The Purpose of Popper

Originally printed in the Melbourne Age Monthly Review, 1985

 

POPPER, Sir Karl (b.902); Member of the Vienna Circle. "That which is unfalsifiable is meaningless." Did he solve the problem of induction? The argument still rages. See Swans. (Henry Root?s World of Knowledge)

 

Just over 50 years ago an argumentative Viennese cabinet maker, social worker and schoolteacher wrote a revolutionary book about the philosophy of science. This came about by accident. After a night-long conversation between Karl Popper and Herbert Feigl (a member of the Vienna Circle) Feigl suggested that Popper should organise his ideas into a book.

It had never occurred to me to write a book. I had developed my ideas out of sheer interest in the problems, and then written some of them down for myself because I found that this was not only conductive to clarity but necessary for self-criticism?.Writing a book did not fit my way of life nor my attitude towards myself?(my father) was afraid that it would end in my becoming a journalist. My wife opposed the idea because she wanted me to use any spare time to go skiing and mountain climbing with her.

 

Logic der Forshung (translated 25 years later as The Logic of Scientific Discovery) appeared in 1934. It created quite a stir and this resulted in another happy accident: Popper obtained a job as a philosophy lecturer at Canterbury College, Christchurch, New Zealand. This probably saved his life for he was born of Jewish parents and he might not have survived the Nazi regime that came to power in Austria in 1938.

Writing books became something of a habit after this late start though the rate of production was slowed by the infinite pains that he took in polishing his manuscripts. This process reached epic proportions in a companion volume to The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

 

"Henry Root" Scholarship

Just to set Henry Root straight on a couple of points before going any further, Popper was never a member of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, neither of the inner core nor of the fringe groups, though he knew many of the members (Incidentally, Wittgenstein was not a member either although his early doctrines were employed by the Circle to support their campaign against metaphysics). Popper was even referred to as the "official opposition" to the Circle although he is widely regarded as a positivist by people who have not read his books because his first book appeared in a series sponsored by the members of the Circle. And Popper emphatically never used falsification as a principle of meaning.

Henry Root?s claim to fame rests on his hilarious book of letters between himself and the great and famous, including Maggie Thatcher, Buckingham Palace, the BBC, various publishers and politicians and a retired English cricket captain. Inspired by the success of the Henry Root letters, described (by himself) as a bestseller and blockbuster, he branched out as a polymath in his World of Knowledge. This is not likely to enjoy the same success as his letters but his entry on Popper does have the value of creating a kind of baseline for evaluation of comments on Poppers ideas

The real nature and importance of Popper?s work is seriously obscured my myths perpetuated by "Henry Root" scholarship. Critical demolition work is required to correct some of the most common and damaging misconceptions.

Logik der Forschung responded to some of the problems that concerned the logical positivists, though not their problems with meaning or metaphysics. Popper wanted to explain what it was about science that enabled scientific knowledge to grow, in contrast with pseudosciences, and perhaps philosophy. He suggested that the distinctive feature of the empirical sciences is the way that they can use data to test or falsify hypotheses.

However, some people in the Vienna Circle, followed by a great many others outside, thought Popper was trying to formulate a principal to define meaningful statements. This mistake occurred because one the major aims of some positivists was to formulate a definition of meaning which would serve to banish metaphysics by labeling it meaningless. But Popper was not concerned with formal problems of meaning and never has been. The widespread belief that his criterion concerned meaning hindered a proper understanding of his work for decades and apparently the myth is still going strongly in some of the more cloistered backwaters of academia. Quentin Skinner, professor of political science at Cambridge and a lading light in a revival of classical political philosophy, wrote in Australia Society (January 1985), "For a statement to have a meaning, it was widely agreed, it must be clear what would count as a verification, or at least (in Karl Popper?s influential reformulation) as a falsification of the claim embodied in that statement". This statement is flatly wrong insofar as it purports to describe Popper?s intention. This places Professor Skinner at or near the "Henry Root" baseline.

