This article is written to encourage literary intellectuals who may feel threatened by Lord Snow's scientists who 'have the future in their bones' (and who know all about the second law of thermodynamics). From time to time people need to be reminded that we do not live by bread and technology alone. We live by values, traditions and myths, which are embedded in our literature and are studied by the humanities. A society which loses the capacity to subject these myths and traditions to imaginative criticism will die. The reason for this is that our traditional heritage contains a dangerous mixture of elements and if we do not maintain our efforts to eliminate error and confusion the risk is ever-present that the bad will drive out the good. This is a task that Popper undertook in The Open Society and its Enemies, pointing out that Plato, perhaps the most revered, and rightly revered, figure in western philosophy, harboured dangerous ideas that could create havoc if given the opportunity during times of political and social dislocation.
Another reason for critical attention to the humanities is that they are important areas of intellectual activity and as long as we value the growth of knowledge and the search for truth we should not devalue them. Those of us who are professionally outside the humanities may sometimes be critical of the way the scholars are going about their tasks and they should welcome our interest and concern.
I will argue that Sir Karl Popper's theory of objective knowledge breathes fresh life into the study of values, myths and traditions. This theory goes to the root of the problems of the social sciences and the humanities. It also provides a new perspective on the old problem of freedom and rationality as shown in his essay 'Indeterminism is not enough' in Encounter, April 1973. This introduced the notion of objective knowledge and the three "\'worlds' of bodies, minds and ideas, shortly after publication of the book Objective Knowledge which presented the theory in more detail. His ideas about 'world 3' of objective knowledge have aroused little enthusiasm up to date, reflecting perhaps the time that new ideas need to germinate and bear fruit. I will show how this theory illuminates and unifies problems in the scope and methods of philosophy, in some aspects of moral and political philosophy, in the theory of literature and criticism, in the social sciences and in psychology.
Section I contains some background on Popper's ideas, explaining why they have not penetrated to the educated public. Section II sketches the theory of objective knowledge and some of its history. Section III treats Russell's method of logical analysis and argues that the valuable part of this method consists of teasing out the objective content of scientific theories, not the process of clarifying concepts as is usually believed. Section IV argues that Wittgenstein's 'forms of life' may be regarded as the objective contents of traditions These traditions exert plastic control over our activities and they can be subjected to rational (critical) scrutiny as soon as we become conscious of them. Section V argues that morals have a similar kind of existence and this enables them to exert a plastic control over our actions. They cannot usefully be described as true or false, but the acceptance or rejection of specific values can be controlled by critical discussion and can be a matter of critical preference between alternatives. Section VI examines the nature of creative literature and shows how T.S. Eliot's ideas about the social function of poetry can be illuminated by Popper's theory. Section VII suggests that this theory can contribute to a model of explanation in the social sciences; this is explained with reference to Durkheim's problem of social order and Weber's problem of social change. Section VIII pursues the idea that psychology needs to be revolutionised by looking at the brain as an organ that enables us to interact with objective knowledge in the form of theories, traditions and values. For some of the social and political implications of this theory (and Popper's rejection of the quest for "justified beliefs") see this paper.
I
Some time ago Bryan Magee wrote in the Fontana Modern Masters Popper that Karl Popper is not a household name among the educated, a fact that needs explanation in view of the remarkable fertility and range of his ideas. The simplest explanation is that he has run foul of several dominant orthodoxies in philosophy and elsewhere. His first book written in English, The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) criticised Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Marx. The criticism of Aristotle made the book almost impossible to publish in the United States, the criticism of Plato scandalised classical scholars brought up to regard him as the 'divine philosopher' and the criticism of Marx (albeit sympathetic) has denied Popper an open-minded readership among the Left ever since.
The heartland of Anglo-Saxon philosophy has been dominated for most of the century by the loosely defined analytical schools inspired by Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein. Popper's work has negligible appeal to philosophers in that tradition because he has systematically refused to be drawn into arguments about words, or into conceptual and linguistic analysis.
In the philosophy of science he has taken issue with the theory of induction that until recently was almost universally regarded as the true method of science. In a nutshell, induction may be described as a version of the 'bucket theory' of the mind. Scientific activity starts with observations, then theories are derived from these observations, or from observed regularities in the world around us. The aim of inductive logic in its more refined form is to calculate the degree of probability of a scientific theory, based on the amount of evidence that has accumulated to confirm it (perhaps the number of times that apples have been observed to fall to the ground). This theory does not have anything to say about the most interesting feature of scientific knowledge, namely its growth. It assumes that the existing theories are more or less correct, wanting only a method to establish their degree of credibility.
