The meeting was in Christchurch, New Zealand, in November 1989. The session celebrated the work of Karl Popper in the city where he wrote the 700-page The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).

Popper (1902-1994) fled from Austria in 1937 and moved to London after the war. Sixteen of his relatives did not survive the Holocaust.

This is the list of posts in the Popper section.

This is the commentary on the papers by Dr William W. Bartley, Professor Peter Munz, Professor Colin Simkin and Dr Naomi Moldofsky

Mont Pelerin 1989 Commentary On Three Popper Related Papers In Christchurch 1989

91.5KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

FUND

Well, we cannot forget that Anthony Fauci is not alone here.

We should not focus just on him. Lots of other people that Anthony Fauci was corresponding with in assembling and meetings were part of this cover-up and part of this campaign of intimidation against any critics who dared to challenge these lockdowns.

This is a systemic problem.

What we really have to do is, I think, challenge the very scientific-industrial complex we have created in this country.

Remember that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about a military-industrial complex. We also warned about an educational-industrial complex. We have increasingly seen science funding controlled by the federal government that has become a cesspool of corruption and favouritism and hatred.

POPPER ON THE INSTITUTIONS OF SCIENCE

Hence the need for more attention to the institutions and the customary practices in science that Popper identified over 80 years ago when he was in New Zealand, writing The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and the papers that appeared in The Poverty of Historicism (1957).

He claimed that the objectivity of science comes from the process of more or less free criticism in the scientific community.

It may be said that what we call ‘scientific objectivity’ is not a product of the individual scientist’s impartiality, but a product of the social or public character of scientific method; and the individual scientist’s impartiality is, so far as it exists, not the source but rather the result of this socially or institutionally organized objectivity of science. (Popper 1996 220)

Considering what drove progress in science and industry, he contemplated what could STOP progress.

By closing down or controlling laboratories for research, by suppressing or controlling scientific periodicals and other means of discussion, by suppressing scientific congresses and conferences, by suppressing Universities and other schools, by suppressing books, the printing press, writing, and, in the end, speaking. All these things which indeed might be suppressed (or controlled) are social institutions…Scientific method itself has social aspects. Science, and more especially scientific progress, are the results not of isolated efforts but of the free competition of thought. For science needs ever more competition between hypotheses and ever more rigorous tests. And the competing hypotheses need personal representation, as it were: they need advocates, they need a jury, and even a public. This personal representation must be institutionally organized if we wish to ensure that it works. (Popper 1961 154-5)

The audience that Popper wanted would come through the teaching that Jacques Barzun advocated to produce laypeople who know enough about the history and methods of science to follow public discussions of controversial scientific matters. The scientists, for their part, would be alert to the moral, social and political implications of their work.

THE GOVERNANCE OF SCIENCE

Popper’s reference to the institutional context of science in The Poverty of Historicism points to the governance of science. This became a big issue in Britain when Marxists such as John Bernal, a world leader in molecular biology, pushed for government control of the national research effort (Bernal 1939). This provoked a reaction to defend autonomous science led by Michael Polanyi and he wrote “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” that was published in Minerva (1962). For an account of this episode and a survey of the range of issues involved, see Ravetz Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (1971).

Other postwar developments intensified the issue of governance, notably the rise of Big Science and the official discovery of the phenomenon of “normal science”. Big Science refers to the major research and development projects on the model of the Manhattan Project which transformed the scientific and academic landscape (Shills 1972, Greenberg 2001).

In his unpublished lectures Popper referred to the menace of Big Science with too much money chasing too few ideas and other adverse effects. Speaking from a very different vantage point President Eisenhower in his farewell speech to the nation in 1961 warned that the nation’s scholars might be dominated by Federal employment and project allocations.

…the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Barzun saw that college science teaching at the time (1948) was creating a large, powerful, and complacent class of college-trained scientists at the heart of the industrial and political system. “The technicians [normal scientists] - wedded solely to their workbench - will work for any group that hires. .. And the mass of people – the citizens - are trained to accept the authority of experts.”

His remedy - teach science as a humanities subject.

Then came Kuhn’s account of normal science, which many people accepted as the proper way to go, especially in the social sciences where researchers were keen to copy the more prestigious disciplines (Notturno 1984).

A TURN TOWARDS DARKNESS

A more recent development is a rapidly growing literature on problems in the quality of published research. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of Lancet wrote “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may be simply untrue…Science has taken a turn towards darkness” with reference to small sample sizes, invalid analyses, conflicts of interest and obsession with fashionable trends (Horton 2015).

There is concern about the increasing incidence of retractions and the higher rate of retractions in high impact journals (Fang et al 2011) and the dangerous liaison of science and politics (Butos and McQuade 2006).

Less than 12% of articles in 2004 in The Journal of Economic Theory passed three tests – stating a theory, explaining why it mattered and testing it (Klein and Romaro 2007).

There are problems of replication of results and politicization in some fields such as climate science. Another concern is the declining publication of negative results (Fanelli 2012) and it would be interesting to explore if this has any basis in the persistent teaching of confirmation theory rather than critical rationalism in epistemology and the philosophy of science.

ENTER GORDON TULLOCK

The economist Gordon Tullock (1922-2014) was inspired by his contact with Popper to make a significant but little-appreciated contribution to the literature on the governance of science. He is regarded as one of the most gifted and innovative economists not to win a Nobel Prize. In The Organization of Inquiry (1966) he approached the topic of scientific research and publication as a student of legal, social and economic systems to sketch a scenario for the decline of a scientific discipline, given a particular combination of motivational factors and institutional incentives.

Concerning the people who engage in pure and applied research he identified three kinds of curiosity:
1. Pure curiosity and compulsion to find how the world works. This drives the great scientists.
2. The passionate desire to solve practical problems. This drives the great builders and engineers.
3. “Induced curiosity” directed to either pure or applied problems.

The researchers with induced curiosity are those who do not have a consuming passion for research but do it as a job. The most obvious examples are academic staff who have to “publish or perish” in the struggle for tenure and promotion and the scientists who work “nine to five” in public and private research laboratories. Of course outstanding work can be produced by academics seeking promotion and even by nine to five scientists but Tullock’s analysis addressed some tendencies which could emerge in a system where more and more of the workers have “induced” curiosity and less and less (in proportion) harbour a burning commitment to the quest.

Closely related to the motives of the investigators is their concern for the quality of the work and their willingness to test their assumptions and their results. Tullock noted that the dedicated truth seeker and also the serious practical problem-solver must pay close attention to reality to align their ideas with it and this demands constant testing and critical evaluation. In contrast, the researcher who is only aiming to publish to satisfy the requirements of an employer or grant-giving agency can be happy with results that are merely publishable even if they are not robust. As Tullock put it, scientific concern with the real world can run second to other matters.

If he could establish and maintain his reputation, and hence his job, by reporting completely fictional discoveries, this would accomplish his end. While an investigator motivated by curiosity or practical utility must, of necessity, concern himself with real phenomena, the man motivated by induced curiosity could, if the risk of discovery were not great, simply ignore reality. (Tullock 1965 56)

SELF-PERPETUATING CORRUPTION OF PEER REVIEW

He suggested that a self-perpetuating process could occur in a journal or a field of research dominated by investigators with induced curiosity (or “normal” or “uncritical scientists”) so the work could “gradually slip away from reality in the direction of superficially impressive but actually easy research projects”. The peer review process is designed to avert such a decline however if the reviewers are too closely associated with the authors either personally or by membership of a school of thought then the rigor of the process may suffer. Tullock speculated that this would be most likely to happen in a field dominated by “induced” and “normal scientists” rather than the dedicated truth seekers.

Towards the end of that slippery slope is the situation where there is a widespread belief in the field that the function of the researcher is to support a “side” on some issue. Simply presenting a rationalization for some position chosen on other grounds may be acceptable as an objective of research, and the principal criterion in judging journals may become their points of view.

The concern with reality that unites the sciences, then, may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia…these symptoms may be found in some of the social sciences.

When Tullock wrote the book in the 1960s, he considered that the natural sciences were sound, but he thought that parts of economics and the social sciences were well down the slope that he sketched. In view of the concerns that are being expressed about the state of science at present, it may be time to revisit Tullock’s analysis to see what we can learn from it.

“my view is that philosophers do better to paint a picture in which we urge trust in the consensus of the scientific community, based on features of that community’s social organization ,” (Winsberg p. 161)

The critique introduces Laframboise on the production of the IPCC Assessment Reports, the Wegman review of Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph, and the institutional approach that Karl Popper advocated to complement his work on the logic of science

Defending the merchants of alarmism.

This appears to be the first book of its kind, promising a thorough and rigorous investigation of the philosophical and methodological issues that arise in the problematic and controversial field of climate science. It is long overdue because the scholars in the history and philosophy of science have by and large neglected this particular science. The two outstanding exceptions are Philip Kitcher and more recently Eric Winsberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida.

Philip Kitcher recently retired from Columbia College NY. With Evelyn Fox Keller he wrote The Seasons Alter that portrays a dystopian future in a warming world that probably represents Peak Alarmism. Any advance on a pandemic that kills billions of people?

In a similar vein but less flamboyant mode Eric Winsberg’s Philosophy and Climate Science is a sustained defence of the methods and conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and those who share its mission to promote alarm about the future of the planet. Consequently this book is not a solution to the apathy of the philosophers and scholars in the social studies of science in the face of the shortcomings in the mainstream of climate science but instead it is part of the problem. This book cannot be recommended even at a remainder price unless you are looking for yet another example of the failure of the academic “dogs” to bark a warning.

A striking feature of the book is Winsberg’s quite remarkable display of cherry picking of evidence, selective treatment of contested issues his benign view of the credibility of the IPCC and the institutional organization and funding of climate science. He is a two-fisted partisan in the climate debate and this stance is on display from the opening chapter with carefully selected items of information to paint a picture of dangerous warming. He fatuously disparages “climate deniers” (229) as though the considerable number of eminent climate scientists who are not alarmed about the warming trend cannot be taken seriously.. The book begins with some particularly tendentious and misleading data to convince the uninformed and the unwary that serious anthropogenic warming is happening.

He refers to the number of recent years that are the “warmest on record”, the retreat of Arctic ice, the extreme weather events of recent times including a record drought in Australia, and the acceleration of rising sea levels. Given the uncontroversial view that the earth has warmed over the last two centuries and even more since the little Ice Age it stands to reason that recent years are likely to be warmer than earlier ones. the Antarctic ice is growing? The record shows that there has not been a trend to more extreme weather lately (possibly the reverse). The claim about the record recent drought in Australia is simply fake news. The latest report on sea levels by Dr Judith Curry shows no acceleration (possibly a slowing down).

Apparently there is “well funded” opposition to genuine climate science (215) and he cites The Merchants of Doubt (2010) by Oreskes and Conway with their account of Big Oil and others who back the “climate deniers.” But it seems that Exxon Mobil stopped funding climate dissidents around 2005 when they went green like the other oil. Winsberg reports “by all accounts their [Oreskes and Conway’s] claims are true” ( ). Strangely no other accounts are cited. Of course other people and organizations are funding a handful of organisations like the Heartand Institute to challenge the orthodoxy. The Heartland Institute has an annual budget in the order of seven million dollars so it is hardly “well funded” in comparison with the tens of billions poured into mainstream climate research and development projects. Seven million dollars is not even in the same league with the contributions to environmental activists from the great philanthropic foundations. Between 2011 and 2015, the top 20 charitable donors alone gave $556 million to green activists, notably the Sierra Club, which received 49 million (not its only income, of course). The donors are a roll call of the great foundations – Rockefeller, Pew, Hewlett, Packard, Skoll, Bloomberg, Ford and many more. A consortium of the foundations hired a firm of consultants to produce a report “Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming”. The aim was to triple funding from $210 million in 2007 to $600 million per annum over the next decade. How many Heartland Institutes costing 7 million each could be funded with 600 million dollars? They may have failed to reach that target; still, it is a David versus Goliath contest and the reverse of the picture painted by the likes of Oreskes and uncritically recycled by Winsberg.

The Problem with Models

A significant part of the book is concerned with the principles and practice of model building that is central to the effort to specify the role of CO2 and to provide projections of future developments. This is Winsberg’s home ground because he previously wrote Science in the Age of Computer Simulation and he has many publications in the field. He provides an introduction to the vocabulary and the concepts in the business with emphasis on the size and complexity of the computer programs, the difficulty of interpreting the output and some of the philosophical issues that arise.

Not enough is said to explain their remarkable lack of success in projecting the trends in warming after the pause at the turn of the millennium. Roy Spencer produced the most dramatic picture of the failure showing that almost all of 92 computer models over-estimated the warming trend compared with the most reliable measurements both on the ground and in the troposphere. During the pause in warming the projections deviated more each year from the actual temperature and by about 2005 only four or five of the projections were even close to the measured temperature and the situation deteriorated every year.

The Australian Garth Paltridge provided a much more helpful account of the modelling exercise in The Climate Caper (date). He noted that the model builders are reluctant to give up hope that detailed forecasts can be achieved, perhaps with more data and the next generation of computers for number-crunching. Trillions of dollars worldwide are riding on the predictions of the IPCC and the modelling exercise may be too big to be allowed to fail any time soon.

He reported that the twenty or so models favoured by the IPCC calculate global-average temperatures that range several degrees about the observed value of 15 degrees C.” (p 21) A team at the ANU looked at the predictions for current (measured) rainfall in Australia based on the several IPCC models and the range extended from 200 mm per year less than the actual, to 1000 mm per year more. About half predicted more rainfall for Australia later in the century and half predicted less. The average was an increase of about 8 mm per annum but the model used to develop Australia’s climate policy by the Rudd Government predicted 100 mm less rainfall. Where rigorous standards are applied that model might have been regarded as an outlier and discarded.

Consensus rules in climate science and Paltridge explained why so many of the models converge towards the same broad story of warming, albeit at different rates, The models are so complex that they use the biggest computers in the world and months or years of work may be required complete a trial and there is overwhelming pressure not to run sensitivity tests using alternative models with different tuneable parameters. The “tuneable parameters” are knobs that the operators can twiddle to get the model to fit the data in hand but that process does not guarantee that the model is actually capturing reality, as revealed by the failure in the projections.

Some outstanding climate scientists such as Richard Lindzen who are not hostages of the modelling industry have argued that the macro-modelling approach is the wrong way to go on the basis of scientific first principles. This is rather along the lines of critique that classical and Austrian economists mount against Keynesian macro modelling in economics. That fundamental criticism is supported by a long-running project on forecasting methods and principles conducted by J Scott Armstrong in the US and Kesten Green in Australia. For decades, they have studied the success of various forecasting methods in many fields, including climate science, and they concluded in a paper, “Global warming forecasts by scientists versus scientific forecasts.

“The forecasts in the IPCC Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they were the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing. Research on forecasting has shown that experts’ predictions are not useful in situations involving uncertainty and complexity. We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.”

Faced with the difficulty of validating models by the conventional criteria of scientific merit, Winsberg referred to one of his colleagues, Wendy Parker, who explained in a published paper that “the most successful modelling approaches incorporate several computational models that rely on assumptions that contradict one another.” She concedes that this could erode confidence in the work (as indeed it should) but “distinctive methods and standards of justification are in play.” This suggests that POMO has officially arrived in climate science! Winsberg also conceded that it is difficult to explain the new standards of justification that are in play and he virtually threw up his hands and offloaded the criteria for evaluation and validation to the consensus in the field. He wrote “my view is that philosophers do better to paint a picture in which we urge trust in the consensus of the scientific community, based on features of that community’s social organization , than to try to provide a normative framework from which we can demonstrate the reliability (or its absence) of such-and-such modelling result” (161, my italics)

The Social Organisation of Climate Science

Many features of the social organization of the IPCC and the community of climate scientists have come to light that tend to undermine trust in the consensus that emerges from it. Notable sources include Donna Laframboise’s study of the governance of the IPCC, the Wegman committee’s investigation of Michael Mann’s “hockey stick”, the revelations in the emails released from the University of East Anglia and the work of Armstrong and Green noted above.

In 2011 Donna Laframboise published an exhaustive and damning review of the procedures used to assemble the fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. In The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert she pointed out that it is a political body, created by that most political organization, the United Nations. Rupert Darwall charted the role of the UN in the politics of climate change in two landmark works The Age of Global Warming (date) and Green Tyranny ().

Laframboise described the process in a nutshell. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change convened in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and sold the idea that greenhouse gasses are The Problem. 154 nations signed up in principle and later enrolled in the Kyoto Protocol. The UNFCCC had a brief to reduce human emissions and failing to do so would be “nothing less than criminal irresponsibility”.

The IPCC was created to recruit scientists to support the agenda. Observe the steps: Step one was the political decision that a greenhouse gas treaty was a worthy and achievable goal. Step two was the recognition that before such a treaty could be negotiated, certain documents representing a common understanding were required. Step was to enlisting scientists to help produce such documents.

Laframboise pointed out that the UN did not wait for climate science to mature. Political operators in the organization decided on the solution to a problem that legitimate climate scientists never depicted in alarming terms. The shortest version of the IPCC Climate Bible appeared in 1990 and the findings were tentative. Yet in the next two years the UN convinced a majority of the world’s governments to sign a framework document that essentially started the “war on CO2,”

The IPCC is the spearhead of the politically-driven scare campaign to support the “war” and it produces regular Assessment Reports to maintain the climate of alarm. Each report has a small summary volume for politicians and journalists; This is the report that recently warned that the Barrier Reef may disappear in our lifetime if we not mend our coal-burning ways. Longer reports are produced at the same time and some of the chapters in them contain proper science but it they are scarcely mentioned in the media and they are very little read.

Large numbers of scientists contribute material in the lead-up to the final report writing that is in the hands of a small team of lead authors overseen by two coordinating lead authors. Scientists in the lowest tier are contributing authors and they are generally excluded from meetings of the other authors. They provide raw material on specific and limited topics to be incorporated, re-worked and cited by the lead authors under the direction of the coordinating authors. Additional material, published and occasionally unpublished, can be used at the discretion of the senior authors.

The coordinating lead authors are overwhelmingly the really key figures and Laframboise found that some of them are incredibly unlikely figures in terms of experience, qualifications (doctorates not completed) and background (climate activists). Claims were made about the use of peer-reviewed literature, and a count of the 18,531 references in the 2007 report found that 5,587 (one third) were not peer reviewed including drafts of scientific papers, Greenpeace documents and even press released! In defence it was claimed that the process of internal review would ensure that only “high quality” information in the “grey” literature would be used in the reports.

Scientists outside the inner circle do not agree with that claim. They are routinely snubbed when they challenge the work in progress and outraged at the misrepresentation of the findings in their fields of expertise. A chapter describes the way that leading hurricane expert Chris Landsea was sidelined by Kevin Trenbath who was in charge of the relevant chapter in the Climate Bible. Another chapter follows the story about pseudo-scientific data on hurricanes that became part of the Climate Bible. Another chapter describes one of the most scandalous beatups on the IPCC record, the allegation that warming will massively increase the prevalence of malaria. Among other defects in the argument, malaria is not especially a warm climate illness.

The chapter “Extinction Fiction” charts the abuse of pseudo-scientific findings to predict alarming species losses. One of the two key papers was written by Chris Thomas and 14 co-authors. Daniel Botkin, a leading figures in the field described it “the worst paper I have ever read in a major scientific journal” and the journal that published it was obliged to print not one or two but three critical appraisals of the original paper. Laframboise’s book is essential reading for anyone who is not fully aware of the corruption of the UN climate program and especially the IPCC.

Edward Wegman at George Mason University VA headed an ad hoc committee convened by the Chairman of two US House committees to review the science behind Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph. Mann’s work in the late 1990s was a major feature of the Third IPPC Assessment report in 2001 where it created a sensation. The hockey stick shape of the warming curve eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and gave the impression that the current warming was unprecedented in modern times. After sustained and devastating criticism, notably in the Wegman report, the IPPC discretely parked the hockey stick in the archives to be forgotten although it was a major propaganda weapon for some time and some diehard alarmists have stuck with it.

Noting the crippling defects in the statistical analysis of the data used by Mann and his associates at the East Sussex , the committee stated the community of paleoclimatologists appeared to be out of touch with developments in the relevant field of statistical analysis. In addition the scientists in the field were “tightly coupled” as revealed by a network analysis of the connections between the members in the community. Clearly more work is required on the network connections in the climate science community because close associations in relatively closed groups obviously have the capacity to undermine the rigor of refereeing for the peer reviewed literature. The emails released from the East Anglia etc clearly demonstrated the downside of the “close coupling” described in the Wegman report.

Enter Popper and Tulloch

All the indicators and symptoms of the problems in the quality of climate science call for a master theorist to create a framework for a Grand Narrative. Gordon Tullock provided this in a neglected masterpiece, The Organization of Inquiry (1966) . To provide context for the work it is essential to understand the transformation of science since 1945. Previously the communities of scientists were quite small, with modest funding from diverse sources.. The Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb signalled the emergence of Big Science funded by Big Government.

Karl Popper in his unpublished lectures in the early 1950s predicted bad things for science in the service of politicians. He saw too much money chasing too few ideas, the publication explosion (good buried under bad) and the distortion of incentives for scientists by the pressure to obtain grants for fashionable and the politically “hot” topics. Richard Lindzen, probably the doyen of genuine climate scientists, put some meat on the bones of Popper’s concern when he recently described the impact of the 15-fold increase of funding for climate research during the Clinton/Gore administration. That was too much money for a small backwater of science, as Lindzen described climate science at the time, and the funding promoted a proliferation of studies by all manner of investigators without appropriate training or genuine interest in serious climate science.

Popper was also alarmed by the phenomenon of normal science and normal (uncritical) scientists described by by T S Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Some of his concerns were shared by a man with a very different vantage point - the Oval Office in the White House in Washington DC. In his farewell speech at the end of his term President Eisenhower warned “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present.” He noted the “equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” (Eisenhower, 1961).

Both of those possibilities became real when the governments of the western world were driven by the United Nations to embrace radical environmentalism under the influence of the worldwide green movement. New international forums and agencies proliferated, driven by a new class of political entrepreneurs like Maurice Strong. They played up the challenge of climate change, and created additional vehicles for this particular issue, notably the IPCC.

Turning to Gordon Tullock (1922-2014). Climate science was not yet on the radar when he wrote in the early 1960s and he thought the natural sciences were good shape. His scenario for the decline of a scientific discipline drew on his experience of the social sciences including parts of economics. He was a colleague of James Buchanan in the Virginia School of public choice studies and he was unlucky not to share the Nobel Prize with Buchanan, probably because he was temperamentally a contrarian and he was easily distracted. In addition to seminal work on economics he wrote a book about the social life of insects and he engaged in long-running correspondence with Karl Popper, trying to persuade him to take up some of Tullock’s ideas in quantum physics.

After he met Popper at a Volker Fund (free enterprise) conference at Emory University he put aside the work that became The Politics of Bureaucracy and wrote The Organization of Enquiry. He took the social/institutional approach advocated by Popper in The Poverty of Historicism, written in New Zealand during the war as a companion to The Open Society and Its Enemies. The idea was to explain the development or lack of scientific and industrial progress in terms of the institutional context rather than psychological factors (advocated by Comte and Mill) or the manifestation of a historical tendency. Contemplating the factors that could stop the progress of science Popper suggested closing down or controlling laboratories for research and anything that impeded the free exchange of criticism and ideas in the scientific community. “Scientific method itself has social aspects. Science, and more especially scientific progress, are the results not of isolated efforts but of the free competition of thought. For science needs ever more competition between hypotheses and ever more rigorous tests.” He went on to suggest that competing hypotheses need personal representation, advocates, “and even a public.” He might have suggested ‘an informed public’ because the public at present is so misinformed about the weather that politicians are easily driven by public opinion to embrace disastrous policies.

Tullock sketched a scenario that has a haunting resemblance to the progress of climate science and probably other fields as well, judging from the famous warning issued by Richard Horton in his capacity as editor-in-chief of The Lancet. “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may be simply untrue…Science has taken a turn towards darkness” with reference to small sample sizes, invalid analyses, conflicts of interest and obsession with fashionable trends (Horton 2015).

The scenario involves a combination of personal and institutional factors. The personal factor is the rise of the normal scientist who does science for a living, working under the direction of the laboratory manager without necessarily having any sense of vocation or passion to find the truth. The institutional factors include the rise of Big Science driven by Big Government, the imperative to publish perish to maintain tenure and research grants and the politicisation of intellectual life.

At the individual level he identified three forms of curiosity. First the pure curiosity of the scientist engaged in a compulsive or or obsessive quest for the truth,. Second the equally driving practical curiosity of the person obsessed with making things work better. Third, the “induced curiosity” of the researcher who does not necessarily have a passion for research or the truth but takes on science as a job. The most obvious examples are academic staff who have to “publish or perish” to obtain tenure and promotion, and the large numbers of scientists who work “nine to five” in public and private research laboratories. Of course outstanding work can be produced by academics seeking promotion and even by nine to five scientists but Tullock’s analysis addressed some tendencies which could emerge in a system where more and more of the workers have “induced” curiosity and less and less (in proportion) harbour a burning commitment to the quest.

Tullock noted that the dedicated truth seeker and also the practical problem-solver must pay close attention to reality to align their ideas with it. This demands constant testing and critical evaluation but in contrast, the researcher who is not so motivated can be happy with results that are merely publishable Tullock suggested that for these scientists concern with the real world could become secondary to other matters and if the investigators could maintain their reputations and their jobs by reporting fictional discoveries that would serve the purpose.

The peer review process is designed to maintain standards and he developed the scenario further to consider what would happen if the reviewers are too closely associated with the authors either personally or by membership of a school of thought. He was working before natural science was seriously politicized and of course in the radically polarized world of climate science nowadays the membership of the correct school of thought has become a professional imperative for most investigators.

He observed the politicization of the social sciences because he and Buchanan had both suffered from it (denied funding by the left-trending Rockefeller Foundation) and he observed that the end of the that slippery slope of declining standards is the situation where there is a widespread belief in the field that the function of the researcher is to support a particular position. At this point “Simply presenting a rationalization for some position chosen on other grounds may be acceptable as an objective of research, and the principal criterion in judging journals may become their points of view…The concern with reality that unites the sciences, then, may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia”.

Readers can decide for themselves how far various fields have gone down that path, bearing in mind Horton’s warming in The Lancet. To conclude with a reminder of Winsberg’s suggestion quoted at the head of this review –to trust the scientific consensus based on the organization of the community. This means referring questions of scientific credibility to a consortium of politically correct grant-seekers, environmental fundamentalists and UN officials dedicated to the transformation of the economies of the western world. That is not really what one might have expected from a scholar in the Queen of the Sciences!

Missing from the references Lindzen, Curry, Spencer, Christy.

Missing from Index Curry, Lindzen, Laframboise, Mann, Gore.

Index Christy and Spencer 13-14 re discredited work.

