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| '''Situational logic''' (also '''situational analysis''')<ref>Boumans, M. and Davis, John B. (2015), ''Economic Methodology: Understanding Economics as a Science'', Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 92.</ref> is a concept advanced by ] in his '']''.<ref>Popper, Karl (2013), ''The Poverty of Historicism'', Routledge, p. 141.</ref> Situational logic is a process by which a social scientist tries to reconstruct the problem situation confronting an agent in order to understand that agent's choice. | |||
| <noinclude>'''Situational logic''' is a label coined by ] to identify a logical theory of reasoning capable of expanding reliable knowledge. Human reasoning is prompted by problems which focus the attention of an individual or group on a situation: “the stimulus of practical problems” arising in given “specific initial conditions.”<ref name="Pop57">{{cite book|last=Popper|first=Karl R.|title=The Poverty of Historicism|publisher=Harper Torchbooks|date=1964}}</ref>{{rp|56, 122}} Some kind of habitual practice or belief, once justified by a theory, breaks down, stops “working,” in unique existing conditions. Situational logic tries to solve such a breakdown by rejoining conceptual theory—hypothetical universal regularities or general continuing factors—to operational practice in unique situational conditions. | |||
| ] (1975) provides a helpful clarificatory summary.<ref group="note">This use of this summary is from Boumans and Davis (2010).</ref> | |||
| For Popper, a situation prompting reasoning is a cognitive breakdown. A theory fails to work and must be replaced. His situational logic prescribes conjecturing potential new universal regularities from which to deduce logical solutions capable of restoring unity to theory and practice. | |||
| :First provide a description of the situation: | |||
| ] preceded Popper in recognizing this situational need to reason, but his logical steps defining and solving problems are radically incompatible. For Dewey, a situation prompting reasoning is an operational breakdown with conceptual implications. It is a pre-cognitive and unspeakable experience. The practical continuity of an established practice must be restored. His situational logic prescribes responding by inductively defining observable conditions operating in the situation, from which to deduce practical solutions restoring unity to theory and practice. | |||
| ::<nowiki>''Agent A was in a situation of type C''</nowiki>. | |||
| :This situation is then analysed | |||
| Both men accepted the instrumental criterion of judgment to identify breakdown of continuing factors.] But Popper added an independent criterion of judgment: logical coherence in theories. Dewey held logical coherence to be integral with operational success. A situation becomes cognitive only through inductive operations. | |||
| ::<nowiki>''In a situation of type C, the appropriate thing to do is X.''</nowiki> | |||
| :The rationality principle may then be called upon: | |||
| :<nowiki>''agents always act appropriately to their situation''</nowiki> | |||
| :Finally we have the ''explanadum'': | |||
| ::<nowiki>''(therefore) A did X.''</nowiki><ref>Koertge, N. (1975), "Popper's Metaphysical Research Program for the Human Sciences", ''Inquiry'', 18 (1975), 437–62.</ref> | |||
| ==Notes== | |||
| Assuming independent criteria of practical and logical judgment contaminates reasoning. It reflects the traditional ] between knowledge of concrete situations—particular facts known by induction—and theoretical knowledge of universal regularities—deduced from general laws known intuitively to be right.<ref name="Pop57"/>{{rp|143}} Objective value-free facts that work may not correlate with subjective fact-free preferences, intentions, expectations. | |||
| {{reflist|group=note}} | |||
| These incompatible criteria are present today in popular approaches to rational problem solving, without acknowledgment of their philosophical origins. Popper's logic underlies the value-free tool labelled ] widely applied to conjectural situations in business and government. ] is a technological application of Dewey's instrumental situational logic. In the fact-free mediation tool labeled ], the pre-cognitive starting point of Dewey’s logic appears as a valued end point. Dividing theory from practice and fact from value contaminates rationality. | |||
| This article presents the background of ‘’this’’ still-indeterminate situation of mutually incompatible logics. It draws largely on the Library of Living Philosophers, edited by ], which honored Dewey in its first volume and Popper in its fourteenth volume. Summary of Dewey’s position is followed by a critique by ], one of 17 scholars offering descriptive and critical essays, and Dewey’s response. Summary of Popper’s position is followed by an essay (one of 33) by ], and Popper’s response. | |||
| ==Logic of John Dewey (1859-1952) == | |||
| In ''Logic: The Theory of Inquiry'', published in 1938, Dewey reported results of years spent criticizing traditional academic philosophy. He hoped to have resolved philosophers’ perennial debate over how to extend human understanding by relating facts—particular valuation-free means used in practice—to valuations—general fact-free theoretical ends. He made “situation” a universal focus to eliminate the imagined autonomy of theory and practice. | |||