Another widespread misunderstanding is revealed in the claim that the criterion does not define the "essence of science". It is pointed out that scientists are not all the time falsifying their hypotheses, or even trying to do so. It is pointed out, as a criticism of Popper, that scientists can get around apparently unfavorable results by ignoring them, or by inventing a quick "saving hypothesis" that accounts for the discrepancies as a special case. But the criterion is not an attempt to define science; it is best regarded as a proposal about them most effective way to use evidence to promote the growth of knowledge. If people do not want too expose their theories to criticism, including empirical tests, then they cannot advance by error-elimination. This is a problem for them, not Popper?s criterion.

Another line of criticism states that in testing one theory we have to make use of a lot of other theoretical assumptions (for example about the behaviour of our instruments) so the results are inevitable ambivalent about which theories are really being tested in any particular experiment. Quentin Skinner made this point strongly: "Kuhn?s most basic contention is that the reason why the sciences do not and cannot emulate a Popperian account of their practice is that our access to the facts in the light of which we test our theories is always filtered?there are no facts independent of our theories about them.

This is a truly remarkable criticism to bring against Popper. For over 50 years he has stressed that here is not such thing as a ?raw? fact or a pure observation. Facts are interpreted in the light of theories: they are useful an important to the extent that they bear upon theoretical problems. These points (repeated by Skinner) have been labored by Popper from his earliest writings against the traditional theory of induction and the accumulation of data.

The criticisms that are repeatedly urged against Popper?s philosophy of science are very convincing on a casual reading, though it is sometimes noticed that they are not wholly original. Indeed they are not. They may be found in his own books of 1934 and 1959 where he anticipated numerous possible objections and answered them. After 50 years the same objections keep coming up, though without mention of his counter-arguments. As Popper noted in his autobiography. "My own results were, in these legends, turned into reasons for rejecting my approach."

 

Defending the Open Society

Popper?s first book in English was his war effort, written in New Zealand and commenced on the day that he heard the news of Hitler?s invasion of Austria. The Open Society and its Enemies is a monumental exposition of democratic principles. At the same time it is a systematic investigation of several powerful ideas which render our traditions of democracy, rationality and tolerance dangerously fragile under the pressure of social and political crises.

Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Marx bore the brunt of Popper?s attack and this has spawned a rich and misleading mythology, as was the case with his philosophy of science. People ho take ?sides? for or against various philosophers as though philosophy were a sporting event cannot understand the critical approach adopted by Popper to the great men of he past. Part of the 1943 Preface to the Open Society runs thus

If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the tradition of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes: and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them.

Popper?s problems began when he tried to find a publisher. The criticism of Aristotle made the book almost impossible to publish in the United Sates and for a time Popper despaired of ever seeing his work in print, A Viennese friend, the art historian Ernst Gombrich, "saved his life" with the aid of F.A Hayek by finding a publisher (Routledge) and guiding the book through the press to London.

Then came the problems with the supporters of Plato, Hegel and Marx. The dissection of Plato scandalised the people who regarded him as the "divine philosopher" and provoked a flurry of publications that purported to show that Popper had mistranslated certain words in the sacred texts. Thus the substantive issues were buried under a mountain of scholastic footnotes. Much the same occurred with his treatment of Marx, described by Isaiah Berlin as "the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer". Marxists ignored the positive points and blacklisted Popper to the present day. This has effectively cut him off from many people who have so much to learn from the magisterial arguments in favour of democratic and equalitarian social reform in the Open Society. Interestingly, opponents do not generally confront his arguments head-on. This would require the critics to read his books and might encourage other people to do the same. It is clearly more effective to emulate Henry Root and Quentin Skinner, in giving a garbled misrepresentation of Popper?s ideas, or to ignore them completely in the hope that they will just go away.

