that is tightly packaged with an absolutely seething personality disorder (no Blixa, I’m not talking about Ernest Hemmingway):

But the speaker who blew me away on that occasion was Truman Madsen. Each evening he spoke to a packed audience. One night it was on “Logical Positivism,” of all things. Another night it was on “Existentialism.” The topic(s) for the other night or two have slipped from my memory.

But I was thrilled. Here was Mormonism with an intellectual face, with depth. Heady stuff. For me, life-changing.

I can’t express in words the dopamine rush I get when Daniel does his pantomime about being the type of person who gets intoxicated with ideas. It is similar to listening to someone brag about how athletic they are and then watching them get into a situation where it becomes painfully obvious they lack any semblance of athleticism, but with various books and the person only having the vaguest idea about what is in said books:

Much of my subsequent career and professional focus can be traced more or less to that encounter with one of the greatest speakers and teachers that the Church has ever produced.

(I apologize Blixa, but I simply had to insert an image. Even within the strictures of e-mail I must find a way to shitpost.)

Daniel’s memory of hearing riveting lectures on logical positivism is significant I think, because it is another example of him trying to establish his credibility. Daniel will be the first person to tell you he is neither a trained scientist nor philosopher, but he will insist that he has a deep abiding interest in the topics of science and philosophy (and in this context the Philosophy of Science!). Moreover, this interest has spurred him to read widely and deeply and in the course of his private studies he’s come to some conclusions that he’d like to share with anyone who’d like to read them. Logical positivism just so happens to be one of those conclusions.

So what exactly is logical positivism and how does this relate to Karl Popper? I’ll let Daniel speak to that; here is a blog post from 2018 titled
‘A Quick Thought on Scientism and Logical Positivism’:

I’m not quite sure why the thought hadn’t occurred to me years before, but it seems pretty clear to me that scientism, in at least some of its manifestations, is the close cousin or sibling if not indeed altogether the Doppelgänger of the once-fashionable form(s) of philosophy known as logical positivism, logical empiricism, and/or neopositivism.

For Daniel, “scientism” is another descriptor for the modern incarnations of atheism that he encounters and occupies himself with. Scientism often gets applied to atheists if it is perceived that they place such a value on modern scientific methods that it becomes the primary (if not the only) method of investigating any problem. Not many established philosophers or scientists actually adopt that term for themselves and it has taken on the character of an accusation than a deliberately taken position.

To be blunt I think Daniel is feigning surprise here at just recently making the connection between logical positivism and contemporary scientism. He framed the connection this way so it looks like he is intimately familiar with logical positivism and thus his rejection of it can be transferred to scientism with little effort. Even better for Daniel, very few people read the works of logical positivists today and their unfamiliarity means they won’t have much recourse to respond.

I am curious though, in light of Daniel’s “reading” of Gadamer if he considers John Stuart Mill and Hermann von Helmholtz as advocates of scientism? Would that charge also stick to Wilhelm Dilthey given how Gadamer characterized the man’s work? Was Dilthey guilty of crypto-scientism?

Daniel continues:

Very popular, especially in Europe, in the 1920s and 1930s, logical positivism, as I’ll call it here, argued that only statements that can be verified through empirical observation can be regarded as “significant” or genuinely meaningful. Statements regarding “unobservables” — and there is a vast host of such unobservables, some of them really quite important — were to be regarded as expressions of hope or preference, or as metaphorical, or, less charitably but not uncommonly, as “nonsense.”

On a technical level Daniel doesn’t really capture the complexity of the ideas involved or even the diversity of thought within logical positivism on the philosophy of language and the nature of meaning in both natural languages and in formal ones as well. I actually gave Daniel a pass on this because it is a common trope in Christian literature and he simply adopted it for his own use; Daniel really didn’t do his due diligence, but at least there was some kind of token effort on his part to read something on the subject, right?

