Re-tooling Popper: conventional decision and the rationality of improvement

Karl Popper attempts to provide an algorithm for the justification of scientific knowledge, based on a formalist control strategy that assumes a dichotomy between the “rational” and the social. Central to this control strategy is a reliance on conventional decision to exclude the social from science by excluding all human decisions not forced by the logic of the algorithm. On examination, these conventional decisions turn out to involve implicit appeal to various social factors, including consensus processes and a range of social practices. The result is that the processes of construction of knowledge escape the control of his algorithm, and knowledge comes to be seen as a “social construction” rather than a “rational” one. However, deeper examination of three sets of these conventional decisions reveals, firstly, that Popper is rationally designing science as a tool to control the construction of scientific knowledge, and secondly, an implicit control strategy that is far more powerful and sophisticated than the failed formalist control strategy. This implicit strategy provides a new account of the rationality of science which draws on the regulatory capacities of the full range of available regulatory structures, including both “rational” method and various social regulatory formations such as refined consensus processes, social practices and institutions. It provides an account of science as a complex regulatory tool for the control of the construction of scientific knowledge which overcomes the simplistic dichotomy between the rational and the social. These regulatory functions are governed by the rationality of improvement which evaluates the rationality of an input by the extent to which it contributes to the effectiveness of the tool and thus to improvement in overall output. This account makes sense of Popper’s conventional decisions and his project for science better than he is able to do, limited as he is by his formalist presuppositions. Science is a complex regulatory tool for the production of scientific knowledge that is both social and rational.