Who is in and out in the philosophical story? No Popper Lakatos, passing reference to Kuhn.

No reference to big science and the Eisenhower warning.

For English-speaking people Popper first signaled what Jarvie called his “social turn” in Chapter 23 of The Open Society and Its Enemies and in Sections 31 and 32 of the Poverty of Historicism. Popper confronted Karl Mannheim’s exposition of the Marxist doctrine that our beliefs are determined by class interest and by the social and historical situation of our time. In defence of scientific objectivity Popper turned the sociology of knowledge on its head by arguing that its focus on the origin of subjective beliefs did not engage with its proper object of inquiry, namely knowledge as a public or social product. He claimed that the objectivity of science comes from the process of more or less free criticism in the scientific community.

It may be said that what we call ‘scientific objectivity’ is not a product of the individual scientist’s impartiality, but a product of the social or public character of scientific method; and the individual scientist’s impartiality is, so far as it exists, not the source but rather the result of this socially or institutionally organized objectivity of science. (Popper 1996 220)

Hence scientific objectivity is a situational or institutional problem which calls for such things as theoretical pluralism, clear formulation of the problems that the theories are supposed to solve, the design of critical experiments, the existence of journals, seminars and conferences to facilitate critical discussion. Some of these requirements have to be provided by individual scientists, especially new ideas and imaginative criticism while others call for institutions, including political institutions to maintain the autonomy of the journals and the research institutes.

In The Poverty of Historicism Popper carried the institutional analysis further in his argument against the psychological approach of Comte and Mill to explain scientific and industrial progress [Note 1]. He adopted the counter-intuitive procedure of trying to imagine conditions under which progress would be arrested.

By closing down or controlling laboratories for research, by suppressing or controlling scientific periodicals and other means of discussion, by suppressing scientific congresses and conferences, by suppressing Universities and other schools, by suppressing books, the printing press, writing, and, in the end, speaking. All these things which indeed might be suppressed (or controlled) are social institutions…Scientific method itself has social aspects. Science, and more especially scientific progress, are the results not of isolated efforts but of the free competition of thought. For science needs ever more competition between hypotheses and ever more rigorous tests. And the competing hypotheses need personal representation, as it were: they need advocates, they need a jury, and even a public. This personal representation must be institutionally organized if we wish to ensure that it works. (Popper 1961 154-5)

Turning to Jarvie’s The Republic of Science, this book aroused little interest when it was published in 2001, too late for mention in Fuller’s The Governance of Science which first appeared in 2000. Wettersten wrote a critical appraisal (Wettersten 2006) and Heclo acknowledged it as an influence in On Thinking Institutionally (2008). In view of the limited circulation of the contents it is probably helpful to sketch the main lines of the argument.

The dust jacket announces:

This book offers a careful re-reading of Popper’s classic falsificationist demarcation of science, stressing its institutional aspects. Ian Jarvie tracks Popper’s social thinking about science, individuals, institutions, and rationality through The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies as he criticised and improved his earlier work. New links are established between the works of the 1935-1945 period, revealing them as a source for criticism of the institutions and governance of science.

Jarvie found a “social turn” in Popper’s first published work. He clearly took to heart one of Popper’s favourite catch phrases “We never know what we are saying” meaning that our theories have contents and consequences that we do not realize. He suggested that Popper, for all his resistance to the sociological approach, in fact anticipated it.

Some comment is required regarding Jarvie’s use of the term “social turn” because this has created a deal of confusion in discussing this work with friends of Popper and others who ask whether this “turn” marked a change in Popper’s thinking or a deviation from the line of the logical positivists. It may be more helpful to talk about the social or institutional theme in Popper’s work and so my gloss on Jarvie’s thesis is that a significant achievement of Logik der Forschung was to emphasise the need for a critical approach to methodological procedures and conventions which function as rules of the game in science. That aspect of the book was generally overlooked because commentators and critics concentrated on the concerns which Popper shared with his opponents, notably the problems of demarcation and induction.

For those who are equally interested in Poppers work in the philosophy of science and politics the critical approach to the rules of the game can be seen as a theme which is common to both. One of the functions of the philosophy of science is to formulate and criticize the rules of the game of science while political philosophers may do the same for the rules of social and political life. Some of these rules are written laws, regulations, protocols and procedures and others are unwritten customs and habitual practices. In science these would appear to include what Polanyi called “tacit knowledge”.

The Introduction, ‘Science as an Institution’, sets out the major issues in the complex relationship between science and society. The word science may refer to a body of public knowledge, a set of beliefs about the world, the whole range of activities performed by scientists, some subset of those activities that are supposed to be special, the complex of social and political institutions which support and influence the activities of scientists.

Jacques Barzun wrote wrote an important book with the unlikely title of Science: The Glorious Entertainment and Popper referred to scientific research as possibly the ultimate example of roundabout production, a concept from Austrian economics. Jarvie surveyed various approaches including the positivist and falsificationist demarcation principles and Merton’s account of the distinguishing features of scientific knowledge.

Chapter 1 unpacks the hidden elements of the “social turn” in Popper’s early philosophy of science. Jarvie identified a number of procedural rules which constitute what he calls Popper’s “proto-constitution of science”. This is the foundation of his project and it is spelled out in some detail, drawing from Logik der Forschung.

My argument will be that thinking socially (rather than logically or psychologically) is central to Popper’s philosophical enterprise beginning with [the German prototype of] The Logic of Scientific Discovery, continuing for his ten most creative years, and emerging sporadically after that. Popper’s consistent ability to think socially also does much to account for his originality, since it is hard to do and its difficulty is attested by how often readers and critics of Popper do not grasp that this is what he is doing. (The Republic of Science 21).

Jarvie argued that the roots of Popper’s social/institutional thinking can be traced back to Logik der Forschung but after The Open Society and Its Enemies Popper did not expanded on the theme. Wettersten suggested in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy “He was so concerned not to explain away scientific knowledge as a mere social phenomena that he did not engage in the social studies of science even though his view called for such studies.” This looks like an example of “snowblindness”, a term which Arthur Koestler used in The Act of Creation to refer to “that remarkable form of blindness which often prevents the original thinker from perceiving the meaning and significance of his own discovery” (Koestler 1969 217-21).

The second chapter is ‘Popper’s 1935 Proto-Constitution for the Republic of Science’. This contains Popper’s supreme or meta-rule (SR) and 14 subsidiary rules (R1 to R14), which constitute the rudimentary scaffolding for Popper’s republic of science.

SR: The other rules of scientific procedure must be designed in such a way that they do not protect any statement in science against falsification.

R1: The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.

R2. Once a hypothesis has been proposed and tested, and has proved its mettle, it may not be allowed to drop out without ‘good reason’ (LScD 53-54).

The “supreme rule” and the first two subsidiary rules were proposed by Popper and Jarvie identified additional rules in the text of Popper’s book.

R3. We are not to abandon the search for universal laws and for a coherent theoretical system, nor ever give up our attempts to explain causally any kind of event we can describe (LScD 61).

R4. I shall…adopt a rule not to use undefined concepts as if they were implicitly defined (LScD 75).

R5. Only those auxiliary hypotheses are acceptable whose introduction does not diminish the degree of falsifiability or testability of the system in question but, on the contrary, increases it (LScD 83).

R6. We shall forbid surreptitious alterations of usage (LScD 84).

R7. Inter-subjectively testable experiments are either to be accepted, or to be rejected in the light of counter-experiments (LScD 84).

R8. The bare appeal to logical derivations to be discovered in future can be disregarded (LScD 84).

R9. After having produced some criticism of a rival theory, we should always make a serious attempt to apply this criticism to our own theory (LScD 85n).

R10. We should not accept stray basic statements - i.e logically disconnected ones – but…we should accept basic statements in the course of testing theories; or raising searching questions about these theories, to be answered by the acceptance of basic statements (LScD 106).

R11. This makes our methodological rule that those theories should be given preference which can be most severely tested…equivalent to a rule favouring theories with the highest possible empirical content (LScD 121).

R12. I propose that we take the methodological decision never to explain physical effects, i.e. reproducible regularities, as accumulations of accidents (LScD 199).

R13. A rule…which might demand that the agreement between basic statements and the probability estimate should conform to some minimum standard. Thus the rule might draw some arbitrary line and decree that only reasonably representative segments (or reasonably ‘fair samples’) are ‘permitted’, while a-typical or non-representative segments are ‘forbidden’ (LScD 204).

R14. The rule that we should see whether we can simplify or generalize or unify our theories by employing explanatory hypotheses of the type mentioned (that is to say, hypotheses explaining observable effects as summations or integrations of micro events) (LScD 207).

Jarvie’s commentary on the “constitution” begins with the reminder that it is very incomplete and very abstract, as though the whole of science is a kind of debating society, leaving out of account a great deal of gritty reality, such as the question of leadership. He noted Polanyi’s discussion in Personal Knowledge of rules in scientific practice which he called maxims . Polanyi considered that these are “tacit”, picked up in the process of training and induction into the scientific community. They are interpreted and administered by the leadership of the scientific community but they do not include any guidelines for critical appraisal and reform of the maxims even in the republic itself, much less by outsiders.

Chapter 3 “The Methodology of Studying Social Institutions” takes up three topics in The Poverty of Historicism; first Popper’s ideas about the emergence of institutions, second his ideas about individuals and their function in science and third his ideas on rationality and the scope for objectivity and testing in the human sciences. He was influenced by the ideas of Carl Menger and the “Austrian school” of social and economic thought which were “in the air” in Vienna at the time. Two of the central “Austrian” doctrines which Popper took on board are the theory of the origin of social institutions and methodological individualism.

In chapters four and five on The Open Society and its Enemies Jarvie aimed to capture Popper’s published ideas over the decade 1935 to 1945, avoiding the complications of subsequent changes to the original texts. This is where a problem of organisation becomes apparent, partly due to the density of argument. Popper spent several hundred pages to spell out his arguments and Jarvie in a hundred pages set out to convey the gist of those arguments along with his first take on the way that Popper’s ideas about society enrich his ideas about science and vice versa.

There are two or three books in here, jostling for attention. There is the strong thesis regarding Popper’s “social turn”; the analogy between Popper’s approach to the rules of the game in science and society; the parallels between Popper and the “Austrians” in the methodology of the social sciences; the exegesis of The Open Society and Its Enemies; and the implications of all of the above in working out the relationships between science (in all its various aspects) and society (and politics).

Many issues arise from the troubled relationship between science and politics since applied science became vital for national defence and pure science moved beyond the point where people could win Nobel Prizes with equipment purchased from the local hardware shop. Much of Jarvie’s discussion on these matters is directly or indirectly concerned with the governance of science (another book trying to get out) and Steve Fuller’s comments on these parts of the book will be welcome.

Implications and Applications

Moving on to the implications and applications of the social/institutional approach by Popper and others.

1. A common thread in Popper’s philosophy of science and his approach to social and political issues.

2. A common thread in Popper and Hayek.

3. The governance of science.

Regarding 1 and 2, Popper’s criterion for the value of his proposals in Logik der Forschung was their utility in helping scientists to get on with their work. He didn’t quite put it like that, he referred to “their fertility – their power to elucidate the problems of the theory of knowledge” (LScD 38). The point is that working scientists are disadvantaged if they operate with dysfunctional ideas in the theory of knowledge such the notion that they should start with observations. The working scientists applauded, notably Einstein, Medawar, Monod, Eccles and countless others including soil scientists in New Zealand, Melbourne and Adelaide.

The point is to begin with the right questions, that is, questions which facilitate purposeful and effective action both in the experimental sciences and in social and political matters. Collingwood made the same point in writing about “the logic of question and answer” (Collingwood 1957 Chapter V). Working scientists are expected to carry out experiments and make observations. They have to be active and Popper’s proposals (rules) can be applied to their activities including their deliberations before and after experimental and observational work. In the realm of politics and social action Popper similarly provided some rules, starting with the suggestion to use the language of political demands or proposals instead of the language of essentialism and historicism.

For example while the essentialist wants to find the essence of justice (or the state) and the historicist wants to look at the history of the state or the way things are going Popper suggested that we should consider what we want from our system of justice and from the state.

In a clear presentation of this theory [of the protective state], the language of political demands or of political proposals should be used; that is to say, we should not try to answer the essentialist question: What is the state, what is its true nature, its real meaning? Nor should we try to answer the historicist question: How did the state originate, and what is the origin of political obligation? We should rather put our question in this way: What do we demand from a state? What do we propose to consider as the legitimate aim of state activity? (Popper 1966 109 my emphasis)

That is not to dismiss studies which search for patterns or regularities in social or political processes. Similarly, we do not dismiss historical studies, it means that we do not confuse trends with laws and it means that we do not have to submit to historical tendencies like the ruin of democracy under communism in Russia and state socialism in Germany and the recent lockdowns around the world (added in 2023)..

Hayek took a similar approach in The Constitution of Liberty where he discussed the pros and cons of democracy. He noted that the power of the state was not expected to be a problem after power came into the hands of the people because the new rulers (replacing kings, emperors and despots) would not harm themselves. However the people are represented by politicians, parties and factions which are not under the immediate control of the people. Hence the danger of the abuse of power persists under democracy “But it is not democracy but unlimited government which is objectionable…It is not who governs but what government is entitled to do that seems to me the essential problem.” (Hayek 1976 403 my italics)

Compare that with Popper’s criticism of the idea that the question of sovereignty (who shall rule) is a fundamental issue in politics. “It is high time for us to learn that the question ‘who is to wield the power in the state?’ matters little as compared with the questions ‘how is the power wielded’ and ‘how much power is wielded?’” (Popper 1966 162). Writing on Marxism and revolutionary violence Popper pointed to the need for “rules of engagement” for the use of violence by the state both in defence of the realm and in policing law and order. This approach calls for rules for revolutionary violence in the extreme situation where the rulers cannot be dismissed by democratic means.

Hayek’s last book The Fatal Conceit (edited by Willliam W. Bartley) pulled together the threads of his project on rationality, law and liberty [Note 2]. He argued the case for the importance of evolved moral conventions which he called the ‘extended moral order’ of western civilization including rules related to markets and especially dealings in private property. Other important rules concern honesty, contracts and privacy. Popper also referred to the vital function of the moral framework of society (Popper 1963 Chapter 17) and more recently Deirdre McCloskey has written extensively on the “the bourgeois virtues” and related matters (McCloskey 2006 and 2010). Popper and Hayek can be glossed as discovering, criticizing and improving those principles which function as the rules of the game in social life.

The ‘rules of the game’ range from the possibly innate rules of grammar, through the tacit knowledge of local traditions and folkways to the rules of games and other codified forms of procedure. They include the laws of the land embodied in common law, statutes and constitutions. At another level they include the unformalized rules of the moral framework which Popper noted in his essay “Public Opinion and Liberal Principles”.

The study of these rules would need to probe the way that different sets of rules support or undermine each other and the effect of changing from one set to another. This would be essentially an ecological study with the emphasis on unintended ‘downstream’ effects of changes in the prevailing order. This does not imply a rigidly conservative attitude to the status quo, it merely signals that we need to learn from our conscious or unconscious social experiments. This approach would supplement the methods of conceptual analysis and crude ‘positivist’ empirical description of social and political systems. It would have the theoretical advantage of linking disciplines and the practical merit of being continually in touch with problems and their possible solutions. (Champion 1992)

This is a program which might engage followers of Wittgenstein if they pursue their interest in “life games” and “forms of life” into problems of politics and public administration.

The governance of science

Popper’s reference to the institutional context of science in The Poverty of Historicism points to the governance of science which became a big issue in Britain when Marxists such as Bernal pushed for government control of the national research effort (Bernal 1939). This provoked a reaction to defend autonomous science led by Michael Polanyi and in this context he wrote “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” published in Minerva (1962). For an account of this episode and a survey of the range of issues involved, see Ravetz Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (1971).

Other postwar developments intensified the issue of governance, notably the rise of Big Science and the official discovery of the phenomenon of “normal science”. Big Science refers to the major research and development projects on the model of the Manhattan Project which transformed the scientific and academic landscape (Shills 1972, Greenberg 2001). In his unpublished lectures Popper referred to the menace of Big Science with too much money chasing too few ideas and other adverse effects. Speaking from a very different vantage point President Eisenhower in his farewell speech to the nation in 1961 warned that the nation’s scholars might be dominated by Federal employment and project allocations.

…the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Then came Kuhn’s account of normal science which was taken up in some quarters as a recommendation about the proper way to go, especially in the social sciences which were keen to copy the more prestigious disciplines (Notturno 1984).

A more recent development is a rapidly growing literature on problems in the quality of published research. Richard Horton in his capacity as editor in chief of Lancet wrote “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may be simply untrue…Science has taken a turn towards darkness” with reference to small sample sizes, invalid analyses, conflicts of interest and obsession with fashionable trends (Horton 2015).

There is concern about the increasing incidence of retractions and the higher rate of retractions in high impact journals (Fang et al 2011) and the dangerous liaison of science and politics (Butos and McQuade 2006). Less than 12% of articles in 2004 in The Journal of Economic Theory passed three tests – stating a theory, explaining why it mattered and testing it (Klein and Romaro 2007). There are problems of replication of results and politicization in some fields such as climate science . Another concern is the declining publication of negative results (Fanelli 2012) and it would be interesting to explore if this has any basis in the persistent teaching of confirmation theory rather than critical rationalism in epistemology and the philosophy of science.

The economist Gordon Tullock (1922-2014) was inspired by his contact with Popper to make a significant but little-appreciated contribution to the literature on the governance of science. He is regarded as one of the most gifted and innovative economists not to win a Nobel Prize [Note 3]. In The Organization of Inquiry (1966) he approached the topic of scientific research and publication as a student of legal, social and economic systems to sketch a scenario for the decline of a scientific discipline, given a particular combination of motivational factors and institutional incentives.

Concerning the people who engage in pure and applied research he identified three kinds of curiosity:
1. Pure curiosity and compulsion to find how the world works. This drives the great scientists.
2. The passionate desire to solve practical problems. This drives the great builders and engineers.
3. “Induced curiosity” directed to either pure or applied problems.

The researchers with induced curiosity are those who do not have a consuming passion for research but do it as a job. The most obvious examples are academic staff who have to “publish or perish” in the struggle for tenure and promotion and the scientists who work “nine to five” in public and private research laboratories. Of course outstanding work can be produced by academics seeking promotion and even by nine to five scientists but Tullock’s analysis addressed some tendencies which could emerge in a system where more and more of the workers have “induced” curiosity and less and less (in proportion) harbour a burning commitment to the quest.

Closely related to the motives of the investigators is their concern for the quality of the work and their willingness to test their assumptions and their results. Tullock noted that the dedicated truth seeker and also the serious practical problem-solver must pay close attention to reality to align their ideas with it and this demands constant testing and critical evaluation. In contrast, the researcher who is only aiming to publish to satisfy the requirements of an employer or grant-giving agency can be happy with results that are merely publishable even if they are not robust. As Tullock put it, scientific concern with the real world can run second to other matters.

If he could establish and maintain his reputation, and hence his job, by reporting completely fictional discoveries, this would accomplish his end. While an investigator motivated by curiosity or practical utility must, of necessity, concern himself with real phenomena, the man motivated by induced curiosity could, if the risk of discovery were not great, simply ignore reality. (Tullock 1965 56)

He suggested that a self-perpetuating process could occur in a journal or a field of research dominated by investigators with induced curiosity (or “normal” or “uncritical scientists”) so the work could “gradually slip away from reality in the direction of superficially impressive but actually easy research projects”. The peer review process is designed to avert such a decline however if the reviewers are too closely associated with the authors either personally or by membership of a school of thought then the rigor of the process may suffer. Tullock speculated that this would be most likely to happen in a field dominated by “induced” and “normal scientists” rather than the dedicated truth seekers.

Towards the end of that slippery slope is the situation where there is a widespread belief in the field that the function of the researcher is to support a “side” on some issue. Simply presenting a rationalization for some position chosen on other grounds may be acceptable as an objective of research, and the principal criterion in judging journals may become their points of view.

The concern with reality that unites the sciences, then, may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia…these symptoms may be found in some of the social sciences. (ibid 56)

When Tullock wrote the book in the 1960s he considered that the natural sciences were sound but he thought that parts of economics and the social sciences were well down the slope that he sketched. In view of the concerns that are being expressed about the state of science at present it may be time to revisit Tullock’s analysis to see how much we can learn from it.

Conclusion

We can be grateful for the contribution of Jarvie and Tullock for their wide-ranging contributions to their respective fields. It seems that Jarvie’s book did not arouse the interest which is warranted by the implications and applications of the social/institutional approach to research and the institutions where it is done. Let us ensure that there is a more expansive and inclusive conversation on the themes and issues which Jarvie and Tullock addressed, especially in relation to the governance of science. The parties to this conversation could include other followers of Popper such as Wettersten, Agassi and Shearmur who have addressed the social aspects of science, Steve Fuller, and the exponents of the strong program in the sociology of science. This could generate more heat than light but it will be an opportunity lost if it does not occur.

NOTES

Note 1. The institutional approach points to the type of work which Douglas North pursued to win a Nobel Prize in Economics. In his acceptance address North stated “Institutions form the incentive structure of a society and the political and economic institutions, in consequence, are the underlying determinants of economic performance” (North 1993).

Note 2. An interesting feature of this book is the Hayek’s introduction of the concept of non-justificationism to support his criticism of “constructivist rationality”, presumably due to the influence of Bartley (Champion 2013b).

Note 3. He may wasted too much time and energy trying to interest Popper in his ideas about physics. This is revealed in extended correspondence between them from the 1950s to 1992 (Levy and Peart 2015).

REFERENCES

Barzun J 1964 Science: The Glorious Entertainment. Secker and Warburg, London.

Bernal J D 1939 The Social Function of Science. Routledge, London.

Butos W N and McQuade T 2006 Government and Science: A Dangerous Liaison? The Independent Review, 11(2): 177–208.

Champion R A 1992 Review of The Fatal Conceit in the Melbourne Age Monthly Review August. Reprinted in Champion (2013) Chapter 4.

Champion R A 2013 Commentary on Hayek. Amazon.

Champion R A 2013b Hayek, Bartley and Popper: Justificationism and the Abuse of Reason in R Leeson (ed) Hayek: A Collaborative Biography. Part 1 Influences, from Mises to Bartley. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Collingwood R G 1957 An Autobiography. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Eisenhower D D 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm

Fanelli D 2012 Negative results are disappearing from most disciplines and countries. Sociometrics 90 (3): 891–904.

Fang F C, Casadevall A and Morrison R P 2011 Retracted Science and the retraction index. Infect. Immunol. 78 (10) 3855-3859. http://iai.asm.org/content/79/10/3855.

Fuller Steve 2000 The Governance of Science. Open University Press, Buckingham.

Greenberg D S 2001. Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion. Chicago University Press.

Hayek F A 1976 The Constitution of Liberty. Routledge, London.

Hayek F A 1991 The Fatal Conceit. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Heclo H 2008 On Thinking Institutionally. Paradigm Publishing, London.

Horton R 2015 Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma? www.thelancet.com Vol. 385 April 11.

Jarvie Ian C 2001 The republic of science: The emergence of Popper’s social view of science 1935-1945. Ripodi, Amsterdam.

Klein D B and Romero P P 2007 Model building versus theorising: The paucity of theory in The Journal of Economic Theory. Econ Journal Watch 4 (2): 241-271.

Koestler A 1967 The Act of Creation. Pan, London.

Levy D M and Peart S J 2015 Gordon Tullock and Karl Popper: Their Correspondence. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f938/17b5783522387fe674e112ca7fdd95ff753a.pdf

McCloskey D N 2006 The bourgeois virtues: Ethics for an age of commerce. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/bv_selection.pdf

McCloskey D N 2010 Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.North D 1993 Economic Performance Through Time. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1993/north-lecture.html

Polanyi M 1962 The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory, Minerva1:54-73.

Polanyi M 1958 Personal Knowledge. Routledge, London.

Popper K R 1966 The Open Society and Its Enemies. Routledge, London.

Popper K R 1963 The Poverty of Historicism. Routledge, London.

Popper K R 1963 Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge, London.

Popper K R 1972 The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson, London.

Ravetz J 1971 Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.

Shills E 1972 The Intellectuals and the Powers, and Other Essays. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Tullock G 1965 The Organization of Inquiry. Duke University Press, Durham NC.Wetttersten J 2006 Essay review of The Republic of Science, Philosophy of Science 73 (1): 108-121.

Wettersten J Karl Popper: Critical Rationalism The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/cr-ratio/

Popper’s Institutional Turn Final

Hacohen gives a lot of credit to the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle for
putting up with Popper’s Steppenwolf-like activity, prowling on the fringe of the circle where Schlick, Carnap, Neurath et al huddled around their campfire, seeking warmth and consolation from the dying embers of the verification principle They accepted Popper’s book which most of them perceived to have merit even if none of them really agreed with Popper’s turn from induction to a theory of conjectural knowledge that is tested but never confirmed.

Publication of the book aroused intense disagreement among the members of the Circle and no less than three reviews appeared in their house journal because Reichenbach and Neurath insisted on writing critical reviews after Carnap signaled assent to the turn from verification to testing. Support from Carnap was short-lived and the positivists generally managed to convince themselves, and many others, that Popper’s falsification criterion was concerned with meaning which was their own ruling obsession. This misunderstanding persisted for some decades because the positivist Diaspora carried it to Britain and North America where it became well entrenched while Popper was “down under” in New Zealand.

Popper (unlike the young visitors Quine and Ayer) was never invited to the inner circle of the logical positivists but others were more accepting. He attended the mathematical symposium run by Karl Menger (son of Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school of economics) and also the symposium on probability theory convened by Richard Mises (brother of Ludwig, the link between Carl Menger and Hayek). Because Popper was kept at arms length by the logical positivists he was grateful to be invited to the Menger and Mises seminars. This was important as a sign of personal recognition, also because the Mises group was an excellent forum to develop Popper’s ideas on probability which were a central part of his philosophy of science. These semi-private gatherings were a feature of the robust intellectual life of Vienna. In addition to the logical positivists and the Menger and Richard von Mises groups there was the famous Ludwig von Mises symposium and many others such as the Schoenberg group.

In the background to all this intellectual activity there were ebbing and flowing tides of political revolution from both the left and the right. The communists plotted, the anti-communists reacted, the socialists took control of the Vienna city council in democratic elections, the Jewish problem created ongoing tensions. Hacohen has a special interest in the Jewish problem and he may have overdone this part of the narrative but his account of the shifting balance of power between the rival forces is engrossing. Popper had huge admiration for many aspects of the socialists’ program but he despaired of their tactics - they talked violent revolution (though their moderate leadership did not believe in it) and this prompted a violent reaction which they were not sufficiently organised and resolute to match, even when they had the numbers to prevail. Against them were arrayed the conservative bourgeoisie and much worse elements of the kind that flocked to Hitler’s banner. Eventually Hitler annexed Austria and all bets for civilisation were off. Those who could see the writing on the wall, like Mises and Popper, escaped if they could. Mises crossed the border to Switzerland, just before his apartment was raided. Popper’s teacher Karl Buhler was less fortunate, he was arrested and interned for some weeks until he had the chance to escape, leaving all his library and possessions behind to attempt a new life in the United States. Later on Popper counted sixteen relatives who perished in the holocaust.

