A critic of Karl Popper on Reddit wrote:
Here's an exercise for you: to the best of your ability, restate and respond to Putnam's criticism of Popper in 'The 'Corroboration' of Theories' or Lakatos's criticism of Popper in 'Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes'. Bonus points for also stating how they differ from each other. Shouldn't be too difficult since you're aware of these common criticisms of Popper!
So let's take a look at that Putnam text. It opens:
... Sir Karl's fundamental attitudes: 'There is no method peculiar to philosophy'. 'The growth of knowledge can be studied best by studying the growth of scientific knowledge.'
Philosophers should not be specialists. For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.
I checked the three unsourced quotes. They're from Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery, in the 1959 preface to the first English edition. The third quote has significant edits with no indication that Putnam made changes. Let's go through them in order.
The first quote omits Popper's italics.
The second quote omits italics, begins mid-sentence, and changes the first word to begin with a capital letter.
The third quote, the block quote, also starts mid-sentence and edits the first word to be capitalized.
So far these issues are somewhat minor. But it gets worse. The third and final sentence of Putnam's block quote is:
And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.
Here's the sentence Popper actually wrote:
And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from narrow specialization and from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill, and in his personal knowledge and authority; a faith that so well fits our 'post-rationalist' and 'post-critical' age, proudly dedicated to the destruction of the tradition of rational philosophy, and of rational thought itself.
Putnam deleted the words "from narrow specialization and".
Putnam deleted the comma after "special skill".
Putnam replaced the semi-colon and everything after it with a period.
Putnam didn't communicate that he made edits.
Deleting words from the middle of a quote without using an ellipsis or square brackets is unacceptable.
Putnam's text is a reprint of a text that Popper already responded to, plus a brief response to Popper's response. In Putnam's followup he has a section "The Charge of Textual Misrepresentation" which responds to Popper's claim that Putnam had misrepresented Popper. It doesn't address these quotation issues, which seems careless to me: if you're going to address that kind of charge, you ought to double check the accuracy of your quotes!
This does not inspire confidence that Putnam's text is worth reading or contains good criticism of Critical Rationalism (or that the Lakatos text, recommended by the same Redditor, is good).
Lakatos, it should be noted, is a fan of Popper. Here's how Lakatos begins his contribution to The Philosophy of Karl Popper, edited by Paul A. Schilpp, volume 1, page 241:
Popper’s ideas represent the most important development in the philosophy of the twentieth century; an achievement in the tradition— and on the level—of Hume, Kant, or Whewell. Personally, my debt to him is immeasurable: more than anyone else, he changed my life.
So it doesn't make sense to cite Lakatos when you want to dismiss Popper as a bad thinker who should be ignored and whose fans shouldn't be debated.
And Putnam is a partial fan of Popper, not someone who thinks Popper should be dismissed or ignored. Here's how Putnam begins the text the Redditor recommended:
Sir Karl Popper is a philosopher whose work has influenced and stimulated that of virtually every student in the philosophy of science. In part this influence is explainable on the basis of the healthy-mindedness of some of Sir Karl’s fundamental attitudes
And Putnam wrote a text trying to engage with Popper, plus a followup. Putnam did not behave like some Redditors (who ironically cite Putnam) who think Popper should be treated as an unreasonable outcast and his claims and fans ignored without debate.
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