Stowe, David Charles

David Stoke was born in Morea ( New South Wales ) - a small Australian town. He later lived in Newcastle (New South Wales) , then entered the University of Sydney , where he studied philosophy in the 1940s . At university, he, like many Australian philosophers of that generation, came under the influence of Professor John Anderson. Although he supported his views on rationalism, he later got rid of all the other elements of his influence.

After completing his education, Stow became a member of the political / bohemian circle at the University of Sydney (some of whose members later joined Sydney Push (Sydney Push)). At that time, Stove was fond of Marxism , but later abandoned it when he realized "what intellectual work really is." He became a conservative and later his views often clashed with those of his former comrades.

Stove attended lectures at the University of New South Wales (in Sydney) in 1952 , and in 1960 began to lecture at the University of Sydney, where he eventually became an assistant professor . In the early 1970s, his department became quite unpopular due to fights between Marxists and conservatives. Their misunderstandings received wide coverage in the local press. Stowe and David Armstrong actively resisted what they saw as Marxist attempts to take over the leadership of the department. The consequence of these battles was the division of the department into two new ones. Even after that, Stowe continued to talk about the dominance of Marxists and feminists at the University, as a result of which he was threatened with disciplinary proceedings against him by the University if he did not stop such statements. Frustrated by what is happening to university life in particular and academic culture in general, Stow resigned early in 1987 .

Stove moved from the city center to the outskirts of Sydney - to Mulgoa Bay. He was interested in gardening and believed that it was necessary to preserve the natural beauty of the world, but sometimes he was criticized by environmentalists. Stove’s other hobbies were his family, old books, and cricket. David Stoke smoked and was diagnosed with stomach cancer in the early 1990s . His wife also suffered from this disease, although she survived Stowa for 7 years. After a painful struggle with the disease, David Charles Stove committed suicide on June 2, 1994 at the age of 66.

Stowe was best known for his fierce criticism (especially the falsificationism of Popper, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism). Some thought that Stowe was witty in expressing a common opinion and said that he would defeat inductive skepticism. However, many reject his arguments in favor of induction and his criticism of contemporaries: Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend. Sometimes Stow is seen simply as a reactionary polemic. Stove also wrote articles on various topics for non-philosophical journals. In the early 2000s, art critic and conservative expert Roger Kimball published a collection of articles by Stowe, which could not but improve the position of the latter in society. Since the death of David Stowe in 1994, 2 collections of his works have been released.

In many ways, Stow’s views were contrary to what many considered acceptable. Here are two examples: “The Intellectual Capacity of Women” and “Racial and Other Antagonisms” - from “Cricket versus Republicanism” and “Against the Idols of the Age” ^[2] - and “Against the idols of the age: edited with an introduction by Roger Kimball” ^[3] ). In the first of these works, he cites inductive evidence that “in most cases” women are lower than men in intellectual development. Stowe states that in history there were only a few women with a high level of intelligence and, therefore, there is no reason to believe that this circumstance does not reflect the degree of inborn mental abilities of women. In Racial and Other Antagonisms, Stow argues that racism is not at all a definite form of prejudice, but reflects generally available knowledge: “Despite the fact that everyone claims that“ racism ”is something false and not true, it’s actually absolutely everyone knows that he is justified. ”

The starting point in the philosophy of science for Stowe was Hume's arguments for inductive skepticism . Stove always admired David Hume ^[4] , but at the same time believed that his arguments were not only erroneous, but also destructively harmful, because they became one of the causes of modern unrest in society. Thus, Stow set to work on refuting Hume's inductive skepticism, identifying the inconsistency of his arguments and confirming the validity of induction .

Stove denied Hume's position as follows. Take the well-known statement that "All crows are black." According to Hume, we do not know this a priori and this is not an obvious truth. In addition, our observations of crows cannot convince us of this. We can probably assume that the unobserved crows are exactly the same as the observed crows, but we cannot be sure of the correctness of this assumption. Thus, attempts to prove this on the basis of sensory experience seem to us to be movement in a circle. So Hume concluded that induction is not verifiable.

Stowe believed that Hume even dared to talk about the existence of “deductivism.” allow us to draw any conclusions and achieve the desired results.If we agree with this statement, then we need to add the condition that unobserved ravens, such as exactly observed ones, disappear, because our observations themselves can lead us to the necessary conclusions, convincing us that “all crows are black.” Stoke believed that Hume’s arguments were not studied in detail and did not understand point by point, because they looked like an indisputable fact, but this continued until the scientists engaged The study of deductivism. Stow was not the first to talk about this, but he was one of the first to clearly articulate his position and express it openly.Many philosophers agreed with him, thereby providing significant support for deductivism.