After Logik der Forschung was launched, Popper’s focus shifted to politics and the social sciences. His major concern was the failure of Marxism to provide a bastion against the rise of fascism and he attributed this more than anything to an intellectual error, namely the doctrine of historical inevitability. He labeled this “historicism” because he found that the doctrine of historical determinism was only the tip of a complex iceberg of defective ideas about the methods of the social sciences. The label was unfortunate because similar words (including some in German) have different meanings to that assigned by Popper.

Hacohen has traced the evolution of his project on historicism from 1936 when some of the themes were discussed at a private gathering in Brussels as Popper made his way to London looking for a job to get himself and his wife out of Austria. Later in the year he gave a talk on “historical laws and the methodology of sociology” to Hayek’s seminar at the London School of Economics.

Popper returned to his notes on “the poverty of historicism” in 1939 when he was settled at Canterbury College, Christchurch. By that time he was writing in English and his closest colleague was Colin Simkin, a young NZ economist (aged 26 when he met Popper). Popper had a low opinion of the social sciences although he thought that mathematical economics had turned the corner, an opinion based on almost complete ignorance of the field beyond the impact of Morgenstern’s presentation in the Menger symposium. He relied heavily on the young Simkin for an introduction to the innovations of Keynes and for advice on the capacity for social engineering by democratic governments to control major problems such as monopolies and high levels of unemployment.

In return for this dubious assistance, he offered Simkin the advice to develop his mathematical skills in order to pursue the path of macroeconomic modeling. This advice turned out to be a something of a disaster for Simkin because it seems that this lifelong project failed to bear fruit. Simkin later came to the University of Sydney to assist in the battle against the Marxists in the Department of Economics.

Despite all the pressures of the times, the loneliness and isolation of New Zealand, the dreadful news from home, the threat of the Japanese advance, his teaching load and problems with his Professor (described in Roger Sandall’s book The Culture Cult), The Open Society and its Enemies was eventually written and dispatched. This book can be seen as a kind of “Battle of Britain” in the world of ideas, a desperate counterpart to the struggle where young men daily took to the air in the skies over the South of England with the future of civilisation virtually in their hands. On the other side of the world a relatively young Karl Popper patrolled the stratosphere of the world of ideas, confronting those from Heraclitus and Plato to the present day whose ideas he thought were undermining the cause of freedom and the open society. Like the young men in their Hurricanes and Spitfires, he did not fly in vain. The Open Society joined Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom to provide twin pillars of resistance to totalitarian thinking post WWII.

The Open Society and its Enemies is a monumental defence of democratic principles and a demolition of many pervasive ideas that render our traditions of rationality and tolerance dangerously fragile under the pressure of social and political crises. Chief among these is the utopian impulse to recreate society in the image of someone’s dreams. There is some debate as to whether Popper’s dramatic view of science as a succession of revolutions is consistent with the relative conservatism of his political philosophy. In fact there is no conflict because both garments are cut from the same cloth of critical rationalism, the spirit of criticism, respect for arguments, for the truth and for the rights of individual people.

In view of Hacohen’s plea to the socialists of the world to rally behind the ideas of Popper it is essential to work out whether Popper provides support or resistance to policies of state intervention along socialist or social democrat lines. Popper is generally regarded as a social democrat because he supported state intervention to counter monopolies and unemployment (to protect the economically weak from the economically strong). He also adopted the language of social democracy in his endorsement of Marx’s condemnation of the exploitation that occurred under unrestrained capitalism, while claiming that the rise of state regulation and welfare had substantially put things to rights (contra Marxist expectations).

To assess the legitimacy of Hacohen’s claim on Popper it is helpful to examine the impact of Hayek on Popper, and also to consider some of the implications of Popper’s ideas that he never followed to their logical conclusion. Briefly, it appears that when Popper’s views are adjusted to take account of his misunderstanding of the nature of monopoly and unemployment, his basic principles place him with minimum state liberals or even libertarians. Hacohen describes Popper’s correspondence from Hayek while commenced in 1943 while The Open Society was still in manuscript. Hayek had identified a common enemy, a three-headed monster - positivism, Marxism and historicism. They had differences, though one of them was resolved when Popper pointed out that scientism (positivism), which Hayek found objectionable, had already been refuted by Popper himself.

Hayek’s reaction to The Open Society was gratifying and he did not object to interventionism or social engineering (in principle), though he preferred not to use those terms himself. In the course of their exchanges Popper became more alert to the dangers of state intervention and he settled for the minimum state, with intervention limited to controlling the abuse of power, including economic power.

Like Mises, Popper and Hayek saw a role for the state in tending the legal institutions of a liberal order. Mises even cast this role in the language of engineering, when he wrote in Liberalism: The Classic Tradition:

“The organization of human society according to the pattern most suitable for the attainment of the ends in view is a quite prosaic and matter of fact question, not unlike, say, the construction of a railroad or the production of cloth or furniture...Problems of social policy are problems of social technology...”

Despite this precedent, Hayek took fright at Popper’s language of social technology and social engineering because he had identified the enemy, even more than the historicist, as the constructivist rationalist (the coercive utopian) who thought he could impose a pattern upon the organisation of a whole economy, like an engineer working from a blueprint.

Popper was concerned with freedom and he was equally concerned with human suffering and deprivation, after his formative years surrounded by the abject poverty in Austria after the Great War. Like the Prince of Wales visiting the out of work Welsh miners during the Great Depression, he knew “Something has to be done!.” For this reason he reserved the right of the state to intervene to that the economically powerless could not be exploited by the economically powerful. He was a free trader in goods because he recognised that under monopoly, the consumers may have to pay to cart away the rubbish produced by the monopolist. He was not a redistributionist and he was not unduly concerned about disparities in wealth, although he acknowledged that it was disturbing to see extremes of wealth.

What was to be done about mass unemployment, the major cause of widespread suffering (apart from war)? This was never specified, though he would have learned the dangers of state interference with the labour market if he had read the works of E H (Bill) Hutt on collective bargaining and the strike threat or even (some time later) the CIS pamphlet on the counterproductive activities of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission written by P McGuiness. Popper came near to a breakthrough in economics in the course of appraising Marx on capitalism and the “excessive” labour supply that supposedly leads to exploitation. He wrote in Chapter 20 of The Open Society:

“What is not so clear, and not explained by Marx either, is why the supply of labour should continue to exceed the demand. For if it is so profitable to ‘exploit’ labour, how is it, then, that the capitalists are not forced, by competition, to try to raise their profits by employing more labour? In other words, why do they not compete against each other in the labour market, thereby raising the wages...It appears that the phenomena of ‘exploitation’ which Marx observed were due, not, as he believed, to the mechanism of a perfectly competitive market, but to other factors - especially to a mixture of low productivity and imperfectly competitive markets.”

Low productivity and imperfectly competitive markets! These are recognised by free traders as a consequence of injudicious state intervention to constrain the function of markets, especially the labour market. Of course Marx did not observe exploitation, at least not in the factories. One of the Bronte sisters wrote in her diary how she envied the girls in the mills for their regular hours and better pay, while she, constrained by middle class gentility, had to make do as a genuinely exploited governess. Probably the nearest that Marx ever came to exploitation was when he anticipated Freud and seduced his housemaid. In the world outside the reading room in the British Museum wages were rising while Marxist theory predicted the reverse. It seems that Popper almost discovered the truth by logical analysis, despite the view which he inherited from all the socialist and conservative critics of industrialisation who believed in the devastating impact of “unrestrained capitalism”.

As a result of Hayek’s influence Popper emphasised that state intervention should take the form of laying down clearly formulated rules, and state officials should not be empowered to issue discretionary orders to achieve particular short-term aims. He became more alert to the dangers of increasing state power, he insisted that social democratic policies should never be envisaged as a “cure-all” and he warned that socialists of good will should be alert to abuses of power that could result from increased state activity, however well meaning the original intention might be. In March 1944 he wrote to Hayek “I think I have learnt more from you than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski”.

The result of all this is distressing to Hacohen.

“In the postwar years, Popper no longer demonstrated commitment to reform...He never disavowed piecemeal engineering, but he argued that its purpose was to decrease, not increase, state power. He also showed growing sympathy towards libertarianism, and did little to stop the conservative onslaught of the 1980s”. Hacohen cited a reference to a 1982 interview where Popper expressed some sympathy with anarchism...”It was, he said, an unrealisable ideal but the closest we can get to it, the better off freedom is”.

Hacohen’s statement above seems to assume that decreasing state power does not count as reform. Such is the gulf that has opened up between socialism and common sense. Hacohen hopes that the left can be reinvigorated by Popper’s ideas, properly understood, to regain their sense of mission, to recover from the setbacks of the Thatcher and Reagan years, take the offensive and move forward again. I have a similar hope, that the left can move forward, but in a very different direction, the direction of classical liberalism, the direction pointed by Mises and Hayek, and by Popper in his stance as a minimal state liberal.

Despite this negative conclusion regarding one of Hacohen’s aims, I do not want to leave the reader with an unfavourable impression of the book. It is a work of quite remarkable scholarship, well organised, clearly and vigorously written. It will provoke debate among friends of Popper’s ideas, and perhaps among others who are less friendly. It should lead to a reconsideration of Popper’s low standing in contemporary philosophy. It stands as a monument to Popper’s indomitable spirit and to the labours of many people, not all of them adequately recognised by Popper himself, who helped him on his way.

I would like to dedicate this article to the memory of Keith Barley, Reader in Agronomy at the Waite Agricultural Research Institute, Adelaide, who lent me The Open Society and its Enemies in the spring of 1968.

Originally printed in Quadrant Monthly circa 2001.

Circular Head, in the far North West of Tasmania, was a pretty isolated place when I was growing up, there was the road and the railway but the coastal trader still docked regularly at the Smithton wharf, a reminder of the little boats that used to ply a dangerous trade in Bass Straight.

It was a long way out of the district with the gravel road winding through the hills on the way to Wynyard and Burnie. You can probably still find parts of the old road like the terrible bend called the “Devil’s Elbow” if you poke about a bit off the new road.

That was the road from the farm near Irishtown that led to the Grammar School in Launceston, then to the University of Tasmania in Hobart, then to Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney.

Actually the farm was a mile off the Lower Scotchtown Road, running out of Smithton towards Edith Creek. Irishtown was the nearest place with a shop, a post office and a football team. I grew up expecting to be a farmer and there was talk of agricultural college, then I went to boarding school (Launceston Grammar) and the science master probably had a word to Dad and the talk shifted to Ag Science at the university.

One day while I said grace after lunch there was a great crash at the end of the dining room as one of the big photos of past headmasters fell off the wall. There was a roar of laugher from the children near the accident, because they could see that the picture was the Reverend R. A. Champion, my granduncle. He moved on from Grammar to the Kings School in Sydney and then to a parish at Bungendore, near Canberra. Two of his sons died in World War I. One of them was missing in action and a couple of years ago his remains turned up in a French paddock so he had a proper burial at last.

Round about the time I started thinking about doing Agricultural Science a speaker visited the school to talk about World Hunger. The school was big on community service and there was a good example at home as well, without a lot being said. Dad could always be relied on to help with any community collection that was happening, as well as fundraising for the football club. One time he put a shovel in the car and drove down to the main road to fill in a big pothole near the corner with loose gravel from the side of the road. I was about six at the time and I told him the council workers were supposed to do that. He replied that any number of cars could break their springs in the hole before the council workers got to it.

The speaker must have said something about the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation and I had the idea of getting some qualifications and working with FAO in distant lands. I must have mentioned this to Dad and he expressed disbelief that the people in Africa needed someone from Tasmania to tell them how to grow things. He had a good point because by the time I had the qualifications I discovered that the problem of hunger was nothing to do with the capacity of the people to grow food. It was all about the social and political conditions, so I shifted from Agriculture to Sociology to get at the problem from that direction.

Getting back to the university in Hobart, I lived in Hytten Hall, a men’s college a stone’s throw from the heart of the campus on the slopes of Mount Nelson.

The Hall had a very bad reputation and relatives in Launceston who heard the rumours of riotous behaviour were alarmed to hear that I missed out on a place in Christ College where Grammar boys usually went. I thought that I did a really good interview as well. When they asked how I would feel about rooming with a coloured man I replied it would be fine as long as he was a good Christian. I still think that was an inspired answer but there were too many of us and some of the others must have been equally inspired. John Gee got in, he rowed in the Tasmanian eight, became a Rhodes Scholar, went to Oxford and became a diplomat and an arms inspector in Iraq. Last year he was awarded with a Commonwealth gong and died a few weeks later.

Jon Hawkes got in as well because his father was a man of the cloth, however Jon was cut to a different pattern from his father, he joined the drama society, went to a lot of parties and failed every subject. He also lined up the biggest collection of empty spirits bottles on his window sill that the college had ever seen. He moved to Monash University where his father was the chaplain, worked in the book room and started his degree again, one subject per year. He became the editor of Rolling Stone (Australia), a prime mover in the innovative drama group based at the Pram Factory in Melbourne (David Williamson’s first base) and then he was the business manager and strongman with Circus Oz. I kept in touch with him and he said I was the only person from the school that he ever talked to later on.

The tone of the Hall was set to some extent by the leadership from George Wilson the Warden. George was a big man in a small body. A New Zealander with the silver-haired appearance of Einstein and Albert Schweitzer he coached the Uni rugby team. When he first arrived in Tasmania at the age of 37 he made the state ruby union team as the halfback and he coached the university rugby team. In Christchurch during the war when George was a lecturer in History he was trying to organise militia groups to hide food and weapons in the hills to fight on if the Japanese invaded.

Some years later when I met Colin Simkin I discovered that George was on a committee with Karl Popper, agitating for representation of the academic staff on the University council. “You will want the college porter on the council next” grumbled the old Registrar. Prescient words!

George wanted his young men to work hard and play hard which we generally did, and in the third term most of us went into examination mode. Not that George or anyone else was in a position to force people to do much, apart from abiding by the reasonably relaxed rules of the house. Once evening we raided the women’s college, Jane Franklin Hall, it would have been called a ‘panty raid’ in US parlance. When we got upstairs and found ourselves surrounded by laughing girls running in all directions we didn’t know what to do. So we threw a lot of bedding down the stairs and carried some back to the Hall. The warden of Jane Franklin did not enter into the spirit of the occasion and told George that she had notified the police, so he had to read the riot act and tell us not to do it again.

The Hall had a very good little library, presumably donated by George to get them out of his house. It was hardly used, except by students on desperate deadlines who could not afford to be distracted by noisy room-mates. All the rooms apart from half a dozen were double rooms. In addition to a well thumbed copy of Balzac’s Droll Stories I found The House of Intellect by Barzun (a formative experience) also the novels of Graham Green, some Arthur Koestler The Lotus and the Robot and The Act of Creation), Bertrand Russell and many others who were not on any of my reading lists. Due to the dismissal of the professor of philosophy nobody could major in philosophy (the union of philosophers put a black ban on the chair until some time after Professor Orr died). At that stage my philosophy was coming from the essays of Julian and Aldous Huxley and the Vedas as expounded by the likes of Isherwood. Fortunately I read Popper (courtesy of my supervisor in Adelaide) before I read any mainstream philosophy and when that happened I was stunned to find so much written about perception without reference to the scientific literature.

Ag Science at Hobart was a brand new course, in previous years students had to go to the mainland after first year. Five or six of us went through in the first batch, a couple of others dropped subjects on the way and finished later. The final year was important because I was the only student who wanted to do a second year of Soil Science. The teacher, Dr John Beattie, sent me off to the library at the Commonwealth Soils Laboratory, a branch of which was located nearby (a massive piece of good luck). In the library, surrounded by shelves of bound soil science journals, I formulated the idea of objective knowledge that is located in the bound journals and our subjective knowledge grows as we take on board stuff from that store and from the new research in progress. So much had been done that I began to wonder if there would be anything left to do when I started my own research. Then he turned me over to Kevin Marshall for a term, he was a microbiologist with a world reputation and working with him was like moving up from the seconds into the A team.

The term that I spent with Kevin Marshall (the Oxbridge tutorial system) worked out so well that the faculty encouraged me to move on to a bigger pond for post graduate work. That was Adelaide, at the Waite Research Institute (the postgraduate part of Ag Science) where my supervisor was Keith Barley, very much a member of the A team. He had a reputation around the world for the work he did on the mechanics of plant growth with two colleagues in the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. The Waite Institute, the CSIRO Soils Laboratory and also the CSIRO Wine Research Institute were all side by side, so there were dozens of research staff and scores of postgraduate students from around the world.

In his laboratory I worked alongside Bruce Cockroft who was managing a Victorian State research farm at Tatura near Shepparton until the Department of Agriculture sent him off with his family to do some research at the Waite. Waterlogging was causing serious problems in the irrigation area and he did a higher degree to work on root growth in saturated clay. I became a friend of the family and later on I always stopped overnight at Tatura on trips between Melbourne and Sydney, sleeping in a caravan out the back with the music of the water running through an irrigation ditch a few metres away.

Interesting people passed through the Waite. Peter Nye from England came for a few months after a spell in Africa. He said the biggest problem with his field work was the baboons that came out of the hills at night and ate the seed in his experimental plots. In the laboratory he did a lot of work with onions and when he gave a talk he was introduced as “a man who really knows his onions”. I called on him at Oxford in 1972 and he took me for a drive to show off the spires of the old university.

A young black man called Danny came from Antigua (home of some famous cricketers). He didn’t complete his degree because his brother came to power with a bloodless coup so Danny went back to be the Minister for Agriculture.

A bright and enthusiastic young fellow came from England with his fiancee and when they married quite soon after they arrived I was the best man. We wore tails for the occasion and I had to give a speech and then read out all the dreadful risque telegrams that people used to send to the newlyweds for the amusement of the old folk.

A big student from Canada became a real Aussie football nut. We went to the 1967 grand final to see Sturt beat Port Adelaide and the next Friday when we were having our end of the week drink at the Arkaba Hotel we found ourselves surrounded by the Carlton team, over from Melbourne to play Sturt for the battle of the premiers.

A young man gave me and a student friend a brief introduction to the philosopher Hospers when he knocked on the door and we let him in for morning tea. The next morning he returned and we invited him in again, our appetites aroused. He said all the same things from the day before so when he came back the third time we hid in the kitchen. Our place was over the road from the Parkside Mental Hospital and some years later (being slow on the uptake) I realised why I was stopped two or three times on my late evening walks and friendly policemen asked me who I was, and where I lived.

At the end of the year in Adelaide I took a trip to Perth to see the Nullabor Plain, and the Swan River and some soil science laboratories. One of them was in an outer suburb and when I came out to catch a bus in the middle of Friday afternoon an old Holden stopped at the bus stop and the driver said “You’ll wait a long time for a bus at this time of day, mate”. He was heading back to town, which was ok because he gave me a lift. He was a great one for asking questions and he soon found out who I was and where I came from and what I was doing in Perth. He asked if I knew about the football star who was recruited from Perth to play in Melbourne with the Geelong team. Of course I knew his name was Roy West. He said he used to work with Roy, and then it was “Fancy a drink” and that was ok as well because we went to three pubs and I didn’t need to pay for a drink in any of them.

In each place he was instantly in a circle of friends and he enjoyed introducing me as his new young friend from Tasmania. For some reason they all seemed to think that this was rather amusing and I didn’t get the joke at the time. Maybe it was because I was carrying in my hand a copy of Evelyn Underhill’s classic book on mysticism to read on the bus. I thought it was a bit strange moving from one pub to the next, with just a beer or two in each and a couple of the pubs were pretty strange as well. One had very rough clientelle and another had a very strangely dressed and theatrical crowd of people. Later I realised it was an early Western Australian version of the gay scene that became a highly visible spectacle in parts of Sydney.

The next day I remembered that Roy West was called “The Policeman” because in Perth he worked in the Special Branch of the Police Force. Special Branches have been disbanded in some states because some of the officers used to get too friendly with criminals and my man in Perth was probably doing a circuit of some watering holes frequented by his contacts on the fringe of the underworld.

Keith Barley: Supervisor and Friend

This is a tribute to the late Keith Barley who supervised my postgraduate work at the Waite Institute in 1967 and 1968.He was a wonderful supervisor who quickly became a friend. His wife Anne got into the picture because often on Fridays after a beer or two at the Arkaba we would go on to dinner at their home. Sometimes we would meet at other times and one weekend they took me on my first visit to an art gallery. That was probably important because later I married an artist! Their influence went well beyond soil-plant relations and it was all for the good. It was in Keith’s office that I first saw Quadrant and The Australian Humanist, and of course later on he introduced me to the works of Karl Popper.

John Beattie was the Soil Science lecturer in Hobart. Near the end of 1966 he wrote to Keith and to Jim Quirk in Perth to ask if they were interested in taking on a fresh graduate for postgraduate study. Quirk was not interested but Keith was positive, even enthusiastic. He advised John that I should apply for a studentship from the Meat Research Council, formulating the project in very broad and general terms, mentioning soils, plants and animals. The result was a generous living allowance for the honours year.

It later turned out that the more pragmatic members of the Council were becoming disgruntled with some of the esoteric research they were funding and my thesis on the penetration of clay by root hairs would not have alleviated their concerns. Keith had a view on this, not that he mentioned it in respect to my project but he said it when I raised the issue of some other work that had no apparent application. He said (words to the effect that ) the short period of postgrad study was probably the only time in most people’s lives when they could play seriously and freely in the world of ideas and they should make the most of it without being restricted by concerns about the practical application of the research. One day as we walked away from a talk on soil testing he was almost spitting with irritation at the effort being wasted in that direction but I can’t recall what it was that disturbed him, maybe it was too narrowly practical or maybe it wasn’t really practical at all because it was never going to deliver the benefits that farmers expected. Keith was well aware of the need for practical work but he had a broader view.

With the enrolment in place we arranged to meet in Melbourne early in 1967 at a major conference of Australian and New Zealand scientists (ANZAAS) In the meantime the agitation over the Vietnam War was building up and I had a letter published in The Australian commenting with heavy irony on the banning of a conscientious objector from classroom teaching. It was supposed to be critical of the decision but it could have been read either way. Keith took The Australian but he never mentioned the letter and neither did I.

We met for coffee between sessions at the conference. He was a neat figure with a three-piece suit and well trimmed beard which was unusual in those days. I think we may have been a little awkward and formal, each feeling our way. He probably inquired whether I had any ideas about a research topic and I would have mentioned the recently-discovered “mucigel” or sludge around the root. Another interest was the phenomenon of clay skins “cutans” on the surface of soil aggregates.

He was a Reader (between Senior Lecturer and Professor) in the soil-plant relations group in the Agronomy branch of the Waite Institute which was the postgraduate part of the Faculty of Agriculture. It was said that Keith did not aspire to a Chair because he wanted to focus on teaching and research. The other branches of the Waite were Plant Pathology, Animal Production, Soil Chemistry, Plant Breeding, Entomology and Biochemistry. Agronomy was almost a microcosm of the whole, with groups working on soils, crops, plant breeding, pastures and animal production.

The Waite and especially the people in soils gained immensely from the close proximity of the CSIRO Soils Division. The CSIRO Wine Research Unit was also next door but nobody took much notice in those days when we were still drinking most of our wine out of glass flagons.

Keith wanted me to explore the topic fairly thoroughly before firming up the thesis project. This is the really tricky part of supervising research students, working out how much the student can be left to explore the field and how soon he or she needs to be pushed and shoved and cajoled to get to work on a manageable project that can be turned into a presentable thesis in the time required.

Some students get too little help so they can thrash around and waste months or even years (in a doctorate). Others function as additional technical assistants for the professor, so they generate papers and a thesis but they dont usually discover how to work their way into a problem and become independent researchers.

It was necessary to do a lot of reading and also some preliminary work in the field. One sunny morning we drove to Victor Harbour with Bruce Cockroft (an older Ph D student) to look at some exposed soil profiles with strata of clay that cracked into large peds (lumps of soil). The idea was to check the root distribution (if any could be found) and take some samples back to the lab for further investigation. The beach was nearby and we had sandwiches for lunch, so we sat on the otherwise deserted shore and Keith decided to take a dip, naked, like a good Humanist with no old-fashioned prejudices about the body beautiful. Bruce and I were more conservative on this issue, so we sat still and dry while Keith took the waters until some people loomed up on the horizon and he hastened back to sit beside us, with his hat strategically placed as the interlopers walked past.

Keith’s office was adjacent to the laboratory where I dissected lumps of soil, fixed them in cement, cut sections of the aggregates and became increasingly frustrated in the search for point of entry to work on soil structure and root distribution. The office was the place where I first encountered Quadrant magazine and also The Australian Humanist, just lying around presumably for Keith to read at lunchtime. He never actually put them forward or suggested reading them but as a compulsive reader of course I dipped in, to be mystified by an article of literary criticism in Quadrant and possibly intrigued by the contents of the Humanist.

Sometimes Keith was prepared to suggest things to read, in addition to papers on soils. One weekend I read Teilhard de Chardin’s book The Phenomenon of Man and mentioned in the lab that I found it interesting. Next day Keith brought in The Art of the Soluble, a collection of essays by Peter Medawar including a devastating criticism of de Chardin’s book.

Keith shared some of his research interests with Charles Darwin, notably earthworms and the mechanical aspects of plant growth. I don’t know if he was aware of the parallel, he never mentioned it and I only found out about Darwin’s interests decades later.

On the role of mechanical factors in plant growth, he was collaborating with Farrell and Greacen in the CSIRO next door. E L “Bill” Greacen was one of the drinkers at the Arkaba.

Getting back to the art and science of supervising students, some students probably don’t see enough of their supervisor and the ones who work as lab assistants probably see them too much. I think Keith got the balance right, so we established a kind of master and apprentice relationship without any hint of master and servant. It helped that we worked in close proximity so it was possible to pick up a lot of little things in casual conversation in the lab or on the way to morning tea or to seminars.

Things like the protocol for lending items of portable equipment (like the vacuum pump for embalming soil samples prior to cutting and polishing sections). If people did not return it as promised, it was not available next time they called. On reading instead of thinking, it is too easy when confronted with a problem to head off to the library instead of putting in some hard thought about it. Value the technical support staff; Keith was always in touch with the concerns of the ancillary staff – their shop steward was the Senior Technician in the adjacent laboratory.