Right. If the bar is low enough to the ground, Daniel can surely vault over it. As Daniel expands on his historical narrative, the name Karl Popper crops up:

Prominent groups of philosophers, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, especially those associated with the so-called Berlin Circle (“led” most prominently by Hans Reichenbach) and the Vienna Circle (most notably including Moritz Schlick, but also Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, and eventual Carl Hempel, with Karl Popper as their persistent, friendly, in-house dissenter and critic), were seeking to establish philosophy as a science-based discipline, freed from such matters as metaphysics and (certainly for some, at least) theology, where no empirical proof was available — definitely no decisive empirical proof — and, thus, where arguments have gone on and on for centuries and are likely to continue forever, this side of the veil of death anyway, without clear, objective resolution.

Regrettably Daniel doesn’t show much enthusiasm for the history behind the Vienna Circle and to be frank, Daniel isn’t the most reliable narrator of intellectual history either. So to remedy that state of affairs I felt the need to introduce a book called
‘Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science’ by Karl Sigmund, a mathematician at the University of Vienna and Game Theorist.

Personally I find the early to mid 20th century philosophy to be one of the more exciting periods of modern philosophy and thus deserves a bit more color than Daniel ever gives it. I’d reckon this is because he is ignorant of almost all of it, but it may just be the case that he genuinely doesn’t enjoy it. In any case Sigmund will help provide some much needed context on just who Karl Popper was.

Unlike Daniel and much more helpfully to his readers, Sigmund tells us about what sort of questions the Circle were asking themselves:

In 1924, philosopher Moritz Schlick, mathematician Hans Hahn, and social reformer Otto Neurath joined forces to launch a philosophical circle in Vienna. At that time, Schlock and Hahn were professors at the University of Vienna, and Neurath was the director of the Vienna Museum for Social and Economic Affairs.

From that year on, the circle met regularly on Thursday evening in a small university lecture hall on a street named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, where they discussed philosophical questions such as: What characterizes scientific knowledge? Do metaphysical statements have any meaning? What makes logical propositions so certain? Why is mathematics applicable to the real world? (p.2)

Daniel’s list of luminaries that associated with the Circle was short a few names as well:

The Vienna Circle forged ahead in the tradition of Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann, two towering physicists who had made great discoveries and had taught philosophy in turn-of-the-century Vienna. The other main guiding lights of the small band of thinkers were the physicist Albert Einstein, the mathematician David Hilbert, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Before long, a thin volume that had just been published came to dominate the discussions of the Vienna Circle. This was the ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, written by Ludwig Wittgenstein during his military service in the trenches of World War I...Brilliant newcomers joined the group, such as philosopher Rudolf Carnap, mathematician Karl Menger, and logician Kurt Gödel. These three in particular were to eventually to radically redefine the border regions between philosophy and mathematics. The philosopher Karl Popper, too, became closely connected with Vienna Circle, although he never was invited to its meetings. (p.3-5)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was perhaps the biggest influence on the Circle and there is a short and delightful book called
‘Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers’ that details an encounter between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein that took place at Cambridge University. I encourage anyone interested to read/listen to it.

Tales of murder and suicide, of love affairs and nevervous breakdowns, of political persecution, and hair’s-breadth escapes all have their place in the rich tapestry of the Vienna Circle, but the tapestry’s main thread is the unbroken stream of heated debates among its members. In no way was the Circle the intellectual collective that a few of its members had hoped it would become, nor was it the congregation that its opponents accused it of being. It teemed with vociferous controversies and silent misgivings. How can it be otherwise when philosophers meet? (p.7)

That is a hell of paragraph, eh Blixa?

[_MrStakhanovite]

Part 2(f): Epistle to The North African

...and the Vienna Circle (most notably including Moritz Schlick, but also Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, and eventual Carl Hempel, with Karl Popper as their persistent, friendly, in-house dissenter and critic)...

The philosopher Karl Popper, too, became closely connected with Vienna Circle, although he never was invited to its meetings.

It seems like a minor point of contention, but just how much of a “friendly” and “in-house critic” was Karl Popper? I wonder how familiar Daniel is with what is known about the man’s disposition and just what he thinks Popper’s relationship to the Circle was.