II
The Theory of Objective Knowledge
Popper's theory at first glance resembles the discredited Platonic notion of transcendental objective knowledge. Ayer referred to '...the Platonic tradition which Sir Karl Popper has lately attempted to revive...,' [ Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Counterpoint, 1984, p.200].
In fact the revival started last century with a line of thought running through Bolzano, Frege, Brentano and his pupils Meinong and Husserl to Russell and Moore. [G. Ryle, 'The theory of meaning' in C. A. Mace (Ed.) op cit and J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, Penguin, 1970]. This thread, described by Passmore as 'The Movement Towards Objectivity', might have unified empiricism and rationalism, the two main streams of modern philosophy.
Philosophers and scientists in the empiricist tradition seek the Truth as revealed by the evidence of the senses; people in the Continental rationalist tradition locate the criterion of Truth in the intuition of clear and distinct ideas. In each case the Truth forms in the minds of individual people. Each is a subjective theory of knowledge but under the influence of the 'movement towards objectivity' some people began to pay attention to a realm of the objects or contents of thought, in addition to the realm of material bodies and the realm of purely subjective thought processes and minds. So around the turn of the century Platonic 'third realms' containing the objective contents of thought were all the rage.
Bertrand Russell in The Problems of Philosophy (1912) referred to the contents of thought as 'universals' to avoid the mentalistic connotations of the term 'ideas'. As he put it, following Meinong, these things have subsistence but not (material) being. At this point the empiricist and rationalist traditions might have converged to focus on these objective contents. These newfangled notions deeply offending the sensibilities of William James who wrote to a friend; 'Surely truth can't inhabit a third realm between realities and statements or beliefs '..I wish you would forget about this mongrel cur of a supposal, begotten upon you by the unspeakable Meinong and his English pals'. [ cited by J. Passmore, op cit, p.185].
He need not have worried. The objective contents of thought disappeared from empiricist theories under the influence of Russells quest for certainty based on empirical evidence. This forced his theory of knowledge to be a subjective theory based on sense data. Thus empiricism turned into modern positivism with its doomed attempt to base knowledge on experience, in defiance of Humes formulation of the problem of induction. On the rationalist side Husserl's quest for certainty based on intuitions turned him away from the objective contents to the study of subjective thought processes as the basis of knowledge. This approach underpins most forms of modern irrationalism. Thus the demand for justification of belief and the desire for certainty, resulted in the loss of objective knowledge for almost 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 encompass subjective knowledge and objective knowledge as well, spelled out in his essay 'Indeterminism is not enough' in Encounter, April, 1973.
By "world 1" I mean what is usually called the world of physics, of rocks, and trees and physical fields of forces. By "world 2" I mean the psychological world, the world of feelings of fear and of hope, of dispositions to act, and of all kinds of subjective experiences.
By "world 3" I mean the world of the products of the human mind. Although I include works of art in world 3 and also ethical values and social institutions (and this, one might say, societies), I shall confine myself largely to the world of scientific libraries, to books, to scientific problems, and to theories, including mistaken theories.
A physical object, such as a book, belongs to world 1. It contains information which belongs in world 3. Two books with identical contents are two separate world 1 objects containing identical world 3 contents. When read by two people, they give rise to two distinct and private sets of world 2 events, based on world 1 brain processes. If the two people attempt to communicate their understanding of the book in spoken or written form then the contents of their speech or writing belong in world 3. The communication involves world 2 in the form of thoughts and intentions, and world 1 in the form of brain processes and the sound waves or the marks on paper. The contents of the communication may be different from the original contents of the book (due to imperfect understanding), even so, there will be objective relationships between the original contents and the modified contents.
One of the important features of this world 3, as distinct from earlier versions of similar ideas such as Plato's theory of Forms, is that Popper's version is both man-made and autonomous.
I suggest that it is possible to accept the reality or (as it may be called) the autonomy of the third world, and at the same time to admit that the third world originates as a product of human activity. One can even admit that the third world is man-made and, in a very clear sense, superhuman at the same time . It transcends its makers. (We must beware, however, of interpreting these objects [of thought] as the thoughts of a superhuman consciousness as did, for Aristotle, Plotinus, and Hegel). [ 'On the theory of the objective mind' in Objective Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 1972].