An attempt to formulate his position more clearly was made by Stove in his works “Hume Probability and Inductive Skepticism” (1973) ^[5] and “Rationality of Induction” (1986) ^[6] . Stowe's main argument for induction was made in his later books. It was developed from the ideas of the revered Stove, the late Donald Carey Williams (during the life of Professor Harvard), expressed by him in his book, "Founding of Induction." Stoke was convinced that most likely subspecies of a certain size are similar to the rest of the population to which they belong. For example, most of the subspecies containing 3,000 ravens each, which are formed from the entire raven population, are all alike. Therefore, Stow argued that if you take any subset, it is highly likely that this is one of the subsets related to the set itself, and from here, we are convinced that the subset matches the set quite accurately. A similar situation is possible when you need to pull a ball out of a barrel with balls, 99% of which are red. In this case, the probability of drawing a red ball is 99%. Thus, when we see a raven, we are sure that this is a typical representative of a raven. As long as you have no reason to think that this individual is not characteristic of a raven population, you are sure that this is possible (although this is not so at all).

Stowe became known to the general intelligentsia for his criticism of Popper's work and its falsification of the philosophy of science, as well as the influential philosophies of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feiraband. His book Popper and Followers: 4 Modern Irrationalists (1982) (Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists ^[7] ) has been released in two editions in recent years:

• Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult ^[8] (Scientific Irrationalism: The Origin of the Postmodern Era)
• “Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism” (“Everything will go: the origin of the philosophy of scientific irrationalism”)

In them, Stoke claims to expose and flaunt the methods used by Popper, Kuhn, and Feyrabend in their work, so that, in their meaning, unreliable reasoning seems convincing.

One of these methods is “neutralizing important words”. Stove speaks of the absence of such things as progress, discovery, proof and knowledge in the reasoning of these authors. And if these arguments were firmly fixed and stated clearly and openly, few would ever take their philosophies seriously. Stove claims that they are going around the bush using these words, but using them in quotation marks, as if saying that the word should not be taken literally, for example, “knowledge”. The fact that these words are used regularly, even in quotation marks, gives the impression that the views put forward in one way or another do not deviate from true concepts. Another method attributed by Stove to Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feirabend is the so-called "sabotage of logical expressions." It represents the deprivation of logical expressions of their logical strength by placing them in epistemological contexts; for example, instead of the expression “A is evidence for B,” they will say, “Scientists usually take it for the truth that A is evidence for B”. This gives rise to what Stoke calls "false logical statements": they give the impression that serious statements of logic were made, although this is not so - what is actually done is sociological or historical statements that are resistant to criticism based on logic .

Stow accuses Popper, saying that his book was motivated by frivolity, it clearly rejects the discovery of the truth on seriously stated topics. The fact that Feirabend is guilty of this mistake is obvious even to his supporters, but attacks on Popper's ultra - serious works look, at first glance, surprising. However, Stowe writes that Popper was a man of the "era of jazz" , where, according to the song by Col Porter, "day is night," the opposite is true - only the Popper era of jazz manifested itself more in the intellectual world than in the Bohemian aspects.

On the other hand, there is no frivolity in Kuhn's works. Stove writes: “He takes seriously the irrational philosophy of science, while others do not. He actually believes that others only imply and pretend to be faith ... and he even admits the likelihood of a huge impact of his work on ordinary people, and thus the transformation of irrationalism into the majority opinion. ”

In recent years, Stoke began to research and criticize Darwinism . This surprised and alarmed many of his supporters. However, Stowe's attacks on Darwinism were not as radical as expected. He acknowledged that evolution is a plausible theory for all living organisms, and he has no objection to natural selection for most primitive organisms. Stove criticized the idea of ​​"ultra-Darwinism", calling their views distorted. For example, he correlates the famous saying of the scientist Haldane “I would give my life for two brothers or eight cousins” with the thoughts of the biologist Hamilton , who developed the ideas of cognate selection, and suggests that these ideas are incorrect, and of course, they are not verifiable. Stove writes that this kind of statement is usually made by uncompromising sociobiologists, but nevertheless they are rarely distinguished even by opponents. Stowe also argues that the leading Darwinists were entangled in the ideas of altruism , usually speaking of him as actually non-existent, a kind of deception. What they had to say, according to Stow, was to explain its origin. But the damage has already been done: many people now share the same opinion about altruism, and this, at least to some extent, has contributed to the growth of cynicism and selfishness.