UNCHANGED MEANINGS

Popper's thoughts on objective knowledge are best approached by way of his theory of language. This is a biological theory, rooted in the four-stage problem-solving schema that he has generalised to describe the full range of problem-solving activities from the amoeba, through the evolution of life on earth to the intellectual activities of Einstein. The starting point is a problem confronting the organism; the second step is the production of tentative solutions, trial responses to the problem situation. The third stage is the process of error-elimination, weeding out those among the competing solutions that do not work. The fourth stage is the emergence of new problems, created by the foregoing activities. As applied to biological evolution, this model signals some important differences from the traditional picture of "nature red in tooth and claw" where the driving force was supposed to be the pressure of competition in the battle for survival. Here the progressive impetus comes not from the pressure of the environment or competitors but from the capacity of the organism to generate variations in form or behaviour (or theoretical constructs) to explore and exploit its situation.

Levels of Language

Popper followed Karl Buhler in his theory of language. Buhler is probably best known with his wife Charlotte as a pioneer in child psychology in the 1920s. He also taught Piaget, Wittgenstein and Popper and was an examiner of Popper's doctoral dissertation. He distinguished three functions of language, each with different biological functions.

1. The expressive function.

2. The signaling function.

3. The descriptive function.

To these Popper added

4. The argumentative function.

(There is no correlation between the four stages of the problem-solving schema and the four levels of language) Buhler suggested that animal and human languages have much in common at the lower levels of expression and signaling but the descriptive level is distinctively human.

Reductive or "nothing but" theories, including the materialist theory of mind and theories of knowledge which view knowledge as a form of subjective belief, argue that the higher functions are merely special cases of the lower functions. Such reductions have a degree of plausibility because the lower functions are always present with the higher order functions but not vice versa. We can express ourselves or signal without at the same time describing or arguing. The expressive function is the lowest common denominator of all forms of language and so reductionists can always locate an expressive component in any communication.

The lowest level is symptomatic or expressive of the state of the organism and is not by itself important as a means of communication. Machinery functions at this level (a ticking clock or a squeaky wheel). The signalling or trigger function appears in communities of animals where signals are important in the life of the group. Special signals can indicate the presence of food or the appearance of a predator; others are involved in hunting, mating and raising the young. Signalling occurs when the receiver is primed to respond in a certain way or can be trained to do so. Machinery can be programmed to behave in this way and the signalling function does not require any assumption about intentions on the part of the sender, nor any suggestion that the receiver reflectively assigns a meaning to the communication. Of course signals can be interpreted in different ways and the mating call of one species could signal "dinner time" to a predator.

Popper argues that the descriptive function only appears with the human use of language.

In contrast with the rigid sets of signals which animals inherit or learn, descriptive language is almost infinitely flexible and this enables the playful and creative invention of myths and stories, (and also the deliberate use of lies). Popper speculated that the evolutionary pathway from the signal to the descriptive level lay with the playfulness of young animals, with the babbling of mothers with babies and the antics of gangs of youngsters.

The advent of descriptive language raises the issues of truth and falsity, which leads to the possibility of argument and the use of reasons for or against the truth or adequacy of a description. This in turn can result in systematic critical thinking and the deliberately cultivated attitude of willingness to reconsider ideas and opinions.

"But in order to make it possible to criticise a theory, the organism must be able to regard the theory as an object. The only way known to do this is to formulate the theory in a descriptive language and, preferably, in a written language".

The Contents of Thought

The implication of Popper's argument is that we need to talk about an idea or write it down before we can find out what the idea really means. We need to explore its implications and its relationships to other things that we know. Speech and writing enable our thoughts to have a feedback effect on us, through the interaction between mind and language. And the medium of language enables us to communicate with other minds as well.

This raises the question: what is being communicated from one mind to another? It seems the something travels in addition to the wound waves in the air or the visual impression of the marks on the paper. The state of mind of the speaker or writer does not travel, though some approximation of something that was in the mind of the sender sometimes makes its way into the mind of the receiver. The standard answer is that the meaning of the communication travels. But what is the status of the meaning, apart form brain states, soundwaves and the like?

The Unspeakable Meinong

He need not have worried. The objective contents of thought disappeared from empiricist theories under the influence of Russell's quest for certainty based on the reduction of beliefs to empirical evidence (possibly goaded by Wittgenstein in his first phase). So empiricism turned into modern positivism and the problem of induction remained at the heart of doomed efforts to base knowledge firmly on the foundation of experience. In this way the demand for the justification of beliefs resulted in the loss of the theory of objective knowledge for half a century.

Popper does not deny that there is such a thing as personal or subjective knowledge and he argues that this should be studied from a biological or evolutionary point of view. He has proposed a "three world" theory to take account of subjective knowledge and objective knowledge as well. In his essay on human freedom titled "Indeterminism is not enough", Encounter April 1973 he suggested

To make this a little more concrete, consider a book, its contents and its readership. The book as a physical object belongs in world 1. It contains information, which belongs in world 3. Copies of the same book are separate world 1 objects with the same world 3 contents. When different people read them they give rise to distinct and private sets of world 2 events, based on world 1 brain processes. If people attempt to communicate their understanding of the contents of the book in spoken or written form then the contents of their speech or writing can be located in world 3. The communication involves world 2 in the form of thoughts and intentions, and world 1 in the form of more brain processes, soundwaves and marks on paper. The contents of the communication may be very different from the original contents of the book, due to imperfect understanding and the vagaries of interpretation, even so, there will be objective relationships of various forms between the original contents and the translations or interpretations or criticisms that are aroused by reading the work.