He has presented many arguments in favour of this theory, with criticism of alternative views but these arguments are not pursued here because my intention is to draw out the consequences of the theory, not to defend it in detail.
III
Russell's Method of Logical Analysis
It is widely accepted that Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore with their methods of analysis laid the foundation for modern analytical philosophy. Opinions differ about the nature of analysis, partly it involves strenuous efforts to be clear about meanings, partly it involves the refinement and clarification of concepts. This process is alleged to occur in science as well as in philosophy, a view that has been explained by Bryan Magee though it is not one that he himself holds.
You give a particular meaning to a concept, you sharpen it. And this is very like a scientific activity. It's exactly what Einstein did, for example, with the concept of simultaneity. You can either say that Einstein was telling what we all meant by simultaneity or that he was producing a new concept which replaced the old defective one. [ B. Magee Modern British Philosophers, Secker & Warburg, 1971, p.53).
Alternatively, and more to the point, you can say that Einstein produced a new theory in response to an open problem situation. He located and criticised theoretical assumptions that had hitherto been taken for granted. This point needs to be urged against the analytical philosophers because the false theory that knowledge advances by means of refining concepts is highly misleading and the prevalence of this theory is one of the obstacles that blocks progress in the social sciences and some areas of the humanities such as the theory of literature.
Part of Russell's practice of analysis involved clarification of terms and sharpening of concepts; this part dominated parts of his writing, such as the opening chapters of An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940) and it is the part of his method that has generally been taken on board by analytical philosophers. Another part of his analysis is quite different. In Human Knowledge (1948) his investigation of (subjective) knowledge involved drawing out the contents and implications of all the relevant theories that he knew about, ranging from the physics and physiology of perception, through psychology (as it stood at the time) to the behaviour of his pets, his children and his own thought processes. This process required an input of objective knowledge which was subjected to critical analysis for its relevance to the problem in hand, a process that is radically different from conceptual analysis in a theoretical vacuum. It is a process resembling Popper's description of unpacking the contents of theories. [Unended Quest, section 7 and especially note 20].
Thus Russell transcended the limitations of conceptual analysis and always had something interesting to say. Of course he aspired to be more than a librarian of concepts, and he is regarded as a bit old hat these days. He may be genuinely superseded in his quest for justified belief and in his concern with the clarification of concepts but these errors are alive and well in philosophy and elsewhere. Much can be retrieved from his method if it is seen as a form of unpacking the contents of theories, a process that demands the philosopher to give up narrow specialisation and emulate Russell and Popper in learning a great deal about problems outside philosophy.
IV
Wittgenstein's Forms of Life
The later Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein II as Russell called him) has exercised many minds with a perplexing bundle of problems. Central to his thinking was a concept of 'forms of life'. A form of life consists of rule-following behaviour which cannot be explained by the reductive scientific methods of dynamic psychology and behaviourism. Forms of life, like the rules of language games, were apparently envisaged by Wittgenstein as explanations in themselves, not amenable to further investigation, much less to criticism. It may be that Wittgenstein sought a certain base in the forms of life.
Again, in this context, as elsewhere, the quest for certainty has unfortunate consequences. Far from being certain, the traditions that make up our forms of life need to be subjected to sensitive, rational criticism to weed out those that do not measure up to our best standards. As Gellner pointed out, the discovery of forms of life marks not the end but the beginning of serious work [Thought and Change, also "The crisis in the humanities and the mainstream of philosophy" in J. H. Plumb (Ed.) Crisis in the Humanities, Penguin, 1964]. The point of sensitivity in the criticism of traditions is to find out the purpose that the tradition is serving. If it does serve a valuable purpose, then it is important that something at least as good as put in its place, or that some other tradition is strengthened to take its place. To be concrete: many people are outraged by loutish and insensitive male dating behaviours. One of the avenues to improve this situation is to encourage males to be less loutish and insensitive but the more popular response (at least in the US) is to push for regulations and penalties to punish offenders. This course is often pursued by people who are themselves inclined to loutish and insensitive behaviour in debate with political opponents. In that respect they are themselves a part of the problem, that is, the problem of maintaining standards of politeness and good manners.
