critical rationalism blog

For many years Popper delivered a series of 15 lectures as an introduction to the philosophy of science. They were designed for undergraduates but many other people attended.

While Popper was alive Mark Notturno started work on a reconstruction of the lectures based on transcripts of tape recordings.  Work stopped with 12 of the 15 completed.

When I look at the unsatisfactory books on the philosophy of science, I often wonder what a good book would look like. What would I write myself?  Of course Popper was not writing a book, he lectured without notes and the theme of each lecture was the same each year but he talked about what was on his mind at the time.

1. Values

Welcome to the lecture. Do not expect too much because I am a very bad lecturer and the important part of learning is what you do yourself. Be free to interrupt and to criticize.

Degrees of understanding and levels of criticism.

The distinction between tentative criticism and serious criticism that is based on good understanding of the issue (but understanding can always be improved).

The wrong reason to go to university, to learn to speak impressively.

The proper reason is to find out how little we can ever know.

The overwhelming importance of simplicity and clarity.

We should try to educate people to tell the difference between a charlatan and an expert.

Confusing clarity with precision. Clarity and simplicity are ends in themselves but precision is context-dependent.

Second point for the day, on fast and slow reading. Not enough people recognize the difference between skimming and reading. And the first part of scientific method is the method of reading a book.

Don’t believe me, but do try to understand me and be prepared to argue, to criticize me and force me to clarify my views.

2. Scientific Method

No such thing. On the non-existence of subjects (just problems) and no such thing as a “scientific method” that can reliably deliver the goods. Demonstrated by Planck, a great scientist with only one great discovery, and Einstein failed to achieve his next great break for 40 years after his initial achievements.

The Webbs (founders of the London School of Economics), Mill and the idea that we start by collecting material.

Observe!  Observe what?

First thesis, science starts from problems, not from observations.

The problem with textbooks, lack of historical background and context.

The mythical origin of geometry – measuring fields on the Nile

Plato’s cosmology and the disaster of Euclid’s textbook, regarded as an authority rather than a report on work in progress at the time.

Revealing Popper’s secrets, the four-step schema.

Problem -> Tentative Solutions -> Error Elimination by Criticism and Testing -> New Problems

3. Problems

Repeating the basic message of the course – starting with problems.

Finding problems: known problems, problems that you find, the problem of starting with problems that are too hard.

Solving a problem should create more problems.

How to find solutions? No recipe (see Planck and Einstein above).

The historical approach (among others) but what about finding good ideas?

Still no recipe, just have ideas and criticize them.

The search for ideas by observation and the bucket theory of the mind.

Exams as a dipstick to find the level of knowledge in the brain.

Inborn knowledge, expectations and the active role of trial and error.

Preliminary criticism of induction, inductivism and the sunrise, refuted millennia ago by the discovery of the land of the midnight sun!

The resort to probability in place of certainty to prop up induction.

Inductivists like Carnap die frustrated but still calling for more work…

4. Diarrhesis

Why he does not believe in definitions.

How diarrhesis is different from the usual obsession with definitions.

He challenges the idea that useful discussion has to start with shared assumptions or presuppositions.

He argues that the more disagreement on assumptions, the better, citing 5^th century BC Greeks vs Egyptians and other eastern cultures.

The corrosive effect of Marxism and Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge.

Culture clash and the piecemeal elimination of prejudices.

Aristotle, essences and the origin of the obsession with definitions (with reference to the handbook on good driving by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police).

The alternative approach, clarification, which he calls diarrhesis.

Two points, diarrhesis is only used when necessary and it is used for clarity, not precision.

The myth of the framework, people who stop learning, who think they have nothing to learn from people who have conflicting opinions.

5. Understanding

Breaking out of frameworks.

Killing bad ideas before they kill us.

Understanding and the four-stage problem-solving schema.

Start with problems rather than theories because the theory cannot be understood apart from the problem and this raises the question of understanding.

There is a school in social science which sees understanding as the unique feature of the social sciences.

Some quantum physicists deny that you can ever really understand.

The danger of teaching maths and science with no history of the problem situation – hence no real understanding.

The discovery of spectral lines in 1913 created the need for a statistical theory to account for probabilistic events at the quantum level: the need cannot be understood without a grasp of the evolving problem situation.

How do we understand the problem? By trying (and failing) to solve it.

The importance of making many mistakes in order to understand better.

The role of education to permit people to identify charlatans from experts .

The importance of serious testing and the history of science as refutations which created new problems and hence new science.

6. Cosmology

The lead up to Newton’s theory shows how science advances by the criticism and refutation of theories to explain the origin and structure of the universe (cosmologies and cosmogonies).

Our success in science is amazing considering how close we are to the ants and how far they are from having science and understanding of their situation.

Myths are the starting point, like the Maori myth of NZ being pulled out of the sea by a fisherman.

The first problem of critical (scientific) cosmology was to account for the stability of the fixed stars and the eccentric movements of some others, the wanderers, the planets.

The concentric crystal spheres led to the Ptolomaic system, then the heliocentric suggestion of Copernicus, then the equations of Kepler.

In the neo-Platonic religious background light had great significance: for cosmology that put the sun in the centre: for religion it meant letting light (God) into the churches, hence the gothic design with big windows replacing the Norman and Roman designs.

The geocentric and the heliocentric theories are completely equivalent with regard to observation.

What is wrong with armchairs for scientists?

7. Explanation

Science was inspired by curiosity and explanation can be seen as the historical aim of science.

Explanation is always deductive.

Other views on the aim of science – prediction and practical application (the American pragmatists).

The logic of deductive explanation from the explicans (the cause) which consists of a universal law plus initial conditions, to the explicandum (what was to be explained).

Explanations can be circular or ad hoc and science advanced as the demand for non-circular explanations became more strict.

Better ideas about explanation emerged to avoid charges of circularity and ad hoc explanations.

