The quote says that biologists don’t deal with questions such as “what is life?” because that’s essentialism and that’s Bad. Similarly, physicists certainly don’t study ideal systems like atoms or light. The disease is in the false dichotomy.
Oh, hmm, I thought what he was saying about atoms and light is not that physicists don’t study those things, but that they don’t study some abstract platonic version of light or atom derived from our intuitions, but instead use those words to describe phenomena in the real world and then go on to continue investigating those phenomena on their own terms.
So, for example, “Do radio waves really count as light?” is not a very interesting question from a physics perspective once you grant that both radio waves and visible light are on the same electromagnetic wave spectrum. Or with atoms we could ask, “Are atoms really atoms if they can be broken down into constituent parts?” These would just be questions about human definitions and intuitions rather than about the phenomena themselves. And so it is with the question, “What is life?”
That’s what it seemed like Popper was saying to me. Did you have a different interpretation? Also, I’m not sure I’ve understood your comment—which dichotomy are you saying is a false dichotomy?
Asking whether radio waves really count as light is just arguing a definition. That’s not interesting to anyone who understands the underlying physics.
Notice that the questions he gives for essentialists are actually interesting questions, they’re just imprecisely phrased, e.g. “what is matter?” These questions were asked before we’d decided matter was atoms. They were valid questions and serious scientists treated them. Now these questions are silly because we’ve already solved them and moved on to deeper questions, like “where do these masses come from?” and “how will the universe end?”
When a theorist comes up with a new theory they are usually trying to answer one of these essentialist questions. “What is it about antimatter that makes it so rare?” The theorist comes up with a guess, computes some results, spends a year processing LHC data, and realizes that their theory is wrong. At some point in here they switched from essentialist (considering an ideal model) to nominalist (experimental data), but the whole distinction is unnecessary.
… they don’t study some abstract platonic version of light or atom derived from our intuitions …
Yes, they most certainly do. QED is an extremely abstract idea, derived from intuition about how the light we interact with on a classical level behaves. This is called the correspondence principle.
String theorists come up with a theory based entirely on mathematical beauty, much like Plato.
I think you’re reading Popper uncharitably, and his view of what physicists do is about the same as yours. He really is arguing against arguing definitions. “What is matter?” is an ambiguous question: it can be understood as asking about a definition, “what do we understand by the word ‘matter’, exactly?”, and it can be understood as asking about the structure, “what are these things that we call matter really made of, how do they behave, what are their properties, etc.?”. The former, to Popper, is an essentialist question; the latter is not.
Your understanding of “essentialist questions” is not that of Popper; he wouldn’t agree with you, I’m sure, that “What is it about antimatter that makes it so rare?” is an essentialist question. “Essentialist” doesn’t mean, in his treatment, “having nothing to do with experimental data” (even though he was very concerned with the value of experimental data and would have disagreed with some of modern theoretical physics in that respect). A claim which turns out to be unfalsifiable is anathema to Popper, but it is not necessarily an “essentialist” claim.
Oh, hmm. I see now that we were interpreting Popper differently, and I may have been wrong.
Notice that the questions he gives for essentialists are actually interesting questions, they’re just imprecisely phrased, e.g. “what is matter?” These questions were asked before we’d decided matter was atoms. They were valid questions and serious scientists treated them. Now these questions are silly because we’ve already solved them and moved on to deeper questions …
If Popper did mean to exclude that kind of inquiry, then I agree with you that he was misguided.
In that case, it sounds like you would agree with the rest of Anatoly’s comment, just not the Popper quote. Is that right?
The quote says that biologists don’t deal with questions such as “what is life?” because that’s essentialism and that’s Bad. Similarly, physicists certainly don’t study ideal systems like atoms or light. The disease is in the false dichotomy.
Oh, hmm, I thought what he was saying about atoms and light is not that physicists don’t study those things, but that they don’t study some abstract platonic version of light or atom derived from our intuitions, but instead use those words to describe phenomena in the real world and then go on to continue investigating those phenomena on their own terms.
So, for example, “Do radio waves really count as light?” is not a very interesting question from a physics perspective once you grant that both radio waves and visible light are on the same electromagnetic wave spectrum. Or with atoms we could ask, “Are atoms really atoms if they can be broken down into constituent parts?” These would just be questions about human definitions and intuitions rather than about the phenomena themselves. And so it is with the question, “What is life?”
That’s what it seemed like Popper was saying to me. Did you have a different interpretation? Also, I’m not sure I’ve understood your comment—which dichotomy are you saying is a false dichotomy?
Asking whether radio waves really count as light is just arguing a definition. That’s not interesting to anyone who understands the underlying physics.
Notice that the questions he gives for essentialists are actually interesting questions, they’re just imprecisely phrased, e.g. “what is matter?” These questions were asked before we’d decided matter was atoms. They were valid questions and serious scientists treated them. Now these questions are silly because we’ve already solved them and moved on to deeper questions, like “where do these masses come from?” and “how will the universe end?”
When a theorist comes up with a new theory they are usually trying to answer one of these essentialist questions. “What is it about antimatter that makes it so rare?” The theorist comes up with a guess, computes some results, spends a year processing LHC data, and realizes that their theory is wrong. At some point in here they switched from essentialist (considering an ideal model) to nominalist (experimental data), but the whole distinction is unnecessary.
Yes, they most certainly do. QED is an extremely abstract idea, derived from intuition about how the light we interact with on a classical level behaves. This is called the correspondence principle.
String theorists come up with a theory based entirely on mathematical beauty, much like Plato.
I think you’re reading Popper uncharitably, and his view of what physicists do is about the same as yours. He really is arguing against arguing definitions. “What is matter?” is an ambiguous question: it can be understood as asking about a definition, “what do we understand by the word ‘matter’, exactly?”, and it can be understood as asking about the structure, “what are these things that we call matter really made of, how do they behave, what are their properties, etc.?”. The former, to Popper, is an essentialist question; the latter is not.
Your understanding of “essentialist questions” is not that of Popper; he wouldn’t agree with you, I’m sure, that “What is it about antimatter that makes it so rare?” is an essentialist question. “Essentialist” doesn’t mean, in his treatment, “having nothing to do with experimental data” (even though he was very concerned with the value of experimental data and would have disagreed with some of modern theoretical physics in that respect). A claim which turns out to be unfalsifiable is anathema to Popper, but it is not necessarily an “essentialist” claim.
Oh, hmm. I see now that we were interpreting Popper differently, and I may have been wrong.
If Popper did mean to exclude that kind of inquiry, then I agree with you that he was misguided.
In that case, it sounds like you would agree with the rest of Anatoly’s comment, just not the Popper quote. Is that right?
That’s right, more or less.
Gotcha, thanks!