David Stove
Encyclopedia
David Charles Stove was an Australia
n philosopher of science
.
His work in philosophy of science
included detailed criticisms of David Hume
's inductive skepticism, as well as what he regarded as the irrationalism of his disciplinary contemporaries Karl Popper
, Thomas Kuhn
, Imre Lakatos
, and Paul Feyerabend
. Also, he marshalled a positive response to the problem of induction
in his 1986 work, The Rationality of Induction.
Stove was also a staunch critic of sociobiology
, going as far as describing the field as a new religion in which genes play the role of gods.http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=27
(a small country town in northern New South Wales
), David Stove was the youngest of five children; his parents were Robert Stove, a schoolteacher (d. 1971), and Ida Stove, née Hill (d. 1946). Later, David lived (with his family) in Newcastle, New South Wales
before moving south and studying philosophy at the University of Sydney
from 1945 to 1948. During his childhood he had been associated with Presbyterianism, but in his teens he became an atheist and, as far as is known, never again espoused any religious belief whatsoever (although, curiously, he retained a lifelong interest in patristic theology, in which he was well read).
At university, like many Sydney intellectuals of his generation, Stove came under the influence of the famously anti-Christian Professor John Anderson
. Whilst he did absorb Anderson's realism and impatience with metaphysics, he was later to shake off other elements of Anderson's teaching.
Early on in his undergraduate career Stove was part of a political/bohemian set at Sydney University (some of whom later became part of the "Sydney Push
"). Stove flirted with Marxism
at this stage, but, on his own admission, abandoned it when he discovered "what real intellectual work was". He eventually became a political conservative, and was later to clash with some of his former comrades.
In 1952 he obtained a lectureship at the University of New South Wales
(in the Sydney suburb of Kensington), and in 1960 became lecturer at the University of Sydney, where he eventually became Associate Professor. During the 1970s, his department became infamous for its battles between Marxists and conservatives, these struggles receiving national press coverage. Stove and David Armstrong
both resisted what they regarded as attempts by Marxists to take over the department; and the result was that the department had to be split into two new departments. After this split, Stove continued to speak out (notably in the magazine Quadrant) about what he felt were abuses by Marxists and feminists in the University, and was warned that disciplinary proceedings against him would be taken by the University if he did not keep quiet. Former Senator and Cabinet Minister Susan Ryan
spoke similarly in Parliament against him. Disenchanted with what was happening in University life and in academic culture at large, he took early retirement in 1987.
Stove had moved out of the city centre to the edge of the Sydney basin at Mulgoa. He was devoted to gardening and preserving the wilderness, although he was sometimes critical of environmentalists. His other great loves in life were his family, Handel
, Henry Purcell
, old books, and cricket
.
In 1959 he had married Jessie Leahy (1926–2001), who had grown up in Queensland
before working in Sydney as a pathologist (and who resembled him on religious matters, being an unbeliever from a Presbyterian background). The couple had two children, Robert
and Judith.
A lifelong, enthusiastic smoker
, David Stove developed debilitating esophageal cancer
in 1993. His wife suffered, also in 1993, a massive stroke (although she outlived him by seven years). After a painful struggle with the disease he took his own life on 2 June 1994, aged 66; he hanged himself at his home.
, feminism
, and postmodernism
. Some regard him as a witty defender of common sense, who defeated inductive skepticism. Others, however, reject his argument
s for induction
and his criticisms of the philosophies of contemporaries Karl Popper
, Thomas Kuhn
, Imre Lakatos
, and Paul Feyerabend
. Some detractors have attempted to portray Stove as a reactionary controversialist.
Stove also wrote articles on a variety of topics for non-philosophical magazines. He achieved increased prominence in North America in the early 2000s when art critic and conservative pundit Roger Kimball
published a collection of his essays. Since his death in 1994 four collections of his writings have been published.
but thought that this argument (which some contemporary Hume scholars would hesitate to attribute to Hume) was not only fallacious but harmful in its effects, and was one of the causes (though not the only one) of the "modern nervousness". Stove took it as his main task to refute Hume's inductive skepticism. There were two aspects to this task. The first was negative - to show that Hume's argument failed. The second was positive - to provide a justification of induction
.
Stove's argument for the negative task was this. Consider a claim such as "All ravens are black". Hume argued that we don't know this a priori
and that it cannot be entailed from necessary truths. Nor can it be deduced from our observations of ravens. We can only derive it from these observations if we add a premise to the effect that the unobserved is like the observed. But we have no a priori justification of this premise, and any attempt to derive it by empirical means would be circular. So Hume concluded that induction
is unjustified.
