POPPER, Sir Karl (b 1902); 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 under 70 years ago, an argumentative Viennese cabinet maker and schoolteacher wrote a revolutionary book about the philosophy of science. This came about by accident. After a night-long conversation a friend 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 conducive 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 Forschung (translated 25 years later as The Logic of Scientific Discovery) appeared in 1934. It resulted in another happy accident when in 1937 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. After the war he counted fourteen relatives who perished in the Holocaust.
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 which appeared three decades behind schedule. Such a long delay was most unfortunate because The Postscript contains a highly important 'Metaphysical Epilogue' which reveals some of the themes running through Popper's work which simultaneously account for its depth and for the problem of reception among professional philosophers.
Henry Root Scholarship
Henry Root's claim to fame rests on his hilarious book of letters between himself and the great and famous, including Prime Minister 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. Just to set Henry Root straight on a couple of points before going any further; in the quote above he states that Popper was a member of the Vienna Circle, and that one of his slogans was 'that which is unfalsifiable is meaningless'. Both of these statements are false. Popper was never a member of the group of scientists and philosophers known as the Vienna Circle, though he knew many of the members.
As to the slogan about falsifiability and meaning, Henry Root is either sending up those Circle members who thought Popper shared their obsession with meaning or he is simply repeating their mistake. The members of the circle promoted a doctrine which they called logical positivism to signal their conviction that the only knowledge that really matters is the positive knowledge of science in contrast with the nonsense of metaphysics. In order to banish metaphysics for good and all, they proposed that statements should be regarded as literally meaningless if they could not be confirmed or verified by evidence. The propositions of logic and mathematics were exempt from the requirement for verification on the understanding that they are true by definition and they do not pretend to convey information about the world.
The most obvious casualties of the verification principle were religion and moral philosophy, though there were others that were less obvious, including the principle itself and, more surprisingly, the laws of science. When these laws are stated in their strong form, along the lines of 'All swans are white', they cannot be verified by any number of observations of white swans, simply because you cannot be certain that you have sighted all the swans in the universe. Popper pointed out these difficulties in the early 1930s but Ayer went on regardless with his Language, Truth and Logic (1935) which carried the verification principle to the English-speaking world.
The historian Manning Clarke recorded something of the flavour of encountering the crusading and reformist spirit of the positivists, around about 1940.
The first time I sat down in the 'caf' at Melbourne University I asked politely 'Would you please pass the salt?' My neighbour, a gifted woman, looked at me with the eye of the saved for the damned and said. 'I don't know what you mean.' I decided to listen to what was going on. In the ensuing weeks I picked up a new vocabulary. I often heard the word 'tautology': that, I gathered, was a sin against the Holy Ghost. I heard the phrase 'non sequitur'. I was often asked: 'Is that a verifiable proposition? The Quest for Grace, p112.
Popper addressed a different problem from that of meaning and metaphysics because he was concerned with the demarcation between science and pseudo-sciences such as astrology which appear to be based on observations but are actually unsinkable. His exemplar of science was Einstein's theory which might have been refuted by a particular set of observations on the eclipse of the sun. Inspired by this example Popper advanced his criterion of falsification to demarcate between testable statements on the science side of the line ('All ravens are black' which is logically refuted by the observation of a white raven) and various categories of statements on the other side of the line.
Popper wanted to explain what it was about science that enabled scientific knowledge to grow, in contrast with pseudosciences, and perhaps philosophy. Unfortunately there was a widespread belief (echoed by Henry Root) that his criterion concerned meaning because the positivists were so preoccupied with meaning that they could only regard Popper's line of demarcation as a rival to their own verification principle. This misunderstanding hindered a proper understanding of Popper's 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 leading light in a revival of classical political philosophy, wrote in Australian 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 the 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 filteredthere 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 there is no such thing as a 'raw' fact or a pure observation. Facts are interpreted in the light of theories: they are useful and important to the extent that they bear upon theoretical problems. 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 70 years the same objections keep coming up, though without mention of his counter-arguments.
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, a kind of intellectual Battle of Britain fought in the rarefied hights of the world of ideas, an inspiring counterpart to the feats of the young airmen who virtually held the fate of the free world in their hands during the desperate days while Britain stood alone against Hitler.
The Open Society and its Enemies 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 who 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:
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, and generally 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 arguments in favour of democratic and equalitarian social reform. 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, to give 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. 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. A commentary picking up the main points can be found here.
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 the 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 Popper's 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 to 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.
Radical critics often lampoon Popper's approach to social reform as timid and conservative 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 contemplate 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, for example to cope with the lack of a functioning legal system in Russia, Popper suggested that the French or German legal code might be transplanted to make a start towards the rule of law (one of the essential requirements for a market-based economy). The point of piecemeal change is to take account of the fact that any significant innovation will ripple through the whole society, and 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 Logic of Scientific Discovery. This work remained in preparation until the 1980s. In the meantime 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 (See 'Unchanged Meanings: The Kind of Literary Criticism We Need').
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 be used to illuminate a wide range of problems from the theory of literature to the nature of human motivation and mind-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 the expensive 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).
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).
Lakatos 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 retrieve whatever could be saved from Popper's 'falsificationism', a program allegedly reduced to tatters by Kuhn, Lakatos and other critics. 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. Ian Jarvie has explained how this came about due to the symbiotic (mutually beneficial) relationship between the modern Big Science establishment, operating essentially on inductive lines, and the supposedly radical (but in practice conservative) innovation of paradigm theory.
The Unifying Themes Revealed
All this time the galleys of The Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery continued to gather dust, though copies circulated among Popper's colleagues. Finally they emerged in the early 1980s in three volumes edited by Bartley. The first volume is Realism and the Aim of Science, the second is The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism and the third is 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 work and 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 influence is often unrecognised because they are generally assumed by schools of thought which disagree about other matters, and so they are rarely challenged or subjected to critical appraisal.
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 was inspired by a 1960 lecture by Popper on the dogmatic structure of western thought and he proceeded to trace the thread of dogmatism or 'justificationism' running through almost all areas of knowledge and rationality. Bartley 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 the work of Popper and Bartley 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.
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 or 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 influenced by arguments and ideas which cannot be reduced to the laws of physics, nor to biological instincts nor to immutable social or historical forces.
For Popper, this program was animated by a profound moral purpose, by 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.
Rafe Champion
Printed in the Melbourne Age Monthly Review. 1985