| {{quotation | |||
| |What is designated by the word “situation” is ‘’not” a single object or event or set of objects and events. For we never experience nor form judgments about objects and events in isolation, but only in connection with a contextual whole.<ref name="Dew38">{{cite book|last=Dewey|first=John|title=Logic: The Theory of Inquiry|publisher=Holt, Rinehart & Winston|date=1938}}</ref>{{rp|66}}}} | |||
| A problematic situation arises when some pattern of correlated belief and behavior breaks down. The obstruction generates a need to understand the cause of breakdown and how to overcome it. The need is an objective fact of every unique situation, not a subjective opinion or preference. | |||
| {{quotation | |||
| |The unsettled or indeterminate situation might have been called a ‘’problematic situation’’. …. becomes problematic in the very process of being subjected to inquiry. The indeterminate situation comes into existence from existential causes, just as does, say, the organic imbalance of hunger. There is nothing intellectual or cognitive in the existence of such situations, although they are the necessary condition of cognitive operations or inquiry. In themselves, they are precognitive.<ref name="Dew38"/>{{rp|107}}}} | |||
| A situation becomes an object of discourse when those experiencing breakdown are forced to reason about it. Is it a breakdown of some known kind of regularity? Can some universal regularity be found conjoined to unique observable traits? Answering such questions requires induction: “… laws of uniform relations are ultimately instrumentalities for control of individualized situations …<ref name="Dew38"/>{{rp|531; 252, 479}} | |||
| Historically, induction has been a method for arriving at laws of uniform relations by moving from particulars to the general.<ref name="Dew38"/>{{rp|419–20}} In common sense, it starts with observation of some regularity and an inference that that regularity is in fact a continuing factor. The inference is strengthened by counting its frequency of observation—numerical induction. | |||
| In modern science, the permanence of traits and kinds is determined experimentally by transforming what is existentially given into abstract universal kinds of traits—operational induction. Each situation is made into a “kind” by identifying relevant data. | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |Operations are deliberately performed that experimentally modify given antecedent objects of perception so as to produce ‘’new’’ data in a new ordered arrangement. …. Objects and qualities as they naturally present themselves or as they are “given,” are not only ‘’not’’ new data of science but constitute the most direct and important obstacle to formation of those ideas and hypotheses that are genuinely relevant and effective.<ref name="Dew38"/>{{rp|425}}}} | |||
| Here is one example of Dewey's situational steps to define kinds of data relevant to solving a problematic situation. A man is found dead in unusual circumstances. | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |Was it a case of murder, accident or suicide? The problem is one of determining the traits which will enable the phenomenon in question to be securely referred to a determinate kind. The only way in which to discover and adjudge traits that will be sufficiently differential as to fix the kind is … to find out “the cause” of the death in question. Whatever else the word “cause” may or may not mean in this context, it at least involves taking the event out of the isolation in which it first presented itself, so as to link it up with other events. As analytically transformed, it is then one constituent in a much more extensive spread of events.<ref name="Dew38"/>{{rp|447}}}} | |||
| He referred to a famous example of numerical induction that failed for lack of these operations determining continuing factors: “All swans are white.” It confused all swans-as-observable-birds with the abstraction swan-as-an-abstract-species with conjectured determinate universal traits—found not to include color of feathers.<ref name="Dew38"/>{{rp|379–80}} | |||
| Dewey offered inductive plus deductive situational logic as an alternative to traditional analyses that started with conceptual ”facts” and ended with “known truths.” | |||
| ==Critique by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)== | |||
| Russell did not take kindly to Dewey's effort to reconstruct philosophy. In 1939, he contributed a critical essay to the Library of Living Philosophers volume entitled ''The Philosophy of John Dewey''. He entitled his contribution “Dewey’s New Logic” which he identified with a doctrine labeled ]. He suggested that Dewey's logic could be partly explained by the cultural situation or “social system” prevailing in the United States—“the age of industrialism and collective enterprise”—and by the academic context of competition between British analytic philosophy and German synthetic philosophy.<ref name="Sch39">{{cite book|last=Schilpp|first=Paul Arthur|title=The Philosophy of John Dewey|publisher=Northwestern University|date=1939}}</ref>{{rp|137–8}} | |||