Stove argued that Hume was presuming "deductivism" (Stove's best-known expression of this point was in a paper titled 'Hume, Probability and Induction'). This is the view, explicitly or implicitly accepted by many modern philosophers, that the only valid and sound arguments are ones that entail their conclusions. But if we accept that premises can support a conclusion to a greater (or lesser) degree without entailing it, then we have no need to add a premise to the effect that the unobserved will be like the observed - the observational premises themselves can provide strong support for the conclusion, and make it likely to be true. Stove argued that nothing in Hume's argument shows that this cannot be the case and so Hume's argument does not go through, unless one can defend deductivism. This argument wasn't entirely original with Stove but it had never been articulated so well before. Since Stove put it forward some philosophers have come to accept that it defeats Hume's argument.
The positive task was attempted by Stove in Probability and Hume's Inductive Scepticism (1973) and later in The Rationality of Induction (1986). Stove's principal positive argument for induction
was presented in the latter book and was developed from an argument put forward by one of Stove's heroes, the late Donald Cary Williams (formerly Professor at Harvard University
) in his book The Ground of Induction. Stove argued that it is a statistical truth that the great majority of the possible subsets of specified size (as long as this size is not too small) are similar to the larger population to which they belong. For example, the majority of the subsets which contain 3000 ravens which you can form from the raven population are similar to the population itself (and this applies no matter how large the raven population is, as long as it is not infinite). Consequently, Stove argued that if you find yourself with such a subset then the chances are that this subset is one of the ones that are similar to the population, and so you are justified in concluding that it is likely that this subset 'matches' the population reasonably closely. The situation would be analogous to drawing a ball out of a barrel of balls, 99% of which are red. In such a case you have a 99% chance of drawing a red ball. Similarly, when getting a sample of ravens the probability is very high that the sample is one of the matching or 'representative' ones. So as long as you have no reason to think that your sample is not unrepresentative you are justified in thinking that probably (although not certainly) that it is representative.
Stove also worked on falsificationism, the raven paradox
, grue (color)
and inductive logic.
and his falsificationist philosophy of science, as well as the influential philosophies of Thomas Kuhn
and Paul Feyerabend
. His book Popper and After
: Four Modern Irrationalists (1982) has been reprinted in two new editions in recent years (under the titles Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult and Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism). In it Stove claimed to expose the methods by which Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos
and Feyerabend managed to make their purportedly untenable philosophies seem respectable.
One such method, Stove claimed, was the "neutralizing of success words". Stove argued that in the philosophies of these authors such things as progress, discovery, evidence and knowledge do not exist and that if this position were stated openly and consistently maintained then few would ever have taken these philosophies seriously. Stove contended that these authors got around this problem by using these success words, but in scare quotes, e.g., "knowledge". The fact that these words were used regularly, even if in scare quotes, gave the impression that the view being put forward was somehow not rejecting these concepts.
Another method Stove attributed to Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend was what he called the "sabotaging of logical expressions". This was the practise of robbing logical statements of their logical force by placing them in epistemic contexts; for example, instead of saying "P is a proof for Q" one would say "It is generally believed by scientists that P is a proof for Q". This produces what Stove calls a "ghost logical statement": it gives the impression that serious statements of logic are being made when they are not - all that is really being made are sociological or historical claims which are immune to criticism on logical grounds.
Stove charged Popper with enfant terriblisme, claiming that his work was motivated by levity - the failure to take the truth about the topics under discussion seriously. That Feyerabend is guilty of this sin is obvious even to his supporters (nor does he deny it) - but the accusation against the apparently ultra-serious Popper seems at first glance surprising. Stove nevertheless argued that Popper was a product of the "jazz age", where, in the words of Cole Porter
, "day's night today" and vice versa - only that Popper's "jazz age" was played out in the intellectual world rather than at bohemian parties.
Kuhn's writings on the other hand are free of levity. Stove said that this is because Kuhn
's "worldmaking", external world skepticism
and solipsism
, Popper again, and Robert Nozick
's idea that explanation should replace argument (Stove argued that the distinction was vacuous, and a product of the desire to appear non-coercive).
Stove also harshly criticised philosophical idealism. Stove claimed that what George Berkeley
did was to try to derive a non-tautological conclusion from tautological reasoning. He argued that in Berkeley's case the fallacy
is not obvious and this is because one premise is ambiguous between one meaning which is tautological
and one which is not (but which is logically equivalent
to the conclusion). Stove concluded that it was hard to avoid the view that idealism is just a religious substitute.