For a while in his youth, Karl Popper had been apprenticed to an aged Viennese cabinetmaker with a vast store of knowledge of the sort that comes in handy for crossword puzzles. The old man used to say with modest pride and a Viennese twang: “Go ahead, m’boy—ask me whatever you like: I know it all!”

Popper later wrote he had learned more about the theory of knowledge from his dear, quasi-omniscient master than from any of his teachers. “None did so much to turn me into a disciple of Socrates.”

Socrates is reputed to have declared: “I know that I know nothing.” Popper liked to add: “and frequently not even that.” There is no secure knowledge. And yet, for someone allegedly holding such a modest view, Popper was remarkably opinionated and self-assured. (p.235)

Popper earned his doctorate in Psychology with Moritz Schlick as the second-reader of his thesis. Early on Popper earned his keep by teaching elementary school. Interestingly enough Schlick was never very fond of Popper and thus Popper had to be introduced to the broader learned society of Vienna by a fellow of the name Heinrich Gomperz; himself a philosopher by training (and an early patient of Sigmund Freud!) that had his circle of friends who met to discuss topics on philosophy, science, and psychology:

“Gomperz invited me from time to time to his house,” as Popper wrote, “and let me talk.”...Gomperz introduced the talkative young Popper to Viktor Kraft, a librarian at the University of Vienna, who for many years had been a member of the Vienna Circle. Popper also made friends with Friedrich Waismann, Schlick’s librarian, and he gave his first philosophical presentation in the flat of Edgar Zilsel. He was plagued by intense stage fright, he reports, but this did not keep him from ruthlessly assailing the views of the Vienna Circle. And he did quite well in the follow-up discussion. As a result, other groups that formed a sort of halo around the Vienna Circle started to invite him to their meetings. (p.242)

Gomperz had encouraged Popper to organize and expend on his criticisms of the Vienna Circle into a book, a project which he threw himself into:

As Popper wrote: “From the beginning, I conceited the book as a critical discussion and correction of the views of the Vienna Circle.” Increasingly, Popper became the official opposition” of the Vienna Circle, as Neurath acknowledged. But Popper remained an outsider: “I was never invited, and I never fished for an invitation.”

On another occasion, he wrote: “I never was a member of the Vienna Circle, but it is an error if one assumes that my nonmembership in the Circle was a consequence of my opposition to its ideas. That is not true. I would have loved to become a member of the Vienna Circle. But the fact is, Schlock never invited me to participate in his seminar. Being invited was the only avenue through which one could become a member of the Vienna Circle.”(p.243-244)

Popper the “in-house critic” of the Vienna Circle was never invited to a single meeting, even though he himself lived in Vienna and was personally acquainted with many of its members? But he was “friendly” was he not?

But Schlick feared that Popper’s aggressiveness and obstinacy would destroy the atmosphere of goodwill that was so central to the spirit of the Vienna Circle. Schlick had witnessed Popper operating at full steam in December 1932, during a meeting of the Gomperz Circle. (p.244)

Remember, Wittgenstein was hugely influential with the Circle and was damn near revered by many of its members. Thankfully this admiration could never really go to Wittgenstein’s head, the man was exceedingly eccentric (probably somewhere on the spectrum)and that kind of social currency held absolutely no interest for him. Yet you don’t just lay into the Circle’s golden boy and not leave a poor impression:

Schlick’s patience was quickly used up, and he angrily stormed out of the meeting. He was willing to listen to any sort of criticism leveled at himself but not to sit by passively while savage attacks were directed against Wittgenstein.