Writing up the thesis and then converting the thesis into a small paper turned out to be a significant education in writing. I thought I wrote well enough before I arrived in Adelaide but when I started on the thesis, with some pressure of time due to the delay in getting the project organised, it turned out that I was a rank beginner. When we got to the paper the condensation and clarity that are required for a refereed journal imposed strict disciplines and sometimes our progress was slow. After one session that yielded about two paragraphs we broke for lunch and Keith remarked “we were really in first gear this morning!”.

Keith turned 40 in 1967 and that seemed to be almost unbelievably ancient from the perspective of 21. Soon we would be told not to trust anyone over 30. I didn’t see much of Keith in his social rounds, apart from the pub and one or two formal Waite functions. People said that Keith and Anne used to be involved in amateur theatricals, in addition to Humanist activities. Anne also played bridge in a group that included our CSIRO colleague “Bill” Greacen. Bill kept a collection of native finches in a big cage, also he had an attractive daughter (with a Rhodesian ridgeback dog) and a very talented son who later turned up in Sociology in Sydney until he went off to pursue his big interest (singing) to Paris.

Keith got into trouble in a small way when I gave a seminar paper on my work and adopted the theme that Agronomists should take more notice of the plant roots, even thought they were out of sight. As an aside I noted that the people studying roots were out of sight in the basement of the building. This was a reference to Bruce Cockroft and myself who did not fit into the room upstairs where most of the other research students had their desks. It was only a joke but some people suspected that Keith had put me up to it for some devious purpose.

Something similar happened when I went to Perth at the end of the year and visited Professor Jim Quirk’s department. Keith and Jim had been at the Waite together for a while and there was some professional rivalry between them (which I knew nothing about). He showed me around and pointed out all the equipment (like a brand new Gee Whizz electron microscope) that he had obtained from different kinds of industry sponsorship. Then I talked to some other staff and all the postgrad students who were around at the time. That seemed like a sensible thing to do, after spending several days and nights on the train to get there, but later the word came back from Perth that Jim thought Keith had sent me over as a spy!

The philosophy of science took a particularly unhelpful turn in the 1930s when the subject became an academic speciality dominated by logical positivism, which morphed into logical empiricism. The leading exponents of these ideas, like Carnap and Hempel, fled from Hitler and occupied prestigious chairs in the anglosphere. Karl Popper’s ideas provided an alternative, but he languished in New Zealand from 1937 to 1945, when he escaped to London. The most popular reactions to that orthodoxy were Kuhn’s paradigm theory and social studies of science, but they were equally unhelpful because they became dominated by cultural Marxists and fellow travellers.

This book is not a contribution to the academic literature; it is much more important and helpful than that. It is actually more than one book, in a single set of covers. One of the books is a practical handbook or an operating manual for serious scientists. In the language used by Gordon Tullock in his classic work The Organization of Inquiry (1965) their curiosity is driven by the quest for truth or practical value, unlike the “normal scientists” whose curiosity is induced by their conditions of employment.

Armstrong dedicated his life to discovering useful scientific results, and he has spent 52 years as a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, with forays to deliver guest lectures at universities in 27 countries. Green moved into academia at the University of Adelaide to follow his passion for research after 30 years as an entrepreneur. From the window of his home, he looks into the grounds of the Waite Agricultural Research Institute, where I did my first postgraduate research after moving from the University of Tasmania to Adelaide. The Waite Institute is co-located with the CSIRO Soils Division and a generation ago this was a world-class centre of excellence in rural research, before the universities and the CSIRO were taken over by content-free managers with political agendas.

The authors begin with a survey of the problems that afflict science at present, and they end with practical suggestions for improvement that can be taken up by the range of stakeholders in the scientific enterprise. There are chapters on assessing the quality of scientific practice, the problem of advocacy, concerns with the effectiveness of peer review and the complications that arise with government funding. The positive suggestions are offered to university managers, journal editors, governments, courts, the media and interested individuals.

The core of that book is a series of checklists to help scientists to navigate on the journey from the beginning of a research career through the stages of research projects to the publication and dissemination of the findings. All of the elements of the process should become second nature for researchers who are well taught and well supervised early in their careers, but unfortunately, not enough supervisors bother to master the art and science of supervision.

The first list is “self-assessment of self-control” in a chapter on “what it takes to be a good scientist”. The prospective scientist is advised to carefully weigh the pros and cons of a research career. Armstrong was influenced by the 1925 novel Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, which could be prescribed as a text to learn about the trials and tribulations of idealistic researchers.

The hero of the book is a radical and independent medical researcher who adheres to strict scientific principles. The central drama of the book is Arrowsmith’s discovery of a special kind of cell in the blood that destroys bacteria and his dilemma in the face of an outbreak of bubonic plague on a fictional Caribbean island. His scientific principles demand that he test the therapy before its mass use on the Island, even at the expense of lives that might be saved. There is a message for our public health officials, especially when the disease in question is not a plague but a bad variant of influenza.

As for the exhilaration of advancing the frontier of knowledge, the authors cite a survey of doctoral students in economics at eight leading US universities. The survey found that 18% of the students experience moderate or severe depression and 11% think about suicide occasionally. Not surprisingly, economics is dubbed “the dismal science.”

There is a short checklist on identifying significant problems and a long list of things to attend to in planning and executing the data collection and analysis.

After drawing out conclusions, the scientist turns to disseminate the findings. There are progress reports and seminar papers on preliminary findings along the way, but the critical products to maintain tenure and ongoing grants are papers published in peer-reviewed literature. Hence, the “publish or perish” refrain has been an ongoing theme since the 1960s.

The checklist starts with “Explanation of findings and why they are credible and useful.” It has to be said that many claims of usefulness in the softer sciences tend to strain credibility. These are the projects that regularly attract criticism from conservative critics of the major grants allocated by bodies such as the Australian Research Council.

The largest item on the checklist concerns writing the paper. By the time researchers get to this point, they should be thoroughly familiar with this particular literary form, but familiarity does not guarantee that the beginner or even experienced scientists will do a good job. The most important suggestions are at the end of the list: “Use editors to improve clarity and rewrite until the report is clear and interesting.” By 'editors,' I presume they mean colleagues, preferably experienced in report writing.

At the Waite Agricultural Research Institute in the 1960s, there was a valuable practice to have all papers rigorously reviewed by two people using the kind of scrutiny that the paper would receive from referees at the journal when it was submitted. One reviewer was drawn from the specialists in that field to check the technical aspects of the paper, the other was selected from a neighbouring field to see if it was written clearly enough to be understood by people outside the speciality.

The last three checklists are concerned with sales and marketing. Some of the most conscientious and committed truth-seekers overlook this work because they find it distasteful or beneath the dignity of scholars. It certainly calls for a very different skill set from research itself, and neglecting it probably didn’t matter so much a generation ago when there were fewer scientists and good work would usually be picked up by influential colleagues and given due attention, including all-important citations. This is no longer the case unless the researcher is fortunate with their colleagues; otherwise, the necessary connections will have to be reached by well-organised efforts to contact and cultivate them.

The book is clearly written. It contains the fruits of many years of dedicated work in research and the evaluation of research findings. This makes it a valuable addition to the shelf of working scientists and anyone else with a serious interest in science as a source of knowledge or a social institution.

See also The Two Faces of Karl Popper.

More reading.

For English-speaking people, Popper first signalled what Jarvie called his “social turn” in Chapter 23 of The Open Society and Its Enemies and in Sections 31 and 32 of the Poverty of Historicism. In defence of scientific objectivity, Popper turned the sociology of knowledge on its head by arguing that its focus on the origin of subjective beliefs did not engage with its proper object of inquiry, namely, knowledge as a public or social product. He claimed that the objectivity of science comes from the process of more or less free criticism in the scientific community.

“It may be said that what we call ‘scientific objectivity’ is not a product of the individual scientist’s impartiality, but a product of the social or public character of scientific method; and the individual scientist’s impartiality is, so far as it exists, not the source but rather the result of this socially or institutionally organised objectivity of science.” (Popper 1996, 220)

Hence, scientific objectivity is a situational or institutional problem that calls for, among other things, theoretical pluralism, a clear formulation of the problems the theories are supposed to solve, the design of critical experiments, and the existence of journals, seminars, and conferences to facilitate critical discussion. Some of these requirements have to be provided by individual scientists, especially new ideas and imaginative criticism, while others call for institutions, including political institutions, to maintain the autonomy of the journals and the research institutes.

In The Poverty of Historicism Popper carried the institutional analysis further in his argument against the psychological approach of Comte and Mill to explain scientific and industrial progress [Note 1]. He adopted the counterintuitive procedure of trying to imagine conditions under which progress would be arrested.

“By closing down or controlling laboratories for research, by suppressing or controlling scientific periodicals and other means of discussion, by suppressing scientific congresses and conferences, by suppressing Universities and other schools, by suppressing books, the printing press, writing, and, in the end, speaking. All these things which indeed might be suppressed (or controlled) are social institutions…Scientific method itself has social aspects. Science, and more especially scientific progress, are the results not of isolated efforts but of the free competition of thought. For science needs ever more competition between hypotheses and ever more rigorous tests. And the competing hypotheses need personal representation, as it were: they need advocates, they need a jury, and even a public. This personal representation must be institutionally organised if we wish to ensure that it works.” (Popper 1961 154-5)

Turning to Jarvie’s The Republic of Science, the dust jacket announces:

“This book offers a careful re-reading of Popper’s classic falsificationist demarcation of science, stressing its institutional aspects. Ian Jarvie traces Popper’s social thinking about science, individuals, institutions, and rationality through The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies, as he criticised and refined his earlier work. New links are established between the works of the 1935-1945 period, revealing them as a source for criticism of the institutions and governance of science.”

Jarvie found a “social turn” in Popper’s first published work. He clearly took to heart one of Popper’s favourite catch phrases “We never know what we are saying” meaning that our theories have contents and consequences that we do not realize. He suggested that Popper, for all his resistance to the sociological approach, in fact anticipated it.

It may be more helpful to talk about the social or institutional theme in Popper’s work and so my gloss on Jarvie’s thesis is that a significant achievement of Logik der Forschung was to emphasise the need for a critical approach to methodological procedures and conventions which function as rules of the game in science. That aspect of the book was generally overlooked because commentators and critics concentrated on the concerns which Popper shared with his opponents, especially the problems of demarcation and induction.

For those interested in Popper's work in the philosophy of science and also politics, the critical approach to the “rules of the game” is common to both. One of the functions of the philosophy of science is to formulate and criticise the rules of the game of science, while political philosophers may do the same for the rules of social and political life. Some of these rules are written laws, regulations, protocols and procedures and others are unwritten customs and habitual practices.

The Introduction, ‘Science as an Institution’, sets out the major issues in the complex relationship between science and society. The word science may refer to a body of public knowledge, a set of beliefs about the world, the whole range of activities performed by scientists, some subset of those activities that are supposed to be special, the complex of social and political institutions which support and influence the activities of scientists. Jacques Barzun wrote wrote an important book with the unlikely title of Science: The Glorious Entertainment.

Chapter 1 unpacks the elements of the “social turn” in Popper’s early philosophy of science. Jarvie identified several procedural rules which constitute what he calls Popper’s “proto-constitution of science”. This is the foundation of his project, and it is spelt out in some detail, drawing from Logik der Forschung.

“My argument will be that thinking socially (rather than logically or psychologically) is central to Popper’s philosophical enterprise, beginning with [the German prototype of] The Logic of Scientific Discovery, continuing for his ten most creative years, and emerging sporadically after that. Popper’s consistent ability to think socially also does much to account for his originality, since it is hard to do and its difficulty is attested by how often readers and critics of Popper do not grasp that this is what he is doing.”(The Republic of Science 21).

Jarvie argued that the roots of Popper’s social/institutional thinking can be traced back to Logik der Forschung but after The Open Society and Its Enemies Popper did not expanded on the theme. Wettersten suggested in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy “He was so concerned not to explain away scientific knowledge as a mere social phenomena that he did not engage in the social studies of science even though his view called for such studies.” This looks like an example of “snowblindness”, a term which Arthur Koestler used in The Act of Creation to refer to “that remarkable form of blindness which often prevents the original thinker from perceiving the meaning and significance of his own discovery” (Koestler 1969 217-21).

The second chapter is ‘Popper’s 1935 Proto-Constitution for the Republic of Science’. This contains Popper’s supreme or meta-rule (SR) and 14 subsidiary rules (R1 to R14), which constitute the rudimentary scaffolding for Popper’s republic of science.

SR: The other rules of scientific procedure must be designed in such a way that they do not protect any statement in science against falsification.

R1: The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.

R2. Once a hypothesis has been proposed and tested, and has proved its mettle, it may not be allowed to drop out without ‘good reason’ (LScD 53-54).

The “supreme rule” and the first two subsidiary rules were proposed by Popper and Jarvie identified additional rules in the text of Popper’s book.

R3. We are not to abandon the search for universal laws and for a coherent theoretical system, nor ever give up our attempts to explain causally any kind of event we can describe (LScD 61).

R4. I shall…adopt a rule not to use undefined concepts as if they were implicitly defined (LScD 75).

R5. Only those auxiliary hypotheses are acceptable whose introduction does not diminish the degree of falsifiability or testability of the system in question but, on the contrary, increases it (LScD 83).

R6. We shall forbid surreptitious alterations of usage (LScD 84).

R7. Inter-subjectively testable experiments are either to be accepted, or to be rejected in the light of counter-experiments (LScD 84).

R8. The bare appeal to logical derivations to be discovered in future can be disregarded (LScD 84).

R9. After having produced some criticism of a rival theory, we should always make a serious attempt to apply this criticism to our own theory (LScD 85n).

R10. We should not accept stray basic statements - i.e logically disconnected ones – but…we should accept basic statements in the course of testing theories; or raising searching questions about these theories, to be answered by the acceptance of basic statements (LScD 106).

R11. This makes our methodological rule that those theories should be given preference which can be most severely tested…equivalent to a rule favouring theories with the highest possible empirical content (LScD 121).

R12. I propose that we take the methodological decision never to explain physical effects, i.e. reproducible regularities, as accumulations of accidents (LScD 199).

R13. A rule…which might demand that the agreement between basic statements and the probability estimate should conform to some minimum standard. Thus the rule might draw some arbitrary line and decree that only reasonably representative segments (or reasonably ‘fair samples’) are ‘permitted’, while a-typical or non-representative segments are ‘forbidden’ (LScD 204).

R14. The rule that we should see whether we can simplify, generalise, or unify our theories by employing explanatory hypotheses of the type mentioned (that is to say, hypotheses explaining observable effects as summations or integrations of micro events) (LScD 207).

Jarvie’s commentary on the “constitution” begins with the reminder that it is very incomplete and very abstract, as though the whole of science is a kind of debating society, leaving out of account a great deal of gritty reality, such as the question of leadership. He noted Polanyi’s discussion in Personal Knowledge of rules in scientific practice which he called maxims . Polanyi considered that these are “tacit”, picked up in the process of training and induction into the scientific community. They are interpreted and administered by the leadership of the scientific community but they do not include any guidelines for critical appraisal and reform of the maxims even in the republic itself, much less by outsiders.

Chapter 3 “The Methodology of Studying Social Institutions” takes up three topics in The Poverty of Historicism; first, Popper’s ideas about the emergence of institutions, second, his ideas about individuals and their function in science and third, his ideas on rationality and the scope for objectivity and testing in the human sciences. He was influenced by the ideas of Carl Menger and the “Austrian school” of social and economic thought, which were “in the air” in Vienna at the time. Two of the central “Austrian” doctrines which Popper took on board are the theory of the origin of social institutions and methodological individualism.

In chapters four and five on The Open Society and Its Enemies Jarvie aimed to capture Popper’s published ideas over the decade 1935 to 1945. This is where a problem of organisation becomes apparent, partly due to the density of argument. Popper spent several hundred pages spelling out his arguments, and Jarvie, in a hundred pages, set out to convey the gist of those arguments, along with his first take on the way that Popper’s ideas about society enrich his ideas about science and vice versa. There are two or three books in here, jostling for attention. There is the strong thesis regarding Popper’s “social turn”; the analogy between Popper’s approach to the rules of the game in science and society; the parallels between Popper and the “Austrians” in the methodology of the social sciences; the exegesis of The Open Society and Its Enemies; and the implications of all of the above in working out the relationships between science (in all its various aspects) and society (and politics).

Many issues arise from the troubled relationship between science and politics since applied science became vital for national defence and pure science moved beyond the point where people could win Nobel Prizes with equipment purchased from the local hardware shop. Much of Jarvie’s discussion on these matters is directly or indirectly concerned with the governance of science.

Implications and Applications

Moving on to the implications and applications of the social/institutional approach by Popper and others.

1. A common thread in Popper’s philosophy of science and his approach to social and political issues.

2. A common thread in Popper and Hayek.

3. The governance of science.

Regarding 1 and 2 Popper’s criterion for the value of his proposals in Logik der Forschung was their utility in helping scientists to get on with their work. He didn’t quite put it like that, he referred to “their fertility – their power to elucidate the problems of the theory of knowledge” (LScD 38). The point is that working scientists are disadvantaged if they operate with dysfunctional ideas in the theory of knowledge such the notion that they should start with observations. The working scientists applauded, notably Einstein, Medawar, Monod, Eccles and countless others including soil scientists in New Zealand, Melbourne and Adelaide.

The point is to begin with the right questions, that is, questions which facilitate purposeful and effective action both in the experimental sciences and in social and political matters. Collingwood made the same point in writing about “the logic of question and answer” (Collingwood 1957 Chapter V). Working scientists are expected to carry out experiments and make observations. They have to be active, and Popper’s proposals (rules) can be applied to their activities, including their deliberations before and after experimental and observational work. In the realm of politics and social action Popper similarly provided some rules, starting with the suggestion to use the language of political demands or proposals instead of the language of essentialism and historicism.

For example, while the essentialist wants to find the essence of justice (or the state) and the historicist wants to look at the history of the state or the way things are going, Popper suggested that we should consider what we want from our system of justice and from the state.

In a clear presentation of this theory [of the protective state], the language of political demands or of political proposals should be used; that is to say, we should not try to answer the essentialist question: What is the state, what is its true nature, its real meaning? Nor should we try to answer the historicist question: How did the state originate, and what is the origin of political obligation? We should rather put our question in this way: What do we demand from a state? What do we propose to consider as the legitimate aim of state activity? (Popper 1966 109 my emphasis)

That is not to dismiss studies which search for patterns or regularities in social or political processes. Similarly, we do not dismiss historical studies, it means that we do not confuse trends with laws and it means that we do not have to submit to historical tendencies like the ruin of democracy under communism in Russia and state socialism in Germany and the recent lockdowns around the world (added in 2023)..

Hayek took a similar approach in The Constitution of Liberty where he discussed the pros and cons of democracy. He noted that the power of the state was not expected to be a problem after power came into the hands of the people because the new rulers (replacing kings, emperors and despots) would not harm themselves. However the people are represented by politicians, parties and factions which are not under the immediate control of the people. Hence the danger of the abuse of power persists under democracy “But it is not democracy but unlimited government which is objectionable…It is not who governs but what government is entitled to do that seems to me the essential problem.” (Hayek 1976 403 my italics)

Compare that with Popper’s criticism of the idea that the question of sovereignty (who shall rule) is a fundamental issue in politics. “It is high time for us to learn that the question ‘who is to wield the power in the state?’ matters little as compared with the questions ‘how is the power wielded’ and ‘how much power is wielded?’” (Popper 1966 162). Writing on Marxism and revolutionary violence Popper pointed to the need for “rules of engagement” for the use of violence by the state both in defence of the realm and in policing law and order. This approach calls for rules for revolutionary violence in the extreme situation where the rulers cannot be dismissed by democratic means.

Hayek’s last book The Fatal Conceit (edited by Willliam W. Bartley) pulled together the threads of his project on rationality, law and liberty [Note 2]. He argued the case for the importance of evolved moral conventions, which he called the ‘extended moral order’ of western civilisation, including rules related to markets and especially dealings in private property. Other important rules concern honesty, contracts and privacy. Popper also referred to the vital function of the moral framework of society (Popper 1963 Chapter 17) and more recently Deirdre McCloskey has written extensively on the “the bourgeois virtues” and related matters (McCloskey 2006 and 2010). Popper and Hayek can be glossed as discovering, criticizing and improving those principles which function as the rules of the game in social life.

The ‘rules of the game’ range from the possibly innate rules of grammar, through the tacit knowledge of local traditions and folkways to the rules of games and other codified forms of procedure. They include the laws of the land embodied in common law, statutes and constitutions. At another level, they include the informalized rules of the moral framework, which Popper noted in his essay “Public Opinion and Liberal Principles”. The study of these rules would need to probe how different sets of rules support or undermine each other, and the effects of switching from one set to another. This would be essentially an ecological study with the emphasis on unintended ‘downstream’ effects of changes in the prevailing order. This does not imply a rigidly conservative attitude to the status quo, it merely signals that we need to learn from our conscious or unconscious social experiments. This approach would supplement the methods of conceptual analysis and crude ‘positivist’ empirical description of social and political systems. It would have the theoretical advantage of linking disciplines and the practical merit of being continually in touch with problems and their possible solutions. (Champion 1992)

This is a program which might engage followers of Wittgenstein if they pursue their interest in “life games” and “forms of life” into problems of politics and public administration.

The governance of science

Popper’s reference to the institutional context of science in The Poverty of Historicism points to the governance of science which became a big issue in Britain when Marxists such as Bernal pushed for government control of the national research effort (Bernal 1939). This provoked a reaction to defend autonomous science led by Michael Polanyi and in this context he wrote “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” published in Minerva (1962). For an account of this episode and a survey of the range of issues involved, see Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (1971).

Other postwar developments intensified the issue of governance, notably the rise of Big Science and the official discovery of “normal science”. Big Science refers to the major research and development projects on the model of the Manhattan Project which transformed the scientific and academic landscape (Shills 1972, Greenberg 2001). In his unpublished lectures Popper referred to the menace of Big Science with too much money chasing too few ideas and other adverse effects. Speaking from a very different vantage point, President Eisenhower, in his farewell speech to the nation in 1961, warned that the nation’s scholars might be dominated by Federal employment and project allocations.

“…the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Then came Kuhn’s account of normal science which was taken up in some quarters as a recommendation about the proper way to go, especially in the social sciences which were keen to copy the more prestigious disciplines (Notturno 1984).

A more recent development is a rapidly growing literature on problems in the quality of published research. Richard Horton in his capacity as editor-in-chief of Lancet wrote “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may be simply untrue…Science has taken a turn towards darkness” with reference to small sample sizes, invalid analyses, conflicts of interest and obsession with fashionable trends (Horton 2015). There is concern about the increasing incidence of retractions, the higher rate in high-impact journals (Fang et al., 2011), and the dangerous liaison of science and politics (Butos and McQuade, 2006). Less than 12% of articles in 2004 in The Journal of Economic Theory passed three tests – stating a theory, explaining why it mattered and testing it (Klein and Romaro 2007). There are problems of replication of results and politicization in some fields such as climate science . Another concern is the declining publication of negative results (Fanelli 2012) and it would be interesting to explore if this has any basis in the persistent teaching of confirmation theory rather than critical rationalism in epistemology and the philosophy of science.

Tulloch

Popper inspired the economist Gordon Tullock (1922-2014) to make a significant but little-appreciated contribution to the literature on the governance of science. He is one of the most gifted and innovative economists not to win a Nobel Prize [Note 3]. In The Organization of Inquiry (1966) he approached the topic of scientific research and publication as a student of legal, social and economic systems to sketch a scenario for the decline of a scientific discipline, given a particular combination of motivational factors and institutional incentives.

Concerning the people who engage in pure and applied research he identified three kinds of curiosity:
1. Pure curiosity and compulsion to find how the world works. This drives the great scientists.
2. The passionate desire to solve practical problems. This drives the great builders and engineers.
3. “Induced curiosity” directed to either pure or applied problems.

The researchers with induced curiosity do not have a consuming passion for research but do it as a job. The most obvious examples are academic staff who have to “publish or perish” in the struggle for tenure and promotion and the scientists who work “nine to five” in public and private research laboratories. Of course, outstanding work can be produced by academics seeking promotion and even by nine-to-five scientists, but Tullock’s analysis addressed some tendencies which could emerge in a system where more and more of the workers have “induced” curiosity and less and less (in proportion) harbour a burning commitment to the quest.

Closely related to the investigators' motives are their concern for the quality of the work and their willingness to test their assumptions and results. Tullock noted that the dedicated truth seeker and also the serious practical problem-solver must pay close attention to reality to align their ideas with it and this demands constant testing and critical evaluation. In contrast, the researcher who is only aiming to publish to satisfy the requirements of an employer or grant-giving agency can be happy with results that are merely publishable, even if they are not robust. As Tullock put it, scientific concern with the real world can run second to other matters.

“If he could establish and maintain his reputation, and hence his job, by reporting completely fictional discoveries, this would accomplish his end. While an investigator motivated by curiosity or practical utility must, of necessity, concern himself with real phenomena, the man motivated by induced curiosity could, if the risk of discovery were not great, simply ignore reality.“ Tullock 1965 56)

He suggested that a self-perpetuating process could occur in a journal or a field of research dominated by investigators with induced curiosity (or “normal” or “uncritical scientists”) so the work could “gradually slip away from reality in the direction of superficially impressive but actually easy research projects”. The peer review process is designed to avert such a decline; however, if the reviewers are too closely associated with the authors either personally or by membership of a school of thought, then the rigour of the process may suffer. Tullock speculated that this would be most likely to happen in a field dominated by “induced” and “normal scientists” rather than the dedicated truth seekers. Towards the end of that slippery slope is the situation in which there is a widespread belief in the field that the researcher's function is to support a “side” on some issue. Simply presenting a rationalisation for some position chosen on other grounds may be acceptable as an objective of research, and the principal criterion in judging journals may become their points of view.

“The concern with reality that unites the sciences, then, may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia…these symptoms may be found in some of the social sciences.” (ibid 56)

When Tullock wrote the book in the 1960s, he considered that the natural sciences were sound, but he thought that parts of economics and the social sciences were well down the slope that he sketched. In view of the concerns that are being expressed about the state of science at present it may be time to revisit Tullock’s analysis to see how much we can learn from it.

NOTES

Note 1. The institutional approach points to the type of work which Douglas North pursued to win a Nobel Prize in Economics. In his acceptance address North stated “Institutions form the incentive structure of a society and the political and economic institutions, in consequence, are the underlying determinants of economic performance” (North 1993).

Note 2. An interesting feature of this book is the Hayek’s introduction of the concept of non-justificationism to support his criticism of “constructivist rationality”, presumably due to the influence of Bartley (Champion 2013b).

Note 3. He may wasted too much time and energy trying to interest Popper in his ideas about physics. This is revealed in extended correspondence between them from the 1950s to 1992 (Levy and Peart 2015).

REFERENCES

Barzun J 1964 Science: The Glorious Entertainment. Secker and Warburg, London.