In the light of Gellner's comments and Popper's theory of objective knowledge it appears that 'forms of life' can be regarded as traditions which have an objective (world 3) content. The contents of our traditions can be subjected to criticism, just as soon as we become aware of them. It also helps to become aware of alternatives, so critical discussion can ensue with the aim of formulating a critical preference among the options. To be concrete, there is not much point in arguing about the traditional theory that Shakespeare was the greatest English playwright unless someone is prepared to put up an alternative. (It may also be argued that this is not a particularly useful question to discuss; again, alternatives are required).
At this point I want to make two distinctions, first between the choice of methods within a broad 'form of life', the form of life of the scientist, and second, between the choice of career, say between being a scientist and a criminal [ Recall the cartoon in Punch: Vocational guidance officer to shortsighted, knockneed child 'Have you seriously considered a life of crime?']. The aim of the first distinction is to show how uncritically held assumptions can subvert the prima facie purpose of the scientific enterprise; the aim of the second is to provide a lead into the section dealing with moral values.
Consider the form of life of the scientist. This depends on theories about the way scientists are supposed to go about their tasks, modified of course by circumstances of time, place and individual taste. At least two traditions can be discerned among scientists, one is the critical approach extolled by Popper and exemplified by Watson and Crick on their way to the Nobel Prize, as described by Watson in The Double Helix. The other is the tradition of 'normal science' which has gained notoriety following some work by T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962). The 'normal scientist' works on 'puzzles' that exist in the context of a framework of accepted theories and assumptions which collectively constitute the 'paradigm' of current knowledge - the state of the art. This paradigm gains its authority from its acceptance by the community of scientists, especially from its support by the leading experts in the field. (A critic may detect a hint of a circular argument here; it is likely that a person who does not support the paradigm may not be allowed to count as a leading authority). The paradigm is not, as a matter of routine, subjected to critical appraisal or tests.
The puzzle-solving activity of the normal scientist is sustained in part by the theory of induction (knowledge grows by the accumulation of facts) and normal science certainly generates a plethora of data. This process is aided by computers and by automated and semi-automated equipment (including, one is tempted to add, normal scientists). Of course scientists, normal or otherwise, may not know anything about the theory of induction and some very good scientists have told me they have nothing useful to learn from the philosophy of science. This opinion is quite probably sound in the case of the theory of induction, and in the case of Kuhn's 'paradigm' theory, which is really a sociological theory about the diffusion of new ideas through the scientific community. It is not so easily justified in the case of Popper's theory of conjecture and refutation.
The theory of induction has a lot to answer for, ranging from the alienation of several generations of poets from the tradition of rationality (which, from William Blake onwards became associated with the inductive methods of science), the 'Two Cultures' phenomenon and the current vogue of overspecialisation. This threatens to turn even clever and ambitious scientists into technologists, either unwilling or unable to follow the theoretical implications of their work across the artificial boundaries between subjects. These charges all need exploration in depth and the simple point to be made here is that the form of life of the 'normal scientist' is in need of criticism, assuming that scientists hope to contribute to the growth of knowledge, not just to the proliferation of journal articles.
Some of the choices between forms of life are comparatively trivial (being a pipe smoker or a supporter of a particular football team). Arbitrary choices may be acceptable in these cases, though of course in certain times and places all manner of trivia have been very important, even matters of life and death. Intertwined with our forms of life, partly embedded in them, partly used to control them, are our moral codes, our values. These become crucial in the choice between, say, the life of the mind and the life of crime. If we wish to deplore crime on moral grounds (beyond simply saying that we don't like to come home and find our television set and croquet trophies stolen) then we are forced to contemplate some problems of moral philosophy, particularly the status of values and the way we justify our moral standards.
V
The Status of Moral Values
A central problem of moral and political philosophy is to formulate and criticise standards which, when adopted, act as guiding principles or "rules of the game". These can be informal as in standards of politeness and dress; they can be be more formalised as in the traditions of rationality and freedom; they can be embodied, however imperfectly, in social and political institutions; they can be laid down as rules and regulations in Acts of Parliament, to be enforced by government agencies and the courts.