Aristotle founded the essentialist school of explanation, using “essences” which are supposed to represent the rock bottom of explanation, leaving no more questions.

Modern opponents of essentialism are usually instrumentalists or pragmatists.

Instrumentalists nowadays defend science but originally instrumentalism was a weapon used by the Church against science (Cardinal Bellarmino vs Giadorno Bruno and Galileo) against science! Similarly Berkeley used instrumentalism to criticize Newton’s science and also the calculus.

According to modern instrumentalists we make theories for prediction, in contrast, according to Popper we make predictions to test our theories.

8. Scientific Knowledge

Science begins and ends with problems.

P -> TS -> EE -> New P

This runs contrary to the expectation that science should end with less problems and more knowledge.

For standard epistemology real knowledge means justified true beliefs, that is knowledge which is (a) true and (b) which we have sufficient reasons to believe to be true.

Scientific knowledge never satisfies the most severe conditions and so we never know for certain, and we never know how long may be required to find that it is false.

Scientific knowledge has no authority, even though it is the best knowledge that we have.

The quest for authority became a quest for sources or criteria of truth, for knowledge with a pedigree.

Historically, there came a great desire to escape from dogmatism and rely on something other than Aristotle, instead to rely on senses and reason, however these became authorities in their turn.

Popper is in favour of reason and also in favour of evidence from the senses but neither can be regarded as authorities.

He is not concerned with sources or pedigrees. Science begins when a theory is presented for discussion and criticism.

He is happy for scientists to disagree, for problems to be open and the contest between theories to be undecided.

It is not a healthy situation where scientists are unanimous, that is most likely due to lack of imagination and criticism to generate new problems and rival theories.

In contrast Kuhn regards unanimity (the shared paradigm) as healthy and normal.

Science is revolution in permanence and criticism is the lifeblood of science.

9. Truth

Criticism or error elimination in the four-step schema is an attempt to eliminate what is false to strive to arrive at the truth.

Omniscience is not a practical aim of science, instead truth should be regarded as a REGULATIVE PRINCIPLE (following Kant).

Given the model of proof from maths and logic, epistemologists have been very keen to find a proof for the truth of scientific theories.

That led the search for a CRITERION – Descartes (clear and distinct ideas), Bacon (clarity and directness of perception).

The over-optimistic “manifest theory” of truth and its counterpart, the conspiracy theory of error. Failures of criterion theories of truth led to relativism, the corrosive form of skepticism – there is no such thing as truth.

Between the optimists and the pessimists, the pragmatists sought a middle ground in the success of theories.

Two other “middle ways” between optimism and pessimism, the COHERENCE and CONVENTION theories of truth.

Viennese efforts to get clear on various correspondence theories – Schlick and Wittgenstein.

Tarski’s solution, and the rehabilitation of the correspondence theory, using modern logic, to maintain the regulative idea of truth.

10. Falsity

More discussion of truth, Tarski and metalanguages.

The law of the excluded middle: unambiguously formulated statements are either true or false, no middle ground (proved by Tarski).

This is signaled as a preliminary statement in advance of the discussion of theories in economics and the social sciences in the next lecture, where we have to operate with theories that we know are false.

Same applies in astronomy where all our models are over-simplifications; the sun and planets treated as “masspoints”; the sun is not really an ellipsoid (it has craters and bulges); light exerts pressure on planets which is practically always neglected in calculations.

Reality is too rich to depict in a model, we abstract and select according to our problem and purpose at the time, and according to our theoretical knowledge at the time.

Our picture of the world is always defective, always false and over-simplified and always contains real mistakes in addition to the over-simplifications.

11. Social Science

A story: a critic of Popper’s views on Plato first stated that Popper was wrong to identify Plato as a forerunner of totalitarianism, then later he wrote that Plato was indeed a forerunner of totalitarianism and Popper’s criticism was misguided because totalitarianism is inevitable due to its strength and efficiency. Between the two criticisms the Russians launched sputnik into space, which triggered something like hysteria in the free world with a panic about the state of western education and science.

Speculations on things that could kill science: too much money, the publication explosion (good buried under bad), angling for money at the expense of good science, hostility of the mediocre to the producers because the unproductive fear they will miss out on the big money.

Hopeful signs (in those days of the 1950s) that many students and scientists were still more interested in learning than money.

Serious concern about the split in the social scientists between factfinders and theoreticians. The factfinders were dominant and made fun of the theorists but they had no theories worth testing and many became part of the advertising industry.

Moving on to the methods of the social sciences, first of all, is there a difference from the natural sciences, perhaps due to the “Oedipus effect” of predictions which become self-fulfilling?

He found that a similar effect could occur in the natural sciences using calculating machines.

He rejected the idea that the natural sciences are intrinsically more objective, the rationality of science depends on the free exchange of criticism (and is undermined when that is reduced).

“Objectivity consists in the clash of biases, not their elimination”.

Beware of anything that appears to be intuitively self-evident.

Another story: a scientist was investigating why the leaves of a plant twist to the left in New Zealand as opposed to the right in England. After working for a year on the problem he attended a Popper lecture, then he checked and found they twisted to the right. No problem!

Bacon on “confirmation bias”, seeing what our theories (prejudices) tell us to find. Bacon’s solution was the empty mind (no assumptions), Popper’s solution is to subject all assumptions to critical analysis, use observations as criticisms, not confirmations.

On the differences between natural and social sciences, for the most part the difference are not what people think they are, but there is a difference, and that is the use of the rationality principle.

12. The Rationality Principle (RP)

Hume, Rousseau and Freud on human irrationality.

Freud as a rationalist: we act rationally within the limits of our knowledge at the time AND understanding the cause of neurosis should result in a cure.

Popper’s rationality principle means explaining actions in terms of the situation (situational analysis).

Not a hypothesis to be tested, but a principle of method (a “rule of the game” of social science):

The rule: Try to explain things rationally.