Bernal J D 1939 The Social Function of Science. Routledge, London.

Butos W N and McQuade T 2006 Government and Science: A Dangerous Liaison? The Independent Review, 11(2): 177–208.

Champion R A 1992 Review of The Fatal Conceit in the Melbourne Age Monthly Review August. Reprinted in Champion (2013) Chapter 4.

Champion R A 2013 Commentary on Hayek. Amazon.

Champion R A 2013b Hayek, Bartley and Popper: Justificationism and the Abuse of Reason in R Leeson (ed) Hayek: A Collaborative Biography. Part 1 Influences, from Mises to Bartley. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Collingwood R G 1957 An Autobiography. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Eisenhower D D 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm

Fanelli D 2012 Negative results are disappearing from most disciplines and countries. Sociometrics 90 (3): 891–904.

Fang F C, Casadevall A and Morrison R P 2011 Retracted Science and the retraction index. Infect. Immunol. 78 (10) 3855-3859. http://iai.asm.org/content/79/10/3855.

Fuller Steve 2000 The Governance of Science. Open University Press, Buckingham.

Greenberg D S 2001. Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion. Chicago University Press.

Hayek F A 1976 The Constitution of Liberty. Routledge, London.

Hayek F A 1991 The Fatal Conceit. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Heclo H 2008 On Thinking Institutionally. Paradigm Publishing, London.

Horton R 2015 Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma? www.thelancet.com Vol. 385 April 11.

Jarvie Ian C 2001 The republic of science: The emergence of Popper’s social view of science 1935-1945. Ripodi, Amsterdam.

Klein D B and Romero P P 2007 Model building versus theorising: The paucity of theory in The Journal of Economic Theory. Econ Journal Watch 4 (2): 241-271.

Koestler A 1967 The Act of Creation. Pan, London.

Levy D M and Peart S J 2015 Gordon Tullock and Karl Popper: Their Correspondence. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f938/17b5783522387fe674e112ca7fdd95ff753a.pdf

McCloskey D N 2006 The bourgeois virtues: Ethics for an age of commerce. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/bv_selection.pdf

McCloskey D N 2010 Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.North D 1993 Economic Performance Through Time. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1993/north-lecture.html

Polanyi M 1962 The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory, Minerva1:54-73.

Polanyi M 1958 Personal Knowledge. Routledge, London.

Popper K R 1966 The Open Society and Its Enemies. Routledge, London.

Popper K R 1963 The Poverty of Historicism. Routledge, London.

Popper K R 1963 Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge, London.

Popper K R 1972 The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson, London.

Ravetz J 1971 Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.

Shills E 1972 The Intellectuals and the Powers, and Other Essays. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Tullock G 1965 The Organization of Inquiry. Duke University Press, Durham NC.Wetttersten J 2006 Essay review of The Republic of Science, Philosophy of Science 73 (1): 108-121.

Wettersten J Karl Popper: Critical Rationalism The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/cr-ratio/

This article explains how Popper’s ideas promote creativity and effective problem-solving in science and elsewhere. In 1934 he started a new era in the philosophy of science with a book written in German, and translated in 1959 under the title The Logic of Scientific Discovery. He rejected the traditional idea that scientific knowledge was based on a method called induction whereby theories are verified by observations. Popper argued that the logical process of induction simply does not exist. Theories are forever tentative and the most useful function (and the only logically decisive effect) of observations is to act as tests or attempted falsifications of theories.

Since 1960 Popper’s work has been dominated by biological themes. He has revived an approach to knowledge called evolutionary epistemology. This approach was very popular last century but has lapsed in modern times due to the obsession with physics in the philosophy of science.

Evolutionary epistemology applies Darwin’s principle of natural selection to scientific theories and to other forms of knowledge. It is concerned with problem-solving and error-elimination under various forms of selective pressure. This contrasts with most theories of knowledge that are concerned with the foundations of belief or the probability of theories.

Popper started with the old idea that knowledge grows by trial and error, or in more learned terms, by conjecture and refutation. He generalised this theory to encompass all forms of learning and problem-solving, including the evolution of life on earth.

On his account every organism, from the amoeba to Einstein, is constantly engaged in problem solving. In the plant and animal world this involves the production of new reactions, new organs, new forms of life. For humans it involves the production of new ideas. When these forms of life or theories appear they confront selective pressures. These may come from the biological environment or from competing forms of life. Ideas meet the competition of alternative theories, critical arguments and experimental tests.

The central motif of Popper’s evolutionary epistemology is the four-step problem-solving schema:

P ---> TS ---> EE ---> P

The starting point is a problem, which evokes tentative solutions. These are subjected to the process of error elimination by way of critical discussion and experimental testing. In the course of these activities new problems emerge.

The Significance of this Scheme

It brings out the importance of recognizing problems and working on them. In this schema a problem functions as an ecological niche to be colonised by tentative solutions. Problems are not a nuisance because they provide a habitat for new species of ideas. This provides a theory of discovery, based on the creative function of criticism. Criticism is often regarded as a negative kind of thing and critics are supposed to be second-rate people, rather like teachers, who cannot actually do anything. To grasp the full power of evolutionary epistemology it is necessary to understand this creative function of criticism. Problems are the habitat where new ideas grow and criticism has two functions, which are about equally valuable: (a) to eliminate error and (b) is to generate new problems, i.e. new habitats. Thus Popper’s theory brings out both the error elimination and the creative function of criticism. And we need to maximise the free play of criticism to get the best out of both its functions.

This brings us to another function of the evolutionary schema. It reveals the protective devices and the conservative limits on criticism that are imposed by many theories of science. I will criticise four of these, namely the traditional theory of induction and the supposedly radical innovations of Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend.

Conservative Limits on Criticism

The theory of induction claims that there is a method or a process called induction, whereby scientific laws or generalisations are derived from repeated observations. But observations are only useful if they relate to a problem and in practice the inductive method can lead to mere accumulation of data. Even if this extreme is avoided the inductive approach tends to cramp the imaginative search for new ideas. It does not assign any role at all to criticism. It encourages over-specialisation (sticking to data collection in your own field). It provides no incentive to explore the wider theoretical, technological and moral implications of problems and theories.

We now turn to Thomas S. Kuhn and his ideas about normal science and paradigms. These were spelled out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn rejected the view that science grows in a steady fashion as observations accumulate. He suggested instead that periodic revolutions occur, with whole world-views changing in the process. These world-views he called paradigms. In the period between revolutions we have what Kuhn called “normal science”, performed by “normal scientists” who work on relatively minor “puzzles”. In contrast with a Popperian scientist who accepts no limits to criticism, normal scientists never try to explore or criticise the wider framework of ideas (the paradigm) in which the puzzles are located.

The secret of the success of Kuhn’s ideas lies in their symbiotic relationship with inductivism. A symbiotic relationship is a partnership between two species where both derive benefit. The inductivist approach produces “normal scientists” who uncritically accept the “paradigms” that they inherit. Kuhn made his reputation by describing this situation and this is his debt to inductivism. In return his theory legitimates whatever scientists are doing, and so he repays his debt by providing support for inductivism. At the surface level his ideas can be seen as a challenge to some ideas about induction which Popper demolished in 1934. At the deeper level Kuhn’s ideas are thoroughly conservative and unhelpful for working scientists.

We now proceed to Imre Lakatos. He appeared to be following Popper in resisting Kuhn’s ideas about paradigms and he produced a complicated methodology of scientific research programs to provide a rational reconstruction of scientific progress. In contrast with the symbiotic relationship between Kuhn and inductivism, Lakatos formed a parasitic relationship with both Popper and Kuhn. From Popper he took the idea of research programmes. From Kuhn he took the idea that the central part of the program should be protected from criticism. He used some exciting new terms; his program has a “hard core” of theories. A “protective belt” of lesser theories that can be modified or discarded surrounds it. But beneath the verbal froth and bubble this is a recipe for conservatism. It prohibits the most important and fruitful criticisms which are directed at the framework assumptions of the program.

Finally a look at Paul Feyerabend and his assertion of methodological anarchism, summed up in the formula “anything goes”. Reverting to the four-stage problem solving schema, we welcome the notion that anything goes at the stage of Tentative Solutions (the more of these the better). But if this permissive attitude is allowed at the error elimination stage, then everything stays.

So in conclusion, contrast the protective devices in the four theories sketched above with Popper’s advice to use unlimited criticism at all levels including the metaphysical framework assumptions which dominate the selection of problems and the formulation of solutions.

Objections

One might ask: What manner of counter-arguments do these schools use against Popper? They have two main lines of defence, first, they recycle arguments that Popper raised and refuted in his first book (in 1934). Second, they claim that Popper does not adequately describe what the scientific community is actually doing. This is a very perverse criticism. Popper wants to help scientists to solve their problems more effectively by mobilising the creative energy of critical thought. His ideas have to be criticised as tentative suggestions to that end. What sort of criticism is it to say that most scientists are not really very critical in their thinking? Imagine someone making suggestions for famine relief in Ethiopia who is criticised by people who point out that there is famine in Ethiopia? This is the level of logic that has been used to discredit Popper’s ideas.

If scientists take these ideas to heart then the practice of many will change. And if they are taken up by people other than scientists then we can hope to move towards a more problem-solving community. Immense resources of creative and critical problem-solving energy are locked up by conservative theories of knowledge in their traditional and radical forms. These resources may be released by the evolutionary approach championed by Karl Popper. But these ideas are threatened because Popperian philosophers are an endangered species and they could be extinct in the universities within a generation.

This places a heavy responsibility upon people outside the academies to keep these ideas alive, (so long as they stand up to criticism) and to preserve them for future generations who in time may break down the barriers that the ruling academic guilds have erected against Popper’s ideas.

The paper has seven sections:

The myth of public opinion.

The dangers of public opinion.

Liberal principles: a group of theses.

The liberal principle of free discussion.

The forms of public opinion.

Some practical problems: censorship and monopolies of publicity.

A short list of political illustrations.

It may help to start with a summary of the liberal principles that Popper spelt out in section 3. This will be helpful for a general readership (unlike the Mont Pelerin meeting) where there are likely to be many people who do not hold non-socialist liberal principles and some who are not clear about what these principles are.

(1) The state is a necessary evil, and its powers should be kept to the minimum that is necessary.

(2) A democracy is a state where the government can be changed without bloodshed.

(3) Democracy cannot confer benefits on people. "Democracy provides no more than a framework within which the citizens may act in a more or less organised and coherent way".

(4) Democracy does not mean that the majority is right.

(5) Institutions need to be tempered and supported by traditions.

(6) There is no Liberal Utopia. There are always problems, conflicts of interest, and choices to be made between the lesser of evils.

(7) Liberalism is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It is about modifying or changing institutions and traditions rather than replacing the existing order wholesale. The exception to this is when a tyranny is in place, that is a government that can only be changed by violence and bloodshed.

8) The importance of the moral framework.

"Among the traditions that we must count as the most important is what we may call the 'moral framework' (corresponding to the institutional 'legal framework') of a society. This incorporates the society's traditional sense of justice or fairness, or the degree of moral sensitivity that it has reached... Nothing is more dangerous than the destruction of this traditional framework. (Its destruction was consciously aimed at by Nazism)."

Returning to the beginning of the paper, Popper noted that we need to be wary of several ideas about public opinion that many people accept without thinking critically about them. He stated the following:

(a) The idea that the voice of the people is a kind of authority, based on the essential wisdom and "rightness" of the mythical "man in the street". Apart from his objections to any kind of authority, he noted that the people usually differ considerably on most issues. He also accepted a fragment of truth in the myth, because simple people can be wiser than their governments, and also motivated by more honourable intentions.

(b) The "manifest truth" theory, which makes people impatient of differences of opinion.

(c) A dangerously irrational and romantic form of the "voice of the people" myth - that the popular will can represent the genius and Spirit of the People."

Moving on to the dangers of public opinion, he noted that it can be very powerful and hence liberals (wary of concentrations of power and their danger) should treat it with a degree of suspicion: "Owing to its anonymity, public opinion is an irresponsible form of power, and therefore particularly dangerous from the liberal point of view."

On the liberal theory of free discussion, he suggested that freedom of thought and discussion are ultimate liberal values that are not in need of further defence or justification. However, he noted that they can be given additional support on account of the way they contribute to the search for truth and the elimination of error by critical public discussion.

In connection with some practical problems such as censorship and monopolies of publicity he had no theses to offer, just questions, for example, what should be done about the influence and responsibility of the intelligentsia in connection with spreading ideas such as socialism, and their role in the acceptance of tyrannical fashions such as abstract art (and political correctness)?

He ended with some random thoughts on the use and abuse of public opinion.

"It may sometimes assume the role of an enlightened arbiter of justice. Unfortunately, it can be managed. These dangers can be counteracted only by strengthening the liberal tradition. Public opinion should be distinguished from the publicity of free and critical discussion, which is (or should be) the rule in science, and which includes the discussion of moral and other issues. Public opinion is influenced by, but is not the result of, nor under the control of, discussions of this kind. Their beneficial influence will be the greater the more honestly, simply, and clearly, these discussions are conducted."

The paper was first prepared to provide a starting point for debate at an international conference, the sixth meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, held in Venice in 1954. It was published in Italian in 1955 and in German in 1956. It first appeared in English in the 1963 in the collection Conjectures and Refutations.

A note on the Mont Pelerin Society.

The Mont Pelerin Society was formed in 1947 when Hayek invited a number of academics, writers and assorted others to consider what should be done to sustain the ideas of freedom at a time when socialist central planning in more or less coercive forms was underway in most countries. Popper was among the founding members, along with Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and Frank Knight.

Defending the merchants of alarmism.

This appears to be the first book of its kind, promising a thorough and rigorous investigation of the philosophical and methodological issues that arise in the problematic and controversial field of climate science. It is long overdue because the scholars in the history and philosophy of science have neglected this particular science. The two outstanding exceptions are Philip Kitcher and more recently Eric Winsberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida.

Philip Kitcher recently retired from Columbia College NY. With Evelyn Fox Keller he wrote The Seasons Alter that portrays a dystopian future in a warming world that probably represents Peak Alarmism. Any advance on a pandemic that kills billions of people?

In a similar vein but less flamboyant mode, Eric Winsberg defends the methods and conclusions of those who promote alarm about the future of the planet. Consequently, this book is not a solution to the apathy of the philosophers and scholars in the social studies of science in the face of the shortcomings in the mainstream of climate science, but instead it is part of the problem. This book cannot be recommended even at a remainder price unless you are looking for yet another example of the failure of the academic “dogs” to bark a warning.

A striking feature of the book is Winsberg’s quite remarkable display of cherry picking of evidence, selective treatment of contested issues his benign view of the credibility of the IPCC and the institutional organization and funding of climate science. He is a two-fisted partisan in the climate debate and this stance is on display from the opening chapter with carefully selected items of information to paint a picture of dangerous warming. He fatuously disparages “climate deniers” (229) as though the considerable number of eminent climate scientists who are not alarmed about the warming trend cannot be taken seriously.. The book begins with some particularly tendentious and misleading data to convince the uninformed and the unwary that serious anthropogenic warming is happening.

He refers to the number of recent years that are the “warmest on record”, the retreat of Arctic ice, the extreme weather events of recent times including a record drought in Australia, and the acceleration of rising sea levels. Given the uncontroversial view that the earth has warmed over the last two centuries and even more since the little Ice Age it stands to reason that recent years are likely to be warmer than earlier ones. The record shows that there has not been a trend to more extreme weather lately (possibly the reverse). The claim about the record recent drought in Australia is simply fake news. The latest report on sea levels by Dr Judith Curry shows no acceleration (possibly a slowing down).

Apparently there is “well funded” opposition to genuine climate science (215) and he cites The Merchants of Doubt (2010) by Oreskes and Conway with their account of Big Oil and others who back the “climate deniers.” But it seems that Exxon Mobil stopped funding climate dissidents around 2005 when they went green like the other oil. Winsberg reports “by all accounts their [Oreskes and Conway’s] claims are true” but no other accounts are cited. Of course some ther people and organizations are funding a handful of organisations like the Heartand Institute to challenge the orthodoxy. The Heartland Institute has an annual budget in the order of seven million dollars so it is hardly “well funded” in comparison with the tens of billions poured into mainstream climate research and development projects. Seven million dollars is not even in the same league with the contributions to environmental activists from the great philanthropic foundations.

Between 2011 and 2015 the top 20 charitable donors alone gave $556 million green activists, notably the Sierra Club that received 49 million (not its only income of course). The donors are a roll call of the great foundations – Rockefeller, Pew, Hewlett, Packard, Skoll, Bloomberg, Ford and many more. A consortium of the foundations hired a firm of consultants to produce a report “Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming”. The aim was to triple funding from $210 million in 2007 to $600 million per annum over the next decade. How many Heartland Institutes costing 7 million each could be funded with 600 million dollars? They may have failed to reach that target, still it is a David versus Goliath contest and the reverse of the picture painted by the likes of Oreskes and uncritically recycled by Winsberg.

A significant part of the book is concerned with the principles and practice of model building that is central to the effort to specify the role of CO2 and to provide projections of future developments. This is Winsberg’s home ground because he previously wrote Science in the Age of Computer Simulation, and he has many publications in the field. He provides an introduction to the vocabulary and the concepts in the business with emphasis on the size and complexity of the computer programs, the difficulty of interpreting the output and some of the philosophical issues that arise.

Not enough is said to explain their remarkable lack of success in projecting the trends in warming after the pause at the turn of the millennium. Roy Spencer produced the most dramatic picture of the failure showing that almost all of 92 computer models over-estimated the warming trend compared with the most reliable measurements both on the ground and in the troposphere. During the pause in warming the projections deviated more each year from the actual temperature and by about 2005 only four or five of the projections were even close to the measured temperature and the situation deteriorated every year.

The Australian Garth Paltridge provided a much more helpful account of the modelling exercise in The Climate Caper (2010). He noted that the model builders are reluctant to give up the hope that detailed forecasts can be achieved, perhaps with more data and the next generation of computers for number crunching. Trillions of dollars worldwide are riding on the predictions of the IPCC and the modelling exercise may be too big to be allowed to fail any time soon.

He reported that the twenty or so models favoured by the IPCC calculate global-average temperatures that range several degrees about the observed value of 15 degrees C." (p 21) A team at the ANU looked at the predictions for current (measured) rainfall in Australia based on the several IPCC models and the range extended from 200 mm per year less than the actual, to 1000 mm per year more. About half predicted more rainfall for Australia later in the century and half predicted less. The average was an increase of about 8 mm per annum but the model used to develop Australia’s climate policy by the Rudd Government predicted 100 mm less rainfall. Where rigorous standards are applied that model might have been regarded as an outlier and discarded.

Consensus rules in climate science and Paltridge explained why so many of the models converge towards the same broad story of warming, albeit at different rates, The models are so complex that they use the biggest computers in the world and months or years of work may be required complete a trial and there is overwhelming pressure not to run sensitivity tests using alternative models with different tuneable parameters. The “tuneable parameters” are knobs that the operators can twiddle to get the model to fit the data in hand but that process does not guarantee that the model is actually capturing reality, as revealed by the failure in the projections.

Some outstanding climate scientists such as Richard Lindzen, who are not hostages of the modelling industry, have argued that the macro-modelling approach is the wrong way to go on the basis of scientific first principles. This is rather along the lines of critique that classical and Austrian economists mount against Keynesian macro modelling in economics. That fundamental criticism is supported by a long-running project on forecasting methods and principles conducted by J Scott Armstrong in the US and Kesten Green in Australia. For decades they have studied the success of various forecasting methods in many fields including climate science and they concluded in a paper “Global warming forecasts by scientists versus scientific forecasts.

“The forecasts in the IPCC Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they were the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing. Research on forecasting has shown that experts' predictions are not useful in situations involving uncertainly and complexity. We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.”

Faced with the difficulty of validating models by the conventional criteria of scientific merit Winsberg referred to one of his colleagues Wendy Parker who explained in a published paper that “the most successful modelling approaches incorporate several computational models that rely on assumptions that contradict one another.” She concedes that this could erode confidence in the work (as indeed it should) but “distinctive methods and standards of justification are in play.” This suggests that POMO has officially arrived in climate science! Winsberg also conceded that it is difficult to explain the new standards of justification that are in play and he virtually threw up his hands and offloaded the criteria for evaluation and validation to the consensus in the field. He wrote “my view is that philosophers do better to paint a picture in which we urge trust in the consensus of the scientific community, based on features of that community’s social organization , than to try to provide a normative framework from which we can demonstrate the reliability (or its absence) of such-and-such modelling result” (161 my italics)

Many features of the social organization of the IPCC and the community of climate scientists have come to light that tend to undermine trust in the consensus that emerges from it. Notable sources include Donna Laframboise’s study of the governance of the IPCC, the Wegman committee’s investigation of Michael Mann’s “hockey stick”, the revelations in the emails released from the University of East Anglia and the work of Armstrong and Green noted above.

In 2011 Donna Laframboise published an exhaustive and damning review of the procedures used to assemble the fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. In The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert she pointed out that it is a political body, created by that most political organization, the United Nations. Rupert Darwall charted the role of the UN in the politics of climate change in two landmark works The Age of Global Warming (date) and Green Tyranny ().

Laframboise described the process in a nutshell. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change convened in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and sold the idea that greenhouse gasses are The Problem. 154 nations signed up in principle and later enrolled in the Kyoto Protocol. The UNFCCC had a brief to reduce human emissions and failing to do so would be "nothing less than criminal irresponsibility".

The IPCC was created to recruit scientists to support the agenda. Observe the steps: Step one was the political decision that a greenhouse gas treaty was a worthy and achievable goal. Step two was the recognition that before such a treaty could be negotiated, certain documents representing a common understanding were required. Step was to enlisting scientists to help produce such documents.

Laframboise pointed out that the UN did not wait for climate science to mature. Political operators in the organization decided on the solution to a problem that legitimate climate scientists never depicted in alarming terms. The shortest version of the IPCC Climate Bible appeared in 1990 and the findings were tentative. Yet in the next two years the UN convinced a majority of the world's governments to sign a framework document that essentially started the “war on CO2,”

The IPCC is the spearhead of the politically-driven scare campaign to support the “war” and it produces regular Assessment Reports to maintain the climate of alarm. Each report has a small summary volume for politicians and journalists; This is the report that recently warned that the Barrier Reef may disappear in our lifetime if we not mend our coal-burning ways. Longer reports are produced at the same time and some of the chapters in them contain proper science but it they are scarcely mentioned in the media and they are very little read.

Large numbers of scientists contribute material in the lead-up to the final report writing that is in the hands of a small team of lead authors oversighted by two coordinating lead authord. Scientists in the lowest tier are contributing authors and they are generally excluded from meetings of the other authors. They provide raw material on specific and limited topics to be incorporated, re-worked and cited by the lead authors under the direction of the coordinating authors. Additional material, published and occasionally unpublished, can be used at the discretion of the senior authors.

The coordinating lead authors are overwhelmingly the really key figures and Laframboise found that some of them are incredibly unlikely figures in terms of experience, qualifications (doctorates not completed) and background (climate activists). Claims were made about the use of peer-reviewed literature, and a count of the 18,531 references in the 2007 report found that 5,587 (one third) were not peer reviewed including drafts of scientific papers, Greenpeace documents and even press released! In defence it was claimed that the process of internal review would ensure that only "high quality" information in the "grey" literature would be used in the reports.

Scientists outside the inner circle do not agree with that claim. They are routinely snubbed when they challenge the work in progress and outraged at the misrepresentation of the findings in their fields of expertise. A chapter describes the way that leading hurricane expert Chris Landsea was sidelined by Kevin Trenbath who was in charge of the relevant chapter in the Climate Bible. Another chapter follows the story about pseudo-scientific data on hurricanes that became part of the Climate Bible. Another chapter describes one of the most scandalous beatups on the IPCC record, the allegation that warming will massively increase the prevalence of malaria. Among other defects in the argument, malaria is not especially a warm climate illness.

The chapter "Extinction Fiction" charts the abuse of pseudo-scientific findings to predict alarming species losses. One of the two key papers was written by Chris Thomas and 14 co-authors. Daniel Botkin, a leading figures in the field described it "the worst paper I have ever read in a major scientific journal" and the journal that published it was obliged to print not one or two but three critical appraisals of the original paper. Laframboise’s book is essential reading for anyone who is not fully aware of the corruption of the UN climate program and especially the IPCC.

Edward Wegman at George Mason University VA headed an ad hoc committee convened by the Chairman of two US House committees to review the science behind Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph. Mann’s work in the late 1990s was a major feature of the Third IPPC Assessment report in 2001 where it created a sensation. The hockey stick shape of the warming curve eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and gave the impression that the current warming was unprecedented in modern times. After sustained and devastating criticism, notably in the Wegman report, the IPPC discretely parked the hockey stick in the archives to be forgotten although it was a major propaganda weapon for some time and some diehard alarmists have stuck with it.

Noting the crippling defects in the statistical analysis of the data used by Mann and his associates at the East Sussex , the committee stated the community of paleoclimatologists appeared to be out of touch with developments in the relevant field of statistical analysis. In addition the scientists in the field were “tightly coupled” as revealed by a network analysis of the connections between the members in the community. Clearly more work is required on the network connections in the climate science community because close associations in relatively closed groups obviously have the capacity to undermine the rigor of refereeing for the peer reviewed literature. The emails released from the East Anglia etc clearly demonstrated the downside of the “close coupling” described in the Wegman report.

All the indicators and symptoms of the problems in the quality of climate science call for a master theorist to create a framework for a Grand Narrative. Gordon Tullock provided this in a neglected masterpiece, The Organization of Inquiry (1966) . To provide context for the work it is essential to understand the transformation of science since 1945. Previously the communities of scientists were quite small, with modest funding from diverse sources.. The Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb signalled the emergence of Big Science funded by Big Government.

Karl Popper in his unpublished lectures in the early 1950s predicted bad things for science in the service of politicians. He saw too much money chasing too few ideas, the publication explosion (good buried under bad) and the distortion of incentives for scientists by the pressure to obtain grants for fashionable and the politically “hot” topics. Richard Lindzen, probably the doyen of genuine climate scientists, put some meat on the bones of Popper’s concern when he recently described the impact of the 15-fold increase of funding for climate research during the Clinton/Gore administration. That was too much money for a small backwater of science, as Lindzen described climate science at the time, and the funding promoted a proliferation of studies by all manner of investigators without appropriate training or genuine interest in serious climate science.

Popper was also alarmed by the phenomenon of normal science and normal (uncritical) scientists described by by T S Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Some of his concerns were shared by a man with a very different vantage point - the Oval Office in the White House in Washington DC. In his farewell speech at the end of his term President Eisenhower warned “The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present.” He noted the “equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” (Eisenhower, 1961).