Consequently our aim should be to formulate the problems that we want our moral and political principles to solve, then to propose tentative solutions and critically discuss them. Unavoidably we start with the existing social and political problems and the rules, laws, traditions and institutions that we find about us. This is the approach adopted by Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies . It is an approach scrupulously avoided by the bulk of moral philosophy this century which has been preoccupied with analysis of words and concepts such as 'right', 'good" and 'ought'. The strength of this tradition is apparent when it is found that Bertrand Russell, passionately concerned with all manner of practical moral and political issues, adopted precisely the same sterile approach in his one major and systematic work on ethics Human Society in Ethics and Politics, Allen and Unwin, 1954..
The value of the theory of objective knowledge in this context is to provide a location for moral principles beyond our states of mind. Our values can be located in world 3 where they are objects of critical scrutiny rather than expressions of emotion, irrational commitments or matters of fact to be derived from observation of the world or human nature. This form of objectivity does not lead to a naturalistic morality; this is ruled out by a long line of arguments including Hume's is/ought distinction, Moore's refutation of the naturalistic fallacy and Popper's demonstration of the dualism between factual propositions and moral proposals. [Chapter 5 of The Open Society and its Enemies and Addendum to volume 2 (1962 edition onward) ibid.]
So in answer to the question: Are values objective? I reply with an unequivocal yes and no. Yes, because they are not merely subjective, they are objects in world 3, the realm of objective contents of thought. No, because we cannot hope to establish that our values are true, or even derivable from true factual statements. The position sketched here can be used to combat dogmatic absolutists who claim that they have hold of the True Authority for moral values (and heaven help everyone else). But it is quite distinct from the position adopted by relativists, often disappointed absolutists, who have given up the effort to formulate better values in the belief that there is no rational way to go about this, and no rational way to critically compare one set of values (or objectives of social policy) with another.
How do we opt for a critical preference for one set of values over another? Or, How do we critically evaluate a social policy? Answer: by examining how successfully it solves its problems. For example, socialism can be regarded as a tentative solution to the problems of suffering and tyranny, a solution based on the assumption that these evils sprang essentially from the nature of capitalism (or monopoly capital). Socialism can be criticised on the grounds that suffering and tyranny still exist in parts of the world that officially regard themselves as socialist: more important, socialism can be criticised on the grounds of internal inconsistencies that appear as soon as any details regarding the desired nature of social and political structures are provided to flesh out the bare bones of socialist premises.
Another policy which is very much in need of critical appraisal is the notion of national self-determinism for racial, religious or ethnic minorities, such as the Sikhs of India. This policy may be regarded as a tentative solution to the problem of persecution of national or racial or ethnic minorities. But this principle provides the rationale for many evils, and has done so in the past, for example the invasion for the purpose of 'liberation' of minority groups by a stronger neighbour. More to the point, as we see in India and Northern Ireland, adoption of the principle closes the door to other options to deal with discrimination.
VI
The Theory of Literature
Whatever else literature may be (using 'literature' as a shorthand for culture at large, including film and music) it is a powerful and important vehicle of values, both literary and moral. This is part of the social function of literature and to give a hint of the fertility of the idea of objective knowledge in this area, I will examine an essay by T. S. Eliot titled 'The Social Function of Poetry', printed in the collection On Poetry and Poets (1957).
In this essay he set out to describe the nature and importance of the 'trickle-down' effect of great poetry. This effect has been noted often enough but it is overlooked by 'practical' people who do not realise that all actions are guided by theories, including theories of morality.
We all understand, I think, both the kind of pleasure which poetry can give, and the kind of difference, beyond the pleasure, which it makes to our lives...We may acknowledge this, but at the same time overlook something which it does for us collectively, as a society...For I think it is important that every people should have its own poetry, not simply for those people who enjoy poetry but because it actually makes a difference to the society as a whole, and that means to people who do not enjoy poetry. I include even those who do not know the names of their own national poets. That is the real subject of this paper.
Considering the responsibilities of the poet, Eliot suggested:
His direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve. In expressing what other people feel he is also changing the feeling by making it more conscious; he is making people more aware of what they feel already, and therefore teaching them something about themselves...[in addition, he] can make his readers share consciously in new feelings which they had not experienced before...[the genuine poet] discovers new variations of sensibility which can be appropriated by others. And in expressing them he is developing and enriching the language which he speaks.