The RP is the functional equivalent of a law of nature in a deductive explanation which starts with a situation (laws and initial conditions, the situation) and produces an effect, the action.

The RP “animates” the model that we make to explain the actions that generate social phenomena of all kinds (war, inflation, unemployment etc).

We know it is false because it is over-simplified, abstracted from the full complexity of the world, like our models and theories in the natural sciences.

The RP should not be confused with personal rationality which is the willingness to correct our ideas.

The RP is a principle of explanation and a heuristic, a guide on what to look for in social situations.

The next major point in the lecture is the nature and function of institutions – social, political, cultural.

Study of institutions raises all the most interesting and important questions in the social sciences. Among the institutions are traditions.

Traditions have an almost biological basis.

The various ways we learn – trial and error, imitation, systematic research.

Karl Popper and Barry Smith on the Metaphysical Research Program of Austrian Realism and Carl Menger’s Economics.

An unpublished paper delivered at a conference on Austrian thought at the University of Texas (Arlington) in 2013. I don’t expect everyone or indeed anyone to read it right through – this is a way of getting the paper on line so I can send the link to interested people instead of attaching a word file to email.

Abstract.
Barry Smith located an Aristotelian or “Austrian realism” framework of ideas which underpinned Carl Menger’s economics. In Popper’s terms this framework is a “metaphysical research program”. The elements of the framework are replicated in the program that Popper elaborated in his long debate with the historicists, the positivists and the quantum physicists. Another parallel in the thinking of Popper and Smith is the theory of conjectural or fallibillistic knowledge. This paper argues that if Menger could have accessed a theory of that kind he might have advanced his program instead of turning to methodological issues after he wrote the first of several planned volumes of economic theory. Today, if the Aristotelian/Austrian/Popperian framework can be revived, the Austrian contribution to the mainline of economics will be better appreciated and economics may be more effectively integrated with sociology and all the disciplines of the humanities including law, politics, and cultural studies.

Introduction
This paper is one of the products of a program to explore the synergy of the ideas of Karl Popper and the Austrian economists, especially in relation to the policy agenda of classical liberalism. This involves unpacking the implications and applications of several “turns” that Popper pursued in epistemology and methodology.

The synergy is obscured by some obvious differences, notably between Popper’s interventionist tendencies in economic policy and the laissez faire of the Austrians, and between Popper’s theory of conjectural knowledge versus the foundationalistic apriorism that Rothbard and Hoppe took from von Mises. The first is not a matter of philosophy or methodology and the second was resolved when Smith demonstrated that fallibillistic apriorism (equivalent to Popper’s conjectural knowledge) is an adequate platform for Austrian economics, so there is no need for the foundationalist variety (Smith, 1996).
The paper is organised as follows: first a section on the Popperian “turns”, then a section comparing the essential elements of the Aristotelian/Austrian framework that Smith found in Menger’s economics with Popper’s program. Then a section on the problems that Menger encountered in “the Methodenstreit” with the suggestion that a theory of conjectural or fallibillistic knowledge would have enabled him to press on with his theoretical program.

The Popperian Turns
The six “turns” are (1) conjectural or hermeneutic (2) objective, (3) against conceptual analysis or essentialism, (4) social or “rules of the game”, (5) biological or evolutionary and (6) metaphysical. These aspects of Popper’s thinking are not generally appreciated and they are seldom brought to the attention of students in the mainstream of teaching and research.

The conjectural, hermeneutic or non-justificationist turn means that Popper rejected the traditional concern of the theory of knowledge with the justification of our theories (typically our beliefs) by reference to some authority or foundational source of knowledge. The objective turn depicts knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, as a human product, spelled out for public inspection and criticism.

On the “anti-essentialist turn”, he did not accept that it is helpful to pursue extended analysis of concepts to “explicate” them or make them more precise. Against “essentialism” and the quest for linguistic precision he favoured clarity of speech and writing as a means to an end in the discussion of substantive problems, that is, the problems that concern working economists. “Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously, problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve and the problems they raise.” (Popper, 1976, section 7).

The social turn means taking account of the social nature of science and the function of conventions or “rules of the game” in scientific practice. Kuhn and the sociologists of knowledge are generally given credit for drawing attention to the social factor in science, however Jarvie in The Republic of Science (2001) identified what he called the “social turn” in Popper’s earliest published work, for example in Sections 4, 5, 9, 10 and 11 in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The social turn also appeared in the chapter on the sociology of knowledge in The Open Society and its Enemies, first published in 1945 and in the final sections of The Poverty of Historicism. Wittgenstein and his followers could have made a contribution in this field if they had adopted a critical approach to the theoretical and practical implications of important real-life games, rules and conventions. For example they could have examined the impact of Keynesian economic policy on the convention of balancing State budgets or the shift in the concept of democracy from limited government under the rule of law to majority rule, and the erosion of responsible government by the “vote-buying motive”.

Biological themes can be found in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (dating from the original Logik der Forschung in 1935). “We choose the theory which best holds its own in competition with other theories; the one which, by natural selection, proves itself the fittest to survive.” (Popper, 1959, 108). That was only a hint of Popper’s interest in the biological approach which he revealed in the 1960s when he delivered a series of papers that are collected in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Popper’s “metaphysical turn” attracted little attention although it is the most striking difference between him and the positivists. For this paper the most significant of the turns are the first, to address the blockage in Carl Menger’s program, and the last, to explain how unexamined metaphysical frameworks create winners and losers among research programs.

Against the justification of beliefs. In traditional epistemology the central concern was (and remains) the justification of beliefs. Philosophers persist with attempts to justify beliefs by various strategies including inductive logic and many texts do not even mention that Popper provided an alternative program. This can be described as a full-blooded “conjectural turn”, to claim that even our best theories may be rendered problematic by new evidence, new criticisms and new theories. This dates from 1935 and it anticipated the “hermeneutic turn” in the mainstream when the work of Kuhn and the modern French theorists made much of the theory-dependence of observations.

