I've re-read this book, now, I think six times. Each time I find myself busting out laughing. David Stove is so withering, so dry, and so damn incisive, that a few months after I've finished, I feel like reading the whole thing again. I don't think I've ever quite come across another philosophy book like it. Fodor's funny, as well as Hobbes in a sadistic sort of way, but Stove is in a class by himself.
I first became aware of Stove and this book through Keith Windschuttle, who mentioned it in his "The Killing of History". By that time, I owned, I think, every book ever written by Karl Popper, including the later Routledge compilations, and I have to admit, I thought he was on to something in many instances. Yet, in the back of my mind, I did have the odd nagging doubt...some of his word usages did seem suspect...but all in all, I thought he might really be on to something. Why, he'd even "solved the problem of induction!" (groan)
Well, budding Popperian as I was, reading the Stove book hurt - but it "hurt so good". It was excruciating - no sooner had I read the words, than that I could see that Stove was exactly right, and that I (and Popper) had been exactly wrong; and yet, it was so hilarious, all I could do was keep reading, laughing at the whole silly mess. (I think Stove's sarcasm is especially funny here because Popper was so unbelievably humourless about his whole project...and Kuhn seemed to have the personality of a dead halibut).
Anyway, Stove makes a few key points in this little book. One is that Popper's (and his disciples's) philosophy of science, taken on its own terms, is patently ridiculous. Another is to show its source (Popper's uncritical acceptance of Hume's arguments against the rationality of induction). And maybe, in some sense, the most important point, is to show how Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos managed to render their spectacularly implausible accounts of science plausible. This is done, shows Stove, by the extreme violence each wreaks upon the English language.
On this last point, take Popper on "knowledge" for example. One upset Stove reviewer on here has mentioned that Popper wrote entire books on knowledge. Indeed he did - but what he means by the word "knowledge", as Stove shows, is something very different than what others mean. Popper, in just "Conjectures and Refutations" alone, draws equivalence in meaning between "knowledge", and words like "conjecture", "hypothesis", "theory", and....(drum roll please....)...."GUESS"! And any "philosophy of science" which relies on equating "guessing" with "knowing" is, as Stove shows, and as will be obvious to most, just not really a philosophy of science at all. Or is it only just a "guess" that an atomic bomb can be built, or that hearts - not earlobes or fingernails - pump blood?. (Popper even sums up his philosophy in his autobiography, "Unended Quest", in this way: "we never know what we are talking about").
In any case, Popper and the other three discussed by Stove, are four of the most influential philosophers of science of the last half of the twentieth century. (In fact, I just read a few days ago that "The Arts and Humanities Index" shows Kuhn's fairly execrable "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to be the most cited book in academic papers, of all time!). And Stove skewers them, quoting them at length to show just how untenable their claims really are.
I only wish that Popper would have responded to Stove prior to his death. What an exchange that would have been!
I hope this review has helped someone.
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