In 1914 the dispute about scientific value judgments in economics reached its climax. In the 1960s it was followed by the positivist dispute in German sociology. In both controversies one party pretended to provide ethical knowledge and questioned the distinction between what is and what should be. In 1961, at a conference of the German Sociological Association, Karl Popper and Theodor W. Adorno gave lectures on “the Logic of the Social Sciences”. While Popper tried to contribute to methodology, Adorno pleaded for a dialectical philosophy of society. In 1963 Jürgen Habermas criticized Popper’s contribution and Hans Albert made a counterplea. At this time Habermas assumed that critical theory, i.e. neomarxist dialectical theory of society, provided ethical knowledge. Instead of seriously defending this assumption he attacked the self-understanding of the empirical social sciences, in particular the idea of the value freedom of research. Albert showed that Habermas’ criticism of the methodology of Popper’s critical rationalism was completely untenable. So the positivist dispute was not a scientific dispute. Nevertheless Habermas’ version of a critical theory of society was politically immensely influential. It provided the illusion that leftist political programs could be known to be ethically right. In 1981 Habermas admitted that his critical theory was due to ‘confusions in fundamental concepts’. Meanwhile he had proposed a consensus theory of the rightness of norms and his ethics of discourse. Both proved to be untenable as well. Finally Habermas turned to religion and advocated the political influence of religious organizations.
Science progresses if we succeed in rendering the objects of scientific inquiry more comprehensively or more precisely. Popper tries to formalize this venerable idea. According to him the most comprehensive and most precise description of the world is given by the set T of all true statements. A hypothesis comes the closer to T, or has the more verisimilitude, the more true consequences and the fewer false consequences it implies. Popper proposes to order hypotheses by the inclusion relations between the sets of their true and of their false consequences (“truth contents” and “falsity contents”). A partial ordering would permit one to decide whether the substitution of theory t1 by t2 represents scientific progress. But because of the logical relations between the elements of the sets of logical consequences, or contents, false hypotheses cannot be compared. As our theories usually turn out to be false sooner or later, they can seldom be compared as to their verisimilitude and when they can, the result depends only on which theory implies the other and on their truth-values. Popper even tries to define a measure of verisimilitude on the partial ordering. It has to fail for the same reason. In addition he tries to relativize the concept of a content and fails. What is more, any attempt at defining a measure of better or worse correspondence to the whole truth must fail, as there is no justification for saying that any true primitive sentence asserts as much about reality as some other primitive sentence, or more.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.