Attempts to justify beliefs generate an infinite regress. The alternative to the quest for justified beliefs is to form tentative critical preferences for theories (or policies) on the basis of their capacity to solve their problems and stand up to various forms of criticism, including experimental and practical tests. Bartley developed some of the implications of Popper’s “non-authoritarian” theory of knowledge and his “non-justificationism”. (Bartley, 1962, 1964, 1983). Smith’s exposition of “extreme fallibillistic apriorism” is also a theory of conjectural objective knowledge (Smith, 1996).

Metaphysical research programs. The metaphysical turn is a striking difference between Popper and the logical positivists, whose signature idea was to render all talk of metaphysics strictly meaningless. Popper developed the theory of metaphysical research programs during the 1950s as he worked on The Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. It flows from the idea that we should look at the history of a subject, and its current status, in terms of its problem situations.

In science, problem situations are the result, as a rule, of three factors. One is the discovery of an inconsistency within the ruling theory. A second is the discovery of an inconsistency between theory and experiment – the experimental falsification of the theory. The third, and perhaps the most important one, is the relation between the theory and what may be called the “metaphysical research programme”.
By raising the problems of explanation which the theory is designed to solve, the metaphysical research programme makes it possible to judge the success of the theory as an explanation. On the other hand, the critical discussion of the theory and its results may lead to a change in the research programme (usually an unconscious change, as the programme is often held unconsciously, and taken for granted), or to its replacement by another programme. These programmes are only occasionally discussed as such: more often, they are implicit in the theories and in the attitudes and judgements of the scientists.
I call these research programmes “metaphysical” also because they result from general views of the structure of the world and, at the same time, from general views of the problem situation in physical cosmology. I call them “research programmes” because they incorporate, together with a view of what the most pressing problems are, a general idea of what a satisfactory solution of these problems would look like. (Popper, 1982, 161)

The idea of the program can be applied to Popper’s own work, to see it as the unpacking of the implications and applications of his key ideas to problems in many fields. This “programmatic” approach to research apparently anticipated both Kuhn’s “paradigm theory” and the methodology of scientific research programs. Leaving aside the question of priority, the decisive difference between Popper and the others is the critical approach. Criticism of the paradigm/hard core assumptions is not recommended by Kuhn and Lakatos but criticism is the lifeblood of Popper’s program and that applies to the metaphysical theories that constitute the MRP. So the most important function of Popper’s theory of MRPs is to invite and encourage criticism of framework assumptions and the critical comparison of the assumptions that animate rival programs.

Wong provided a striking and original example of Popperian program analysis in his critique of Samuelson’s demand theory and Birner explained the coherence and power of Hayek’s work by describing it as a program to pursue an evolving research agenda that he set from the beginning of his publishing career (Wong, 2006 and Birner, 1994).

The Aristotelian/Austrian Frameworks of Smith and Popper
Smith explored the philosophical roots of Carl Menger’s economics and he found a number of Aristotelian framework presuppositions which demarcated “Austrian realism” from German philosophy at the time (Smith 1990, 1995). The following account draws on Smith (1990), to spell out the “Austrian-Aristotelian” program and the extent of agreement with Popper’s program.

1. “The world exists, independently of our thinking and reasoning activities.” This coincides with Popper’s realism regarding the external world, and also mental entities, plus (in Smith’s words) “other sui generis dimensions, for example of law and culture”.

2. “There are in the world certain simple ‘essences’ or `natures’ or ‘elements’, as well as laws, structures or connections governing these, all of which are strictly universal.” Popper took a similar metaphysical view of the uniformity of the laws of nature which he depicted in his later work as “propensities”.

3. “Our experience of this world involves in every case both an individual and a general aspect.” Smith found both radical empiricism and essentialism in Menger and other Aristotelians such as Brentano. “Radical empiricism” here is simply an aspect of realism which does not imply the epistemology of empiricism (accumulation of sense impressions): it means that individual apples and atoms exist in addition to the universal laws that regulate their characteristics and behaviour. And Menger’s essentialism involved the search for causal laws, not protracted conceptual analysis which both Menger and Popper deplored (Menger, 1985, 37). Smith noted that Menger was concerned with a priori categories (‘essences’ or ‘natures’) which exist in reality and the task is to specify the structures and connections among such essences, for example between economic categories such as value, rent, profit, the division of labour and money.

Theoretical economics has the task of investigating the general nature and the general connection of economic phenomena, not of analyzing economic concepts and of drawing the logical conclusions resulting from this analysis. The phenomena, or certain aspects of them, and not their linguistic image, the concepts, are the object of theoretical research in the field of economy. (ibid, 37)

The theoretical scientist, then, has to learn to recognize the general recurring structures in the flux of reality. And theoretical understanding of a concrete phenomenon cannot be achieved via any mere inductive enumeration of cases. It is attained, rather, only by apprehending the phenomenon in question as a special case of a certain regularity. (ibid, 44.)

Menger’s “apprehensions” appear to be the functional equivalents of Popper’s conjectures which are the creative (but fallible) source of ideas.

4. “The general aspect of experience need be in no sense infallible (it reflects no special source of special knowledge), and may indeed be subject to just the same sorts of errors as is our knowledge of what is individual.” In a nutshell, knowledge of both particulars and universals is fallible and conjectural. Our perceptions, our intuitions and even widely accepted scientific knowledge can be wrong. This is the equivalent of Popper’s “conjectural turn”. Smith’s “fallibillistic apriorism” and Popper’s conjectural knowledge both stand against the strong form of apriorism that many people identify with Austrian economics.