Others, too, were irritated by the constant brashness of the young interloper. Kurt Godel, who was by no means a devotee of Wittgenstein, wrote to Karl Menger: “Recently I met one Herr Popper (philosopher) who has written an endlessly long work which, so he claims, solves all philosophical problems. He tried eagerly to attract my interest. Do you think he is any good?” p.244-245)

Popper eventually finished his book and to Schlick’s credit, he accepted it for publication for the Vienna Circle’s ‘Writings on the Scientific Worldview’ series:

“It is an exceptionally intelligent work,” wrote Schlick about ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’, “but I cannot read it with unalloyed pleasure, despite the fact that I think that the author is almost everywhere in the right, if interpreted sympathetically. However, his presentation appears to me to be misleading. Indeed, in his unconscious urge to try and make his own contributions as original as possible, he takes very minor examples of our group’s positions (sometimes just terminological points), distorts them ad libitum, and then he paints these views, concocted by himself more than by us. As fatal blunders on our part on major issues of principle (and he sincerely believes that this is what they are). This warped way of doing things serves the whole perspective very poorly. With time, though, his self-esteem will decrease, no doubt.”

Schlick’s optimistic prediction was never verified. (p.246).

Alas, I’ll have to cease with Sigmund if I’m ever going to finish this email. My God my appointment with the Right Reverend Kishkumen draws near and here I am writing you walls of text about Karl Popper. I may be too far afield here, so let me summarize what I’m trying to convey here.

Popular expression of modern atheism may often be characterized as scientism. It could be argued that scientism is the possible “doppelgänger” of logical positivism; this is to say that there is a significant overlap between scientism and logical positivism. Karl Popper wrote a book that made a significant contribution to the philosophy of science called ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’ wherein Popper lays out several criticisms and challenges of and to logical positivism.

What did Daniel say about Popper again?

Nor am I really interested in arguing about the nature of science, which, I agree, generally does rest on the concept of “falsifiability.” (I’ve read my Karl Popper, after all.)

Does Daniel really believe that in light of Karl Popper that the nature of science rests on the concept of falsifiability? Let me waste no more time and dig into the text of ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’! My copy is the 2002 edition published as part of the ‘Routledge Classics’ and the pagination will reflect the 2006 printing.

A scientist, whether theorist or experimenter, puts forward statements, or systems of statements, and tests them step by step. In the field of the empirical sciences, more particularly, he constructs hypotheses, or systems of theories, and tests them against experience by observation and experiment.

I suggest that it is the task of the logic of scientific discovery, or the logic of knowledge, to give a logical analysis of this procedure; that is, to analyse the method of the empirical sciences.(p.3)

A clean, precise, and short introduction into the topic at hand. These are the very first two paragraphs of Part One, Chapter One, of ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’ and don’t require much analysis from me. We don’t have to move far from them before we already encounter a problem for Daniel:

According to a widely accepted view—to be opposed in this book—the empirical sciences can be characterized by the fact that they use ‘inductive methods’, as they are called. According to this view, the logic of scientific discovery would be identical with inductive logic, i.e. with the logical analysis of these inductive methods.

It is usual to call an inference ‘inductive’ if it passes from singular statements (sometimes also called ‘particular’ statements), such as accounts of the result of observations or experiments, to universal statements, such as hypotheses or theories. (p.3-4)

Fascinating, Popper actually states very plainly and quite strongly from the get-go that the natural sciences cannot be singled out because of their use of induction. Reading this though one can’t help but think of Gadamer and how he characterized the natural sciences. If you followed my reading of the section ‘The Problem of Method’ found in Gadamer’s ‘Truth and Method’ it seems as if the natural sciences are predicated on the use of induction and the futility of trying to adopt various methods for use within the humanities.

In fact let us return to the blog post (bolding mine)
‘Can the Study of History Yield Genuine Knowledge’:

I offer, below, a comment on the subject from the great German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002; yes, you read that right). It’s perhaps just a bit difficult, but his point seems to me unassailably sound to the point of obviousness.

The physical and natural sciences study particular cases in order to generalize rules from those particular cases — replicability being an important aspect of sound work in such sciences as chemistry and physics, though rather less so (or, anyway, differently so) in areas like cosmology, geology, and paleontology. Evolutionary biologists aren’t typically enamored of this or that individual fruit fly; ichthyologists don’t usually try to write biographies of individual groupers or jellyfish; wildlife biologists don’t often devote their careers to a particular elk; no botanist has focused his life’s work on an individual shrub.

