After a long hiatus where we both saw grief counsellors over our fight about Popper's theory of content in the last C&R episode, we are back. And we're ready to play nice ... for about 30 seconds until Vaden admits that two sentences from Popper changed his mind about something Ben had arguing for literally years.

But eventually putting those disagreements aside, we return to the subject at hand: The Conjectures and Refutations Series: Chapter 10: Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Part II). Here all goes smoothly. Just kidding, we start fighting about content again almost immediately. Where are the guests to break us up when you need them.

We discuss

• Why Vaden changed his mind about "all thought is problem solving"
• Something that rhymes with wero horship
• Is Popper sloppy when it comes to writing about probability and content
• Is all modern data science based on the wrong idea? (Hint: No)
• Popper's problem-focused view of scientific progress
• How much formalization is too much?
• The difference between high verisimilitude and high probability
• Why do we value simplicity in science?
• Historical examples of science progressing via theories with increasing content

Quotes

Consciousness, world 2, was presumably an evaluating and discerning consciousness, a problem-solving consciousness, right from the start. I have said of the animate part of the physical world 1 that all organisms are problem solvers. My basic assumption regarding world 2 is that this problem-solving activity of the animate part of world 1 resulted in the emergence of world 2, of the world of consciousness. But I do not mean by this that consciousness solves problems all the time, as I asserted of the organisms. On the contrary. The organisms are preoccupied with problem-solving day in, day out, but consciousness is not only concerned with the solving of problems, although that is its most important biological function. My hypothesis is that the original task of consciousness was to anticipate success and failure in problem-solving and to signal to the organism in the form of pleasure and pain whether it was on the right or wrong path to the solution of the problem.

• In Search of a Better World, p.17 (emphasis added)

The criterion of potential satisfactoriness is thus testability, or improbability: only a highly testable or improbable theory is worth testing, and is actually (and not merely potentially) satisfactory if it withstands severe tests—especially those tests to which we could point as crucial for the theory before they were ever undertaken.
- C&R, Chapter 10

Consequently there is little merit in formalizing and elaborating a deductive system (intended for use as an empirical science) beyond the requirements of the task of criticizing and testing it, and of comparing it critically with competitors.
- C&R, Chapter 10

Admittedly, our expectations, and thus our theories, may precede, historically, even our problems. Yet science starts only with problems. Problems crop up especially when we are disappointed in our expectations, or when our theories involve us in difficulties, in contradictions; and these may arise either within a theory, or between two different theories, or as the result of a clash between our theories and our observations.
- C&R, Chapter 10

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Is "Ben and Vaden will fight about content" high or low probability? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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