5. “We can know, albeit under the conditions set out in 4, what the world is like, at least in its broad outlines, both via common sense and via scientific method….Taken together with 3, this aspect of the Aristotelian doctrine implies that we can know what the world is like both in its individual and in its general aspect, and our knowledge will likely manifest a progressive improvement, both in depth of penetration and in adequacy to the structures penetrated. “

6. “We can know what this world is like, at least in principle, from the detached perspective of an ideal scientific observer. Thus in the social sciences in particular there is no suggestion that only those who are in some sense part of a given culture or form of life can grasp this culture or form of life theoretically.”
5 and 6 are further statements of realism and our capacity to learn more about nature and the social world with no concession to radical subjectivism or cultural relativism. That is consistent with Popper’s critical rationalism and his concern with the growth of knowledge.

7. “The simple essences or natures pertaining to the various different segments or levels of reality constitute an alphabet of structural parts. These can be combined together in different ways, both statically and dynamically (according to co-existence and according to order of succession).” No Popperian locution comes to mind which replicates that proposition which translates into a fairly uncontroversial statement about the existence of various levels of structural organization in nature.

Smith added three more points to demarcate the ideas of “Austrian realism” from the kind of ideas that dominated in Germany which are found in the their most influential forms in the work of Hegel and Marx.  8. “The theory of value is to be built up exclusively on ‘subjective’ foundations, which is to say exclusively on the basis of the corresponding mental acts and states of human subjects. Thus value for Menger in stark contrast to Marx is to be accounted for exclusively in terms of the satisfaction of human needs and wants. Economic value, in particular, is seen as being derivative of the valuing acts of ultimate consumers.”  9.”There are no ‘social wholes’ or ‘social organisms’.” And 10. “There are no (graspable) laws of historical development.”

Popper argued in favour of the points 8, 9 and 10 in The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and its Enemies. Smith’s ten points add up to a position that is very close to Popper’s metaphysics, his ontology and his epistemology. Smith argued that Menger formed his position from the version of Aristotelian thought that was circulating in Austrian circles. Popper developed his position in his lifelong debate with historicists, positivists, inductivists, instrumentalists, subjectivists and determinists, and his critique of the conventional (Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum theory.

Smith went on to suggest that the implications of the ten point program “
“do have a certain metaphysical cutting power.” And indeed they do, ruling out historicism (theses 2, 6, 8, 9 and 10) and positivism (theses 3 and 5), and “constructivism” and hermeneutic relativism as well (theses 1 and 5).

How Popper and Smith Could Have Helped Menger
“The Methodenstreit”, the ill-tempered debate between Menger and Schmoller of the “younger German historical school” started with Menger’s book on the methods of the social sciences (1883). It continued with sporadic exchanges between other members of the rival schools after the principals retired from the contest.
The point of this case study is to suggest that Menger was stuck for want of a theory of fallible or conjectural knowledge. He had to account for the foundations of scientific knowledge in economics and he did not succeed, being forced to resort to such devices as “the rule of cognition” to make his case in the face of difficulties with empirical evidence as the foundation. With the epistemological innovations furnished by Smith and Popper, Menger could have pressed on with his research program, elaborating and extending his basic insights and appealing to the explanatory power of his theories rather than justification by any special method of investigation.

The outcome of the Methodenstreit was inconclusive because neither party considered that they had anything to learn from the other. The debate has been sometimes depicted as a conflict of “theory versus history” or perhaps “induction versus deduction” but Menger did not disparage history, he just insisted that historical studies need to be informed by principles of explanation in the form of universal laws and the general theories which he and the “Manchester free traders” considered to be the core of the discipline. He perceived that the lack of interest in his Principles on the part of the historical school was a problem of methods.

 “In a word, the progress of science is blocked because erroneous methodological principles prevail…[supported by powerful schools]…clarification of methodological problems is the condition of further progress.” (Menger, 1985, 27)

Bostaph (1978) identified eight issues in the debate, ranging from the criteria for designating the various branches of the subject, through the role of theory in explaining events, to whether “necessary” or universal causal laws can be formulated and tested using empirical data. The central issue was the possibility of “causal realism” in economics, and the existence of universal general theories, which Schmoller and the historical school denied, insisting that laws of historical development  might be found, if at all, by accumulating historical data.

In addition to the personal vitriol in the exchange there are two major reasons why that issue was not resolved ; first, Bostaph explained that the protagonists and most of the subsequent commentators did not fully understood the epistemological issues that were at stake (Milford and Birner are notable exceptions). Second, Menger himself did not have a solution to the central issue, namely the justification or the basis or the rationale for accepting and using the laws that he postulated.

 “The conclusion that the differences between the position of the historicists and that of Menger were minor compared to the similarities seems wholly unsupported. The differences in epistemological beliefs were so great that the debate …was not resolved because the fundamental sources of the disagreement lay unidentified and (substantially) untreated by both factions. The epistemological points at issue are matters of crucial importance to anyone who attempts to be self-conscious about his own methodological choices…because an inappropriate choice can (potentially) lead to a lifetime of wasted effort.” ( Bostaph, 1978, 15)

In that paper Bostaph did not indicate what the more correct or helpful result of the debate might have been if the epistemological issues had been directly addressed. He considered that Menger did well to state his assumptions and prescriptions in such a thorough manner and to seek for a methodologically self-conscious economic theory.
“For these reasons alone, there is ample cause to be glad that Menger was drawn into a Methodenstreit and did publish his methodological and epistemological views. It is only to be regretted that his research work on these topics later in life has not been published.” (ibid, 15)

It is even more regrettable that Menger’s concern with methodology distracted him from completing the additional three volumes that were originally planned to follow Principles. Bostaph cited several sources in Hayek to suggest that this was the case. In a later paper, with the benefit of Smith’s account of the Aristotelian/Austrian realism that informed Menger, Bostaph was more specific about the core issue.