| Russell named Dewey's logic ] and grouped it with other synthetic doctrines critical of traditional academic philosophy—positivism, pragmatism, historicism, holism—all denying the legitimacy of metaphysics (untestable because prior to experience) and the reality of natural kinds with defining properties as universal facts. He felt Dewey was turning philosophy into a tool for solving problem rather than a search for truths. We report three questions Russell asked of Dewey's situational logic to explain why he rejected Dewey's definitions and answers. | |||
| 1) HOW LARGE IS A SITUATION? | |||
| Russell was troubled by Dewey treating situations as the starting point of new knowledge. If knowledge grows by inquiry that relates unique problematic situations to environmental continuing factors, how can that activity exclude anything in the universe? It merges particular facts into universal regularities. “It is obvious that, in an inquiry into the tides, the sun and moon must be included in the ‘situation.’ I do not see how, on Dr. Dewey's principles, a ‘situation’ can embrace less than the whole universe; this is an inevitable consequence of the insistence upon continuity .”<ref name="Sch39"/>{{rp|139}} | |||
| {{quotation | |||
| |Data, in the sense in which many empiricists believe in them, are rejected by Dr. Dewey as the starting point of knowledge. There is a process of “inquiry” … in the course of which both subject and object change. The process is, in some degree, continuous throughout life… Nevertheless, in regard to any one problem, there is a beginning, and this beginning is called a “situation.” A situation, we are told, is “a qualified existential whole which is unique.” …. We are told that sense-data are not objects of knowledge, and have no objective existential reference.<ref name="Sch39"/>{{rp|139–40}}}} | |||
| Russell could find no starting or stopping point in such situational logic. He wondered, for example, how astronomers could inquire about the sun and moon without prior knowledge of those unchanging objects: | |||
| {{quotation | |||
| |Inquiry, in his system, operates upon a raw material, which it gradually transforms; it is only the final product that can be known. The raw material remains an Unknowable. …. The first science to be developed was astronomy, yet it can hardly be supposed that the sun and the planets are much altered by the observations of astronomers.<ref name="Sch39"/>{{rp|154}}}} | |||
| 2) HOW CAN DOUBT STIMULATE INQUIRY? | |||
| While rejecting Dewey’s situation as a unit of analysis, Russell criticized feelings of doubt in particular situations as stimulus to inquiry. He stated what he took to be Dewey’s position: | |||
| {{quotation | |||
| |The position ‘’seems’’ to be that there is a certain activity called “inquiry,” as recognizable as the activities of eating and drinking; like all activity, it is stimulated by discomfort, and the particular discomfort concerned is called “doubt,” just as hunger is the discomfort that stimulates eating,… …. He says: “If inquiry begins in doubt, it terminates in the institution of conditions which remove ‘’need’’ for doubt.” I do not know what he means by “need for doubt.” If I doubt whether I am a fine fellow, I can cure the doubt by a suitable dose of alcohol, but this would not be viewed by him as “the institution of conditions which remove the ‘’need’’ for doubt.”<ref name="Sch39"/>{{rp|147–8}}}} | |||
| Contrary to Dewey’s particular feeling of doubt, Russell assumed that cognitive doubt initiates reasoning about what things are “true.” | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |For those who make “truth” fundamental, the difficulty in question does not arise. There is need for doubt so long as there is an appreciable likelihood of a mistake. If you add up your accounts twice over, and get different results, there is “need for doubt;” but that is because you are persuaded that there is an objectively right result. If there is not, if all that is concerned is the psychological fact of inquiry as an activity stimulated by doubt, we cannot lay down rules as to what ‘’ought’’ to remove doubt.<ref name="Sch39"/>{{rp|148}}}} | |||
| 3) HOW CAN WARRANTED ASSERTION BE DISTINGUISHED FROM IMMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE OF FACT, REALITY, TRUTH? | |||
| Russell couldn't understand why Dewey replaced the word “knowledge” with “warranted assertion” when doubt is eliminated. The definition appeared arbitrary and unnecessary. He quoted Dewey: | |||
| {{quotation | |||
| |If inquiry begins in doubt, it terminates in the institution of conditions which remove need for doubt. The latter state of affairs may be designated by the words ‘’belief’’ and ‘’knowledge’’. For reasons that I shall state later I prefer the words ‘warranted assertibility’.<ref name="Sch39"/>{{rp|146}}}} | |||
| Russell found this just another name for instrumental consequences of logically groundless inductive reasoning: if what you do achieves what you want, then what you want is validated—it is TRUE. | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |When our car breaks down, we try various hypotheses as to what went wrong, and there is “need for doubt” until it goes again. …. Beliefs, we are now supposing, may be tested by their consequences, and may be considered to possess “warranted assertibility” when their consequences are of certain kinds. …. So far, we have only the ordinary procedure of induction: “If ‘’p’’ , then ‘’q’’ ; now ‘’q’’ is true; therefore ‘’p’’is true.”<ref name="Sch39"/>{{rp|149}}}} | |||
