Explain how Karl Popper’s methodology of science and the process of value judgment are similar in their deductive form and process of justification, and similar in their logical structure and process of disproof.
Many philosophers of science have developed their own theories about how science progresses and what the nature of science is. Karl Popper is perhaps the most widely recognized philosopher of science. In his book Conjecture and Refutation, Popper proposed a methodology for science, arguing that science is an endless process of “conjecture and disproof. Popper’s methodology for science is similar to the way we explore values. This is what we often call ethical questions. In our lives, we face problematic situations. For example, we may need to make a judgment about criminal behavior, or we may want to determine whether light is a particle or a wave. To solve these problems, we may need a scientific explanation, or in the case of ethical issues, we may need to justify our values or behaviors. It is generally assumed that the methodologies of science and ethics are very different, as science is considered to be objective and rational, and ethics is considered to be subjective and emotional. But in what ways do the methodologies of science and ethics have similar forms? Let’s focus on Popper’s methodology of science and compare it to the structure of value judgments.
First, the deductive form. First, we need to understand the deductive method that Popper advocates as a method of scientific inquiry. Popper was vehemently opposed to ‘inductivism’. The problem with induction is that inductive reasoning – making empirical generalizations from a few observations – cannot be logically proven, no matter how many examples there are. As a simple example, suppose we wanted to prove the proposition “all swans are white.” To do so, we would have to survey all swans, which is impossible. All swans include all the swans on the planet and all the swans that will be found in the future, since it is impossible to observe them all and there is no guarantee that the next swan you see will be white. Popper points out this problem with induction and argues that the logic of induction cannot prove a proposition to be true, so only deductive reasoning makes sense. Let’s look at how Popper’s scientific explanations are organized. Here, all explanation is a process of deduction. The conclusion of the deduction is a statement about the thing being explained, and the premises of the deduction are statements about the laws and conditions being explained. We’ll see an example of this in the next section, after we explain the structure of value inquiry.
The process of making value judgments in value inquiry is organized in the form of a deductive syllogism. The deductive syllogism has a premise (all humans die), a sub-premise (Socrates is a human being), and a conclusion (therefore, Socrates dies). When faced with an ethical problem, to determine which value is correct, we examine the facts, principles, and norms relevant to the problem and make a judgment through a deductive process. Let’s compare the following examples
1. Iron rusts when combined with oxygen. (Universal law)
2. thing X (combined with oxygen) is iron. (Specific fact)
3. therefore, X rusts. (Conclusion: to be explained)
1. It is not right to lie. (value principle)
2. Dean lied. (problem situation)
3. therefore, Dean’s behavior was wrong. (Conclusion)
As you can see, the structure of scientific explanations that explore facts and the process of determining the value of right and wrong have the same logical structure. Although we have used a simple example here, we can see that both are deductive processes, have the same three-step syllogism, and draw conclusions about specific facts from universal laws or principles. The only difference is the nature of the object to be explained (the building blocks of reasoning). The former are statements about factual phenomena, while the latter are statements about values through human rational thought.
The second is that both the growth of knowledge and the process of value judgment are processes of justification according to Popper. Based on the above, Popper argues for ‘disprovationalism’. According to Popper, disproving a theory is showing that it is wrong with empirical evidence. If a prediction is made based on a theory, and observations or experiments show a different result than the prediction, it means that the theory is wrong. Popper saw this logic of disproof as fundamental to science and argued that it is the surest way to gain knowledge from nature. He says that it is impossible to prove a theory, and that the basic form in which scientific knowledge grows is by discarding incorrect theories through disproving them, and then proposing and disproving new theories (hypotheses). In other words, science is an endless process of “speculation and disproving. To summarize Popper’s process of knowledge growth through conjecture and disproof, it is as follows.
Scientific activity starts with a problem. The scientist speculatively proposes a new theory or hypothesis to solve this problem. The proposed hypothesis is subjected to a constant process of disproving (testing). Theories that do not withstand the test of time (i.e., are refuted) are discarded, and those that do are accepted as provisionally valid knowledge until a new theory is found. This process of speculation and refutation is how scientific knowledge evolves.
Now, let’s look at the process of value judgment. Value judgments also start with the identification of a value issue. A value problem is a question such as “Is an action, choice, judgment, etc. right or wrong?” or “Is a situation good or bad?”. To evaluate or resolve this value issue, you gather facts about it, review them for relevance to what you want to evaluate, and make a tentative assessment based on generally accepted social norms (value principles). The value principle is then tested for acceptability as a counterfactual. If the value principle is acceptable, the tentative judgment becomes final; if the value principle is not acceptable, the final judgment must be justified by either proposing a different value principle or revising the tentative judgment. In other words, value judgment is a process of making justified evaluations.
The first thing that both processes have in common is that they rely on theory. In science, observations are influenced by theories, which is called “theoretical reification of observations,” and in value judgment, we rely on commonly accepted ethical norms (theories) to make judgments. Second, scientific knowledge is provisional, and so are value judgments. Third, both are subject to testing, the results of which determine whether they can be justified. These points suggest that value judgments and scientific knowledge are similar in their growth process. The slight difference between the two is that value judgments also involve some logic of induction. In value judgments, the larger the range of facts on which you can base your judgment, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to make the right decision. However, it is clear that Popper’s logic of deduction is an important part of the value judgment process, and again, the more cases we have, the more likely we are to make the right judgment.
Having examined the similarities in logical structure in the second part, this third part will examine the structural equivalence of the two by comparing the process of testing the acceptability of value principles in value judgments with Popper’s process of disproving them. In the hypothetical-deductive method of inquiry, a hypothesis (theory) is proposed and a set of facts are observed. The hypothesis becomes the standard or point of view from which the facts are observed. Each fact is examined to see if it can disprove the hypothesis. In other words, the hypothesis guides where to focus our observations. In value judgment, value principles serve as the criteria equivalent to hypotheses. A value principle determines whether to accept or reject a set of facts through observation, i.e., whether there is a case to reject it. In other words, the process of testing whether to accept or reject a value principle is a process of testing for disprovability.
The similarities between Popper’s philosophy of science and value judgments can be summarized as follows. First, the structure of value judgments and Popper’s scientific explanations have the same logical structure in that they take the form of deduction. Second, both value judgments and Popper’s logic of the growth of scientific knowledge are processes of justification. Third, Popper’s process of disproving and examining value principles have very similar logical characteristics.
Popper’s methodology of scientific inquiry is not the quintessence of scientific methodology, but only one of many methodologies. Therefore, we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the methodology of science and the methodology of ethics are exactly the same. However, science, the study of natural problems, and ethics, the study of human problems, are not inherently different in their methodologies, as we have seen.