About Immanuel Kant
he had this to say:
The book ends with Stove claiming to show (in "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts?") just how easily abstract thought can go wrong, the seemingly endless ways in which it can, and how little we know about these ways. To this end he gave a list of forty propositions about the number 3, all of which he argued demonstrate thought going wrong, and yet we can only say of a few of these what particular "disease of thought" is occurring.
For example:
In the book Stove also coined the phrase Horror Victorianorum
("a horror of the Victorians") to satirise what he perceived as an irrational modernist distaste for Victorian culture. This concept has been taken up within design and art history
in order to characterise unthinkingly visceral dislike of Victorian architecture, art and design.
, Nicolaus Copernicus
and Abraham Lincoln
rather than Pol Pot
, Maximilien Robespierre
, Adolf Hitler
, and Joseph Stalin
. So the odds are that change will make things worse, not better. Hence it is rational to be cautious and conservative about proposed changes. Stove concluded that there is more reason to discourage innovation than encourage it.
Stove believed that proposed changes should not be radical, that they should be very carefully considered, and should have very good supporting evidence on their side before they are implemented. However, according to Stove, current opinion believed the opposite: the very fact that an idea is an innovation is an argument in its favour, and that we even have an obligation to take innovations seriously simply because they are innovations.
Stove also regularly derided the Enlightenment view of progress. This is the view which John Maynard Keynes
attributed to Bertrand Russell
: that
There were many people in modern times, Stove thought, who hold such beliefs - that in the past the world was a dark place run according to foolish principles, but that from now on things will be run properly and the world will be vastly improved as a result. But, he asked, what reason do we have to think that darkness is about to suddenly give way to light? Why is it that we will be so much better at running things than past generations? "Education" is the answer that is often given in reply to this question, but Stove was deeply skeptical about the effectiveness of education in making the world a better place. Stove felt that learning has great value in itself, but unlike Plato
did not think that the more educated a ruler is the better he will be at ruling.
, who had recently developed ideas of Kin selection
, and suggested that such ideas are probably false, and certainly unverified. Stove argued that these sorts of strong claims are often made by hard-line sociobiologists, yet they are seldom pointed out even by many of their opponents.
Stove also argued that leading evolutionary biologists were confused about altruism
, often talking as though altruism didn't really exist and was some sort of sham. What they should have said, Stove contended, was that they had explained the origins of altruism. But the damage has been done, according to Stove: many people now share this suspicion about altruism and this has, at least to some degree contributed to the growth of cynicism and selfishness.
Furthermore, Stove argued that evolutionary theorists have always had difficulties in trying to reconcile their theory with the fact that there appears to be no Darwinian fight for survival in modern times, and Stove harshly criticized what he saw as attempts to patch these perceived holes up by what he calls the 'Cave Men' theory - a view that T. H. Huxley often resorted to - which says that while the "Darwinian struggle" no longer occurs in existing human populations it did so amongst cave-men. The 'Hard Man' says that there is still a evolutionary struggle for survival going on all around us, only we are blind to it (Stove claimed that Herbert Spencer
was a Hard Man). The 'Soft Man' however never notices the inconsistency.
Stove also claimed that the simple Malthusian view of population that many evolutionary scientists accept is not true of humans - humans do not continue expanding in population until they have eaten up all of their food supplies which then results in massive deaths from starvation. In fact, the population growth of richer nations is typically slower than that of poorer nations. (This sort of view has been defended in more recent years by population economists such as Julian Lincoln Simon
.)
His essays on Darwinism were collected in the book Darwinian Fairytales
.
is not a form of prejudice
but common sense:
He argued that, while these differences were likely caused by cultural rather than genetic factors, where statistical associations existed it was rational to make decisions based on them. His views led to his being threatened with disciplinary action by Sydney University.
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n philosopher of science
Philosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...
.
His work in philosophy of science
Philosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...
included detailed criticisms of David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
's inductive skepticism, as well as what he regarded as the irrationalism of his disciplinary contemporaries Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
, Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.Kuhn...
, Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his...
, and Paul Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades . He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand,...
. Also, he marshalled a positive response to the problem of induction
Problem of induction
The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to knowledge. That is, what is the justification for either:...
in his 1986 work, The Rationality of Induction.
Stove was also a staunch critic of sociobiology
Sociobiology
Sociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context. Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology,...
, going as far as describing the field as a new religion in which genes play the role of gods.http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=27
Life
Born in MoreeMoree, New South Wales
Moree is a large town in Moree Plains Shire in northern New South Wales, Australia. It is located on the banks of the Mehi River in the centre of the rich black-soil plains....