| Russell continued to insist that logical deduction can provide knowledge of truth. He closed his critique by suggesting that Dewey's redefinition of induction and deduction made discourse between analytic and synthetic philosophers incapable of rational resolution. | |||
| Dewey felt completely misunderstood by Russell. He responded by explaining that he chose “situation” as the unit of inquiry to escape units used by both atomistic-analytic and holistic-synthetic philosophers. “I have called experiences ''situations'' a viable alternative to an atomism which logically involves a denial of connections and to an absolutistic block monism which … leaves no place for the discrete, for plurality, and for individuals.”<ref name="Sch39"/>{{rp|544}} | |||
| He observed that situations are observably always particular—breakdown at particular time and place—but each such experience includes multiple determinate universal traits that must be discovered to repair the breakdown. | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |Situations are precarious and perilous because the persistence of life-activity depends upon the influence which present acts have upon future acts. The ‘’continuity’’ of a life-process is secured only as acts performed render the environment favorable to subsequent organic acts. …. All perceived objects are individualized … wholes complete in themselves. Everything directly experienced is qualitatively unique.<ref name="Sch39"/>{{rp|545}}}} | |||
| Dewey argued that logical linguistic discourse can only follow an experience of breakdown, which itself is precognitive and unspeakable. He accused Russell of treating discourse as equivalent to experience. | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |I have not held, as is intimated in Mr. Russell’s allusion to knowledge of sun and planets, that knowing modifies the ‘’object of knowledge’’. That a planet ‘’as known’’ is a very different thing from the speck of light that is found in direct experience, I should suppose to be obvious;—although, once more, one of those commonplaces of which philosophers engaged in pursuit of an artificial problem have failed to take proper note.<ref name="Sch39"/>{{rp|547}}}} | |||
| Unsurprisingly, the exchange between these two philosophers did not resolve their differences, which persist today. | |||
| ==Logic of Karl Popper (1902-1994)== | |||
| In ''The Poverty of Historicism'', published in 1957, Popper reported results of years spent criticizing perennial philosophical debate over whether reliable scientific knowledge arises from observation leading to theory, or from theory guiding observation. That essay was a critique of the kinds of synthetic philosophy to which Russell had linked Dewey—instrumentalism, pragmatism, historicism, holism—all of which claim that observation in situations precedes cognition, practice precedes theory. | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |Science, we may say, is confronted by problems, at any moment of its development. It cannot start with observations, or with the "collection of data," as some students of method believe. Before we can collect data, our interest in ‘’data of a certain kind’’ must be aroused; the ‘’problem" always comes first. The problem in its turn may be suggested by practical needs, or by scientific or pre-scientific beliefs which, for some reason or another, appear to be in need of revision.<ref name="Pop57"/>{{rp|121}}}} | |||
| Throughout this essay and subsequent publications, Popper rejected Dewey's kind of logic, without naming Dewey, claiming it to be inductive sociological or psychological “science,” producing only conditional and subjective knowledge—warranted assertions. He considered his kind of logic to be deductive and objectively true, as much as is humanly possible.<ref name="Sch74">{{cite book|last=Schilpp|first=Paul Arthur|title=The Philosophy of Karl Popper|publisher=Open Court|date=1974}}</ref>{{rp|1147}} | |||
| He developed a criterion for distinguishing scientific from unreliable metaphysical reasoning. He called that criterion “demarcation,” measured by the degree to which a conjecture or theory is testable. A situation is an event in which a theory has failed a test, prompting reasoning to replace the failed conjecture. “… there is no such thing as an unprejudiced observation. All observation is an activity with an aim (to find, or to check, some regularity which is ‘’at least’’ vaguely conjectured);… .…. There is no such thing as a perception except in the context of interests and expectations, and hence of regularities or ‘’laws’’.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|40}} | |||