So Daniel tells us that Gadamer makes an observation that is “unassailably sound to the point of obviousness” and then goes on to say that natural sciences “study particular cases in order to generalize rules from those particular cases” which aligns nicely with Popper’s description of inductive inferences as “passing” from “singular statements” to “universal statements”. He then goes on to contrast that with the study of history:

By contrast, historians can spend, and have spent, entire careers on the life and times of Andrew Jackson, on the late Byzantine empire, on the Umayyad Dynasty, on the biography of Napoleon, and on the Tokugawa shogunate. And they’ve done so not so much in order to formulate predictive general theories — in the style of biochemistry or particle physics — about the American presidency, the rise of dynasties or the collapse of states, or the life-cycle of famous Corsicans, as because they wanted to understand those people or those periods in and of themselves.

Why is the modern discipline of history different from the modern sciences? Because they focus on just particular cases and don’t generalize from them. Daniel is contrasting history from disciplines like particle physics by highlighting that history does not use induction.

That’s what Gadamer is getting at in this passage. History, he insists, is very different from the natural or physical sciences and, even, from “social sciences” like anthropology, sociology, and psychology...

Daniel then goes on to quote a passage from page 4 from ‘Truth and Method’ that we have previously discussed and so I’ll omit it. [Thread Lurkers can review the passage with me here].

Since Daniel has, afterall, read his Karl Popper and found his thesis on falsifiability so compelling, one might wonder why Daniel didn’t object to Gadamer’s assertion that the natural sciences can be defined by the use of induction. If Popper is correct then Gadamer doesn’t have a point that is “unassailably sound to the point of obviousness” but actually commits a serious blunder when it comes to the nature of knowledge as it relates to the natural sciences.

Ya know it is almost like Daniel thinks falsifiability is something to be used in conjunction with inductive methods because he only knows about Popper indirectly through secondary sources and because he’s never even glanced at the first few pages of ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’ seems completely unaware that falsifiability is only introduced because Popper believes inductive methods can never be logically justified.

Actually...let's get into that!

[_MrStakhanovite]

Hello there, I just wanted to say I appreciate the posts of support here and in my PM box.

After reading Everybody Wang Chung’s post* on Daniel recycling material for his blog I noticed another example while writing the above posts.

A Quick Thought on Scientism and Logical Positivism

I’m not quite sure why the thought hadn’t occurred to me years before, but it seems pretty clear to me that scientism, in at least some of its manifestations, is the close cousin or sibling if not indeed altother the Doppelgänger of the once-fashionable form(s) of philosophy known as logical positivism, logical empiricism, and/or neopositivism.

Very popular, especially in Europe, in the 1920s and 1930s, logical positivism, as I’ll call it here, argued that only statements that can be verified through empirical observation can be regarded as “significant” or genuinely meaningful. Statements regarding “unobservables” — and there is a vast host of such unobservables, some of them really quite important — were to be regarded as expressions of hope or preference, or as metaphorical, or, less charitably but not uncommonly, as “nonsense.”

Prominent groups of philosophers, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, especially those associated with the so-called Berlin Circle (“led” most prominently by Hans Reichenbach) and the Vienna Circle (most notably including Moritz Schlick, but also Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, and eventual Carl Hempel, with Karl Popper as their persistent, friendly, in-house dissenter and critic), were seeking to establish philosophy as a science-based discipline, freed from such matters as metaphysics and (certainly for some, at least) theology, where no empirical proof was available — definitely no decisive empirical proof — and, thus, where arguments have gone on and on for centuries and are likely to continue forever, this side of the veil of death anyway, without clear, objective resolution.

There’s at least one pretty obvious problem at the base of the enterprise, though: The proposition that only statements verifiable through empirical observation should be regarded as “significant” or genuinely meaningful is, itself, not strictly verifiable through empirical observation.

The above is from November 2018

The “shaky foundations of reality”

Scientism, in at least some of its manifestations, is the close cousin or sibling if not indeed altogether the Doppelgänger of the once-fashionable form(s) of philosophy known as logical positivism, logical empiricism, and/or neopositivism.

