David Stove - Polemics Against Popper and Other 'irrationalists'

Polemics Against Popper and Other 'irrationalists'

Stove became best known to the wider intellectual community for his attacks on Karl Popper and his falsificationist philosophy of science, as well as the influential philosophies of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. His book Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists (1982) has been reprinted in two new editions in recent years (under the titles Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult and Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism). In it Stove claimed to expose the methods by which Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend managed to make their purportedly untenable philosophies seem respectable.

One such method, Stove claimed, was the "neutralizing of success words". Stove argued that in the philosophies of these authors such things as progress, discovery, evidence and knowledge do not exist and that if this position were stated openly and consistently maintained then few would ever have taken these philosophies seriously. Stove contended that these authors got around this problem by using these success words, but in scare quotes, e.g., "knowledge". The fact that these words were used regularly, even if in scare quotes, gave the impression that the view being put forward was somehow not rejecting these concepts.

Another method Stove attributed to Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend was what he called the "sabotaging of logical expressions". This was the practise of robbing logical statements of their logical force by placing them in epistemic contexts; for example, instead of saying "P is a proof for Q" one would say "It is generally believed by scientists that P is a proof for Q". This produces what Stove calls a "ghost logical statement": it gives the impression that serious statements of logic are being made when they are not - all that is really being made are sociological or historical claims which are immune to criticism on logical grounds.

Stove charged Popper with enfant terriblisme, claiming that his work was motivated by levity - the failure to take the truth about the topics under discussion seriously. That Feyerabend is guilty of this sin is obvious even to his supporters (nor does he deny it) - but the accusation against the apparently ultra-serious Popper seems at first glance surprising. Stove nevertheless argued that Popper was a product of the "jazz age", where, in the words of Cole Porter, "day's night today" and vice versa - only that Popper's "jazz age" was played out in the intellectual world rather than at bohemian parties.

Kuhn's writings on the other hand are free of levity. Stove said that this is because Kuhn

"is in earnest with irrationalist philosophy of science, while the others are not. He actually believes, what the others only imply and pretend to believe... and he even bids fair, by the immense influence of his writings on 'the rabble without doors', to make irrationalism the majority opinion".