Deodorising Karl Popper

On those occasions when I make an attempt to not appear like such a pitiful depressive, I point out to correspondents and friends, over here and abroad alike that Kuwait is the kind of place where you can read...and read, and read. The lack of a nightlife might make itself felt in other ways not so nice, but generally, when I pick up a book and find the bookmark, I can rest assured that no friend is going to ring out of the blue to suggest we go get a pint, watch a film or attend a concert--of course, this is ultimately because Kuwait is a dry country where all the films are insipid pop-flicks and the only concerts which ever happen are never publicised (an entire season of world music this summer was sponsored by the Youth & Arts Council, a publicly funded body, where international guests played to empty auditoria because, I gather, nobody could be bothered to advertise anything more than 24 hours in advance, if they advertised them at all).

If you've read anything, you know that books come in different flavours... sure, they all have something in common, and what they have in common is always debatable, but there are books which you read from cover to cover only to forget the characters mid-way (anything written by the Brontes of this world for me) or feel like maybe if one more author died it wouldn't be such a bad thing (see Thomas Friedman, or Peter Singer). Then there are the books which you make you wish you knew people who were more like them: Insightful, funny, poignant, thought-provoking, sexually thrilling, even if sometimes, tragically, flawed (maybe not all at the same time). While it may not be everybody's idea of a piece of vaudeville titillation, Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery definitely belongs in the latter category.

Aside from anything else, the book should be read to remind one of two oft-neglected truths in the modern world, at least by those hooked on American television and its trappings. Firstly, philosophy did not die out with the Stoic school, but is instead an active field of enquiry that stretched well into the Twentieth Century (I once wanted to hit a man who sat next to me at the dinner table and told me that he read Philosophy "but only the good old stuff, like Plato and Aristotle"). Secondly, there are some real questions about what does, and what does not, make science.

Take for example the biggest imprint the book left on this reviewer anyway. To qualify as a theory, says Popper and everybody else, an idea should be able to make future predictions about what will happen in a way that can be disproved, or "falsifiable". To borrow an example from Carl Sagan, if you want to posit the statement that a large pink elephant is in the room, you must be able to show in some way that said elephant has an effect. Maybe you can not see the elephant, but even so, one must be able to smell, feel, hear or otherwise feel the influence of the elephant: At this stage, you must be able to design a way of testing your idea which could conceivably go wrong. If it is impossible for your idea to be proven wrong in any way, then you have gone into the realms of the un-scientific. In short, if it's inconceivable that the suggestion you're putting forward could be disproved, then it just isn't science.

Of course, the fact that the above statement is so well-known, to the point of being a mantra amongst some, makes Popper's books difficult to approach with fresh eyes: You're not really going to disagree with what you're about to read, but the development of the argument which Popper puts forward leaves you with the kind of passionate commitment worthy of--wait for it--a religious initiate. Instead of mildly disliking evolutionary psychologists ("evo pscyhs" as the dimwits call themselves), you feel like wanting to tear all their writings to shreds and burn them in a pile. Like his ideas on falsifiability, Popper also expresses in The Logic of Scientific Discovery some ideas on the interpretation of probabilities, particularly as it applies to quantum theory, also building here on the contributions of those who went before. This is probably the part of the (episodic) book which I most want to read anew, partially for the polemic value of not having to hear someone say that quantum physics "allows you to be two places at once".

On a slightly more disturbing note, Popper also goes to great lengths to suggest that inductive reasoning doesn't count as science. Well, if you can show that n is true, and later that n-1 is true, soon enough you will have mathematicians believing things, so why Popper doesn't like it I don't know. The use of empirical evidence to work towards something also has an air of appealing utilitarianism about it. It's certainly true that some studies of this type go past the peer-review machine and into the media, like the link between deodorant and breast cancer. It might not be easy to find a falsifiable experiment for this one, but do we really want to take risks? Sure, if you're living in the rarefied world of Noether's theorem and Einstein's Relativity, then empirical law science is a little something for the kiddies, but I have in the past wandered away from physics, and seen the ugly world of analytical chemistry, where they use the Beer-Lambert Law, and I have seen that while it is grubby, workmen's science, it is good.

Almost as good, in fact, as Popper's book, which has come out at me through the decades to relieve me of my boredom in Kuwait.