The Dependency Principle

I’m taking a week’s break from consideration of Popper’s work. It seems timely to mention one of the differences between science and information analysis – in general analysts don’t do their own experiments (i.e. generate their own data), while scientists who work directly with experimental data in general do.

Information analysts tend to have their data handed to them. Sometimes from a different department in their organisation, sometimes from entirely outside. Let’s pretend for now that that is the only difference between the role of experiment in the work of analysts and scientists (reserving an exploration of the others for a later post). The consequences that the analyst lacks an overview of the quality, completeness, and coding of the data.

Let’s briefly look at a sketch of the analytical process after the data is received:

Firstly there is (hopefully!) some sort of data checking, cleaning and familiarisation.

After that we might do some pre-processing of the data to turn it from raw data into something that encodes a bit more meaning (for instance turning counts into rates, or grosses into nets).

Then we could get clever with some sophisticated multi-variate analysis, GIS, data-mining or somesuch.

After that we can maybe draw some conclusions, bounce our results off other people’s work. We could bring in causality and the Reverend Bayes and start feeling pretty impressed with ourselves.

But look down… we’re standing on the fifth step of a five step structure, and the foundation was outside our control.

The name of this post draws an analogy between the structure above and a concept introduced by Iain Banks in his novel Excession. This is an unashamed but entertainingly modern space opera which has as it’s most engaging protagonists a bunch of artificially intelligences – minds – and the spacecraft that effectively make up their bodies. As superhuman intelligences they are frustrated with the slow (to them) action in the real world and pace of human affairs. They spend their leisure time in self-created artificial universes beyond the ken of man. But look down…

“... if you spent all your time having Fun, with no way back to reality, or just no idea what to do to protect yourself when you did get back there, then you were vulnerable. In fact, you were probably dead... it didn't matter that base reality was of no consequence aesthetically, hedonistically, metamathically, intellectually and philosophically; if that was the foundation stone that all your higher-level comfort and joy rested on, and it was kicked away from underneath you, you fell, and your limitless pleasure realms fell with you.” - Iain Banks, Excession

You are completely reliant on your data collection methods and lowly paid data gathering staff, no matter how clever you are or how advanced your analytical techniques. That’s The Dependency Principle.

The logic of scientific discovery, Part 2

Continuing on with the Popper...

Chapter 2, On the Problem of a Theory of Scientific Method

This is a short chapter which re-iterates and expands several of the points already made, emphasising the methodologically contingent quality of science.

10. Why Methodological Decisions are Indispensable

Unlike some philosophers of science Popper doesn't see it as a logical system which can produce either provably correct results, nor (absolutely) prove something false - there's wiggle room both at the top and the bottom. The theory of science itself is a built thing. In this picture of science methodological decisions are indispensable, to sew up the loopholes (cherry picking data, rewriting hypotheses post-hoc, and similar naughtiness).

11. The Naturalistic Approach to the Theory of Method

Here Popper spends a few pages talking down orthodox positivism (too-brief summary: positivism is the doctrine that the legitimacy of all knowledge is based solely in personal experience). This position, popular at the time of Popper's writing, requires that a theory of science can be only be based on an empirical study of scientists themselves - purely empirical, experience based, and 'naturalistic'.

This kind of absolutism - that modes of thought outside of personal experience literally have no meaning - sounds odd to modern ears. Popper contends, more relativistically, that there may (potentially at least) be many possible sciences with or without this or that feature or methodological rule, as long as they stay free of internal contradiction. The nature of science itself is not empirically discoverable, but decided.

12. Methodological Rules as Conventions

We see Popper use the analogy of the Logic of Science as the rules of a game. He then sets out some of the more important ones, to his way of playing:

The game never ends. Hypotheses can always be falsified. It always cheers me when I see today's young punks going after gravity.

Winner plays on. Once a hypothesis has been tested against the evidence and corroborated to some extent it doesn't drop out of the game until it's falsified or replaced by another one with a wider scope (the scope of hypotheses to be defined later).

Ya gotta take ya licks. This is a kind of higher order rule that specifies that no hypothesis should be protected from the rough and tumble. To do so would make it unfalsifiable and exclude it from the business of science altogether.

These are by no means an exhaustive set of those proposed in the rest of the book - this chapter is just a taster. Though in fact Popper purposely avoids writing a science methodology shopping list. The further rules, their nature, and the connections between them are the main subject of the rest of the book.


Chapter 2 Summary

So then, we've seen science defined methodologically. Some of it's main structures have been exposed and tied into the partial logical framework constructed in Chapter 1. Popper's science is a built thing and stands on the merit that its insights are useful.

Popper quotes:

"Definitions are dogmas; only the conclusions drawn from them can afford us any new insight" - Karl Menger

Though to what extent does science tell us about the world as it is? To what extent are our hypotheses true? Good questions both...