This last statement shifts from sensibilities, which are presumably subjective, to 'enriching the language' which is on some sense objective. The idea that Eliot wants to convey can be explained in terms of 'world 3 objects'; the poet either creates or discovers new world 3 objects or relationships, as does a pioneer at any frontier of knowledge. This is not to deny that both sensibilities and language are involved in the creation and consumption of poetry. But poetry clearly transcends the intentions (and the feelings) of the poet (we know all about the Intentional Fallacy these days); similarly the content of poetry transcends the effects that it carries to the reader (we know about the Affective Fallacy too). [W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley in W. K. Wimsatt The Verbal Icon, Methuen, 1954, decisively criticised these two fallacies and on the way pointed out some serious limitations in Stephenson's emotivist theory of morals.] In brief, language is not an end in itself, it is a vehicle of meanings, or in other words, the objective contents of the poem.
Eliot in his essays and criticism constantly grappled with the relationship of thought and feeling and their joint relations to poetry. He wanted to do away with the Romantic and espressionistic notion that poetry is created by the poet turning loose his emotions (see for example his famous essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'). But Yvor Winters demonstrated that Eliot never managed to solve the problem in a way that escaped the very romantic (subjectivist) fallacy that he abhored [Y. Winters, In Defense of Reason, 1947.] This is not surprising in view of the problems of escaping subjectivism from within a subjective theory of knowledge. With our feet firmly planted in world 3 we can criticise Eliot's theory that the poet's primary concerns lie with consciousness, sensibilities or language. We can argue that the poet is concerned with world 3 things, the objective contents of thought, and with traditions which enable the poet to mobilise certain feelings in readers who either share the same traditions or who take the trouble to understand them even if they did not initially share them. See this paper for an application of the three world theory to provide a theory of the litarary text, similar to the theory expounded by Warren and Wellek in The Theory of Literature.
VII
Sociological Explanations
Sociology badly needs a revolution to provide relief from the endless talk about the current, the coming, and the continuing crises in the discipline. We can hardly say in advance what the new ideas will look like but we can specify what they will have to do. They will have to provide a linkage between facts and theories. They will need to reconcile the approaches that focus on the individual as the prime mover in society and the approaches that look at social and cultural systems as functioning wholes. They will need to settle the demarcation disputes between sociology and psychology, and perhaps between biology and the humanities. They will have to account for the features that humans share with the animal world and for those features (if any) which mark of humans from other species. They will need to account for social change and social cohesion, for innovation and conformity.
Some social scientists turned to the natural sciences for help and discovered the theory of induction; their subsequent attempts to mimic the rigorous empiricism of physics have attracted devastating criticism from all quarters of the ideological spectrum, ranging from F. A. Hayek to C. Wright Mills. Others turned to philosophy and picked up conceptual analysis which sat particularly well with the long tradition of Platonic and Aristotelian essentialism in the humanities. Popper has argued, as an extension of his anti-essentialist exhortation (quoted above) that the attempt to provide conceptual frameworks and rigorous definitions in advance of genuine or substantive theories is misplaced effort. There is no need to be more precise than the problem in hand requires (compare the degrees of precision required in cutting timber for a fence and milling a bearing for a precision instrument).
The ad hoc method of dealing with problems of clarity or precision as the need arises might be called "dialysis" in order to distinguish it from analysis: from the idea that language analysis a such may solve problems, or create an armory for future use. Dialysis cannot solve problems. It cannot do so any more than definition or explication or language analysis can: problems can only be solved with the help of new ideas . [Unended Quest p. 31].
I suggest that Popper's theory of objective knowledge is precisely the idea that is required. Jarvie made a good start to apply this insight to sociological problems though it appears that his work was not followed up. Concepts and Society, Routledge, 1973. Clearly this program needs to be pressed forward and to this end I will show how Weber and Durkheim made use of objective knowledge in their theories.
Weber's work on religion and the rise of capitalism can be regarded as an 'idealist' polemic against Marx's materialist theory of history and social change. He argued that modern capitalism did not arise in Europe under the dynamics of the material means of production but rather from a combination of material circumstances and a body of new ideas that developed in Calvinism. He claimed, on the basis of comparative studies, that the material circumstances in India and China were equally suitable if not more so for a capitalist take-off but the religious systems were not propitious.
He did not try to say that the Calvinists wanted to create capitalism, or even that they had any ideas about capitalism. He focused on the secular consequences of certain Calvinist attitudes towards work and wealth which he claimed were quite unique. They can be regarded as innovations in world 3, which produce consequences in world 1 which in turn create new situations, problems and possibilities.