(a small country town in northern New South Wales
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
), David Stove was the youngest of five children; his parents were Robert Stove, a schoolteacher (d. 1971), and Ida Stove, née Hill (d. 1946). Later, David lived (with his family) in Newcastle, New South Wales
Newcastle, New South Wales
The Newcastle metropolitan area is the second most populated area in the Australian state of New South Wales and includes most of the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie Local Government Areas...
before moving south and studying philosophy at the University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
from 1945 to 1948. During his childhood he had been associated with Presbyterianism, but in his teens he became an atheist and, as far as is known, never again espoused any religious belief whatsoever (although, curiously, he retained a lifelong interest in patristic theology, in which he was well read).
At university, like many Sydney intellectuals of his generation, Stove came under the influence of the famously anti-Christian Professor John Anderson
John Anderson (philosopher)
John Anderson was a Scottish-born Australian philosopher who occupied the post of Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University in the years 1927-1958. He founded the empirical brand of philosophy known as Australian realism...
. Whilst he did absorb Anderson's realism and impatience with metaphysics, he was later to shake off other elements of Anderson's teaching.
Early on in his undergraduate career Stove was part of a political/bohemian set at Sydney University (some of whom later became part of the "Sydney Push
Sydney Push
The Sydney Push was a predominantly left-wing intellectual sub-culture in Sydney from the late 1940s to the early '70s. Well known associates of the Push include Jim Baker, John Flaus, Harry Hooton, Margaret Fink, Sasha Soldatow, Lex Banning, Eva Cox, Richard Appleton, Paddy McGuinness, David...
"). Stove flirted with Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
at this stage, but, on his own admission, abandoned it when he discovered "what real intellectual work was". He eventually became a political conservative, and was later to clash with some of his former comrades.
In 1952 he obtained a lectureship at the University of New South Wales
University of New South Wales
The University of New South Wales , is a research-focused university based in Kensington, a suburb in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia...
(in the Sydney suburb of Kensington), and in 1960 became lecturer at the University of Sydney, where he eventually became Associate Professor. During the 1970s, his department became infamous for its battles between Marxists and conservatives, these struggles receiving national press coverage. Stove and David Armstrong
David Malet Armstrong
David Malet Armstrong , often D. M. Armstrong, is an Australian philosopher. He is well-known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the...
both resisted what they regarded as attempts by Marxists to take over the department; and the result was that the department had to be split into two new departments. After this split, Stove continued to speak out (notably in the magazine Quadrant) about what he felt were abuses by Marxists and feminists in the University, and was warned that disciplinary proceedings against him would be taken by the University if he did not keep quiet. Former Senator and Cabinet Minister Susan Ryan
Susan Ryan
Susan Maree Ryan AO is an Australian educator who served as a Senator for the Australian Capital Territory 1975–87...
spoke similarly in Parliament against him. Disenchanted with what was happening in University life and in academic culture at large, he took early retirement in 1987.
Stove had moved out of the city centre to the edge of the Sydney basin at Mulgoa. He was devoted to gardening and preserving the wilderness, although he was sometimes critical of environmentalists. His other great loves in life were his family, Handel
HANDEL
HANDEL was the code-name for the UK's National Attack Warning System in the Cold War. It consisted of a small console consisting of two microphones, lights and gauges. The reason behind this was to provide a back-up if anything failed....
, Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell – 21 November 1695), was an English organist and Baroque composer of secular and sacred music. Although Purcell incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, his legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music...
, old books, and cricket
Cricket
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...
.
In 1959 he had married Jessie Leahy (1926–2001), who had grown up in Queensland
Queensland
Queensland is a state of Australia, occupying the north-eastern section of the mainland continent. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales to the west, south-west and south respectively. To the east, Queensland is bordered by the Coral Sea and Pacific Ocean...
before working in Sydney as a pathologist (and who resembled him on religious matters, being an unbeliever from a Presbyterian background). The couple had two children, Robert
R. J. Stove
Robert James Stove is an Australian writer, editor, composer and organist.-Biography:Born in 1961 in Sydney, but later resident in Melbourne, Stove graduated from Sydney University in 1985...
and Judith.
A lifelong, enthusiastic smoker
Tobacco smoking
Tobacco smoking is the practice where tobacco is burned and the resulting smoke is inhaled. The practice may have begun as early as 5000–3000 BCE. Tobacco was introduced to Eurasia in the late 16th century where it followed common trade routes...