| For Popper, a situation prompting reasoning is a theoretical breakdown, and its solution involves conceiving a rational analytic model of the breakdown in order to conjecture solutions to repair it, restoring unity to theory and practice.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Boumans|first1=Marcel|last2=Davis|first2=John B.|title=Economic Methodology|publisher=Palgrave|date=2016|pages=92–3}}</ref> His situational logic locates regularities in physical laws and in social institutions—prescribed patterns of correlated behavior. | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |There is room for a more detailed analysis of the ''logic of situations''. …. Beyond this ''logic of the situation'', or perhaps as part of it, we need something like an analysis of social movements. We need studies, based on methodological individualism, of the social institutions through which ideas may spread and captivate individuals, of the way in which new traditions may be created, and of the way in which traditions work and break down.<ref name="Pop57"/>{{rp|149}}}} | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |The initial conditions (or more precisely, the situation described by them) are usually spoken of as the ''cause'' of the event in question, and the prognosis (or rather the event described by the prognosis) as the effect;… | |||
| I suggest that to give a causal explanation of a certain ''specific event'' means deducing a statement describing this event from two kinds of premises: from some ''universal laws'', and from some singular or specific statements which we may call the ''specific initial conditions''.<ref name="Pop57"/>{{rp|122–3}}}} | |||
| Popper later (1974) agreed with Dewey's position that problems arise as unspeakable, pre-conscious feelings, but denied that this origin can provide situational data to which possible solutions must adapt. He never viewed a situation as a “qualified existential whole” as Dewey did. He attributed any sense of maladjustment or breakdown to inborn universal expectations and knowledge, not to conditional feelings experienced in each unique situation. Theory is involved in observation, and needs logical coherence independently of operational continuity. | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |For ‘’practical problems’’ arise because something has gone wrong, because of some unexpected event. But this means that the organism … has previously adjusted itself … to its environment, by evolving some expectation … or structure (say, an organ). Yet such an adjustment is the preconscious form of developing a theory; and since any practical problem arises relative to some adjustment of this kind, practical problems are, essentially, imbued with theories. | |||
| In fact, we arrive at a result which has unexpectedly interesting consequences: ''the first theories—that is, the first tentative solutions of problems—and the first problems have arisen together''.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|106}}}} | |||
| He had multiple reasons for denying the possibility of situations determining relevant data, “ultimate components” defining properties of kinds and causes. He viewed names as arbitrary conventions, incapable of defining abstract universals to function as signs of inductive particulars. He assumed the need for undefined theoretical terms.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|12–23, 1183; 973}} | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |Definitions are either abbreviations and therefore unnecessary, … or they are Aristotelian attempts to “state the essence” of a word, and therefore unconscious conventional dogmas .;<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|981}}<ref name="Pop57"/>{{rp|29}}}} | |||
| From his earliest publications in the 1930 to his autobiography in 1974, Popper maintained that his demarcation conjecture established the fallacy of induction—inferences based on “repetition of instances.”<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|1015}} Instances named cannot be defining properties, continuing factors, determinate universal traits. | |||
| He supported his rejection of induction with one traditional example of an inductive failure: “All swans are white.” “… no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.<ref>{{cite book|last=Popper|first=Karl R.|title=The Logic of Scientific Discovery|publisher=Routledge|year=1934|pages=3–4}}</ref> | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |A biologist offers the conjecture that all swans are white. When black swans are discovered in Australia, he says that it is not refuted. He insists that these black swans are a new kind of bird since it is ‘’part of the defining property’’ of a swan that it is white. …. | |||
| In any case … the theory “All swans are white” is refutable at least in the following clear logical sense: it must be declared refuted by any body who accepts that there is at least one non-white swan.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|982}}}} | |||
| He presented a more recent presumed inductive failure in the scientific theory that freezing points can serve as defining properties of kinds. | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |For a long time chemists have been inclined to regard atomic weights, melting points, and similar properties as ''defining properties'' of materials: there can be no water whose freezing point differs from 0{{nbsp}}°C; it just would not be water, however similar in other respects it may be to water. But if this is so, then according to my criterion of demarcation “Water freezes at 0{{nbsp}}°C would not be a scientific or empirical statement; it would be a tautology—part of a definition. | |||