Very popular, especially in Europe, in the 1920s and 1930s, logical positivism, as I’ll call it here, argued that only statements that can be verified through empirical observation can be regarded as “significant” or genuinely meaningful. Statements regarding “unobservables” — and there is a vast host of such unobservables, some of them really quite important — were to be regarded as expressions of hope or preference, or as metaphorical, or, less charitably but not uncommonly, as “nonsense.”

Prominent groups of philosophers, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, especially those associated with the so-called Berlin Circle (“led” most prominently by Hans Reichenbach) and the Vienna Circle (most notably including Moritz Schlick, but also Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, and eventually Carl Hempel, with Karl Popper as their persistent, friendly, in-house dissenter and critic), were seeking to establish philosophy as a science-based discipline, freed from such matters as metaphysics and (certainly for some, at least) theology, where no empirical proof was available — definitely no decisive empirical proof — and, thus, where arguments have gone on and on for centuries and are likely to continue forever, this side of the veil of death anyway, without clear, objective resolution.

There’s at least one pretty obvious problem at the base of the enterprise, though: The proposition that only statements verifiable through empirical observation should be regarded as “significant” or genuinely meaningful is, itself, not strictly verifiable through empirical observation.

The above is from August 2020

I wonder if there is some kind of “Q” document Daniel has on his computer where he keeps all these samples of text organized by topic, then he just copies and pastes when the time comes to say something on his blog. Could the six volumes of 'The Reasonable Leap into Light: A Barebones Secular Argument for the Gospel' be nothing more than a thousand pages of blog posts edited together?

*OP is here.

[_malkie]

...
I wonder if there is some kind of “Q” document Daniel has on his computer where he keeps all these samples of text organized by topic, then he just copies and pastes when the time comes to say something on his blog. Could the six volumes of 'The Reasonable Leap into Light: A Barebones Secular Argument for the Gospel' be nothing more than a thousand pages of blog posts edited together?

For a period of time about 15 years ago I was involved in the study of, and attempt to implement, a document fragment database for a large high-tech company.

The concept that they had been sold (I simplify a bit) was that a previously-produced set of documents about a specific technology or product could be decomposed into fragments of various sizes (ranging from a phrase to about a chapter of a book), thus yielding a database containing almost all of the information that was relevant to the subject, in an easily reusable form. All that was required to create another book on the subject was to select appropriate fragments from the database, supply a little bit of "glue", in the form or transitional phrases or paragraphs, and voila, a brand new document that treated the subject from a different point of view.

There were numerous flaws in the proposition - both conceptually, and in implementation - such that I felt obliged to opine at the time that the only coherent documents that could be produced from the database were those that were decomposed to create the fragments in the first place. And even then, coherence was not guaranteed without an inordinate amount of work.

Perhaps Daniel solved the problem that we faced.

Or perhaps he has run into the same implementation difficulties that seemed so clear to me at the time.

[_Doctor Scratch]

I concur with those who've been enjoying these posts. And I can't stop laughing at this:

I can’t express in words the dopamine rush I get when Daniel does his pantomime about being the type of person who gets intoxicated with ideas. It is similar to listening to someone brag about how athletic they are and then watching them get into a situation where it becomes painfully obvious they lack any semblance of athleticism, but with various books and the person only having the vaguest idea about what is in said books

Symmachus has said a number of times that Mopologetics has failed to produce any new ideas. These exegeses are further evidence of that.

[_Physics Guy]

I have also enjoyed the introduction to Gadamer, but I'm kind of scratching my head still about exactly what Peterson said that was so wrong. Peterson's statement about how science mainly cares about universal laws, to the extent that individual cases are rarely of interest except as examples of the universals, seems to me to be true. If history were physics then we'd have lots of books about the general theory of dictators and you'd have to dig deep into old journal articles to find any mention of Caesar or Napoleon or Stalin.

That's a point well worth making, and if Gadamer even mentioned that point in passing then I think it's fine to use Gadamer's words to express that point, regardless of what else Gadamer might also have said in his book.

So what exactly was so bad about what Peterson wrote?