, David Stove developed debilitating esophageal cancer
Esophageal cancer
Esophageal cancer is malignancy of the esophagus. There are various subtypes, primarily squamous cell cancer and adenocarcinoma . Squamous cell cancer arises from the cells that line the upper part of the esophagus...
in 1993. His wife suffered, also in 1993, a massive stroke (although she outlived him by seven years). After a painful struggle with the disease he took his own life on 2 June 1994, aged 66; he hanged himself at his home.
Reputation
Stove is best known for scathing attacks, especially on Popperian falsificationism, MarxismMarxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
, feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
, and postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
. Some regard him as a witty defender of common sense, who defeated inductive skepticism. Others, however, reject his argument
Argument
In philosophy and logic, an argument is an attempt to persuade someone of something, or give evidence or reasons for accepting a particular conclusion.Argument may also refer to:-Mathematics and computer science:...
s for induction
Inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates propositions that are abstractions of observations. It is commonly construed as a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances...
and his criticisms of the philosophies of contemporaries Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
, Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.Kuhn...
, Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his...
, and Paul Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades . He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand,...
. Some detractors have attempted to portray Stove as a reactionary controversialist.
Stove also wrote articles on a variety of topics for non-philosophical magazines. He achieved increased prominence in North America in the early 2000s when art critic and conservative pundit Roger Kimball
Roger Kimball
Roger Kimball is a conservative U.S. art critic and social commentator. He was educated at Cheverus High School, a Jesuit institution in South Portland, Maine, and then at Bennington College, where he took a BA in philosophy and classical Greek, and Yale University...
published a collection of his essays. Since his death in 1994 four collections of his writings have been published.
Philosophy of science, induction and probability
Stove's starting point in philosophy of science was the Humean argument for inductive skepticism. Stove was a great admirer of David HumeDavid Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
but thought that this argument (which some contemporary Hume scholars would hesitate to attribute to Hume) was not only fallacious but harmful in its effects, and was one of the causes (though not the only one) of the "modern nervousness". Stove took it as his main task to refute Hume's inductive skepticism. There were two aspects to this task. The first was negative - to show that Hume's argument failed. The second was positive - to provide a justification of induction
Inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates propositions that are abstractions of observations. It is commonly construed as a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances...
.
Stove's argument for the negative task was this. Consider a claim such as "All ravens are black". Hume argued that we don't know this a priori
A priori and a posteriori (philosophy)
The terms a priori and a posteriori are used in philosophy to distinguish two types of knowledge, justifications or arguments...
and that it cannot be entailed from necessary truths. Nor can it be deduced from our observations of ravens. We can only derive it from these observations if we add a premise to the effect that the unobserved is like the observed. But we have no a priori justification of this premise, and any attempt to derive it by empirical means would be circular. So Hume concluded that induction
Inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates propositions that are abstractions of observations. It is commonly construed as a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances...
is unjustified.
Stove argued that Hume was presuming "deductivism" (Stove's best-known expression of this point was in a paper titled 'Hume, Probability and Induction'). This is the view, explicitly or implicitly accepted by many modern philosophers, that the only valid and sound arguments are ones that entail their conclusions. But if we accept that premises can support a conclusion to a greater (or lesser) degree without entailing it, then we have no need to add a premise to the effect that the unobserved will be like the observed - the observational premises themselves can provide strong support for the conclusion, and make it likely to be true. Stove argued that nothing in Hume's argument shows that this cannot be the case and so Hume's argument does not go through, unless one can defend deductivism. This argument wasn't entirely original with Stove but it had never been articulated so well before. Since Stove put it forward some philosophers have come to accept that it defeats Hume's argument.
The positive task was attempted by Stove in Probability and Hume's Inductive Scepticism (1973) and later in The Rationality of Induction (1986). Stove's principal positive argument for induction
Inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates propositions that are abstractions of observations. It is commonly construed as a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances...
was presented in the latter book and was developed from an argument put forward by one of Stove's heroes, the late Donald Cary Williams (formerly Professor at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
) in his book The Ground of Induction. Stove argued that it is a statistical truth that the great majority of the possible subsets of specified size (as long as this size is not too small) are similar to the larger population to which they belong. For example, the majority of the subsets which contain 3000 ravens which you can form from the raven population are similar to the population itself (and this applies no matter how large the raven population is, as long as it is not infinite). Consequently, Stove argued that if you find yourself with such a subset then the chances are that this subset is one of the ones that are similar to the population, and so you are justified in concluding that it is likely that this subset 'matches' the population reasonably closely. The situation would be analogous to drawing a ball out of a barrel of balls, 99% of which are red. In such a case you have a 99% chance of drawing a red ball. Similarly, when getting a sample of ravens the probability is very high that the sample is one of the matching or 'representative' ones. So as long as you have no reason to think that your sample is not unrepresentative you are justified in thinking that probably (although not certainly) that it is representative.