It is not generally noticed that Popper has great admiration for both Plato and Marx: his concern is to eliminate error from their theories while learning from them, and paying tribute to their pioneering efforts. In the Preface to the 1950 edition of the Open Society he wrote

I have been blamed by some for being too severe in my treatment of Marx, while others contrasted my leniency towards him with the violence of my attack against Plato. But I still feel the need for looking at Plato with highly critical eyes, just because the general adoration of the "divine philosopher" has a real foundation in the overwhelming intellectual achievement. Marx, on the other hand, has too often been attacked on personal and moral grounds, so that here the need is, rather, for a severe rational criticism of his theories combined with a sympathetic understanding of their astonishing moral and intellectual appeal.

The book had a substantial impact in some quarters but several factors told against its wider popularity, among them its size, the prejudices of readers and its novelty and depth. The two volumes run to almost 800 pages with over 200 pages of footnotes, accumulated at the ends of the volumes in small print

Essentially a tract of moral and political philosophy, it is almost totally ignored by moral philosophers and by political scientists. This has come about because Popper formulated the problems of morals and politics in a way that makes no sense to most scholars in those fields. Traditionally these problems are approached either by analysis of the meaning of the key concepts (the state, power, justice etc) or by simply describing he forms taken by states, power-structures, and systems of justice. Popper?s approach, which happens to be eminently practical, looks plain silly to people indoctrinated in the traditional methods.

On Poppers account the central problem of moral and political philosophy is to formulate and criticise standards which act as "rules of the game" in social life. These rules of the game occur in all groups and they may be enforced informally or by due process of law. The question we have to face is not whether we will have rules but whether we will try o improve them by critical discussion and trial and error. This approach cuts through the verbalism that bogs down academic discussions of moral and politics and it is constantly in touch with practical problems and their possible solutions.

Left-wing critics usually lampoon Popper?s approach to social reform as timid and conservative. They ridicule his proposal that reforms should be undertaken in stages, because they pretend to favour Utopian "canvas cleaning? exercises in revolutionary change. The answer to this is simple enough: however radical people tend to be, they never really face up to the unreality of total revolution (whatever that could possibly mean - are we going to have a completely new language as well?). In any case, Popper?s proposal is not intended to limit reforms to small-scale tinkering (the better we understand a system the more ambitious we can be with our changes). The point is to take account of the fact that any significant innovation will ripple through the whole society, therefore we want to be able to monitor its affects and evaluate its unintended consequences.

 

 

The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Objective Knowledge

During the1950s Popper wrote almost a thousand pages of manuscript planned as a companion volume to the English translation of his first book. The Logic of Scientific Discovery emerged from the press in 1959 but The Postscript remained in preparation until the 1980s. In the 1960s Popper renewed his interest in a linked set of problems concerning biological evolution, human consciousness, language and the nature of abstract ideas. He proposed that the distinctive features of human society and culture resulted from our use of language for description and argument functions that cannot be reduced to the expressive and signaling functions of language. Further, there is a kind of objective content to descriptions and arguments that cannot be reduced to purely materialistic or subjective terms. These ideas mount a serious challenge to the prevailing fashions of materialism in the philosophy of mind and the various combinations of expressionism and reductionism that dominate the theories of literature and textual analysis (hermeneutics if you insist)

Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (OUP, 1972) contains a selection of essays presenting these ideas. His theory of evolutionary epistemology is remarkably similar to Piaget?s genetic epistemology, though it has aroused little interest and the central doctrine of objective "world three" knowledge fell like a stone among philosophers. Stuart Hampshire remarked in a review "It does not seem to me to be an illuminating theory". Anthony Quinton described it as "mulish, troublesome and infertile". Paul Feyerabend suggested it as a sign of a research program in decay and Alfred Ayer dismissed it in half a sentence in his book on philosophy in the 20th Century. But despite these adverse comments and a general failure of most people to make anything out of the idea of objective knowledge, preliminary work suggests that it can e used to illuminate a wide range of problems from the theory of literature to the nature of human motivation and min/body relationship.

 

Kuhn, Bartley and Lakatos

Three blows struck Popper during the 1960s. First came the incredible impact of Thomas S. Kuhn?s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) which rapidly overhauled Poppers extensive and slow-circulating The Logic of Scientific Discovery as the most popular and well-known refutation of traditional scientific methods. Then in 1965 Popper broke with one of his most brilliant colleagues, William W. Bartley, and the two did not speak for over 10 years. The story had a happy ending when the breach healed and Bartley edited The Postscript.