“Unfortunately, neither Menger nor Schmoller recognized [the conflict between Humean nominalism and Aristotelian/neoscholasticism] and so never debated the most fundamental issues that separated them – their strongly differing theories of concepts, or universals, and of causality.” (Bostaph, 1994, 460). Bostaph concluded that Menger pinned his hopes for establishing exact universal laws on a combination of abstraction and simplification to establish ‘typical’ economic phenomena and then to discover the connections between these phenomena. “An ‘exact’ or causal law was an absolute statement of necessity to which, Menger pointed out, exceptions were inconceivable because of ‘the laws of thinking’.” (ibid , 463)

That did not represent a satisfactory solution and Milford and Birner discussed Menger’s unresolved efforts to find a way forward. According to Milford “He [Menger] examined this epistemological position primarily with respect to two problems: the problem of concept formation and the problem of justifying strictly universal statements.” (Milford, 1990, 225). Menger did not accept what he called the “realistic-empirical orientation of theoretical research” whereby repeated observations lead to laws, as repeated sunrises may suggest a law regarding the daily appearance of the sun. He rejected that form of simple induction for reasons much the same as Hume’s famous critique “although strangely without quoting him.” (ibid, 227)

A process of abstraction from the observed phenomena is required to penetrate to the exact or strictly universal laws which lie behind experience. This calls for recourse to “the rule of cognition” which was never properly explained.

Exact research solves the second problem of the theoretical sciences: the determination of the typical relationships, the laws of phenomena…Exact science, accordingly, does not examine the regularities in the succession, etc., of real phenomena either. It examines, rather, how more complicated phenomena develop from the simplest…in their isolation from all other influences…[so with strictly typical elements, exact measure, and isolation from other factors ] on the basis of the rules of cognition characterized by us above [we] arrive at laws of phenomena which are not only absolute but according to our laws of thinking simply cannot be thought of in any other way but as absolute. (Menger, 1985, 61)
That left the issue unresolved, hanging on the question of the “rule of cognition”. Birner also examined how Menger ran into problems with the justification, verification or foundations for universal laws. “For Menger (and his contemporaries, with the possible exception of Whewell) the logical or epistemological problem of the relation between exact and empirical theory is a problem about the justification of knowledge: [how can knowledge] be given a foundation that is true beyond doubt?” (Birner, 1990, 250)
At this point Menger encountered the problem of induction, which he recognized as a serious matter.

Menger’s joint justificationist-inductivist theory of knowledge entails that abstraction is conceived of as a process rather than as the description of a set of hypotheses with particular properties, regardless of how they were arrived at. But Menger is not a naive inductivist. He is well aware of the logical problem that arises if one maintains that general, universally valid laws can be derived from a finite number of observation statements. (ibid, 250)

Menger turned to the construction of “pure” or idealised types as a way out of the dilemma but he never broke out of the inductivist framework and he was stuck on a fourfold predicament.

 Exact laws are: (1) not a prior truths; (2) nor the result of conceptual analysis; (3) nor are they empirical; (4) and they can be and must be justified. Item 3 seems to be unproblematic in view of Menger’s idea that exact laws are laws of ideal phenomena. But..Menger thinks that (5) exact laws contribute to our understanding of the real world…Menger’s justificationism-cum-inductivism makes it impossible for him to solve the epistemological level problem while at the same time maintaining both his methodological distinctions and his realism. (ibid, 251-2).

There is a desperately simple resolution to Menger’s central dilemma when we have the benefit of Smith’s fallibillistic apriorism and Popper’s theory of conjectural knowledge. These eliminate the demand for justification (in its strong form), that is, for certain foundations of theoretical propositions or a surrogate for certainty in the form of a numerical probability or degree of confirmation. Such warrants have yet to be provided despite the efforts of the logical positivists and the logical empiricists who followed them. The alternative is to evaluate theories in terms of their capacity to solve problems, to illuminate economic events, to permit the further elaboration of explanatory theories, to formulate effective policies, etc.

If Menger had not felt obliged to shore up the foundations of his system with a solution to the problem of justification, if he had simply appealed to the power and coherence of his approach, he could have pressed on with the extra volumes that he planned to complete the series after Principles. While the Methodenstreit performed a function in laying bare some issues in epistemology it did not produce a solution and the unresolved issues distracted Menger from his great task of theoretical development. The tools required to solve the espistemological problem only became available some decades later with Popper (1935, 1959) and Smith (1996).

Conclusion
It is suggested that the Aristotelian/Austrian framework which animated Menger’s economics and was reinvented by Popper is a robust alternative to the positivism and empiricism that became dominant in the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. Some of the tenets of the Austrian economists, but not the framework, were taken up by the mainstream of the profession, but as positivism rose in the 1930s and significant differences emerged between the Austrians and others, these differences were resolved in favour of the mainstream by weight of numbers rather than arguments. The framework assumptions of rival research programs could not be addressed effectively under the ban on metaphysics imposed by the positivists.

Frameworks include epistemological and methodological theories as well as ontological and metaphysical assumptions. One of the functions of frameworks is to create winners and losers. In economics the winners in the positivist/empiricist framework include general equilibrium theory, the “measure and model” approach, Keynesian macroeconomics, econometrics, mathematical game theory and the general demand for mathematical rigor. These developments isolated economics from the social sciences and humanities at large, and even from the world “outside the window”. If the Aristotelian-Austrian-Popperian framework can be revived, some alternative programs will thrive, especially the Austrians and the political program of classical liberalism. More important, the framework will facilitate the re-integration of economics, sociology, and all the disciplines of the humanities including law, politics, and cultural. The theory of conjectural or fallibillistic knowledge is an important addition to the Aristotelian/Austrian framework.