Stove also worked on falsificationism, the raven paradox
Raven paradox
The Raven paradox, also known as Hempel's paradox or Hempel's ravens is a paradox proposed by the German logician Carl Gustav Hempel in the 1940s to illustrate a problem where inductive logic violates intuition...
, grue (color)
Grue (color)
Grue and bleen are artificial predicates, coined as two portmanteaux of "green" and "blue" by philosopher Nelson Goodman in his book Fact, Fiction, and Forecast...
and inductive logic.
Polemics against Popper and other 'irrationalists'
Stove became best known to the wider intellectual community for his attacks on Karl PopperKarl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
and his falsificationist philosophy of science, as well as the influential philosophies of Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.Kuhn...
and Paul Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades . He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand,...
. His book Popper and After
Popper and After
Popper and After is a book by David Charles Stove first published by Pergamon Press in 1982. It was subtitled Four Modern Irrationalists...
: Four Modern Irrationalists (1982) has been reprinted in two new editions in recent years (under the titles Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult and Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism). In it Stove claimed to expose the methods by which Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos
Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his...
and Feyerabend managed to make their purportedly untenable philosophies seem respectable.
One such method, Stove claimed, was the "neutralizing of success words". Stove argued that in the philosophies of these authors such things as progress, discovery, evidence and knowledge do not exist and that if this position were stated openly and consistently maintained then few would ever have taken these philosophies seriously. Stove contended that these authors got around this problem by using these success words, but in scare quotes, e.g., "knowledge". The fact that these words were used regularly, even if in scare quotes, gave the impression that the view being put forward was somehow not rejecting these concepts.
Another method Stove attributed to Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend was what he called the "sabotaging of logical expressions". This was the practise of robbing logical statements of their logical force by placing them in epistemic contexts; for example, instead of saying "P is a proof for Q" one would say "It is generally believed by scientists that P is a proof for Q". This produces what Stove calls a "ghost logical statement": it gives the impression that serious statements of logic are being made when they are not - all that is really being made are sociological or historical claims which are immune to criticism on logical grounds.
Stove charged Popper with enfant terriblisme, claiming that his work was motivated by levity - the failure to take the truth about the topics under discussion seriously. That Feyerabend is guilty of this sin is obvious even to his supporters (nor does he deny it) - but the accusation against the apparently ultra-serious Popper seems at first glance surprising. Stove nevertheless argued that Popper was a product of the "jazz age", where, in the words of Cole Porter
Cole Porter
Cole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, he defied the wishes of his domineering grandfather and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn towards musical theatre...
, "day's night today" and vice versa - only that Popper's "jazz age" was played out in the intellectual world rather than at bohemian parties.
Kuhn's writings on the other hand are free of levity. Stove said that this is because Kuhn
- "is in earnest with irrationalist philosophy of science, while the others are not. He actually believes, what the others only imply and pretend to believe... and he even bids fair, by the immense influence of his writings on 'the rabble without doors', to make irrationalism the majority opinion."
The Plato Cult
The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (1991) was even more controversial than Popper and After, not least for the fact that its analyses were often as sociological or satirical as they were philosophical. Among the topics that Stove attacked were Nelson GoodmanNelson Goodman
Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.-Career:...
's "worldmaking", external world skepticism
Skepticism
Skepticism has many definitions, but generally refers to any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere...
and solipsism
Solipsism
Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. The term comes from Latin solus and ipse . Solipsism as an epistemological position holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not...
, Popper again, and Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick was an American political philosopher, most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia , a right-libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice...
's idea that explanation should replace argument (Stove argued that the distinction was vacuous, and a product of the desire to appear non-coercive).
Stove also harshly criticised philosophical idealism. Stove claimed that what George Berkeley
George Berkeley
George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...
did was to try to derive a non-tautological conclusion from tautological reasoning. He argued that in Berkeley's case the fallacy
Fallacy
In logic and rhetoric, a fallacy is usually an incorrect argumentation in reasoning resulting in a misconception or presumption. By accident or design, fallacies may exploit emotional triggers in the listener or interlocutor , or take advantage of social relationships between people...
is not obvious and this is because one premise is ambiguous between one meaning which is tautological
Tautology (logic)
In logic, a tautology is a formula which is true in every possible interpretation. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein first applied the term to redundancies of propositional logic in 1921; it had been used earlier to refer to rhetorical tautologies, and continues to be used in that alternate sense...
and one which is not (but which is logically equivalent
Logical equivalence
In logic, statements p and q are logically equivalent if they have the same logical content.Syntactically, p and q are equivalent if each can be proved from the other...
to the conclusion). Stove concluded that it was hard to avoid the view that idealism is just a religious substitute.
About Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
he had this to say:
- "Kant's questions are so strange and arresting that no one who has once heard them ever forgets them. It is just the reverse with his answers to them: no one can ever remember what these are! And there is a simple reason for this: the questions never get answered at all. Once they have served as an excuse for the darkening of sufficient area of wood-pulp, they just get lost."
The book ends with Stove claiming to show (in "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts?") just how easily abstract thought can go wrong, the seemingly endless ways in which it can, and how little we know about these ways. To this end he gave a list of forty propositions about the number 3, all of which he argued demonstrate thought going wrong, and yet we can only say of a few of these what particular "disease of thought" is occurring.
For example:
- Three lies between two and four only by a convention which mathematicians have adopted.
- There is an integer between two and four, but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed.
- Three is an incomplete object, only now coming into existence.
- The tie which unites the number three to its properties (such as primeness) is inexplicable.
In the book Stove also coined the phrase Horror Victorianorum
Horror Victorianorum
Horror Victorianorum is a term devised by the philosopher David Stove to refer to irrational distaste for, or condemnation of, Victorian culture, art and design. The term was used in Stove's book The Plato Cult as part of his argument against Karl Popper and other philosophers whom he...
("a horror of the Victorians") to satirise what he perceived as an irrational modernist distaste for Victorian culture. This concept has been taken up within design and art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
in order to characterise unthinkingly visceral dislike of Victorian architecture, art and design.
Political philosophy
After a brief flirtation with Marxism, Stove abandoned the left. His views were summed-up well in his paper, "Why You Should be A Conservative" (reprinted in part as "The Columbus Argument"). His main argument in this paper was that just as there are many more ways to make a television set worse than those which will make it better, so there are many more ways to make society worse than to make it better. If we think otherwise that is only because we have been fed "a one-sided diet of examples", such as Christopher ColumbusChristopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...
, Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance astronomer and the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe....
and Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
rather than Pol Pot
Pol Pot
Saloth Sar , better known as Pol Pot, , was a Cambodian Maoist revolutionary who led the Khmer Rouge from 1963 until his death in 1998. From 1976 to 1979, he served as the Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea....
, Maximilien Robespierre
Maximilien Robespierre
Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre is one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution. He largely dominated the Committee of Public Safety and was instrumental in the period of the Revolution commonly known as the Reign of Terror, which ended with his...
, Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
, and Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
. So the odds are that change will make things worse, not better. Hence it is rational to be cautious and conservative about proposed changes. Stove concluded that there is more reason to discourage innovation than encourage it.
Stove believed that proposed changes should not be radical, that they should be very carefully considered, and should have very good supporting evidence on their side before they are implemented. However, according to Stove, current opinion believed the opposite: the very fact that an idea is an innovation is an argument in its favour, and that we even have an obligation to take innovations seriously simply because they are innovations.
Stove also regularly derided the Enlightenment view of progress. This is the view which John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton, CB FBA , was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments...
attributed to Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
: that
- "human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally."
There were many people in modern times, Stove thought, who hold such beliefs - that in the past the world was a dark place run according to foolish principles, but that from now on things will be run properly and the world will be vastly improved as a result. But, he asked, what reason do we have to think that darkness is about to suddenly give way to light? Why is it that we will be so much better at running things than past generations? "Education" is the answer that is often given in reply to this question, but Stove was deeply skeptical about the effectiveness of education in making the world a better place. Stove felt that learning has great value in itself, but unlike Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
did not think that the more educated a ruler is the better he will be at ruling.
Evolution
In his final years Stove began to examine and criticize Evolutionary biology. This surprised and dismayed many of his supporters. However, Stove's attack on biological evolution was not as radical as it appeared - he accepted evolution was true of all living things, and said he had no objection to natural selection being true of more primitive organisms. What he wanted to attack was the allegedly distorted view of human beings proposed by some "Ultra-Darwinists". For example, he misattributed JBS Haldane's famous quip that he would "lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins" to the Oxford biologist W. D. HamiltonW. D. Hamilton
William Donald Hamilton FRS was a British evolutionary biologist, widely recognised as one of the greatest evolutionary theorists of the 20th century....
, who had recently developed ideas of Kin selection
Kin selection
Kin selection refers to apparent strategies in evolution that favor the reproductive success of an organism's relatives, even at a cost to the organism's own survival and reproduction. Charles Darwin was the first to discuss the concept of group/kin selection...