Weber's work in this area was not consolidated, possibly for want of an adequate theory of ideas to take account of the contents of traditions, and the corresponding contents of people's thoughts. Durkheim moved in this direction with his theory of 'collective representations' which he developed as a key to his theory of knowledge and simultaneously his theory of social stability. He confronted the inadequacies of classical empiricism and classical rationalism and attempted to solve the problem with his theory of social categories or collective representations
Priceless instruments of thought which the human groups have laboriously forged through the centuries and where they have accumulated the best of their intellectual capital...There is a close relationship between the three ideas of tool, category and institution...The rationalism which is imminent in the sociological theory of knowledge is thus midway between the classical empiricism and a priorism. For the first, the categories are artificial constructions; for the second, on the contrary, they are given by nature; for us, they are in a sense a work of art, but of an art which imitates nature with a perfection capable of increasing unlimitedly'.[Section 2 of the Introduction to The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life].
In Durkheim's sociology these collective representations were the social facts which hold societies together in a moral order. Commentators and critics have difficulty with these things. They are sometimes translated as the collective conscience (indicating their moral significance) and sometimes as the collective consciousness (raising the notion of a group mind which was certainly not Durkheim's idea). They can also be interpreted as a good start on a theory of objective knowledge. [E. Gellner in Thought and Change noted the similarity between Durkheim's collective representations and Wittgenstein's 'forms of life'. Collingwood's 'ultimate presuppositions' are probably the same things. The theory of objective knowledge can perhaps be used to criticise, and to retrieve something from that line of social theory that branched off from Wittgenstein through Peter Winch in The Idea of a Social Science, Routledge, 1958.]
Popper has also drawn the analogy between tools (artifacts), objective knowledge and social institutions, particularly as they can be depicted as a response to objective problems, and, having been created, they become part of the situation. The fate of Durkheim's theory of objective knowledge requires investigation, as does the question of influences one way or the other with the people involved in the 'movement towards objectivity' described in section II. It appears that Durkheim is no longer a living force in modern sociology, though Talcott Parsons assigned him a key role in the evolution of the 'voluntarist theory of social action', described by Parsons in The Structure of Social Action (1937). This book exhibits a remarkable convergence with the Popperian model of social causation, and the praxeology of Mises, using the 'logic of the situation' to analyse the actions and decisions of individual people, constrained by traditions and institutions. (Actually the common source of this theory is Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school of economics and social thought). After this point Parsons turned his back on the individualistic level of explanation to explore social wholes, under the influence of systems theory and a false notion of the role of mathematics in physics. Mathematics, he thought, provided a language for physicists to talk about their objects and he set out to provide sociology with an equivalent language of concepts to classify and describe social phenomena. Thus he reached his terminus of essentialism and the endless ramification of conceptual schemes.
With the advantage of hindsight we can see Parsons' error. It is harder to see what he could have done without a viable theory of objective knowledge to link the contents of traditions and social institutions (the non-individual parts of the social system) with the perceptions and intentions of the actors (the individual, though not entirely subjective, parts of the social situation). The linkage provided by Popper's world 3 of objective knowledge may in some sense unify psychology and sociology in a way that eliminates the tension involved at present in maintaining lines of demarcation against attempts at unification by reduction one way or the other.
VIII
Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind
Professor Jerome Bruner, a leading authority in cognitive psychology, has expressed concern that scientific psychology, presumably the subject with so much to say about human behaviour, in fact has little impact on the commonsense life of ordinary people or upon matters of jurisprudence, economics or social policy [In J. Miller (Ed.) States of Mind, BBC, 1983]. There is a simple reason for this; scientific psychology lacks an essential ingredient and this deficiency renders it incapable of helping people understand purposeful and value-oriented behaviour, as in most daily activities and the affairs of jurisprudence, economics and social policy.
What is the missing factor? Do we just need more facts, as suggested by another authority, Professor George Miller.