References
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Bostaph, Samuel (1978): “The Methodological Debate Between Carl Menger and the German Historicists”, in Atlantic Economic Journal, Vol. VI (3), pp. 3-16.
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Hayek, Friedrich (1979): The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason. Indianapolis, Liberty Fund Press.
Jarvie, Ian (2000): The Republic of Science: The Emergence of Popper’s Social View of Science 1935-1945. Amsterdam, Ripodi.
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Menger, Carl, (1985): Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics. New York, New York University Press.
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Popper, Karl Raimund (1972): Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. London, Oxford University Press.
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Smith, Barry (1990): “Aristotle, Menger, Mises: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Economics”, Caldwell, (ed.) (1990), pp. 263-288.
Smith, Barry. (1994): Austrian Philosophy. The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Chicago and LaSalle, Illinois, Open Court.
Smith, Barry (1996): “In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism”, in Journal of Libertarian Studies, Volume 12, pp. 179-192.
Wong, Stanley (2006): Foundations of Paul Samuelson’s Revealed Preference Theory: A Study by the Method of Rational Reconstruction. London, Routledge.

Joe Agassi, intellectual irritant

This is a short form of a tribute to Joe Agassi, written for a collection to honour his 90^th birthday in 2017. Authors were advised to go beyond Joe’s own contribution to pursue any avenues and applications of critical rationalism which will expand the critical and imaginative conversation about Popper’s ideas.

A paper by Joe encouraged me to cast caution to the winds and unpack the implications of Popper’s ideas on objective knowledge and non-justificationism without being distracted by the arguments about whether objective knowledge exists. As to his own contribution, I think his impact in economics has not been appreciated (certainly not by economists at large). He contributed directly in partnership with Kurt Klappholz and indirectly through his pupil Larry Boland who in turn mentored Stanley Wong. The story moves on to some little appreciated aspects and implications of Popper’s thoughts; the synergy between Popper and the Austrian school of economics; the role of the moral framework of society; his early engagement with the problem of paradigms (his criticism of conventionalism); his warning about the danger of Big Science; his influence on Gordon Tullock.  There is a reminder of the treasure trove of material on the website of Joe’s friend and collaborator Ian Jarvie. In view of their close partnership this is a tribute to Joe as well as to Ian. And last but not least, no tribute to Joe would be complete without a mention of his life partner and collaborator Judith.

Unpacking the content of ideas

“Somebody may be original in being systematic, even if he is not successful in his effort to be systematic” (Agassi 1968). The paper is about novelty in general, with Popper’s ideas as a major example along with avant garde art and some examples of scientific discovery. The takeaway idea is the notion of originality emerging from the simple discipline of being systematic about an idea or insight and taking it as far as it will go.

Prompted by that thought I embarked upon the task of drawing out the consequences of Popper’s theories of objective knowledge and “non-justificationism” across a range of problems and issues. The work on objective knowledge did not progress to publication and it lived on my website until it moved into the collection Reason and Imagination (Champion 2015). The following is a slightly edited form of the introduction and summary.

Objective Knowledge

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. People need to be reminded that we do not live by bread and technology alone; we live by the values, traditions and myths which are embedded in our literature and are studied in the humanities. Our intellectual heritage is a mix of good and bad ideas and if they are not subjected to ongoing criticism there is a risk that the bad may drive out the good. Popper’s task in The Open Society and its Enemies was to examine the work of some revered figures, notably Plato, to identify bad ideas which can be eliminated without necessarily damaging the status and reputation of the authors.

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. 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.

Non-justificationism

The concept of non-justificationism is peculiar to Popper and Popperians and it has made next to no impact in the academic community at large. Exceptions are Weimer (1979), Smith (1982), Butos (1987), Lester (2000) and Barry Smith’s exposition of fallibillistic apriorism (Smith 1996). Bartley in particular took on the idea and made it his own (1964 and 1984).

Again I followed Joe’s hint to pursue the implications of the idea in several directions. One is the theory of literature with a rejoinder to the deconstructionists (Champion 1989). They threatened to outflank their critics by their robust rhetorical techniques which ensure that they would be a force that rival schools of criticism would have to reckon with for some time to come. Prompted by Notturno (1984) I suggested that the rival schools do not need to be intimidated by the pretence of philosophical sophistication on the part of Derrida et al. but instead they should embrace the approach of critical rationalism and become united in self-criticism.

Another paper took up Hayek’s turn to non-justificationism in his last book The Fatal Conceit (Champion 2013a). A paper presented to the Australian Skeptics recruited non-justificationism for the cause of draining the swamp of prejudice and superstition by “cracking the dogmatic framework of western thought” (Champion 2015 Chapter 11). Yet another suggested a resolution to the “foundation of knowledge” problem which perplexed Carl Menger, the founder of Austrian economics  (Champion 2013b Appendix VI). Menger intended to follow his foundational work with more volumes but instead he wrote a polemic on methodological issues and did not continue the main line of his theoretical work. He wanted to account for the foundations of scientific knowledge in economics and he did not succeed, possibly because he lacked a theory of fallible or conjectural knowledge. Without the benefit of such a theory he resorted to devices like “the rule of cognition” to make his case in the face of difficulties with empirical evidence as the foundation. With the benefit of a theory of conjectural knowledge he could have pressed on with his research program, appealing to the explanatory power of his theories rather than justification by any special method.

Economics.

The philosophy and methods of economics became a growth area in the 1980s but some years later a survey concluded that nothing of much value had emerged, although when Popper is read as a critical rationalist, his ideas are robust and relevant (Hands  2001).  The lost years which were dedicated to positivism, paradigm theory and the methodology of scientific research programs might have been saved if people had learned from Klappholz and Agassi (1959). They explained that Popper’s approach was all about robust criticism, with the implicit message was that there was no need for people to specialize in the philosophy and methodology of economics. People doing economics should be problem-centred, critical and imaginative, and that did not call for books, chairs and conferences on philosophy and methodology. From that perspective the new specialty of philosophy and methodology of economics could even be seen as a diversion rather than a contribution to the field.