, and suggested that such ideas are probably false, and certainly unverified. Stove argued that these sorts of strong claims are often made by hard-line sociobiologists, yet they are seldom pointed out even by many of their opponents.
Stove also argued that leading evolutionary biologists were confused about altruism
Altruism
Altruism is a concern for the welfare of others. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures, and a core aspect of various religious traditions, though the concept of 'others' toward whom concern should be directed can vary among cultures and religions. Altruism is the opposite of...
, often talking as though altruism didn't really exist and was some sort of sham. What they should have said, Stove contended, was that they had explained the origins of altruism. But the damage has been done, according to Stove: many people now share this suspicion about altruism and this has, at least to some degree contributed to the growth of cynicism and selfishness.
Furthermore, Stove argued that evolutionary theorists have always had difficulties in trying to reconcile their theory with the fact that there appears to be no Darwinian fight for survival in modern times, and Stove harshly criticized what he saw as attempts to patch these perceived holes up by what he calls the 'Cave Men' theory - a view that T. H. Huxley often resorted to - which says that while the "Darwinian struggle" no longer occurs in existing human populations it did so amongst cave-men. The 'Hard Man' says that there is still a evolutionary struggle for survival going on all around us, only we are blind to it (Stove claimed that Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
was a Hard Man). The 'Soft Man' however never notices the inconsistency.
Stove also claimed that the simple Malthusian view of population that many evolutionary scientists accept is not true of humans - humans do not continue expanding in population until they have eaten up all of their food supplies which then results in massive deaths from starvation. In fact, the population growth of richer nations is typically slower than that of poorer nations. (This sort of view has been defended in more recent years by population economists such as Julian Lincoln Simon
Julian Lincoln Simon
Julian Lincoln Simon was a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute at the time of his death, after previously serving as a longtime business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Simon wrote many books and...
.)
His essays on Darwinism were collected in the book Darwinian Fairytales
Darwinian Fairytales
Darwinian Fairytales is a book by David Stove which criticizes application of the theory of evolution as an explanation for sociobiological behavior such as altruism.Martin Gardner wrote:...
.
Stove's views on race and gender
Stove made bigoted and sexist arguments in some of his works, most notably in "The Intellectual Capacity of Women" and "Racial and Other Antagonisms" (both of which appear in Cricket versus Republicanism and Against the Idols of the Age). In the former he argued that women are "on the whole" intellectually inferior to men, while in "Racial and Other Antagonisms" Stove asserted that racismRacism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
is not a form of prejudice
Prejudice
Prejudice is making a judgment or assumption about someone or something before having enough knowledge to be able to do so with guaranteed accuracy, or "judging a book by its cover"...
but common sense:
- "Almost everyone unites in declaring "racism" false and detestable. Yet absolutely everyone knows it is true."
He argued that, while these differences were likely caused by cultural rather than genetic factors, where statistical associations existed it was rational to make decisions based on them. His views led to his being threatened with disciplinary action by Sydney University.
A selected bibliography
- Probability and Hume's Inductive Scepticism, Oxford: Clarendon, 1973.
- Popper and AfterPopper and AfterPopper and After is a book by David Charles Stove first published by Pergamon Press in 1982. It was subtitled Four Modern Irrationalists...
: Four Modern Irrationalists, Oxford: Pergamon, 1982. (Reprinted as Scientific Irrationalism, New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001; and as Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism, Macleay Press, Sydney, 1998.) - The Rationality of Induction, Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.
- The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
- Cricket versus Republicanism, ed. James Franklin & R. J. Stove, Sydney: Quakers Hill Press, 1995.
- Darwinian FairytalesDarwinian FairytalesDarwinian Fairytales is a book by David Stove which criticizes application of the theory of evolution as an explanation for sociobiological behavior such as altruism.Martin Gardner wrote:...
, Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1995, repr. New York: Encounter Books, 2006. - Against the Idols of the Age, ed. Roger Kimball, New Brunswick (US) and London (UK): Transaction, 1999.
- On Enlightenment, ed. Andrew Irvine, New Brunswick (US) and London (UK): Transaction, 2002.
- What's Wrong with Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment, ed. Andrew Irvine, New York: Encounter Books, 2011.
External links
- Stove's literary executorLiterary executorA literary executor is a person with decision-making power in respect of a literary estate. According to Wills, Administration and Taxation: a practical guide "A will may appoint different executors to deal with different parts of the estate...
, James Franklin, has published a large amount of Stove's work online (here), including links to two complete books. - DAVID STOVE (1927-1994) by Scott Campbell