The Contribution of Wellek and Warren

1. The poem is a physical artefact consisting of marks on paper, or the grooves on a Babylonian tablet.
2. The poem is the sequence of sounds uttered by a speaker, reading aloud.
3. The poem is the experience of the reader.
4. The poem is an expression of the experience of the author.
5. The poem is a stratified complex of values, which cannot be reduced to any of the previous four theories.

They rejected (1) because a poem can be preserved in a purely oral tradition. Also the precise physical form of the work is not crucial. Hamlet is the same regardless of the size of the pages or the typeface or errors in typesetting or translation of particular editions.

They dismissed (2) because we do not read for the sounds alone, we read for plot and character and much more besides. As for (3) they argued that readers are influenced by all manner of personal circumstances ranging from their own theories of poetry and value to momentary conditions such as fatigue, worry or distraction.

The fourth type of theory takes two broad forms; in one the poem represents the intentions of the writer, in the other it reflects in some sense the totality of experience of the author, conscious and unconscious. The first of these views has little credibility because the so-called Intentional Fallacy has taken a severe beating in modern times. The second splits in half again, yielding deep psychological accounts of the work on one hand, and on the other, theories that account for the work as the outcome of largescale historical and social influences bearing on the writer.

Wellek and Warren reject all the foregoing (while allowing some scope for investigations along those lines). They favour (5), a combination of phenomenology and modern linguistics.

This perspective clearly has many points of contact with Popper's three world theory. The poem is more than a physical (world 1) object because is partly a subjective (world 2) event, and there is even more than that because it has some form of intersubjective existence. Wellek and Warren address this aspect in terms of collective ideology, while Popper speaks of the partial autonomy of the contents. Each formulation calls for a theory about emergent possibilities, sui generis qualities that cannot be reduced, without loss, to the more basic physical and subjective aspects of the poem, in the same way that the higher functions of language cannot be fully reduced to the lower functions.

Durkheim and Forms of Life

Wellek and Warren’s mention of the emergent, sui generis nature of a literary work should immediately remind us of Durkheim’s sui generis theory to account for the nature of that cultural artefact par excellence – society itself. Durkheim’s theory of collective representations is a good start on a theory of objective knowledge, which has been relegated to the archive of sociological oddities. It seems that it has not been developed despite Durkheim’s status as a founding father of sociology with his classical investigation of suicide and religious affiliation. Nobody could work out what to do with his conscience collective, sometimes translated as the "collective conscience" to illustrate its role in maintaining moral cohesion in society, and sometimes as the "collective consciousness", raising the spectre of a group mind which was not Durkheim’s intention.

Durkheim confronted what he perceived as the deficiencies of classical empiricism and rationalism and advanced his theory of collective representations, which he described as:

Perhaps the fate of Durhkeim’s collective representations shows the problem faced by theories of emergent properties in the face of pressures towards reductionism, a dominant orthodoxy in modern times though one that is facing increasingly strident opposition. However it is one thing to criticise, it is another to come up with a workable alternative. It turns out that the critics tend to be stuck in a similar mindset, for example critics of crude, mechanistic reductions tend to be operating with subjective theories of knowledge which are lead to unhelpful attempts to explain the contents of texts in terms of social, political or historical determinants. Subjective belief theories of knowledge are so deeply ingrained that Popper’s theory of objective knowledge is often dismissed out of hand as an incoherent or self-contradictory concept. Young eyes may see more sharply – a nine-year-old schoolchild summed up the nature of objective knowledge when asked whether thoughts could exist without actually being thought. She replied "Yes, because there might be a problem that has an answer, and the answer is a thought that nobody has thought of yet".

Wellek and Warren’s theory, along with that of Durkheim, has apparently been buried beneath the weight of subsequent novelties, and Popper’s theory of objective knowledge appears to be completely out of step with reductive spirit of the times. Another theory which possibly avoids that charge comes from Wittgenstein who, like Popper and Piaget, was taught by Buhler and refused to take on board the mechanistic cause-and-effect model of physics to account for human language and behaviour. Wittgenstein’s response is his doctrine of "forms of life" and "language games". This may be compared with Popper's answer - the three world theory, critical rationalism and conjectural objective knowledge. These divergent lines of thought are generally considered to be incommensurable and none of the myriad of books and articles generated by the Wittgenstein industry even mention Popper. But once their common problem is recognised then they can be compared in terms of the fertility of their different solutions.

Of course objectivity is a notoriously difficult product to sell these days because traditional theories of objectivity depend either on the notion that objectivity equals truth (certain truth) or on a state of mind that is free of bias and presuppositions. But the much-publicised loss of certainty has put paid to any such claims for truth, and theories of objectivity that depend on particular states of mind are not theories about objective contents at all.

Non-Dogmatic Rationality and Criticism

Whether or not he is correct on points of detail, large or small, this is clearly the type of criticism that is required to emancipate writers and readers from the more arid forms of academic criticism and from the ad hoc responses of hasty reviewers. Moreover, it is a type of criticism that has something to gain from the theory of objective contents of texts because this theory frees literature from the deathgrip of the reductionists and ideologues without capitulating to the conceptual anarchy of the deconstructionists.

Such a theory is equally important for writers as it is for critics because the often remarked failure of poets to develop after the age of 25 is quite likely a problem of theory; writes need a theory of writing that enables them to move along and develop after the first bloom of creative inspiration has faded.