The indefatigable and mercurial Bartley was Harvard man. He studied Popper?s books privately as an undergraduate and, despite warnings about "that difficult man" went to work with Popper in 1958 "as a kind of pilgrim". First a student, then a teacher at the London School of Economics he claimed to have solved the longstanding problem of rationality and the limits of criticism (an achievement worthy of more than passing notice). Among his interests were the problems of personal identity and integrity, also the relationship between religion and morality. After his break with Popper he embarked on a number of apparently diverse projects: he traced the roots of Popper and Wittgenstein?s thinking to the influence of the non-reductionist psychology of Kulpe and Buhler; he wrote a brilliant but scandalous biography of Wittgenstein, he traced the long-lost galleys of Lewis Carrol?s major work on logic. He studied Oriental philosophy and he wrote a best-selling biography of Werner Erhard, founder of est (Erhard Seminars Training). At the time of his death in 1990 (aged only 55) he was working on the authorised biographies of Popper and Hayek.

In the 1960s another colleague, Imre Lakatos, struck the third blow. A refugee from Hungary in 1956, he proceeded to Cambridge where he took at doctorate in mathematics. He moved to London to work with Popper and there he became something of an entrepreneur and political operator in the academic industry. As described by a colleague "He launched Popper into the limelight, inaugurated the Popper school and acted as its majordomo: soon he took over its leadership (with Popper?s retirement in 1969). He gained ever-more international reputation and notoriety, then departed the scene abruptly" (He died suddenly in 1974).

Popper became the leader of the Popper school and he also became the perceived leader of the Popperian rearguard against the assault of Kuhn and his followers. It is widely believed that Lakatos developed an elaborate "methodology of scientific research programs", trying to whatever could be saved from Popper?s "falsificationism", a program allegedly reduced to tatters by Kuhn?s strictures on the incommensurability of rival paradigms and by arguments by Lakatos on the problems of falsification. In fact the problems of falsification were greatly exaggerated but the winds of fashion carried all before them and Kuhn?s ideas achieved widespread acclaim.

 

The Unifying Themes Revealed

All this time the galleys of The Postscript continued together dust, though copies circulated among Popper?s colleagues. Finally they emerged in the early 1980s in three volumes edited by Bartley. They are Realism and the Aim of Science,

The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism and Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics.

The third volume of this long-awaited opus contains a Metaphysical Epilogue that is remarkable in at least two ways. First, it is clearly the unacknowledged basis of the Lakatosian theory of scientific research programs. Second, it provides the key to understanding the cluster of themes that unify Popper?s thought, which account simultaneously for the power and depth of his thought, and for the difficulty that he has had in obtaining recognition for his ideas in the community of philosophers. These themes contradict a cluster of metaphysical ideas that have dominated Western philosophy, some of them since the time of Plato. Their dominance has been largely unrecognised because they are generally assumed without question and are not stated in a form, with alternatives, that would offer the opportunity to subject them to sustained criticism.

 

Among these ideas is the theory that rational knowledge and action should be based on positively justified beliefs. This theory has created endless and insoluble problems for people who hope to influence events (including the growth of knowledge) by means of reasonable arguments, backed up by evidence. Many people have been driven to irrationalism because opponents could always win arguments by demanding a positive justification of the principle of rationality itself. The deconstructionists of recent times have made great play on this situation but they proceed from the true premise (there are no certain foundations of belief) to the false conclusion that there is no way to form critical preferences in the light of evidence and arguments offered to the present time.

 

Bartley followed Popper to trace the thread of dogmatism or "justificationism" running through almost all areas of knowledge and rationality. He described how the assumption of justificationism generated the problem of "infinite regress versus dogmatism" so that the attempt to justify the premises of an argument could never succeed; the defender would have to take a dogmatic stand at some point and demand an end to criticism at that point. The theory of rationality that emerges from their work is not a theory of justification; it is a theory of critical preference between alternatives. The importance of this is immense. Rationality has been battered in modern times by ideas lifted from Darwin, Marx, Freud and quantum physics but the real problem was internal and logical. (See Bartley?s Critique of Reason).

