Karl Popper (1902 to 1994), an Austrian-born British philosopher, held that what makes a theory scientific is not that it can be proved, but that it can be tested and could turn out to be false; he called this falsifiability, and held that all knowledge stays provisional, open to criticism. For shamanic work the closest meeting point is the line between logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this and mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, by which claims about facts in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer should be checkable, whereas journeys are mythos, not a source of facts. Popper himself never held that what is not science is meaningless.
Who was Karl Popper? #
He was born in Vienna on 28 July 1902. His first book, Logik der Forschung (1935), appeared in English, in his own translation, as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). In 1937 he took a post at Canterbury College in New Zealand, where he spent the Second World War and wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). From 1946 he taught at the London School of Economics, becoming professor of logic and scientific method in 1949. He was knighted in 1965, retired in 1969 and died in 1994.1
What is falsifiability? #
Popper’s answer to what he saw as the central question in the philosophy of science, namely what separates science from things that are not science? It is not that scientific theories are proved true, since no number of observations can prove a general law. It is that a scientific theory sticks its neck out. It forbids certain things from happening, so it can be tested, and if those things happen it is refuted.
He drew the contrast between two kinds of theory. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity made risky predictions, such as the bending of starlight observed by Arthur Eddington in 1919, which could have shown it to be false. The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, by contrast, seemed able to explain any behaviour at all, which to Popper made them “simply non-testable, irrefutable”. Marxism had begun by making predictions, but when they failed its followers added new assumptions to save it, which he called “reinforced dogmatism”.2
From this came his picture of how knowledge grows: by conjectures and refutations, bold guesses put to the hardest tests we can find, with the survivors kept for now and never treated as final. He called his stance critical rationalism, with critical thinking at its centre.3
Did Popper think what is not science is worthless? #
No. Falsifiability marks the edge of science; it is not a test of whether something means anything. On the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy‘s reading of Popper, to call a theory unscientific “is not necessarily to hold that it is unenlightening, still less that it is meaningless”, and “even purely mythogenic explanations have performed a valuable function in the past”. He called psychoanalysis a pre-science, which undoubtedly contained useful truths, even though it was not yet testable.4
What does Popper mean for shamanic work? #
He sharpens the line between logos and mythos. Logos is something literally true; mythos is metaphorically true, meant as metaphor. When an Inuit saying speaks of people becoming animals, it is not claiming that a human body can physically transform.5 Shamanic journeys are mythos, full of symbolic meaning, not literal truth, and “You cannot use them to find out ‘facts’.” Over the last few thousand years an enormous amount of damage has come from people taking mythos, sacred books for example, as literally true.6 There is a resemblance here, drawn in this answer rather than by Popper, whose phrase was about the defenders of Marxism: his reinforced dogmatism, a theory defended against every possible refutation, looks much like mythos hardened into literal fact.
Logos is the literal truth, and journeys are the realm of meanings, relationships and insights, not of facts. Popper’s test belongs on the logos side of that line; a journey answers a different kind of question.
Shamanism is also about direct personal experience, and not about an act of faith. Nobody is asked to accept anyone else’s experiences of the realms; the invitation is to journey and find out for oneself whether shamanic reality is subjective or objective, real or imaginary.7 And views are changed when the evidence changes. When brain imaging found no evidence that either hemisphere dominates in brain activity, the account of the two hemispheres was revised: both are equally active, and the two still perceive and process the world differently, but people differ in which hemisphere’s responses they attend to, so that in that sense some people are indeed more ‘left-brained’.8 There is a shamanic test of usefulness, too, “Does it grow corn?”, meaning never mind the dogma, does it work? A fuller version asks what kind of corn it grows.9
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On how many ways there are of knowing. Popper’s test belongs to logos, and he was concerned with how scientific knowledge grows. Therapeutic Shamanism holds that left-brain analysis is only one way of knowing the truth, and that a right-brain approach is equally valid.10 A journey, like a painting or a poem, is not trying to be falsifiable, and is not a failed science for that reason.
On what experience can show. Popper was wary of theories that every experience seems to confirm. The reality of the spirits, in shamanic practice, is not settled by argument at all but met in experience, and people who persevere with journeying learn to feel the difference between what is imagination and what is very real.11 See How does Therapeutic Shamanism sit with science? and Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
What have critics said about Popper? #
That science does not actually work the way he described. Thomas Kuhn held that scientists inside a paradigm do not drop a theory because of one awkward result, and for many readers his account replaced Popper’s. Imre Lakatos held that theories are guarded by a “protective belt” of auxiliary hypotheses, so that a failed prediction rarely sinks the core theory; Hilary Putnam made a related point, that when a prediction fails we cannot tell whether the law or one of the background assumptions is at fault.12
Popper answered his critics at length, notably in his “Replies to My Critics” (1974). He conceded that falsifiability alone cannot divide science from everything else, and moved to the question of when a change to a theory is properly scientific and when it is a mere patch to save it.13