| Clearly, there is a problem here: either my criterion of demarcation is refuted, or we have to admit the possibility of discovering ''water whose freezing point is other than 0{{nbsp}}°C''.. | |||
| I plead, of course , for the second possibility…. …. For let us assume we have discovered ''water with a different freezing point''. Is this still to be called “water”? ''I assert that the question is totally irrelevant''. The scientific hypothesis was that a liquid (no matter what you call it) with a considerable list of chemical and physical properties which have been conjectured to be constantly conjoined should not materialize then ''we were wrong''; and thus ''new and interesting problems open up''. The least of them is whether or not we should continue to call the liquid in question “water”; ''this'' is purely arbitrary or conventional. Thus my criterion of demarcation is not only not refuted by this example: it helps us to discover what is significant for science and what is arbitrary and irrelevant.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|983}}}} | |||
| Popper refined his rejection of induction by locating regularities with determinate universal traits in a third world, separate from the two sources of generalization earlier specified: initial situational conditions and universal laws. He conjectured that situational conditions, universal laws, and problem solutions occur in autonomous worlds. He found this metaphysical conjecture—unobservable and untestable—instrumentally useful for making predictions based on conjectural situations. “Theories or propositions or statements are the most important third world linguistic entities.”.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|494,137}} Historicists are mistaken to believe that “social entities such as institutions or associations are concrete natural entities … rather than abstract models constructed to interpret certain selected abstract relations between individuals.”<ref name="Pop57"/>{{rp|140}} | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |Science is part of world 3 , and not of world 2; or, more precisely, the psychological world 2 of the scientist is almost completely dependent upon the man-made world 3, the world of scientific theories and problems. The world 3 science can be investigated only logically. Thus any good psychology of research will have to depend on, and be guided by, the logic of discovery.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|1148}}}} | |||
| ==Defense by Henryk Skolimowski (1930-2018)== | |||
| Skolimowski opened his contribution to ''The Philosophy of Karl Popper'' in 1974 with a quote from Popper's 1963 ''Conjectures and Refutations'' to highlight how central to Popper's philosophy was his situational logic. The quote asserts that great philosophers “tried to solve urgent and concrete problems” in their own “contemporary problem-situation.” Philosophers were great because of their “sensitivity to problems.” All reasoners are “students ''of problems''.”.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|483}} | |||
| Skolimowski's contribution reconstructed and analyzed the “knowledge-situation” that produced Popper's situational logic by applying that very logic. He located two distinct knowledge-situations in which Popper reacted against what he found to be breakdowns of philosophy. | |||
| In the 1930s, Popper opposed positivists and empiricists in an academic context much like that in which Russell opposed the synthetic philosophy he attributed to Dewey: instrumentalism, positivism, historicism, holism. Popper rejected the instrumentalist effort to found new knowledge on inductive facts: “protocol statements depicting the ultimate components of the structure of the empirical world.”<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|486}} He replaced such continuing factors with conceptual but objective and testable units: conjectures and refutations. | |||
| Skolimowski observed that, by the 1960s, Popper's knowledge-situation had changed. His minority position rejecting the ultimate reality of knowable natural kinds had become conventional wisdom—at least in philosophy if not in science. The instrumentalists had been defeated by those who followed Popper in basing knowledge on testability. | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |Traditionally, the certainty of objective knowledge was guaranteed either by an infallible method (as for example in Descartes), or by discovering in nature some ultimate components (for logical empiricists these were ‘basic facts’). Popper’s conception affirms that … no objective knowledge can be certain; and hence no ultimate components of any sort can be accepted;…<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|488–9}}}} | |||
| In the 1960s Popper opposed philosophers like Thomas Kuhn, who tried to found new knowledge on the subjective popularity of conceptual frameworks, competing paradigms based on incompatible and untestable premises. Popper challenged such logical analysis by identifying three distinct kinds of objective knowledge as universal continuing factors crossing paradigms. They operate in distinct problem situations: 1) empirical facts and observations are known in a psychological world of material entities; 2) problems are analyzed using conjectures and refutations known in a sociological world of mental entities; 3) “ideas in the objective sense, that is the world of possible objects of thought or the world of objective contents of thought."<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|493}} | |||