The new stance on justification and the limits of criticism can be combined with some other ideas developed by Popper to provide a new agenda or research program for Western philosophy, replacing the following cluster of ideas in the "old program".

Justificationism. A valid principle of knowledge or value must be derived from some authoritative source, which provides conclusive justification for it.

Subjectivism. Knowledge consists of subjective beliefs or concepts. There is no such thing as a structure or fabric of objective knowledge outside the minds of individual people.

Essentialism. Knowledge either results from penetration into the hidden essence of a phenomenon, or is improved by analysis of the concepts used to describe the phenomenon.

Determinism. Every event is pre-determined, so the future is laid down like the sequence of frames in a reel of film passing through a projector.

Reductionism. Complex things are to be explained by reducing them to their simplest constituents. For example, events in society should he examined in terms of biology and eventually reduced to the laws of physics.

In place of justified beliefs, Popper and Bartley opt for conjectural objective knowledge. In place of conceptual analysis and debate about the meaning of terms we should argue about the truth of falsity of theories, or, in the realm of action, the desirability of alternative policies. In place of determinism we need to realise that the future to some extent depends on decisions that we make, and these decisions can be guided by arguments and ideas which cannot be reduced to the laws of physics, nor to biological instincts nor to immutable social or historical forces.

These ideas are all linked with a profound moral purpose, with the aim of promoting the methods of reasonable argument and scientific trial and error to improve the human condition, "to better the lot of our fellows". This purpose may appear to have a strange old-fashioned ring to it in this proud "post-critical" age where Henry Root, Quentin Skinner and Bruce Springsteen are likely to be regarded as major intellectual forces in the land. A respect for reason is redolent of the optimism of the enlightenment, of the Kantian hope that we may be able to liberate ourselves from self-imposed slavery to authority and traditional prejudices by means of critical and independent thought. This vision may be derided as naïve and simple-minded but it has inspired some of the grandest achievements of civilisation and if it can be kept alive, however dimly, it may resurge to deliver triumphs as yet undreamed of.

 

Addendum 1999. Turning the Tide

The ideas of the "old program" noted above are notoriously resistant to criticism. In fact they are often not subjected to criticism at all, they are simply assumed as a part of the invisible framework of debate. Metaphysical ideas been declared "out of bounds" in the positivist or empiricist tradition from the time of Hume but this has not released the bonds of metaphysics, it has simply rendered positivists the slaves of whatever metaphysics they unconsciously picked up (such as justificationism, subjectivism, determinism and reductionism). Anti-positivists need not feel complacent about this situation because the same assumptions can often be found in programs which appear to be hostile to positivism (such as Marxism and the various schools of hermeneutics). Shared assumptions are seldom in dispute, and they operate invisibly to shape the formulation and selection of problems and the kind of solutions that are acceptable.

Shared assumptions render certain theories and methods either wrong, or stupid, or ideologically unsound, and, to some extent, literally unthinkable. This applies at present to Popper's philosophy at large and especially to his theory of objective knowledge. It also applies to the Austrian tradition of social and economic thought, exemplified in the work of Hayek. A revival of these unfashionable but potentially fruitful programs depends on recruiting people from the dominant orthodoxies where they tend to be locked by three influences. First by the guild mentality (professional brand loyalty); second, by ideological commitments (another form of brand loyalty); and finally, by unexamined metaphysical or philosophical theories. The third is probably the most insidious influence because it traps people who might otherwise be prepared to resist brand loyalties. The ideas of Popper and Bartley (and also Hayek) hold out hope for real progress in throwing off the fetters of counter-productive metaphysics because they provide methods for exposing the roots of deep structural assumptions and they show how to subject them to non-dogmatic criticism. (For more on this theme, see the review of Radnitzky and Bartley (eds) Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality and the Sociology of Knowledge.)

 

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