Both of those possibilities became real when the governments of the western world were driven by the United Nations to embrace radical environmentalism under the influence of the worldwide green movement. New international forums and agencies proliferated, driven by a new class of political entrepreneurs like Maurice Strong. They played up the challenge of climate change, and created additional vehicles for this particular issue, notably the IPCC.

Turning to Gordon Tullock (1922-2014). Climate science was not yet on the radar when he wrote in the early 1960s and he thought the natural sciences were good shape. His scenario for the decline of a scientific discipline drew on his experience of the social sciences including parts of economics. He was a colleague of James Buchanan in the Virginia School of public choice studies and he was unlucky not to share the Nobel Prize with Buchanan, probably because he was temperamentally a contrarian and he was easily distracted. In addition to seminal work on economics he wrote a book about the social life of insects and he engaged in long-running correspondence with Karl Popper, trying to persuade him to take up some of Tullock’s ideas in quantum physics.

After he met Popper at a Volker Fund (free enterprise) conference at Emory University he put aside the work that became The Politics of Bureaucracy and wrote The Organization of Enquiry. He took the social/institutional approach advocated by Popper in The Poverty of Historicism, written in New Zealand during the war as a companion to The Open Society and Its Enemies. The idea was to explain the development or lack of scientific and industrial progress in terms of the institutional context rather than psychological factors (advocated by Comte and Mill) or the manifestation of a historical tendency. Contemplating the factors that could stop the progress of science Popper suggested closing down or controlling laboratories for research and anything that impeded the free exchange of criticism and ideas in the scientific community. “Scientific method itself has social aspects. Science, and more especially scientific progress, are the results not of isolated efforts but of the free competition of thought. For science needs ever more competition between hypotheses and ever more rigorous tests.” He went on to suggest that competing hypotheses need personal representation, advocates, “and even a public.” He might have suggested ‘an informed public’ because the public at present is so misinformed about the weather that politicians are easily driven by public opinion to embrace disastrous policies.

Tullock sketched a scenario that has a haunting resemblance to the progress of climate science and probably other fields as well, judging from the famous warning issued by Richard Horton in his capacity as editor in chief of Lancet. “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may be simply untrue…Science has taken a turn towards darkness” with reference to small sample sizes, invalid analyses, conflicts of interest and obsession with fashionable trends (Horton 2015).

The scenario involves a combination of personal and institutional factors. The personal factor is the rise of the normal scientist who does science for a living, working under the direction of the laboratory manager without necessarily having any sense of vocation or passion to find the truth. The institutional factors include the rise of Big Science driven by Big Government, the imperative to publish perish to maintain tenure and research grants and the politicisation of intellectual life.

At the individual level he identified three forms of curiosity. First the pure curiosity of the scientist engaged in a compulsive or or obsessive quest for the truth,. Second the equally driving practical curiosity of the person obsessed with making things work better. Third, the “induced curiosity” of the researcher who does not necessarily have a passion for research or the truth but takes on science as a job. The most obvious examples are academic staff who have to “publish or perish” to obtain tenure and promotion, and the large numbers of scientists who work “nine to five” in public and private research laboratories. Of course outstanding work can be produced by academics seeking promotion and even by nine to five scientists but Tullock’s analysis addressed some tendencies which could emerge in a system where more and more of the workers have “induced” curiosity and less and less (in proportion) harbour a burning commitment to the quest.

Tullock noted that the dedicated truth seeker and also the practical problem-solver must pay close attention to reality to align their ideas with it. This demands constant testing and critical evaluation but in contrast, the researcher who is not so motivated can be happy with results that are merely publishable Tullock suggested that for these scientists concern with the real world could become secondary to other matters and if the investigators could maintain their reputations and their jobs by reporting fictional discoveries that would serve the purpose.

The peer review process is designed to maintain standards and he developed the scenario further to consider what would happen if the reviewers are too closely associated with the authors either personally or by membership of a school of thought. He was working before natural science was seriously politicized and of course in the radically polarized world of climate science nowadays the membership of the correct school of thought has become a professional imperative for most investigators.

He observed the politicization of the social sciences because he and Buchanan had both suffered from it (denied funding by the left-trending Rockefeller Foundation) and he observed that the end of the that slippery slope of declining standards is the situation where there is a widespread belief in the field that the function of the researcher is to support a particular position. At this point “Simply presenting a rationalization for some position chosen on other grounds may be acceptable as an objective of research, and the principal criterion in judging journals may become their points of view…The concern with reality that unites the sciences, then, may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia”.

Readers can decide for themselves how far various fields have gone down that path, bearing in mind Horton’s warming in The Lancet. To conclude with a reminder of Winsberg’s suggestion quoted at the head of this review –to trust the scientific consensus based on the organization of the community. This means referring questions of scientific credibility to a consortium of politically correct grant-seekers, environmental fundamentalists and UN officials dedicated to the transformation of the economies of the western world. That is not really what one might have expected from a scholar in the Queen of the Sciences!

Missing from the references

Lindzen, Curry, Spencer, Christy,

Missing from Index Curry, Lindzen, Laframboise, Mann, Gore

WHAT ABOUT THE DISTINCTIVE POINT OF VIEW OF THE PHILOSOPHER

Who is in and out in the philosophical story.

No Popper Lakatos, passing reference to Kuhn

No reference to big science and the Eisenhower warning.

The philosophy of science took a particularly unhelpful turn in the 1930s when the subject became an academic specialty dominated by logical positivism which morphed into logical empiricism. The leading exponents of these ideas, like Carnap and Hempel, fled from Hitler and occupied prestigious chairs in the anglosphere.

Karl Popper’s ideas provided an alternative but he languished in New Zealand from 1937 to 1945 when he escaped to London. The most popular reactions to that orthodoxy were Kuhn’s paradigm theory and social studies of science but they were equally unhelpful because they became dominated by cultural Marxists and fellow travellers.

This book is not a contribution to the academic literature, it is much more important and helpful than that. It is actually more than one book, in a single set of covers. One of the books is a practical handbook or an operating manual for serious scientists. In the language used by Gordon Tullock in his classic work The Organization of Inquiry (1965) their curiosity is driven by the quest for truth or practical value, unlike the “normal scientists” whose curiosity is induced by their conditions of employment.

Armstrong dedicated his life to discovering useful scientific results and he has spent 52 years as a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with sorties to deliver guest lectures at universities in 27 countries. Green moved into academia at the University of Adelaide to follow his passion for research after 30 years as an entrepreneur. From the window of his home he looks into the grounds of the Waite Agricultural Research Institute where I did my first postgraduate research after moving from the University of Tasmania to Adelaide. The Waite Institute is co-located with the CSIRO Soils Division and a generation ago this was a world-class centre of excellence in rural research, before the universities and the CSIRO were taken over by content-free managers with political agendas.

The authors begin with a survey of the problems that afflict science at present and they ends with practical suggestions for improvement that can be taken up by the range of stakeholders in the scientific enterprise. There are chapters on assessing the quality of scientific practice, the problem of advocacy, concerns with the effectiveness of peer review and the complications that arise with government funding. The positive suggestions are offered to university managers, journal editors, governments, courts, the media and interested individuals.

The core of that book is a series of checklists to help scientists to navigate on the journey from the beginning of a research career through the stages of research projects to the publication and dissemination of the findings. All of the elements of the process should become second nature for researchers who are well taught and well supervised early in their careers but unfortunately not enough supervisors bother to master the art and science of supervision.

The first list is “self assessment of self-control” in a chapter on “what it takes to be a good scientist”. The prospective scientist is advised to think hard about the pros and cons of a research career. Armstrong was influenced by the 1925 novel Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis which could be prescribed as a text to learn about the trials and tribulations of idealistic researchers.

The hero of the book is a radical and independent medical researcher who adheres to strict principles of scientific methods. The central drama of the book is Arrowsmith's discovery of a special kind of cell in the blood that destroys bacteria and his dilemma in the face of an outbreak of bubonic plague on a fictional Caribbean island. His scientific principles demand that he should test the therapy before its mass use on the Island, even at the expense of lives that might be saved. There is a message for our public health officials, especially when the disease in question is not a plague but a bad variant of influenza.

As for the exhilaration of advancing the frontier of knowledge, the authors cite a survey of students in the doctoral programs in economics at eight leading universities in the US. The survey found that 18% of the students experience moderate or severe depression and 11% think about suicide in a two-week period. Not surprisingly, economics is dubbed “the dismal science.”

There is a short checklist on identifying important problems and a long list of things to attend to in planning and executing the data collection and analysis.

After drawing out conclusions, the scientist turns to disseminate the findings. There are progress reports and seminar papers on preliminary findings along the way but the critical products to maintain tenure and ongoing grants are papers published in peer-reviewed literature. Hence the talk about “publish or perish” that has been an ongoing refrain at last since the 1960s.

The checklist starts with “Explanation of findings and why they are credible and useful.” It has to be said that many claims of usefulness in the softer sciences tend to strain credibility. These are the projects that regularly attract criticism from conservative critics of the major grants allocated by bodies such as the Australian Research Council.

The largest checklist concerns writing the paper. By the time researchers get to this point they should be thoroughly familiar with this particular literary form but familiarity does not guarantee that the beginner or even experienced scientists will do a good job. The most important suggestions are at the end of the list: “Use editors to improve clarity and rewrite until the report is clear and interesting.” By editors I presume they mean colleagues, preferably experienced in report-writing.

At the Waite Agricultural Research Institute in the1960s there was a valuable practice to have all papers rigorously reviewed by two people using the kind of scrutiny that the paper would receive from referees at the journal when it was submitted. One reviewer was drawn from the specialists in that field to check the technical aspects of the paper, the other was selected from a neighbouring field to see if it was written clearly enough to be understood by people outside the specialty.

The last three checklists are concerned with sales and marketing. Some of the most conscientious and committed truth-seekers overlook this work because they find it distasteful or beneath the dignity of scholars. It certainly calls for a very different skill set from research itself and neglecting it probably didn’t matter so much a generation ago when there were less scientists and good work would usually be picked up by influential colleagues and given due attention including all-important citations. This is no longer the case unless the researcher is fortunate with their colleagues, otherwise the necessary connections will have to be reached by well-organized efforts to contact and cultivate them.

The book is clearly written. It contains the fruits of many years of dedicated work in research and the evaluation of research findings. This makes it a valuable addition to the shelf of working scientists and anyone else with a serious interest in science as a source of knowledge or a social institution.

FURTHER READING ON KARL POPPER AND ALSO HOW TO MAKE SCIENCE PAY - that is, to advance the field and also generate practical results.

A revival of Karl Popper’s ideas would help. Chris Uhlmann pointed out in The Weekend Australian on 1^st June that Popper changed the game of science to demand rigorous testing instead of accumulating data and building models to support your position.

His ideas did not get far in the academic community because his rivals in Austria fled to the US to escape from Hitler, and they occupied prestigious chairs while he languished in Christchurch writing the 700-page The Open Society and Its Enemies, while sixteen of his relatives went up in smoke back home.

The philosophical diaspora in the US converted the philosophy of science into a wasteland of sterile probability theory instead of an introduction to the kind of imaginative and critical thinking that drives science at its best. Think of them as “Hitler’s revenge”. Leading scientists, including the Nobel Laureates Einstein, Medawar, Eccles and Monod, saluted Popper’s ideas, but the academic philosophers did not.

His book on political philosophy did not fare any better because he antagonised conservatives with criticism of Plato, and he was put on the banned list by the left because he did a number on Marx.

The wasteland in the philosophy of science was invaded by weeds, starting with Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theory and then more exotic species when POMO became fashionable. With Popper dismissed, “consensus science” became accepted as “normal” under the influence of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 blockbuster The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

A historical note: In 1945, Professor Anderson invited Popper to move from Christchurch to Sydney, but with help from Hayek, he went to London instead. Later, Anderson turned against Popper, as did his student David Stove, who practically made a career out of sledging Popper. The otherwise admirable Clive James turned on Popper with a waspish and small-minded dismissal of The Open Society and Its Enemies, “boring and repetitive.”

Moving on from Popper on testing and falsification to the institutional and social aspects of science. Many critics of Popper’s views on testing claim that he didn’t know enough about the history of science and naively ignored the way that falsification is resisted by people who are determined to protect their paradigm.

In fact, Popper was onto this from the beginning, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, published in German in 1935. Observing the rearguard action by Newtonians resisting Einstein’s innovation, he itemised four “conventionalist stratagems” to “immunise” their position against criticism.

These are (1) ad hoc or “off the cuff” explanations of apparently adverse observations, (2) changing the definition of terms in the system, (3) questioning the results, and (4) casting doubt on the acumen of the critic.

In due course, climate alarmists adopted these tactics. Did they read Popper and get the wrong message? First, they shifted from warming to climate change during “The Pause” after a spike caused by a big El Nino in 1998. When all the dire events that were predicted did not materialize (no more snow, no more polar bears, no more beaches) the caravan moved on to “extreme weather” which also turns out to be no worse than any other time since records have been collected. As for casting doubt on the acumen of critics, nowadays they are simply cancelled by the people who control grants, appointments and publishing.

At a conference in 1965 Thomas Kuhn famously confronted Popper with a challenge to join him in addressing the sociological/psychological aspects of scientific progress. Popper briskly rejected the challenge and missed the opportunity to remind the audience of his own institutional approach to science which he sketched in 1945 in a paper that was reprinted in The Poverty of Historicism (1957.)

Talking about the drivers of scientific and industrial progress, he rejected psychological factors and instead he turned to institutions. In a counter-intuitive move, he considered what could arrest progress. He suggested closing down or subjecting to political control the facilities for research, laboratories, conferences and publication. Ultimately, there would be restrictions on free speech. He did not pursue that program himself and it was left to others, notably the political economist Gordon Tullock.

In the 1950s Popper was horrified by the growing role of government in science, inspired by the example of the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb. He feared for the future of Great Science as a result of Big Science in the service of politicians. He saw the danger of too much money chasing too few ideas, the publication explosion (good buried under bad) and the distortion of incentives by the pressure to obtain grants for fashionable and politically “hot” topics.

All of that came about, especially in climate science, when the Clinton/Gore administration presided over a 16-fold increase of funding. The tsunami of funds washed all the way to the shores of the social sciences and the humanities to fund work that has nothing to do with science, carried out by people who knew nothing about science and cared less.

Gordon Tullock (1922-2014) met Popper at a conference in the early 1950s. He was captivated by Popper’s institutional approach which was his own forte as a political economist and put aside the work that became The Politics of Bureaucracy to write The Organization of Enquiry (1966.)

He described what might happen through a particular combination of personal and situational circumstances, starting with the difference between scientists motivated by serious curiosity and others with “induced curiosity.”

Devoted researchers are motivated by intense, often obsessive curiosity to seek the truth, unlike scientists who work nine to five as skilled technicians. Their curiosity is not intrinsic; it is “induced” by the terms of employment, to publish papers and maintain a flow of government grants (publish or perish!)

He sketched a self-perpetuating process which could drive a field of research to produce “superficially impressive but actually easy research projects” which do not advance understanding, like the model-building projects in climate science and other fields.

The peer review process is designed to avert such a decline, but Tullock described how it could be corrupted by reviewers who are associated with the authors either personally or by membership of a school of thought. He speculated that this would almost certainly happen in a field dominated by “induced” researchers with political agendas.

At the end of the slippery slope there is a widespread acceptance of the need to support the right side on the issues of the day, because the principal criterion in judging material for publication will be the position that the work supports.

Tullock wrote, “The concern with reality that unites the sciences may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia”.

Prescient words, published in 1966 when he thought that natural sciences were in good shape, unlike parts of economics, which informed his pessimistic scenario.

Are we there yet?

And what is to be done? Tullock’s book attracted no attention and had no discernible impact on the world of science.

Reviving Popper’s ideas in university courses and in high schools could have a seismic impact, but the immediate prospect is dismal. Fortunately, there is a weapon at hand to pursue the same result, starting at the bottom with working scientists rather than at the top in the philosophy of science. It is a book by Armstrong and Green, The Scientific Method: A Guide to Finding Useful Knowledge.

They begin with a survey of the problems that afflict science at present and they end with practical suggestions for improvement that can be taken up by the range of stakeholders in the scientific enterprise. There are chapters on assessing the quality of scientific practice, the problem of advocacy, concerns with the effectiveness of peer review and the complications that arise with government funding. The positive suggestions are offered to university managers, journal editors, governments, courts, the media, and interested individuals.

It is informed by two long careers in research, it is well written and it speaks to our condition.

It was reviewed in Quadrant online.

An amazing revelation about this piece of research appeared some years later when the senior author wrote a review of the reissue of David Stove's critique of Popper and others. He reported that Popper was the only philosopher of science who was held in any regard by the members of the Institute. He told this story as a joke on the scientists. It would appear to the untutored outsider that this evidence would have refuted the unstated thesis that Popper does not count in the real world of science. Apparently that particular evidence was regarded as superfluous or defective when it came to writing up the research. Of course scientists discard data when they think that the experimental apparatus was malfunctioning. In this case it appears that was the scientists who favourably mentioned Popper were considered to be malfunctioning!

Life Among the Scientists is an ambitious book, representing the findings of four researchers at work over five years. The immediate focus is upon the activities of scientists at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne in order to explore the way that these activities are shaped by social, political, financial and intellectual influences.

Part One, 'The life-world of the Institute', sketches the recent history of ideas in immunology, the field where the Institute gained world renown when its Director, Macfarlane Burnet, shared a Nobel Prize with Sir Peter Medawar. The legendary status of Burnet in the Institute is subjected to critical appraisal, also his conception of the subject and his 'individualistic' view of research. The authors describe the emergence of a 'new biology', heavily influenced by physics (which Burnet did not find particularly appealing) and a new ethos of Big Science where success depends on large teams and massive funding.

Part Two, 'The subjective side of science' includes a chapter on 'The myth of objectivity' which lays the foundation for the major purpose of the whole work - to challenge received views on the philosophy and methodology of science.

Part Three, 'The mode of scientific production' closely examines the way that scientists approach their daily tasks, with the central image being the laboratory as a factory to produce data.

Part Four is written in the same descriptive vein with a broader geographical scope, detailing some of the intellectual and political elements of the worldwide quest to find a vaccine for malaria. These chapters contain some fine writing on the development of ideas and the state of play in several linked fields of research in microbiology and parasitology.

The book operates at several levels, from high journalism and science criticism to the ecology of excellence and the philosophy and methodology of science. As a piece of high quality reporting, it is impressive in its scope and depth, although a hostile insider described it as 'mere' journalism. Leon Wolpert's distinctly humourless review in Nature [Nov 19, 1989] found other faults including a failure to take adequate account of humour among the scientists. The charge of 'mere' journalism is unfair because the writers achieve a standard of science writing that will provide a challenge to all comers.

The book contains a helpful and revealing account of the great scientific task of generating data. The story they tell is familiar to any postgraduate science student but everyone who is interested in science needs to know how much of the scientists' day is absorbed in the quest for corks, pieces of string, portable devices lent to other teams in the Institute or just waiting for special equipment to be built or repaired. The relationship between scientists and technical support staff is sensitively explored, with due regard to the major contribution of high quality assistants and to the hierarchy of technical personnel. They explain the complex and delicate protocol for assigning degrees of credit to multiple authors of journal articles (the person who did most of the work first and the senior or supervising scientist last).

Some false notes are struck in their commentary on the experimental effort and these signal some problems in their conceptual framework. They find that the bench researchers do not spend a lot of time on theory or reading the literature. They also record that research often changes direction due to data that clash with expectations. They appear to accept that this places theory in a secondary role, with facts driving theory but it really indicates the importance of expectations, (theoretical expectations) even if these are somewhat vague and unformalised. They note a comment by the Assistant Director that experiments which at first appeared to be failures because they refuted expectations, in fact 'opened up all sorts of possibilities waiting to be grasped' (151). These are theoretical possibilities and this is why Popperian falsification is a fertile method that opens up new vistas and not a negative, cramped approach as is often claimed.

The authors are keen to challenge the commonsense views of realism and objectivity which are generally held by scientists, 'as though science merely held a mirror up to nature and as though they were simply reading off directly what was out there' (213). As an alternative to the 'mirror' they offer the 'lamp' view that reality is a projection of our socially conditioned presuppositions. Happily there is a third view sometimes labeled 'critical realism' which postulates the existence of an external world whose characteristics do not depend on us or our perception of it. At the same time a process of decoding is required to interpret the world on the basis of signals that we receive from it. This is the perspective offered by the school of evolutionary epistemology, expounded by Popper, Bartley, Campbell and others in a major collection of essays titled Evolutionary Epistemology (eds G. Radnitzky and W.W. Bartley, Open Court, 1987).

This brings us to the least satisfactory aspect of the book. The main purpose of the enterprise is to challenge received views of philosophy and methodology of science, but the writers have not engaged at all with the most robust and fruitful body of ideas in the field. This is a striking example of the phenomenon they describe as 'socially structured forgetting' or 'structural amnesia' (p 101). They have neatly excised Karl Popper and the whole tradition of evolutionary epistemology from their account of the philosophy and methods of science. But Popper's work surely represents either the orthodox view of scientific method (as accepted by a number of eminent scientists who took their philosophy seriously such as Medawar, Ecles, Monod and Einstein), or a formidable rival to the traditional form of Baconian induction, still championed by David Stove.

It is the latter, inductive scheme that draws most of the critical fire in this book. It seems that the authors share Popper's view of science as a human product, however his evolutionary approach contains a theory of conjectural objective knowledge and the book's attack on 'the myth of objectivity' does not attempt to challenge this particular kind of objectivity. As to the authors' concern to retrieve the subjective side of science, they have neglected a rich vein of material and sources mined by Liam Hudson in a series of books from Contrary Imaginations to The Cult of the Fact.

Life Among the Scientists is located in the tradition of the 'social construction of science', a form of thought that thrives in the intellectual wasteland created by the popular reception of T. S. Kuhn's work on the diffusion of scientific innovations. To their credit the authors fall short of the strong form of relativism that is common in this tradition and this may indicate that their interest in science is strong enough to resist the debilitating effect of their theoretical framework. The popularity of the 'social construction' view and its serious limitations raise two questions. What is going on in academic departments of philosophy and the social sciences to account for their structural amnesia regarding Popper (and Hayek)? And is there any way that philosophers or other metascientists can provide assistance to scientists?

The answer to the first question awaits further anthropological studies, though Bartley throws out some clues in his contribution to In Pursuit of Truth (ed P. Levinson, Humanities Press, 1982). As to the second question, philosophers may have nothing to offer at the tactical level of science where the major requirements are better data and new or revised descriptive theories. However there are times when progress is blocked by problems at a higher (or deeper) strategic level and attention needs to be paid to the unstated assumptions and metaphors that guide the formulation of problems and determine the kind of solutions that are sought. For example the immune reaction by the body to foreign matter was supposed to involve a mechanism of instruction from the invaders to the immune system to produce the appropriate antibodies. Burnet followed a hint from Jerne to demonstrate that the mechanism at work is one of selection among a range of responses generated initially by the immune system. A similar shift of focus, from a mechanism of instruction acting on an essentially passive or reactive organism, to one of selection among trials generated by the organism, has important implications in epistemology and evolutionary theory. Popper has drawn out some of these in his critique of inductive and Lamarckian thinking in his intellectual autobiography, Unended Quest.

Unfortunately the dogmatic rejection of metaphysics in the positivist philosophy of science has blinded scientists to deep structural themes. Consequently the process of critical re-thinking at the strategic level is inhibited in the scientific community. Fortunately a rich tradition of thought exists to assist in this task, though little of it is cited in the 'social construction' literature which appears to favour Continental anthropologists and literary critics. Among the names and concepts available are Lovejoy and Holton on 'unit ideas' and 'themes', also Collingwood and Popper on 'metaphysical presuppositioins' and 'metaphysical research programmes'.

In conclusion, Life Among the Scientists succeeds in some of its objectives despite the problems at its conceptual heart. It is a good read for the most part provided that one is not distracted by the potentially irritating device of the first person narrative. It probably deserves a place in the bookcase (though not on the same shelf) with Medawar's Pluto's Republic, Koestler's The Sleepwalkers and Barzun's Science: The Glorious Entertainment.

These essays convey the impression of immense energy and industry. Clearly many people are hard at work in the archives preparing the way for future research programmes in the history of local science and technology. The book itself is a handsome and high quality production, combining some of the bulk and sheen of the coffee table volume with the compendious footnotes of the doctoral dissertation. The notes average a hundred per paper, making this book an excellent starting point for further reading.

The aim of the collection is to 'open windows on to various aspects of Australia's scientific past' (xvii). It contains three chapters on the early days, five on science in a colonial society and seven on the passage to modernity. The papers in the first section treat the cosmology of the Aborigines, the French scientific expedition to Tasmania in 1802 and the difficult circumstances for the life of the mind in the early years of the colony. The 'colonial science' papers cover the 'long arm of London', the factors contributing to the growth of science up to 1900, the activities of the botanist Baron von Mueller of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, a colonial echo of the great debate over the gorillas in our family tree, and the early employment of chemists for industrial research in the Colonial Sugar Refining company. The third section has chapters on radiotherapy for cancer, the mobilisation of science during World War Two, medical science, plant introduction, early radio astronomy, recent progress in general astronomy and the modern history of the advisory bodies which contribute to science policy.

Inevitably the collection is selective and readers may be pained to find that their favorite subject is missing. Those who yearn to read about our achievements in soil science and agriculture can find solace in the excellent two volume Plants and Man in Australia edited by D J and S G M Carr (Academic Press, 1981) and in C M Donald's superb 'Innovation in Australian Agriculture' in Agriculture in the Australian Economy (Ed. D B Williams, Sydney University Press, revised 1982).

Two matters cause concern, one of which is external to the book, the other internal. First, will the book find an adequate readership? This question concerns the state of affairs in 'the house of intellect' as Barzun called it, in a book of the same name. He noted that millions are now literate, hundreds of thousands have higher education but it becomes harder to find a few tens of thousands to attend to intellectual matters. This problem is reflected in the meagre circulation of Search (under 4,000) which should be the leading Australian forum for discussion of the issues raised in this book.

The internal problem is one of theoretical development, namely the shortage of powerful theories to focus attention on significant details, to reveal unexpected connections and to open up new problems. Similarly there are too few common themes to link disparate studies and provide threads of continuity amidst the wealth of information and interesting stories. One theme which does surface regularly is the dearth of privately funded research in this country. Another is the failure of secondary industry to take advantage of local scientific expertise and mount effective research and development programmes.

Though Australian science has attained a high level of achievement, Australian industry has failed to keep pace...[firms] limit their horizons to import-replacement manufacturing rather than looking to export markets" (xvii).

This may be contrasted with the relatively vigorous science-based industrial activity of the 1880s referred to on page xiii. One is inclined to wonder what went wrong between the 1880s and the present day? As noted below, the answer is most likely the New Protection which came in shortly after Federation.

