popper-logic-scientific-discovery

410
new appendices
Kemeny.) Therefore, any change of assumption (a) would be ad hoc. It
is not my criticism that is ‘purely verbal’, but the attempts to rescue the
‘current theory of confirmation’.
For further details, I must refer to the discussion in the pages of the
B.J.P.S. I may say that I was a little disappointed both by this discussion
and by Kemeny’s review in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. From a rational
point of view, the situation appears to me quite serious. In this postrationalist
age of ours, more and more books are written in symbolic
languages, and it becomes more and more difficult to see why: what it
is all about, and why it should be necessary, or advantageous, to allow
oneself to be bored by volumes of symbolic trivialities. It almost seems
as if the symbolism were becoming a value in itself, to be revered for its
sublime ‘exactness’: a new expression of the old quest for certainty, a
new symbolic ritual, a new substitute for religion. Yet the only possible
value of this kind of thing—the only possible excuse for its dubious
claim to exactness—seems to be this. Once a mistake, or a contradiction,
is pin-pointed, there can be no verbal evasion: it can be proved,
and that is that. (Frege did not try evasive manœuvres when he
received Russell’s criticism.) So if one has to put up with a lot of
tiresome technicalities, and with a formalism of unnecessary complexity,
one might at least hope to be compensated by the ready acceptance
of a straight-forward proof of contradictoriness—a proof consisting of
the simplest of counter-examples. It was disappointing to be met,
instead, by merely verbal evasions, combined with the assertion that
the criticism offered was ‘merely verbal’.
Still, one must not be impatient. Since Aristotle, the riddle of induction
has turned many philosophers to irrationalism—to scepticism or
to mysticism. And although the philosophy of the identity of C and p
seems to have weathered many a storm since Laplace, I still think that it
will be abandoned one day. I really cannot bring myself to believe that
the defenders of the faith will be satisfied for ever with mysticism and
Hegelianism, upholding ‘C = p’ as a self-evident axiom, or as the dazzling
object of an inductive intuition. (I say ‘dazzling’ because it seems
to be an object whose beholders are smitten with blindness when
running into its logical contradictions.)
I may perhaps say here that I regard the doctrine that degree of