Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

Popper’s Evolutionary EpistemologyKarl Popper advanced the idea that science made progress through falsification. Popper hadbecome disenchanted with the idea that science is special because it can be derived fromfacts, the more facts the better. He denied the positivist assertion that scientists can prove atheory through induction, or repeated empirical tests or observations. One never knows ifone’s observations have been sufficient; the next observation might contradict all thatpreceded it 21 .Therefore, according to Popper, a claim to truth by a theory is only possible if it canbe shown to be false. The scientist encounters the world - nature - essentially as a stranger,and that what sets the scientific enterprise apart from everything else is that it only entertainsknowledge or experience that is capable of falsification. For Popper this is what distinguishesscience from religion or metaphysics. Science was regarded as a neatly self-correctingprocess. It was never finished in the sense that anything is knowable as true for all time. Itincreased incrementally through constant but piecemeal efforts of falsification so that eachnew element introduced could be tested to see whether it was an improvement on the earlierarrangement 22 .Falsificationists freely admit that observation is guided by and presupposes theory.They are also happy to abandon any claim implying that theories can be established as trueor probably true in the light of observational evidence. Theories are construed as speculativeand tentative conjectures or guesses freely created by the human intellect in an attempt toovercome problems encountered by previous theories to give an adequate account of someaspects of the world or universe. Once proposed, speculative theories are to be rigorouslyand ruthlessly tested by observation and experiment. Theories that fail to stand up toobservational and experimental tests must be eliminated and replaced by further speculativeconjectures. Science progresses by trial and error, by conjecture and refutations. Only thefittest theories survive 23 .Starting with problems, not facts as the inductivist/positivist assert, the enterprise ofscience involves the proposal of highly falsifiable even bold and rash speculative hypotheses,followed by deliberate and tenacious attempts to falsify them. Boyd’s OODA loop can beconstrued as such a process of hypothesis testing. Indeed, in the presentation The ConceptualSpiral he offers his definition of science as ‘a self-correcting process of observation,hypothesis, and test’ 24 . The constant discovery of errors in hypothesis lead to renewed effortsto improve our mental models for coping with the environment.Not surprisingly, and quite relevant for understanding the importance of Popper forBoyd and for Boyd’s take on the function of military doctrine and strategic theory, Poppernamed his theory that knowledge can grow only by conjecture and refutation an evolutionaryepistemology. In 1961 Popper claimed that growth of our knowledgeis the result of a process closely resembling what Darwin called ‘natural selection’; that is, thenatural selection of hypotheses: our knowledge consists, at every moment, of those hypothesiswhich have shown their (comparative) fitness by surviving so far in their struggle forexistence; a competitive struggle which eliminates those hypotheses which are unfit 25 .21 John Horgan, The End of Science (Broadway Books, New York, 1997), p.34.22 Watson, p. 380, 488.23 Alan Chalmers, What is this thing called Science? (3 rd Edition, Cambridge, 1999), pp.59-60.24 John Boyd, The Conceptual Spiral, p.7.25 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, (Oxford University Press, Oxford), 1972.84