A TANGLED TALE

With Daubert, Ronald Allen observed in an article published the following year, the Supreme Court had “replaced a judicial anachronism [Frye] by a philosophical one [Popper].” It’s a nice one-liner; and there’s an element of truth in it. For decades, Karl Popper was enormously influential in philosophy of science (though, interestingly, less so in the US than elsewhere), and much admired by some important scientists. But by the time Daubert came down the year before his death at the age of 93, he was no longer the major player he had once been. The English edition of his Logic of Scientific Discovery first appeared in 1959; and since that time numerous rivals to his falsificationist approach had found supporters: Thomas Kuhn’s picture of routine, “normal” science conducted under a ruling paradigm, and the overturning and replacement of an old paradigm by a new in periods of “revolutionary” science (1962); Imre Lakatos’s attempt to distinguish progressive from degenerating research programs (1970); Paul Feyerabend’s methodological anarchism (1978); and, more recently, the many and various styles of “science studies,” Bayesian and decision-theoretical currents in mainstream philosophy of science, etc., etc. Popper still has his devotedly loyal followers, though they are fewer than they once were.