Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult

Rating:
Summary: Losing the plot - in style!
Review: David Stove has posthumously achieved celebrity status with this book. This status is not well earned because Stove and his claque have completely missed the point of Popper's philosophy and the way that it has sidelined the long-running and pointless academic obsession with knowledge as "justified true belief".

Popper has provided a viable alternative to the "justified true belief" theory of knowledge. He has propounded a theory of conjectural objective knowledge which grows by conjecture and criticism of various kinds, including the criticism of empirical tests. This is a matter of commonsense and it is not hard to explain to scientists and other practical people who have not had their brains addled by academic philosophy and its fruitless quest for the non-achievable - verified theories or "truly justified beliefs" or merely theories with a specified numerical probability. Those, like Stove, who think that inductive probabilities can be assigned to theories, have yet to provide the formula after some centuries of effort.

The fruitless and boring quest for inductive probabilities has driven many students from the pursuit of rationalist philosophy in search of more interesting and exciting fare, hence the rise of the deconstructionists and post-modernists and other related fads and cults. Stove and others have blamed this tendency on Popper's "irrationalism" but this is precisely the reverse of the true situation. It is the failure of the positivists and the inductivists to deliver the magic formula which has wrecked their credibility.

Popper has provided the antidote to irrationalism but he has been so thoroughly sidelined in academic philosophy that students can only find out about his ideas by accident, apart from the garbled and miseading misconceptions of his thoughts that are perpetuated by his opponents.

For a more enlightening introduction to Popper's ideas, in the context of the main postwar philosophical developments, read Bryan Magee "Confession of a Philosopher".

Rating:
Summary: Reason stirs in her sleep
Review: Stove starts this book by observing that a philosophy of science which implicitly denies any possibility of the accumulation of knowledge, while giving birth to a misbegotten relativism, must appear very implausible (naturally this is a trivial point to the philosophically sophisticated). How, Stove persists in asking, could such a thing have been made 'acceptable to readers who would reject it out of hand if it were presented to them without equivocation?' Then he shows how, with Helps to Young Authors on how to denature language and sabotage logic 'after the manner of the best authorities'. This part is dedicated to George Orwell. Read it, and 'scare' quotes will never 'look' the 'same' again. The great and good were not amused. Sir Karl an irrationalist? the sainted Thomas an obfuscator? It's true Stove can be unfair, and many will think that not all four of his bogeymen - Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend - are equally culpable. Nevertheless, they have more in common than you might think. According to Stove they have good reason, or rather unreason, to write that way. (But for a Popperian rejoinder, see the next review.)

The second half of the book traces modern irrationalism back (insofar as it has an intellectual origin in the Anglo-Saxon tradition) to an unacknowledged premise of Hume's inductive skepticism. Whether that premise can bear the weight that rests on it is debatable. To follow the argument you won't need any great knowledge of analytic philosophy, but it may take some mental effort. Don't let that stop you; when Stove is being serious he's a master expositor. Far from being the Idiot's Guide to inductivism, this part is as demanding as anything in Kuhn or Feyerabend, only much better written. Remember, when you read some of the other reviews, that Stove treats Hume with the highest respect.

Taking the book as a whole, it seems that readers either like it or loathe it. Apart from the obvious consideration that people don't like having their idols smashed, the probable reason is that Stove writes with too much clarity, wit and forthrightness for postmodern sensibilities. If you think, as some do, that the ponderous perverseness of Feyerabend's 'Against Method' is 'fun' and 'humorous', you won't appreciate this at all.

Twenty years on, a kind of academic shanty-town sprawls on foundations of make-believe, for which at least some of Stove's 'four irrationalists' inspired the architecture and signed the building permit (they claimed later it was forged). To question the wisdom of this development is 'naive'; one must be 'half-educated' or 'an unwitting positivist' - witness reactions to Sokal & Bricmont's critique, or the ecstatic reviews still surfacing on Kuhn's 'Structure'. (To be fair, some of the latter enthusiasts may not have understood the implications. One reader even persuades himself that Kuhn's ideas lend support to hard-core creationism. Kuhn is all things to all men.) Is it just a strangely persistent fad rooted in muddle, or a symptom of a deeper sickness? Some say that one Stove was enough; I think we need an Aga.

"This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise" - Bertrand Russell.

Rating:
Summary: The naive commonsense of Stove
Review: Stove takes the four most widely recognized and celebrated philosophers of science (plus David Hume), and treats them to some "naive commonsense" criticism. This book will appeal to anyone who has never studied philosophy and who would also like to see those who have studied philosophy, put in their place.

Unfortunately, Stove completely misses the points of the opposing philosophical positions. Everybody is marching out of step except for Mr. Stove? I think not. But,then please read the counter arguments by Popper, or Lakatos, or Kuhn or Feyerabend, or Hume and compare those competing arguments to Stove's, . . . decide for yourself. Hume for instance, is brushed aside with a simple, "logic is more than deduction." I cannot recommend this book.