In a message dated 10/13/2015 7:17:52 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes in a different thread: "Sarah Palin is
presenting
her notes on Popper at the Colloquium."
which are based, at last, on a 'reductive' (but not "reductionist" she
warns) analysis of refudiation.
The blend (or "portmanteau" -- Palin is using a Carollian turn of phrase)
is meant to supersede what she sees as a rather simplistic account of
'falsify' in Popper.
Thus, 'to refudiate' BLENDS both an alethic component (the truth content of
the proposition you are refudiating -- you refute 'p') and what she calls
a boulemaic (or volitive, in colloquial English) component (your
pro-attitude towards 'p' -- you repudiate 'p'). It's like 'refusing' p but
different.
McEvoy was referring to 'avoiding falsification', which comes quite close,
incidentally, to Palin's analysis.
Palin considers different scenarios.
I read from her notes:
"Example: I say "All ravens are black".
"Popper produces an albino raven and directs my attention to it saying
"Here is a non-black raven"".
"Popper," Palin adds, "is begging not a question, but an answer, and why
shouldn't it he be granted his beg?"
"Also, Popper is refudiating leucism."
"As everyone in Alaska knows, leucism means white plumage or, in general,
white colour."
She adds for illustration:
"We had a white fox in our backyard last year."
"We described it as leucistic rather than albino because, on inspection, it
had very dark eyes."
"Whereas an albino fox would have had pink eyes (with no pigmentation in
the iris)."
"In other words, Popper's simplistic account of the universal
generalisation, "All ravens are black" and its possible refudiation, assumes a
mere
variety of albinism as the total inability to produce pigment."
"In leucism, which is more difficult -- but not of course impossible -- to
refudiate -- the production of pigment is suppressed in the fur or
feathers."
"Fur in the case of fox; feathers in the case of Popper's example: raven",
she explains.
She goes on:
"Popper is trying to evade the falsification to "All ravens are black" by
saying that if we cut the alleged white raven open we will find it is
biologically different to a garden-or-variety black raven in a way that it
would
show the white raven it is a different "species" of animal and not a raven
at all. We do the dissection."
"I actually like this sort of thing; and I often feel that I should have
been a dissectionist rather than a philosopher; but I do see conceptual
analysis as an abstract form of dissectiion, as I hope you do, too."
(Palin is playing on the etymology of 'analysis' vs. 'synthesis', a Kantian
distinction).
Palin goes on:
"We fail to find any biological difference to support Popper's
counter-argument and possible falsifier."
"What irritates me is that Popper then, without a notice, changes tack."
"He argues that the thing can NOT be a raven because, in Vienna -- where
he comes from -- only black objects can be ravens and this dead thing in
front of us is not black."
"What Popper is doing is refudiable: he is implicating -- the term is
Grice's -- all ravens are black -- he later told me he took the example from
Reichenbach, and confessed, "I actually never saw a raven in the wild or in a
zoo in my whole life, not even when I moved to my cottage in Surrey" -- by
DEFINITION and a white raven, even in Surrey, is definitionally an
impossible structure".
"My friends in Kenley, however*, -- Kenley is in Surrey -- have told me
that the raven is a common backyard garden there: it would never be HERE in
Alaska because of mimetism, a Darwinian phenomenon."
"The point is that, by that sleight of hand, Popper is refudiating -- to
use my term -- what we may allege to be the falsification of this silly
Reichenbach generalisation,
"Alle raben sind schwartz"
--and Popper does this by treating Reichenbach's claim as not falsifiable
(or refudiable, for that matter) but as definitionally true."
"We might, if we wish, say conceptually true or true by conceptual analysis
here -- but I prefer to follow Quine and say, 'true by convention'".
"The important thing," Palin's notes go on, "is that Poper has not
produced a falsifier or "refudiater" of an empirical sort to Reichenbach's
innocent generalisation, of the type: "Here is a white raven -- never mind if
albino or leucistic."
"In other words, had Popper produced a valid "Here is a white raven --
albino or leucistic" he would be producing a "refudiater" that is itself of a
"refudiable" sort -- if I may repeat myself."
"But his mere refudiation of it, as a refudiater of Reichenbach's "All
ravens are black", does not involve the use of any refudiater of a refudiable
sort."
"Instead Popper has merely used an "immunising stratagem" of a
definitional/conceptual sort -- which may be all right in the all right
circumstances,
which these ain't!".
"Now, the way in which Popper's sneaky "immunising stratagem" refudiates
anything is so far removed from the sense in which refudiation is
commensurate with life, that we can see how far removed may be Popper's
vocabulary of
refudiating falsification from the sense of refudating a refudiation."
So McEvoy is wrong in not checking how Palin spells 'colloquium'.
Cheers,
Speranza
* Sarah is a distant relative of Michael Palin, of Monty Python fame, and
an avid traveller, who happens, like Popper, to live in the "Home Counties".
It was Michael Palin who noted the profusion of black ravens in the Home
Counties -- "in the right reason". "They are also common in Grice's Black
Country, but that's a different story". (Palin is implicating Grice's native
soil, Brum, vernacularly referred to as the black country for the profusion
of coal).
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