It is unlikely that we will see any more revolutions that completely redefine what we mean by mental life. Probably we will see increasing specialisation as our factual information continues to grow in depth and detail. The dream of a single philosophical principle that explains everything it touches seems to be fading before the realisation that man is vastly curious and complicated, and that we need a lot more information about him before we can formulate and test even the simplest psychological laws. [G. A. Miller, Psychology: The Science of Mental Life, Penguin, 1966, p. 369]
We may accept that the dream of a great philosophical principle that explains everything belongs to an age of steam, but so does the idea that we just need more information to solve our theoretical problems. Noam Chomsky posed the current problem rather differently.
One might ask the question whether physical science as known today, including biology, incorporates within itself the principles and the concepts that will enable it to give an account of innate human intellectual capacities and, even more profoundly, of the capacity to make use of those capacities under conditions of freedom in the way which humans do. I see no particular reason to believe that biology or physics now contain those concepts, and it may be that to scale the next peak, to make the next step, they will have to focus on this organising concept, and may very well have to broaden their scope in order to come to grips with it. [In F. Elders (Ed.) Reflexive Water, Souvenir Press, 1974, p. 142. The same volume reports a discussion between Popper and Eccles including an exposition of the three world theory!]
It is entirely possible that the theory of objective knowledge is the key to Chomsky's problem, indeed Popper's paper 'On Clouds and Clocks' (reprinted in Objective Knowledge) is subtitled 'An Approach to the Problem of the Rationality and the Freedom of Man' (as if to give Chomsky a hint). Popper has suggested that psychology may need to be revolutionised to regard the brain as an organ for interacting with world 3 things (objective knowledge) and this view is seconded (unwittingly) by at least one expert in the field of artificial intelligence. In conversation with Jonathon Miller, Professor Daniel Dennett expressed the view that a the 'top down' approach to brain function (starting with more or less 'grand theories') would pay off better than the 'bottom up' approach of the neurophysiologists (building up information on structure and function piece by piece), though both approaches are required. The 'top down' approach pays off because it tells the 'bottom up' people what to look for, and because it uses an idea of information, not the information of mathematical information theory, but '...semantic information, which is information about meaning and about the "aboutness" of what's being carried in some information channel' [States of Mind, p. 72].
Those who have come this far will recognise that this type of information is the objective contents of thought (and of books, and of communications generally). Dennett also noted that this particular idea of information is still not very well formulated. Presumably this is because subjective theories of knowledge and materialist theories of mind simply do not make provision for the objective contents of thought.
The situation in psychology is reminiscent of a murder mystery where someone was killed, in a house, in broad daylight. Nobody in the street saw anyone near the house all day until it turned out that the villain was the postman. He had come and gone 'invisibly' because he did not fit the theoretical expectations about murderers that were held by people in that street. Similarly the brain researchers have placed the brain under close surveillance but world 3 'postmen' shuttle back and forth all day long, rendered invisible by the researcher's theories.
The theory advocated here does not give any special encouragement to believers in the occult or paranormal pyschic phenomena. It argues that minds are not reducible to pysical brain processes but it does not claim that minds are disembodied. Above all, this theory makes no concession to irrationalism, though the rationalism that is advocated in conjunction with the three world theory has parted company with at least three of the traditional rationalists' doctrines; namely the theories of justificationism, determinism and reductionism. Popper's arguments in favour of fallibilism or 'critical preference' are fairly well known and his case for non-determinism and emergence may be found in the three volumes of the long-awaited Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Conclusion
Popper's theory of world 3 has been received with less than wild enthusiasm. It has been described as 'mulish', tiresome and infertile (Quinton) and as a symptom of a research program in decay (Feyerabend). Ayer dismissed it in half a sentence in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. This kind of thing is only to be expected. Quinton writes from the perspective of Oxford analytical philosophy, a line of thought as tiresome and infertile as any that was ever invented. Feyerabend writes as an irrationalist and 'dadaist', presenting a doctrine that at times verges on the psychotic (a description he would probably welcome).
As for Ayer's dismissal; important new ideas are bound to arouse resistance and are bound to look absurd in the light of received opinions. The point is not how they look but how well they solve their problems and whether they stand up to good criticism. Good criticism, in contrast to howls of outrage, must proceed from an understanding of the offending theory and this in turn demands an understanding of the problems that it is trying to solve. I have sketched some of the applications of the theory of objective knowledge. These cover a wide range of problems and I hope the applications provide some encouragement and food for thought among literary intellectuals who often appear to have lost faith in their vocation, in the value and efficacy of their roles as producers and distributors of ideas.
Rafe Champion