In view of the current agitation over education and science policy two areas of investigation call for urgent attention. One might be called "the ecology of intellectual achievement". This concerns the personal, institutional and cultural factors which influence creativity and the growth of knowledge. The other is a similarly ecological investigation of the influences which promote commercial application of research findings (the 'D' part of R&D).

It appears that pure and applied work can flourish in partnership if a number of conditions are met. First, talented people are required who are interested in both practical and theoretical problems. Second, they should have high standards and high expectations of achievement. These attitudes tend to be assimilated by contact with gifted and inspiring teachers or colleagues early in life. They are killed by the inductivist, 'just collect the facts' method and the conformist, follow the Professor" ethos of Kuhn's 'normal science'. In each case the antidote is the Popperian spirit of conjecture and refutation. Thirdly, institutional and personal linkages are required to carry ideas backwards and forwards between the study/laboratory and the factory/farm.

Finally, to promote commercial application of ideas, industry needs to operate in a competitive environment, with the world as a potential market, instead of sheltering behind protective walls. Unfortunately most of the people who write about science policy start with the premise that more government involvement is required, more committees, more central direction to 'pick winners' for favoured (protected) treatment. It seem that the sad lesson of the New Protection (tariffs plus central wage fixing) has not been learned.

The chapters on medicine and astronomy in this collection show that Australians have provided plenty of raw material for studies on the ecology of achievement. These two fields, with agriculture and mining, show that the sporting arena is not the only place where Australians can defy the cultural cringe and perform at world standard. The story of medical research shows a kind of boom and bust cycle with a surge of activity during the 1890s followed by relative stagnation until the advent of privately funded institutes, notably the Kanematsu Institute at Sydney Hospital and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. Progress in the 1890s shows the effect of tackling problems with an eye to their practical and fundamental aspects (among them snake bite and temperature regulation by the native marsupials), the importance of early influences and the synergistic effect of collaboration between good friends. For a time these outweighed the negative influence of isolation from the main centres of medical research.

The radio astronomy story shows the value of teamwork (again), overseas links, adequate resourcing and the sense of urgency engendered by the war effort. The good work continued post war, guided by the joint talents of Bowen (Chief of the CSIR/CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory) and Pawsey, his right-hand man. These two exemplified a generalisation made by Rogers and Shoemaker in their Communication of Innovations (Free Press, 1971) to the effect that intellectual innovators often need a powerful and streetwise mentor to look after their funding and other organisational matters while their ideas come to fruition.

All the essays in the volume deserve some favourable comments. The most significant criticism, overall, is not to be laid at the door of any individual because it concerns the rudimentary state of theory in the field. Small nuggets of minutiae are to be found - the French scientists preferring to arm wrestle with the native men rather than grappling with the women, the prominent dummy knobs build into experimental apparatus to thwart Pawsey's compulsive knob-twiddling, Joan Sutherland's first job as a typist in the Radiophysics Laboratory. In short a book to savour and one to draw to the attention of your local high school and public librarians.

Sir John Carew Eccles 1903-

Sir John Eccles stands tall in the front rank of Australian scientists with other Australian Nobel Laureates. Eccles was indeed a giant among the leading international figures in brain research in a brilliant career of intellectually and physically demanding experimental work spanning the decades from 1929 to 1972.

John Carew Eccles was born in Melbourne on 27 January 1903, son of a school teacher. After a distinguished undergraduate career with first class honours in Medicine he won the Rhodes Scholarship for Victoria in 1925 and moved on to conquer fresh academic fields at Oxford. There he had the immense good fortune to study under Sir Charles Sherrington "the one man in the world whom I wished to have as my master".

Eccles thrived in the academic environment of Oxford and especially enjoyed the companionship available to him in Magdalen College. He met famous senior colleagues and became close friends with younger men who became significant figures in fields ranging from English and chemistry to philosophy and theology. He also started his professional association with many outstanding scholars in his own field "a wonderful and intimate association, not restricted to neuroscience, for during our experiments the conversation ranged widely over literature, history and art".

Much of his research was concerned with the processes of communication across the space between nerve cells (synapses), and between cells in the nervous system and tissues outside the nervous system such as muscles. His early work on reflexes in the spinal cord led eventually to the development of techniques to record the electrical activity in single nerve cells and then to the seminal discovery of the mechanisms of synaptic excitation and inhibition in the spinal cord. Because these processes of excitation and inhibition undelie all the functions of the brain his findings led to a remarkable enhancement of brain research throughout the world which continues to the present day.

His early career blossomed in the heady atmosphere of the British Physiological Society during one of its great periods. However, with the rise of Hitler, he took the opportunity to return to the apparent security of Australia as the Director of the Kanematsu Institute for Pathology at Sydney Hospital. From a basic or fundamental researcher's point of view, there were some drawbacks in this situation. The University medical school was very much a teaching institution and the university campus was located some kilometers away. During the war the Kanematsu became the major blood bank for the war effort and Eccles became involved in various applied research projects such as noise protection and communication in the high noise levels of tanks and aeroplanes. But despite these pressures and distractions he managed to continue publishing on his major concerns, aided by gifted co-workers who arrived from overseas.

Eccles headed the Kanematsu Institute from 1937 to 1944, then in search of a more hospitable environment for basic research he moved to the University of Otago. He once described himself as a traveller, like Odysseus, forced to wander from one research institute to the next, carrying his own highly specialised equipment "like a snail with his house on his back".

The move to Otago was not at first favourable for research because Eccles carried a huge teaching load. However with characteristic energy he returned to his research aided by a newly constructed set of experimental instruments, (the best of their kind in the world, which subsequently moved on to Canberra). His later interests extended to the mechanisms of information processing in the cerebral cortex, the cerebellum and the hippocampus, and he became increasingly concerned with philosophical matters related to the interaction between the brain and mental processes.

In New Zealand Eccles started one of his most important intellectual friendships, with Karl Popper, a Viennese refugee teaching philosophy at Christchurch. Deeply impressed by Popper's then unfashionable views on scientific method, Eccles proceeded to falsify his own cherished theory on synaptic transmission, accepting the result as a pointer to new directions for research.

His mother and her sisters had been fine musicians, though he was not noticably talented in this area himself. During his Otago days he took up music as an active interest, partly inspired by cultured European refugees. He also hosted social gatherings at his home on Friday evenings, including folk dancing. With his wife he enjoyed the repertory theatre, first in Oxford, then at the Independent Theatre in North Sydney and later in New Zealand. They also enjoyed opera and ballet when they were available.

In 1951 Eccles was enticed from the combination of teaching and research at Otago to the newly created John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University. In those early days the University appeared to consist of "a large grassy wooded tract of land on which there were two army huts for administrators". However, a combination of financial backing, inspired administration and a fully international orientation saw the School of Medical Research flourish, and with it the Department of Physiology headed by Eccles from 1951 to 1966.

Like Medawar, Eccles had a gift for surrounding himself with talented and congenial co-workers, a situation he created repeatedly in his moves around the globe, marred only by two unhappy years in Chicago. One Canberra co-worker reported that he could not leave the team because every time the prospect arose, Eccles offered him a better job.

Eccles was always aware of the need for institutional supports for the life of the mind. He was delighted with Menzies' choice of the residential college and faculty club, called University House, as the first permanent building to be erected on the new site. The club provided a meeting place for scholars from all disciplines and Eccles contrasted this generous provision with the miserable facilities for the faculty members at many Americn universities. He was one of the founding members of the Australian Academy of Science which was granted its charter by Queen Elizabeth in 1954. He was deeply involved in the construction of the Aademy's headquarters and served as the second President, following Mark Oliphant.

His time in Canberra ended in 1966 as he approached the compulsory retiring age of 65. He moved on to North America and continued active research at Chicago (1966-1968) and the State University of New York at Buffalo (1968-1972).

The move from Australia coincided with a major change in his private life. He had married Irene Frances Miller in 1928 (the year before he took his Doctorate) and she bore him four sons and five daughters. When he left Australia his wife stayed here, in 1968 the marriage was dissolved and he married again. He spent his retirement with his second wife in Switzerland, surrounded by his books and journals. There he pursued the mind-body problem, following the example of his first master, Sherrington, with added inspiration from his philosopher friend Popper.

Throughout his long academic career he was the recipient of many prizes, awards, lectureships and honorary degrees. Chief among them were a Fellowship of the Royal Society, Knight Bachelor (1958), the Nobel Prize for Medicine which he shared with A L Hodgkin and A F Huxley in 1963, Membership of the Pontifical Academy of Science and Companionship of the Order of Australia (1990).

He is survived by both his first and second wife, the children of his first marriage, almost 30 grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren.

Lindsay Gardiner E. V. Keogh - Soldier, Scientist and Administrator. Hyland House, Melbourne, 1990. 192 pp. hb. $25.

This book reflects great credit on the author, the publisher, and the subject himself. Lindsay Gardiner has done a fine job and the publisher has taken a chance with the life story of a somewhat obscure figure who died twenty years ago. Many people, like the author and myself, will probably have to admit that the name of E. V. Keogh (1895-1970) hitherto meant nothing to them. He does not appear in the chapter on medical research in Australian Science in the Making (CUP, 1988). Nor is he recorded in Mellor's The Role of Science and Industry (in the 1939-45 war), though his co-workers during that period are liberally cited.

Keogh is the epitome of the quite achiever, like a footballer, never voted best on the ground, whose contribution would earn him the most valuable player award in the eyes of anyone who looked carefully at the video replay. And what a list of achievements this 'replay' of his life turns up! He helped to develop the malaria treatment used by the Australian forces in the Pacific during the second world war. His work in the Commonwealth Serum Laboratory delivered penicillin for civilians while elsewhere the 'wonder drug' was limited to military use. He took charge of the Victorian anti-TB program during the early 1950s. He supervised the development and testing of the Salk vaccine in Australia. He injected new life into the Victorian Anti-Cancer Council and made it a potent force in research, treatment and public education.

All of this came after an early life of poverty and pain. His father's uncontrollable drinking broke up an apparently happy and loving family circle when Keogh was five years old. In the army he found comradeship in the ambulance services but at Gallipoli something snapped inside him. The warm-hearted young medical orderly became an angel of death as a machinegunner on the Western front. Then came three lost years on a failing dairy farm where he talked the demons out of his system in the company of a kindly but uncomprehending farmboy. Then to medical school, a disciplined and dedicated scholar on the way to success.

This is a worthy companion to Facey's A Fortunate Life, also Keogh's story is psychologically more interesting and his contribution to public life is much more significant. Much of the psychological interest and many of the biographer's problems can be traced to Keogh's remarkable habit of moving behind the scenes. Perhaps he had an obsession with invisibility, certainly as far as posterity is concerned, because he left hardly any personal records. One of his files labeled 'personal' contained detailed records of racing form and his bets over a long period.

At the personal level 'Bill' Keogh emerges as a man of immense warmth and charm, with a range of interests from betting on the horses to art and literature. The more intimate and troubled aspects of his private life are treated with impeccable sympathy and discretion. We are fortunate to have the benefits of Keogh's life and Lindsay Gardiner's work.

Sally Batton Boillotat, with contributions from John Kohnke, Joy Poole and Max Walters. Photographed by Peter Solness Polocrosse: Australian Made, Internationally Played, Belcris Books, Sydney, 328 pp, hb.

Alex Buzo and Jamie Grant, (Eds.) The Longest Game: A Collection of the Best Cricket Writing, William Heineman Australia, 440pp, $37.95hb.

Roy Masters Inside Rugby League, Pan, 296pp, $12.99pb.

These three books are remarkably good, and they each have something to offer people who would not normally want to be seen near the Sports shelves. Polocrosse, superbly designed and printed with vibrant colour photos and helpful diagrams, provides an account of the history, nature and leading personalities in this rapidly growing game. The rules combine features of polo and lacross, indeed it is called "poor man's polo" because players only need one horse, not a stable of expensive livestock. Part of the book is devoted to pictures and profiles of leading figures and families in the game, "pioneers, leaders and characters". Clearly the game has the capacity to create addicts and the family aspect is significant because children can participate in junior events. Carnival weekends resemble a gathering of the clans as whole families converge for the occasion.

Edward and Marjorie Hirst developed the game in 1939 based on an indoor exercise they observed in England where mounted players used modified polo sticks to play a kind of equestrian basketball. They demonstrated their game at Ingleburn, south of Sydney and the first club formed immediately. Women made up the majority of players during the war years; men and women have equal standing in the game because physical strength is not a decisive factor. Success is based on effective tactics, quick thinking, skill, agility and co-ordination between horse and rider. The man from Snowy River, and especially his horse, would be stars in this game which is dominated by Australian stockhorses, descended from English and Spanish thoroughbreds infused with Arabian and Welsh Mountain Pony blood. After the war the game rapidly spread to other states and beyond, so it is now played in several overseas countries including Canada and the United States, with moves afoot for launches in England, France and Italy.

The Longest Game contains over 60 short pieces which according to the dustjacket represent "the most entertaining and original collection of cricket writing ever to appear in this country". These are fighting words and any red-blooded reviewer will welcome the chance to hit the offending volume out of the ground. Such a feat is not possible due to the presence of so many talented performers such as Arthur Mailey who usually provided entertainment whether it was a ball or a pen in his hand. Other players of note in the collection include Jack Fingleton, Bob Simpson, Ian Chappell and Ritchie Benaud. The literati are represented by Clive James, Louis Nowra, Peter Kocan and others, notably the editors who contributed no less than ten pieces between them. Some omissions are regrettable, such as D'Arcy Niland's "A Giant with a Flower", specially written for Jack Pollard's collection Six and Out which probably remains the best Australian collection of cricket writing to date.

Both collections contain Ray Robinson's classic account of Stan McCabe's three greatest innings, any one of which would have placed him in the ranks of the immortals. This piece will explain the meaning of Manning Clark's comment that Australian culture requires someone to deliver "a McCabe knock", that is, a superlatively inspiring performance against all the odds. One of the many pearls in this volume is dropped by Buzo in a limpid and evocative essay on Bradman when he refers to "the persistent Javert-like Hutton", the Yorkshire and England captain who finally managed to win The Ashes back from Australia.

Some contributors have a tendency to depict the recent trajectory of the game as a disastrous downward slide from the Chappell era of the ugly Australians through the accelerated commercialisation of the game in the Packer revolution. But this is probably a cyclic process, and we must hope that the best features of the game will survive. It may help to remember that W. G. Grace was very good at unsettling opposing batsmen by exchanging pointed remarks with his brothers, also that the game developed as a vehicle for massive bets by the English nobility and most of the early international tours were commercial ventures by the players themselves.

Inside Rugby League does what many critics would regard as impossible. Roy Masters has managed to depict some of the leading figures in the game as intelligent and generally attractive three dimensional personalities. The book is based on extended interviews but it is not an "instant book" created by transcription from tape. The material is thoroughly digested and informed by a broad perspective and a deep knowledge of the game.

Masters (one of Olga's talented brood) started out as a school teacher, turned to coaching and is generally regarded as one of the more cerebral commentators. He vies with Terry Fearnley for the title of the most effective but least rewarded coach of recent times. Both men lifted teams to the limit of their abilities but lacking the elements of good fortune and well placed friends when they were most needed.

Most of his subjects are players or player/coaches and he cast his net wider to examine the administrators (including the new breed of agent/managers for players), the fans, the media and "The Female of the Species", a particularly memorable football wife. On administration, he records that club committees consist of seven men, one of whom does all the work, while five talk about him and the seventh leaks stories to the press.

Masters notes that rugby league does not have much attraction for artists and intellectuals, with striking exceptions such as Tom Keneally who would contemplate the sacrifice of all his literary works to play a test match for Australia. This is an area of genuine difference between Sydney and the Australian Rules territory to the south where academics and professional people generally follow the game with unabashed enthusiasm. The roll call of fans includes Geoffrey Blainey, Manning Clark, Ross Fitzgerald, the late Ian Turner, B. A. Santamaria, and the economist Greg Harcourt who delayed his return to his spiritual home in Cambridge until he was incapable of pulling on his boots for the University of Adelaide fifth team.

Review of Malachi Hacohen Karl Popper, The Formative Years, 1902-1945. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Karl Popper almost came to the University of Sydney in 1945. John Anderson invited him to join the staff in Philosophy but Popper delayed his decision, waiting for an offer from the London School of Economics. When that offer came Professor Anderson was spared the confrontation with a colleague as assertive and argumentative as himself.

Popper died in 1994 at the age of 92 and this is the first comprehensive book to appear on his life and work, although the detailed account stopped halfway through Popper's life. Hacohen is a historian based at Duke University and he has charted the evolution of Popper's thinking with close attention to his intellectual influences and the explosive social and political tensions in Vienna which informed his thoughts on politics and ultimately prompted his flight to New Zealand.

Over twenty years in the making, this is likely to be the standard reference for some time because the author had access to some recently opened archives and he also interviewed some longstanding colleagues of Popper such as Colin Simkin (from New Zealand) and John Watkins (of the London School of Economics) who are no longer with us.

The book has at least four different aspects, each of considerable interest. One is the reconstruction of Popper's intellectual career as he groped towards his seminal work in the philosophy of science and politics. The second is to give some impression of Popper the person, the being of flesh and blood who is practically invisible in his intellectual autobiography Unended Quest. The third is the recreation of the social and political milieu of Vienna, the life of high culture and intellectual achievement that thrived but finally expired under the volcano of fascism and anti-Semitism. The fourth is Hacohen's mission to reclaim Popper for the social democrats, to snatch him back from the clutches of the Cold War liberals and the New Right.

So far as Popper the person is concerned, Hacohen had great difficulty in getting anywhere near the emotional roots of Popper's life. He was so much a man of ideas that everything else appeared to be secondary (after early thoughts of a career in music), including his own comfort and the convenience of anyone who had dealings with him. There is a hint of the man of flesh in his advice to a PhD student asking about selecting a thesis topic. “Would you ask me who to marry? A good thesis topic, like a good wife, should keep a man awake at night.”

Hacohen reports that Popper worked for 360 days of the year, all day, without the distraction of newspapers, radio or TV. Several times a month, even in old age, he worked all night and some friend such as Bryan Magee would get an early morning call from Popper, bubbling with excitement to report on his latest ideas.

Popper lived well out of London near High Wycombe and when Magee gained Popper's confidence he was invited to visit, taking the train to "Havercombe" (in Popper's heavily accented English). When I made the trip to Havercombe, Popper arranged to meet me at the station, carrying a copy of the BBC Listener, presumably to pick him out from all the other elderly gentlemen of middle-European extraction who might be thronging the platform at 2.30 on a Wednesday afternoon. In the event, he left the magazine at home and the kiosk had sold out so he had to buy The Times and fold it to the size of The Listener.

Of course he was the only person in sight apart from the Station Master. Popper, then aged 70, had what his research assistant tactfully described as a "very positive" attitude to driving. Fortunately it was not far to his home and there were few other cars on the road. Safely home, our conversation laboured, and he frequently pushed a tray of choc-chip cookies towards me. Later he lamented to his assistant that I had eaten a whole weeks supply of his favorite cookies in one afternoon. These aspects of Popper are the other face of the man who some described as "the totalitarian liberal".

Magee endorsed the view that Popper's personal behaviour often belied his liberal principles. In fairness, he added that Popper had to endure persistent and gross distortions of his ideas by philosophical and political opponents. Hacohen has resoundingly corrected the rather odd view propounded by David Stove regarding the motivation for Popper's challenge to orthodoxy in the philosophy of science. Stove suggested that this was done in the frivolous spirit of the Jazz Age, so if other people wanted scientific theories to be verified, highly probable and justified, Popper would have them falsified, improbable and conjectural.

In fact it is difficult to imagine anyone more divorced from the spirit of the Jazz Age than the priggish, puritanical, non-smoking, non-drinking young Popper. Apparently his idea of a good time outside working hours was a session as a voluntary helper in Alfred Adler's social work clinic in the slums of Vienna. Following Tolstoy's ideas on the dignity of manual labour Popper tried various jobs and he completed an apprenticeship to become a qualified cabinet maker. Apart from a teenage flirtation with the communist movement Popper's nearest approach to radicalism was Arnold Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances which he attended out of a sense of duty to explore contemporary music. However, when he started serious writing for publication there was no time for that kind of distraction and often on weekends Popper would sit with his wife in a coffee shop writing drafts which she typed up on a portable typewriter.

Popper's lack of progress in the community of professional philosophers needs to be understood against the background of the ideas that dominated Anglo-Saxon philosophy under the influence of Wittgenstein in his two phases. It needs to be remembered that the philosophy of science was not institutionalised in the 1920s and there was only a handful of academics in that field in the world. The issues that are now addressed by some hundreds and maybe thousands of fulltime staff and students around the globe, were in those days the preserve of small groups of interested people, including working scientists, many of them outside the universities, like Charles Sanders Peirce and Bertrand Russell.

Such was the Vienna Circle of logical positivists who gathered around Professor Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), Rudolph Carnap (1891-1970) and Otto Neurath (1883-1945). Their spiritual predecessor was Ernst Mach (1838-1916) a philosopher-physicist in the strong empiricist tradition of David Hume whose mission was to purge science of metaphysics and place it on the firm "positive" foundations of sensation. Few philosophers have had such a deep and wide-ranging influence. In Hacohen's words "He virtually became the official philosopher of Viennese progressivism" (and far beyond) through his influence in psychology, physics (the young Einstein), literature (Robert Musil), painting (the Impressionists), social philosophy (Joseph Popper-Lynkus).

They pursued Mach's positivism, with Russell's Principia their inspiration and Wittgenstein's Tractatus providing the program. This was essentially a war on metaphysics by application of the strict "verificationist" definition of meaning. They proposed that statements should be regarded as literally meaningless if they could not be confirmed or verified by evidence. The propositions of logic and mathematics were exempt from the requirement for verification on the understanding that they are true by definition and they do not pretend to convey information about the world.

The most obvious casualties of the verification principle were religion and moral principles, though there were others that were less obvious, including the principle itself and, most regrettably, the laws of science. When these laws are stated in their strong (universal) form they cannot be verified by any number of observations. This dilemma, with the unsolved problem of induction, represented twin "skeletons in the cupboard" of positivism, but still the circle gained worldwide influence, and they institutionalised the philosophy of science with a series of conferences in the 1930s with the sponsorship of luminaries such as Bertrand Russell. Then the predominantly Jewish and left wing members of the circle had to scatter for their lives, like Popper himself, and they were dispersed far and wide by 1939.

Manning Clarke recorded in his autobiography The Quest for Grace something of the flavour of encountering the crusading spirit of the positivists, round about 1940.

“The first time I sat down in the 'caf' at Melbourne University I asked politely 'Would you please pass the salt?' My neighbour, a gifted woman, looked at me with the eye of the saved for the damned and said. 'I don't know what you mean.' I decided to listen to what was going on. In the ensuing weeks I picked up a new vocabulary. I often heard the word 'tautology': that, I gathered, was a sin against the Holy Ghost. I heard the phrase 'non sequitur'. I was often asked: 'Is that a verifiable proposition?'“

As the circle pursued their program in the 1930s two other forces loomed up on the horizon. One was an intellectual challenge from a young schoolteacher, the other was the lengthening shadow of the swastika.

Popper's career did not pursue any steady course through the 1920s. His father was ruined by the postwar inflation and Karl left home to live in a commune in an old army barracks. Decked in army surplus attire he attended courses in science and mathematics as an unmatriculated student at the university, eking out a living by coaching overseas students. (Arthur Koestler was studying engineering at the university at the time, until he departed to support Zionism in Palestine). There was no prospect of a career and he engaged in socialist causes and social work.

His early experience as a voluntary teacher with a group called the "Young Proletarians" was not inspiring. The working-class children were resistant and greeted the young teacher with loutish behaviour. Things improved after Popper challenged the leader of the roughnecks to a boxing match. Eventually he found a place to train as a proper school teacher, in a newly formed Pedagogic Institute that was established to support Glockel's school reform movement. There he learned philosophy and psychology from Karl Buhler (1879-1964), took on board Kant's view on the projection of intellectual categories upon the world, moved his focus from the psychology of learning to the logic of theory formation and testing, and courted and married a fellow trainee-teacher. Josefine Henninger "Hennie" (1906-85) was a physical education teacher who became Popper's greatest helper.

Popper addressed a different problem from that of meaning and metaphysics because he was concerned with the difference between science, where evidence matters, and pseudo-sciences such as astrology where theories appear to be based on observations but are actually "unsinkable". His exemplar of science was Einstein's theory which might have been refuted by a particular set of observations on the eclipse of the sun.

Inspired by this example Popper advanced his criterion of falsifiability (testability) along with a set of conventions or "rules of the game" of science to ensure that the truth of theories can be tested by evidence. On his account science is not an edifice based on observational foundations, it is more like a hot air balloon that is tethered to the "earth" of facts and observations by thin deductive threads.

These ideas on demarcation and induction formed slowly as Popper conducted endless discussions and debates with members of the Vienna Circle, especially Viktor Kraft and Herbert Feigl. It was Feigl, after a nightlong discussion, who proposed that Popper should write a book.

This aroused mixed feeling among Karl’s associates. His father was afraid that he would become a journalist (a shameful occupation in some Viennese circles at the time) and his wife wanted him to spend more time bushwalking and mountain-climbing.

Hacohen provides a dramatic account of the writing, revision and publication of Logik der Forschung in 1935, one of a series of monographs produced by the Vienna Circle (it appeared in English in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery). All manner of problems intruded, political tensions were on the rise, the inner Circle members were divided on the acceptability of the book, Popper's first effort had to be cut almost in half, the editor procrastinated for months before reading the manuscript, Popper was madly impatient to get into print and rubbed everyone up the wrong way, there were paper shortages, other books to be considered for publication in the series.

Hacohen gives a lot of credit to the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle for putting up with Popper's Steppenwolf-like activity, prowling on the fringe of the circle where Schlick, Carnap, Neurath et al. huddled around their campfire, seeking warmth and consolation from the dying embers of the verification principle They accepted Popper's book because most of them perceived that it had merit even if none of them really agreed with Popper's turn from verification and induction to a theory of conjectural knowledge that may be tested but is never confirmed, or even assigned a numerical probability.

In the background to all this intellectual activity there were ebbing and flowing tides of political revolution. The communists plotted, the anti-communists reacted, the socialists took control of the Vienna city council in democratic elections, the Jewish problem created ongoing tensions. Hacohen has a special interest in the Jewish problem and he may have overdone this part of the narrative but his account of the shifting balance of power between the rival forces is engrossing. Popper had huge admiration for many aspects of the socialists' program but he despaired of their tactics - they talked violent revolution, though their moderate leadership did not believe in it, and this prompted a violent reaction which they were not sufficiently organised and resolute to match, even when they had the numbers.