| Skolimowski supported Popper's three worlds conjecture by rejecting the possibility of unchanging universal linguistic categories. “… if there are innate ''concepts'' (categories, linguistic universals ), then there is no ''growth'' of concepts; if there ''is'' growth of concepts, then there are no ''innate'' concepts; but in fact there ''is'' growth of concepts, therefore there are no innate concepts.”<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|501}} | |||
| He defended Popper, however, by identifying defining properties of Popper's three worlds—which would appear to be just-denied continuing factors, innate concepts. | |||
| {{Quote | |||
| |Assuming the validity of Popper’s contention that all knowledge is man made, but that it nevertheless transcends particular men, and indeed all men, and that its action upon us is no less important than our action upon it, I shall argue that objective mind is an aspect of objective knowledge; that it is, in other words, an aspect of the third world. Put differently, I shall argue that we can talk about the mind as a “subjective instrument” through which an individual grasps universal knowledge and at the same time to treat this “instrument,” and all its cognitive functions as a component of objective knowledge.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|498}}}} | |||
| Skolimowski followed his summary of agreements with Popper by criticizing Popper's effort to relate his world 2 and world 3. He argued that Popper had “failed to provide a theory of ''objective'' mind.” | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |Now the difficulty of Popper’s position and hence his vulnerability to criticism lies in the relation between the third and the second worlds. …. The third-world is entirely a human creation; it is autonomous but a product of the human mind. The activity of an individual mind belongs to the second world (of mental entities, of ''acts'' of comprehension). But … the products of this activity become the third-world entities: meanings of statements, contents of thought. Now, how is it possible that mental activity (all the acts of which belong to the second world) may result in products which are a part of the third world if there is no similarity whatever between entities of these two worlds.? Popper does not explain.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|496}}}} | |||
| Popper's response to Skolimowski started with praising the accuracy of the latter's presentation of his own philosophy: “ Professor Skolimowski’s paper surprised me by the degree of his understanding of what has been so often misunderstood.” “Skolimowski’s summing up of my 'methodological period' again seems to me excellent.”.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|1066, 1069}} But his response to Skolimowski's critique finds his critic failing to understand. | |||
| {{quote | |||
| |In his fourth section, Skolimowski tries to give a guide to my three worlds: world 1 (physical processes), world 2 (mental processes), and world 3 (problems, theories, and solutions, including mistaken solutions). Skolimowski is fairly successful in his description, which ends with the words: “Although effort is strenuous, it is not successful.” | |||
| “It seems to me that from this passage on, Skolimowski utterly fails to give a fair picture of my theory.<ref name="Sch74"/>{{rp|1070}}}} | |||
| The result is that Popper and Skolimowski—both experts in Popper's situational logic—ended up disagreeing over the defining properties of abstract entities for which operational tests appear to be impossible. These colleagues were no more able to reach consensus on situational logic able to produce reliable knowledge for instrumental problem solving than Dewey and Russell arguing from incompatible paradigms. | |||
| == See also == | |||
| * ] | |||
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| == References == | == References == | ||
Revision as of 15:42, 17 May 2020
Situational logic (also situational analysis) is a concept advanced by Popper in his The Poverty of Historicism. Situational logic is a process by which a social scientist tries to reconstruct the problem situation confronting an agent in order to understand that agent's choice.
Koertge (1975) provides a helpful clarificatory summary.
- First provide a description of the situation:
- ''Agent A was in a situation of type C''.
- This situation is then analysed
- ''In a situation of type C, the appropriate thing to do is X.''
- The rationality principle may then be called upon:
- ''agents always act appropriately to their situation''
- Finally we have the explanadum:
- ''(therefore) A did X.''
Notes
- This use of this summary is from Boumans and Davis (2010).
References
- Boumans, M. and Davis, John B. (2015), Economic Methodology: Understanding Economics as a Science, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 92.
- Popper, Karl (2013), The Poverty of Historicism, Routledge, p. 141.
- Koertge, N. (1975), "Popper's Metaphysical Research Program for the Human Sciences", Inquiry, 18 (1975), 437–62.