Against them were arrayed the conservative bourgeoisie and much worse elements of the kind that flocked to Hitler's banner. Eventually Hitler annexed Austria and all bets for civilisation were off. Those who could see the writing on the wall, like Popper and Ludwig Mises (Hayek's teacher), escaped if they could. Mises fled to Switzerland, just before his apartment was raided. Popper's teacher Karl Buhler was less fortunate, he was arrested and interned for some weeks until he had the chance to escape by walking over the border to attempt a new life in the United States. Later on Popper counted sixteen relatives who perished in the holocaust.

With Logik der Forschung launched, Popper's focus shifted to politics and the social sciences. His major concern was the failure of Marxism to provide a bastion against the rise of fascism and he attributed this more than anything to an intellectual error, namely the doctrine of historical inevitability. He labeled this "historicism" and he returned to his notes on "the poverty of historicism" in 1938 when he was settled at Canterbury College, Christchurch. By that time he was writing in English and his closest colleague was Colin Simkin, a young NZ economist, aged 26 when they met.

Popper had a low opinion of the social sciences although he thought that mathematical economics had turned the corner, an opinion based on almost complete ignorance of the field. He relied heavily on the young Simkin for an introduction to the innovations of Keynes and for advice on the capacity for social engineering to control major problems such as monopolies and mass unemployment.

In return for this dubious assistance, he offered Simkin the advice to develop his mathematical skills in order to pursue the path of macroeconomic modeling. This advice turned out to be a something of a disaster for Simkin because it seems that this lifelong project failed to bear fruit. Simkin later came to the University of Sydney to assist Warren Hogan in the battle against the Marxists in the Department of Economics.

Despite all the pressures of the times, the loneliness and isolation of New Zealand, the dreadful news from home, the threat of the Japanese advance, his teaching load and problems with his Professor, The Open Society and Its Enemies was eventually written and dispatched.

This book can be seen as a kind of "Battle of Britain" in the world of ideas, a desperate counterpart to the struggle where young men daily took to the air in the skies over the South of England with the future of civilisation virtually in their hands. On the other side of the world a relatively young Karl Popper patrolled the stratosphere of the world of ideas, confronting those from Heraclitus and Plato to the present day whose ideas he thought were undermining the cause of freedom and the open society. Like the young men in their Hurricanes and Spitfires, he did not fly in vain. The Open Society joined Hayek's The Road to Serfdom to provide twin pillars of resistance to totalitarian thinking post WWII.

The Open Society and its Enemies is a monumental defence of rationality, freedom, tolerance and justicewith a demolition of many pervasive ideas that render our traditions of rationality and tolerance dangerously fragile under the pressure of social and political crises. Chief among these is the utopian impulse to recreate society in the image of someone's dreams. There is some debate as to whether Popper's dramatic view of science as a succession of revolutions is consistent with the relative conservatism of his political philosophy. In fact there is no conflict because both garments are cut from the same cloth of critical rationalism, the spirit of criticism, respect for arguments, for the truth and for the rights of individual people.

In view of Hacohen's plea to the socialists of the world to rally behind the ideas of Popper it is essential to work out whether Popper provides support or resistance to policies of state intervention along socialist or social democrat lines. Popper is generally regarded as a social democrat because he supported state intervention to counter monopolies and unemployment, to protect the economically weak from the economically strong. To assess the legitimacy of Hacohen's claim on Popper it is helpful to examine the impact of Hayek on Popper, and also to consider some of the implications of Popper's ideas that he never followed to their logical conclusion.

Briefly, it appears that when Popper's views are adjusted to take account of his misunderstanding of the nature of monopoly and the real causes of unemployment, his basic principles place him with minimum state liberals or even libertarians. The important assumption here is that the mass unemployment of the 1930s was caused by injudicious state intervention (by minimum wage laws, by central banks and tariff barriers etc), and by excessive trade union power, not by the inherent instability of free markets.

Hacohen describes Popper's correspondence from Hayek which commenced in 1943 while The Open Society was still in manuscript. Hayek's reaction was gratifying but he took fright at Popper's language of social technology and social engineering because he (Hayek) had identified the enemy, even more than the historicist, as the constructivist rationalist (the coercive utopian) who thought he could impose a pattern upon the organisation of a whole economy, like an engineer working from a blueprint.

Popper was concerned with freedom and he was equally concerned with human suffering and deprivation, after his formative years surrounded by the abject poverty in Austria after the Great War. Like the Prince of Wales visiting the out of work Welsh miners during the Great Depression, he knew "Something has to be done!" For this reason he reserved the right of the state to intervene so that the economically powerless could not be exploited by the economically powerful. He was a free trader in goods because he recognised that under monopoly, the consumers may have to pay to cart away the rubbish produced by the monopolist.

What was to be done about mass unemployment, the major cause of widespread suffering (apart from war)? This was never specified, though he would have learned the dangers of state interference with the labour market if he had read the works of W. H. Hutt on collective bargaining and the strike threat or (some time later) The Case Against the Arbitration Commission by P P McGuinness. Popper came near to a breakthrough in economics in the course of appraising Marx on capitalism and the "excessive" labour supply that supposedly leads to exploitation. He wrote in Chapter 20 of The Open Society:

“What is not so clear, and not explained by Marx either, is why the supply of labour should continue to exceed the demand. For if it is so profitable to 'exploit' labour, how is it, then, that the capitalists are not forced, by competition, to try to raise their profits by employing more labour? In other words, why do they not compete against each other in the labour market, thereby raising the wages...It appears that the phenomena of 'exploitation' which Marx observed were due, not, as he believed, to the mechanism of a perfectly competitive market, but to other factors - especially to a mixture of low productivity and imperfectly competitive markets.”

Low productivity and imperfectly competitive markets! These are recognised by free traders as a consequence of inappropriate and counterproductive government intervention. Interference with the labour market has been particularly damaging and it appears that the immediate cause of mass unemployment in Australia during the Great Depression was the fact that award wages were only reduced by 10% at a time when prices had fallen by much more than that figure. One of the best kept secrets of modern history is the comfortable situation of the people who remained employed for the duration at 90% of the previous wage while tens of thousands had no regular income at all. This secret was leaked, not by a historian or a sociologist or even by an economist but by the novelist Jessica Anderson in Tirra Lirra By The River.

As a result of Hayek's influence Popper emphasised that state intervention should take the form of laying down clearly formulated rules, and state officials should not be empowered to issue discretionary orders to achieve particular short-term aims. He became more alert to the dangers of increasing state power, he insisted that social democratic policies should never be envisaged as a "cure-all" and he warned that socialists of good will should be alert to abuses of power that could result from increased state activity, however well meaning the original intention might be. In March 1944 he wrote to Hayek "I think I have learnt more from you than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski".

The result of all this is distressing to Hacohen.

“In the postwar years, Popper no longer demonstrated commitment to reform...He never disavowed piecemeal engineering, but he argued that its purpose was to decrease, not increase, state power. He also showed growing sympathy towards libertarianism, and did little to stop the conservative onslaught of the 1980s.”

Hacohen cited a reference to a 1982 interview where Popper expressed some sympathy with anarchism..."It was, he said, an unrealisable ideal but the closest we can get to it, the better off freedom is".

Hacohen's statement above seems to assume that decreasing the extent of Big Government and the "nanny state" does not count as reform. Such is the gulf that has opened up between socialism and common sense. Hacohen hopes that the left can be reinvigorated by Popper's ideas, properly understood, to regain their sense of mission, to recover from the setbacks of the Thatcher and Reagan years, take the offensive and move forward again. I have a similar hope, that the left can move forward, but in a very different direction, the direction of classical liberalism, the direction pointed by Mises and Hayek, and by Popper in his stance as a minimal state liberal.

Despite this negative conclusion regarding one of Hacohen's aims I do not want to leave the reader with an unfavourable impression of the book. It is a work of quite remarkable scholarship, well organised, clearly and vigorously written. It will provoke debate among friends of Popper's ideas, and perhaps among others who are less friendly. It should lead to a reconsideration of Popper's low standing in contemporary philosophy.

It stands as a monument to Popper's indomitable spirit and to the support of many people, not all of them adequately recognised by Popper himself, who helped him on his way. These include some members of the Vienna Circle, Karl Buhler, Robert Lammer (the diligent first reader of Logik Der Forschung), Ernst Gombrich and Colin Simkin. May they never be forgotten.

I would like to dedicate this article, first published in Quadrant, to the memory of Keith Barley, Reader in Agronomy at the Waite Agricultural Research Institute, Adelaide, who lent me The Open Society and Its Enemies in the spring of 1968.

“my view is that philosophers do better to paint a picture in which we urge trust in the consensus of the scientific community, based on features of that community’s social organization ,” (Winsberg p. 161)

Spoiler. That means referring questions of scientific credibility to a consortium of politically correct grant-seekers, environmental fundamentalists and UN officials dedicated to the transformation of the economies of the western world. That is not really what one might have expected from a scholar in the Queen of the Sciences!

This appears to be the first book of its kind, promising a thorough and rigorous investigation of the philosophical and methodological issues that arise in the problematic and controversial field of climate science. It is long overdue because the scholars in the history and philosophy of science have by and large neglected this particular science. The two outstanding exceptions are Philip Kitcher and more recently Eric Winsberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida.

Philip Kitcher recently retired from Columbia College NY. With Evelyn Fox Keller he wrote The Seasons Alter that portrays a dystopian future in a warming world that probably represents Peak Alarmism. Any advance on a pandemic that kills billions of people?

In a similar vein but less flamboyant mode Eric Winsberg’s Philosophy and Climate Science is a sustained defence of the methods and conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and those who share its mission to promote alarm about the future of the planet. Consequently this book is not a solution to the apathy of the philosophers and scholars in the social studies of science in the face of the shortcomings in the mainstream of climate science but instead it is part of the problem. This book cannot be recommended even at a remainder price unless you are looking for yet another example of the failure of the academic “dogs” to bark a warning.

A striking feature of the book is Winsberg’s quite remarkable display of cherry picking of evidence, selective treatment of contested issues his benign view of the credibility of the IPCC and the institutional organization and funding of climate science. He is a two-fisted partisan in the climate debate and this stance is on display from the opening chapter with carefully selected items of information to paint a picture of dangerous warming. He fatuously disparages “climate deniers” (229) as though the considerable number of eminent climate scientists who are not alarmed about the warming trend cannot be taken seriously.. The book begins with some particularly tendentious and misleading data to convince the uninformed and the unwary that serious anthropogenic warming is happening.

He refers to the number of recent years that are the “warmest on record”, the retreat of Arctic ice, the extreme weather events of recent times including a record drought in Australia, and the acceleration of rising sea levels. Given the uncontroversial view that the earth has warmed over the last two centuries and even more since the little Ice Age it stands to reason that recent years are likely to be warmer than earlier ones. The record shows that there has not been a trend to more extreme weather lately (possibly the reverse). The claim about the record recent drought in Australia is simply fake news. The latest report on sea levels by Dr Judith Curry shows no acceleration (possibly a slowing down).

Apparently there is “well funded” opposition to genuine climate science (215) and he cites The Merchants of Doubt (2010) by Oreskes and Conway with their account of Big Oil and others who back the “climate deniers.” But it seems that Exxon Mobil stopped funding climate dissidents around 2005 when they went green like the other oil companies. Winsberg reports “by all accounts their [Oreskes and Conway’s] claims are true” ( ). Strangely no other accounts are cited. Of course other people and organizations are funding a handful of organisations like the Heartand Institute to challenge the orthodoxy. The Heartland Institute has an annual budget in the order of seven million dollars so it is hardly “well funded” in comparison with the tens of billions poured into mainstream climate research and development projects.

Seven million dollars is not even in the same league with the contributions to environmental activists from the great philanthropic foundations. Between 2011 and 2015 the top 20 charitable donors alone gave $556 million green activists, notably the Sierra Club that received 49 million (not its only income of course). The donors are a roll call of the great foundations – Rockefeller, Pew, Hewlett, Packard, Skoll, Bloomberg, Ford and many more. A consortium of the foundations hired a firm of consultants to produce a report “Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming”. The aim was to triple funding from $210 million in 2007 to $600 million per annum over the next decade. How many Heartland Institutes costing 7 million each could be funded with 600 million dollars? They may have failed to reach that target, still it is a David versus Goliath contest and the reverse of the picture painted by the likes of Oreskes and uncritically recycled by Winsberg.

A significant portion of the book focuses on the principles and practices of model building. This is Winsberg’s home ground because he previously wrote Science in the Age of Computer Simulation and he has many publications in the field. He provides an introduction to the vocabulary and the concepts in the business with emphasis on the size and complexity of the computer programs, the difficulty of interpreting the output and some of the philosophical issues that arise.

Not enough is said to explain their remarkable lack of success in projecting the trends in warming after the pause at the turn of the millennium. Roy Spencer produced the most dramatic picture of the failure showing that almost all of 92 computer models over-estimated the warming trend compared with the most reliable measurements both on the ground and in the troposphere. During the pause in warming the projections deviated more each year from the actual temperature and by about 2005 only four or five of the projections were even close to the measured temperature and the situation deteriorated every year.

The Australian Garth Paltridge provided a much more helpful account of the modelling exercise in The Climate Caper. He noted that the model builders are reluctant to give up the hope that detailed forecasts can be achieved, perhaps with more data and the next generation of computers for number crunching. Trillions of dollars worldwide are riding on the predictions of the IPCC and the modelling exercise is be too big to be allowed to fail any time soon.

He reported that the twenty or so models favoured by the IPCC calculate global-average temperatures that range several degrees about the observed value of 15 degrees C." (p 21) A team at the ANU looked at the predictions for current (measured) rainfall in Australia based on the several IPCC models and the range extended from 200 mm per year less than the actual, to 1000 mm per year more. About half predicted more rainfall for Australia later in the century and half predicted less. The average was an increase of about 8 mm per annum but the model used to develop Australia’s climate policy by the Rudd Government predicted 100 mm less rainfall. Where rigorous standards are applied that model might have been regarded as an outlier and discarded.

Consensus rules in climate science and Paltridge explained why so many of the models converge towards the same broad story of warming, albeit at different rates, The models are so complex that they use the biggest computers in the world and months or years of work may be required complete a trial and there is overwhelming pressure not to run sensitivity tests using alternative models with different tuneable parameters. The “tuneable parameters” are knobs that the operators can twiddle to get the model to fit the data in hand but that process does not guarantee that the model is actually capturing reality, as revealed by the failure in the projections.

Some outstanding climate scientists such as Richard Lindzen who are not hostages of the modelling industry have argued that the macro-modelling approach is the wrong way to go on the basis of scientific first principles. This is rather along the lines of critique that classical and Austrian economists mount against Keynesian macro modelling in economics. That fundamental criticism is supported by a long-running project on forecasting methods and principles conducted by J Scott Armstrong in the US and Kesten Green in Australia. For decades they have studied the success of various forecasting methods in many fields including climate science and they concluded in a paper “Global warming forecasts by scientists versus scientific forecasts.

“The forecasts in the IPCC Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they were the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing. Research on forecasting has shown that experts' predictions are not useful in situations involving uncertainly and complexity. We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.”

Faced with the difficulty of validating models by the conventional criteria of scientific merit Winsberg referred to one of his colleagues Wendy Parker who explained in a published paper that “the most successful modelling approaches incorporate several computational models that rely on assumptions that contradict one another.” She concedes that this could erode confidence in the work (as indeed it should) but “distinctive methods and standards of justification are in play.” This suggests that POMO has officially arrived in climate science! Winsberg also conceded that it is difficult to explain the new standards of justification that are in play and he virtually threw up his hands and offloaded the criteria for evaluation and validation to the consensus in the field. He wrote “my view is that philosophers do better to paint a picture in which we urge trust in the consensus of the scientific community, based on features of that community’s social organization , than to try to provide a normative framework from which we can demonstrate the reliability (or its absence) of such-and-such modelling result” (161 my italics)

Many features of the social organization of the IPCC and the community of climate scientists have come to light that tend to undermine trust in the consensus that emerges from it. Notable sources include Donna Laframboise’s study of the governance of the IPCC, the Wegman committee’s investigation of Michael Mann’s “hockey stick”, the revelations in the emails released from the University of East Anglia and the work of Armstrong and Green noted above.

In 2011 Donna Laframboise published an exhaustive and damning review of the procedures used to assemble the fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. In The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert she pointed out that it is a political body, created by that most political organization, the United Nations. Rupert Darwall charted the role of the UN in the politics of climate change in two landmark works The Age of Global Warming (date) and Green Tyranny ().

Laframboise described the process in a nutshell. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change convened in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and sold the idea that greenhouse gasses are The Problem. 154 nations signed up in principle and later enrolled in the Kyoto Protocol. The UNFCCC had a brief to reduce human emissions and failing to do so would be "nothing less than criminal irresponsibility".

The IPCC was created to recruit scientists to support the agenda. Observe the steps: Step one was the political decision that a greenhouse gas treaty was a worthy and achievable goal. Step two was the recognition that before such a treaty could be negotiated, certain documents representing a common understanding were required. Step was to enlisting scientists to help produce such documents.

Laframboise pointed out that the UN did not wait for climate science to mature. Political operators in the organization, notably Maurice Strong, decided on the solution to a problem that legitimate climate scientists never depicted in alarming terms. The shortest version of the IPCC Climate Bible appeared in 1990 and the findings were tentative. Yet in the next two years the UN convinced a majority of the world's governments to sign a framework document that essentially started the “war on CO2,”

The IPCC is the spearhead of the politically-driven scare campaign to support the “war” and it produces regular Assessment Reports to maintain the climate of alarm. Each report has a small summary volume for politicians and journalists; This is the report that recently warned that the Barrier Reef may disappear in our lifetime if we not mend our coal-burning ways. Longer reports are produced at the same time and some of the chapters in them contain proper science but it they are scarcely mentioned in the media and they are very little read.

Large numbers of scientists contribute material in the lead-up to the final report writing that is in the hands of a small team of lead authors oversighted by two coordinating lead authord. Scientists in the lowest tier are contributing authors and they are generally excluded from meetings of the other authors. They provide raw material on specific and limited topics to be incorporated, re-worked and cited by the lead authors under the direction of the coordinating authors. Additional material, published and occasionally unpublished, can be used at the discretion of the senior authors.

The coordinating lead authors are overwhelmingly the really key figures and Laframboise found that some of them are incredibly unlikely figures in terms of experience, qualifications (doctorates not completed) and background (climate activists). Claims were made about the use of peer-reviewed literature, and a count of the 18,531 references in the 2007 report found that 5,587 (one third) were not peer reviewed including drafts of scientific papers, Greenpeace documents and even press released! In defence it was claimed that the process of internal review would ensure that only "high quality" information in the "grey" literature would be used in the reports.

Scientists outside the inner circle do not agree with that claim. They are routinely snubbed when they challenge the work in progress and outraged at the misrepresentation of the findings in their fields of expertise. A chapter describes the way that leading hurricane expert Chris Landsea was sidelined by Kevin Trenbath who was in charge of the relevant chapter in the Climate Bible. Another chapter follows the story about pseudo-scientific data on hurricanes that became part of the Climate Bible. Another chapter describes one of the most scandalous beatups on the IPCC record, the allegation that warming will massively increase the prevalence of malaria. Among other defects in the argument, malaria is not especially a warm climate illness.

The chapter "Extinction Fiction" charts the abuse of pseudo-scientific findings to predict alarming species losses. One of the two key papers was written by Chris Thomas and 14 co-authors. Daniel Botkin, a leading figures in the field described it "the worst paper I have ever read in a major scientific journal" and the journal that published it was obliged to print not one or two but three critical appraisals of the original paper. Laframboise’s book is essential reading for anyone who is not fully aware of the corruption of the UN climate program and especially the IPCC.

Edward Wegman at George Mason University VA headed an ad hoc committee convened by the Chairman of two US House committees to review the science behind Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph. Mann’s work in the late 1990s was a major feature of the Third IPPC Assessment report in 2001 where it created a sensation. The hockey stick shape of the warming curve eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and gave the impression that the current warming was unprecedented in modern times. After sustained and devastating criticism, notably in the Wegman report, the IPPC discretely parked the hockey stick in the archives to be forgotten although it was a major propaganda weapon for some time and some diehard alarmists have stuck with it.

Noting the crippling defects in the statistical analysis of the data used by Mann and his associates at the East Sussex , the committee stated the community of paleoclimatologists appeared to be out of touch with developments in the relevant field of statistical analysis. In addition the scientists in the field were “tightly coupled” as revealed by a network analysis of the connections between the members in the community. Clearly more work is required on the network connections in the climate science community because close associations in relatively closed groups obviously have the capacity to undermine the rigor of refereeing for the peer reviewed literature. The emails released from the East Anglia etc clearly demonstrated the downside of the “close coupling” described in the Wegman report.

All the indicators and symptoms of the problems in the quality of climate science call for a master theorist to create a framework for a Grand Narrative. Gordon Tullock provided this in a neglected masterpiece, The Organization of Inquiry (1966) . To provide context for the work it is essential to understand the transformation of science since 1945. Previously the communities of scientists were quite small, with modest funding from diverse sources.. The Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb signalled the emergence of Big Science funded by Big Government.

Karl Popper in his unpublished lectures in the early 1950s predicted bad things for science in the service of politicians. He saw too much money chasing too few ideas, the publication explosion (good buried under bad) and the distortion of incentives for scientists by the pressure to obtain grants for fashionable and the politically “hot” topics. Richard Lindzen, probably the doyen of genuine climate scientists, put some meat on the bones of Popper’s concern when he recently described the impact of the 15-fold increase of funding for climate research during the Clinton/Gore administration. That was too much money for a small backwater of science, as Lindzen described climate science at the time, and the funding promoted a proliferation of studies by all manner of investigators without appropriate training or genuine interest in serious climate science.

Popper was also alarmed by the phenomenon of normal science and normal (uncritical) scientists described by T S Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Some of his concerns were shared by a man with a very different vantage point - the Oval Office in the White House in Washington DC. In his farewell speech at the end of his term President Eisenhower warned “The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present.” He noted the “equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” (Eisenhower, 1961.)

Both of those possibilities became real when the governments of the western world were driven by the United Nations to embrace radical environmentalism under the influence of the worldwide green movement. New international forums and agencies proliferated, driven by a new class of political entrepreneurs like Maurice Strong. They played up the challenge of climate change, and created additional vehicles for this particular issue, notably the IPCC.

Turning to Gordon Tullock (1922-2014). Climate science was not yet on the radar when he wrote in the early 1960s and he thought the natural sciences were good shape. His scenario for the decline of a scientific discipline drew on his experience of the social sciences including parts of economics. He was a colleague of James Buchanan in the Virginia School of public choice studies and he was unlucky not to share the Nobel Prize with Buchanan, probably because he was temperamentally a contrarian and he was easily distracted. In addition to seminal work on economics he wrote a book about the social life of insects and he engaged in long-running correspondence with Karl Popper, trying to persuade him to take up some of Tullock’s ideas in quantum physics.

After he met Popper at a Volker Fund (free enterprise) conference at Emory University he put aside the work that became The Politics of Bureaucracy and wrote The Organization of Enquiry. He took the social/institutional approach advocated by Popper in The Poverty of Historicism, written in New Zealand during the war as a companion to The Open Society and Its Enemies. The idea was to explain the development or lack of scientific and industrial progress in terms of the institutional context rather than psychological factors (advocated by Comte and Mill) or the manifestation of a historical tendency. Contemplating the factors that could stop the progress of science Popper suggested closing down or controlling laboratories for research and anything that impeded the free exchange of criticism and ideas in the scientific community. “Scientific method itself has social aspects. Science, and more especially scientific progress, are the results not of isolated efforts but of the free competition of thought. For science needs ever more competition between hypotheses and ever more rigorous tests.” He went on to suggest that competing hypotheses need personal representation, advocates, “and even a public.” He might have suggested ‘an informed public’ because the public at present is so misinformed about the weather that politicians are easily driven by public opinion to embrace disastrous policies.

Tullock sketched a scenario that has a haunting resemblance to the progress of climate science and probably other fields as well, judging from the famous warning issued by Richard Horton in his capacity as editor in chief of Lancet. “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may be simply untrue…Science has taken a turn towards darkness” with reference to small sample sizes, invalid analyses, conflicts of interest and obsession with fashionable trends (Horton 2015).

The scenario involves a combination of personal and institutional factors. The personal factor is the rise of the normal scientist who does science for a living, working under the direction of the laboratory manager without necessarily having any sense of vocation or passion to find the truth. The institutional factors include the rise of Big Science driven by Big Government, the imperative to publish perish to maintain tenure and research grants and the politicisation of intellectual life.

At the individual level he identified three forms of curiosity. First the pure curiosity of the scientist engaged in a compulsive or or obsessive quest for the truth,. Second the equally driving practical curiosity of the person obsessed with making things work better. Third, the “induced curiosity” of the researcher who does not necessarily have a passion for research or the truth but takes on science as a job. The most obvious examples are academic staff who have to “publish or perish” to obtain tenure and promotion, and the large numbers of scientists who work “nine to five” in public and private research laboratories. Of course outstanding work can be produced by academics seeking promotion and even by nine to five scientists but Tullock’s analysis addressed some tendencies which could emerge in a system where more and more of the workers have “induced” curiosity and less and less (in proportion) harbour a burning commitment to the quest.

Tullock noted that the dedicated truth seeker and also the practical problem-solver must pay close attention to reality to align their ideas with it. This demands constant testing and critical evaluation but in contrast, the researcher who is not so motivated can be happy with results that are merely publishable Tullock suggested that for these scientists concern with the real world could become secondary to other matters and if the investigators could maintain their reputations and their jobs by reporting fictional discoveries that would serve the purpose.

The peer review process is designed to maintain standards and he developed the scenario further to consider what would happen if the reviewers are too closely associated with the authors either personally or by membership of a school of thought. He was working before natural science was seriously politicized and of course in the radically polarized world of climate science nowadays the membership of the correct school of thought has become a professional imperative for most investigators.

He observed the politicization of the social sciences because he and Buchanan had both suffered from it (denied funding by the left-trending Rockefeller Foundation) and he observed that the end of the that slippery slope of declining standards is the situation where there is a widespread belief in the field that the function of the researcher is to support a particular position. At this point “Simply presenting a rationalization for some position chosen on other grounds may be acceptable as an objective of research, and the principal criterion in judging journals may become their points of view…The concern with reality that unites the sciences, then, may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia”.

Readers can decide for themselves how far various fields have gone down that path, bearing in mind Horton’s warming in The Lancet. To conclude with a reminder of Winsberg’s suggestion quoted at the head of this review –to trust the scientific consensus based on the organization of the community. This means referring questions of scientific credibility to a consortium of politically correct grant-seekers, environmental fundamentalists and UN officials dedicated to the transformation of the economies of the western world. That is not really what one might have expected from a scholar in the Queen of the Sciences!

Missing from the references

Lindzen, Curry, Spencer, Christy,

Missing from Index Curry, Lindzen, Laframboise, Mann, Gore

NoKarl Popper. No reference to big science and the Eisenhower warning.