Larry Boland is one of the more helpful contributors to that literature. He took an economics degree and found his way into a course of lectures from Joe which changed the direction of his philosophical thinking and his approach to his substantial work in economics (the irritant at work again). He mentored Stanley Wong who made a very significant contribution with his doctoral dissertation, a critique of Paul Samuelson’s demand theory (Wong, 1978, revised 2006). The book has a helpful Foreword by Mirowski which is available on line (Mirowski  2006).

Wong’s chapter on “understanding and criticism” is one of the clearest accounts of Popperian situational analysis in the literature.  He explained the situational constraints of a theoretical problem situation and he then looked at the theory of demand (supply and demand) as it evolved in recent times, especially in Paul Samuelson’s project from the 1930s to 1950.  Samuelson wanted to revolutionize the methods of economics by putting the theory of consumer preferences on a proper scientific basis, eliminating all non-empirical references in the theory. He received the Nobel Prize in economics for his efforts but Wong argued cogently that he did not succeed. The economics profession in general and Samuelson in particular went on as though nothing had happened but if Wong’s thesis is robust his critique of  Samuelson is a capital achievement, based on Popper’s ideas, transmitted through the influence of Agassi and Boland.

The Synergy of Popper and the Austrian economists

This is another example of following an idea to see where it leads. The idea in this case is that the most under-rated school of philosophy can empower the most under-rated school of economics and challenge the mainstream of economics to take the Austrians seriously. Popper’s ideas suggest that the Austrians are not vulnerable to the standard objection of the mainstream (the Austrians are not scientific) and they demonstrate that the supposedly scientific mainstream has got hold of the wrong end of the stick on the philosophy and methods of science.

An introduction to the Austrian school is necessary to explain why the synergy is significant, if true. The founding fathers in the 19^th century were native-born Austrians but nowadays most of the “Austrians” are Americans. They represent about 2% of the economics profession and most economists know next to nothing about the Austrian program. The leading features of the school include methodological individualism, the origin of social institutions such as money as the unintended consequences of human action, the salience of dynamic competition and entrepreneurial innovation in the marketplace, the subjective theory of value, recognition of the time factor in social and economic processes, and the uncertainty of human knowledge. The most distinctive feature and the one that has created the most problems in gaining wider acceptance is the epistemological concept of strong apriorism which purports to establish the axioms of the discipline, independent of empirical studies. This aroused the ire of Samuelson who wrote, referring to several authors including von Mises, Frank Knight, Lionel Robbins. “Well, in connection with the exaggerated claims that used to be made in economics for the power of deduction and a priori reasoning…I tremble for the reputation of my subject. Fortunately, we have left that behind us.” Samuelson 1964)

The founding father of the school was Carl Menger (1840-1921), followed by Friedrich von Wieser (1851-1926) and Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk (1851-1914).  Major contributors include Knut Wicksell (1851-1926), Ludwig von Mises (1880-1973, Friedrich A. Hayek (1898-1994) and Murray Rothbard (1926-1995). Recent leaders include Ludwig Lachmann (1906-1990), Israel Kirzner (1930 – ) and a new generation including names such as Ebeling, Salerno, Rizzo, Caldwell, Boettke, Klein, Lewin, Koppl, Herbener,  with doctoral programs at GMU, Texas Tech, Baylor, West Virginia, Rey Juan Carlos Madrid, and Francisco Marroquin.

Early in the 20^th century the Austrian ideas appeared to be firmly planted in the mainstream of the economics profession but the rise of Keynes and the logical positivists in the 1930s transformed the situation. After the war the Austrians became practically invisible until the movement staged a revival in the 1970s (Vaughn 1990). As to their scientific status, both positivism and falsificationism seemed to rule out the strong form of apriorism advocated by von Mises and after him Rothbard and the contemporary Hans Herman Hoppe.

Popper’s ideas support the Austrian school of economics in three ways. First, his account of the role of methodological conventions and the theory of metaphysical research programs shows that Austrian a priorism cannot be dismissed as “unscientific” as many critics suppose.  Some of the so-called a priori principles of Austrian economics can be regarded as working assumptions, either methodological or metaphysical postulates, of the kind that occur in all sciences. These need to stand up to criticism but they do not have to be directly testable or falsifiable. They are tested at one stage removed by their capacity to sustain testable theories, progressive research programs and effective advice on policy issues (Champion 2002, 2011).

Second, Popper’s method of situational analysis or the “logic of the situation” is remarkably similar to the approach advocated by von Mises in Human Action (1949) and by Talcott Parsons The Structure of Social Action (1937). All three were at work in the 1930s developing a framework for the study of economics and the other social sciences which could have:

• maintained sociology and economics as an integrated discipline;
• sponsored partnerships between economists and all students of social institutions – law, politics, literature, religion and cultural studies at large;
• ensured that “high theory” and empirical studies informed, enriched and corrected each other;
• contributed to good public policy, especially by monitoring the results of increased regulation and the erosion of “civic/bourgeois virtues”.

There was a window of opportunity for these three leading figures in their respective fields to form a united front across the disciplines of sociology, economics and philosophy to promote the ideas that they shared and to debate the issues where they disagreed. This did not happen, there was no united front and the defective ideas which all three identified in the 1930s became embedded in the rapidly growing community of academics and researchers after the war.

Thirdly, Popper propagated some metaphysical theories which provide a congenial framework for the Austrian approach. In a nutshell, Popper and the Austrians are metaphysical fellow travellers. Barry Smith found that Carl Menger used a set of Austrian/Aristotelian ideas as the framework for his ideas and the ten propositions which he used to define the framework have some overlap with Popper’s metaphysical research program (Smith 1990 1996).

Popper versus paradigms in the 1930s.

Popperian exegesis mostly dwells on his arguments with logicians so it took Jarvie’s Republic of Science to spell out what he called Popper’s “social turn” although it was signalled in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (section 5), in Chap 23 of The Open Society and section 32 of The Poverty of Historicism. The final section of chapter 1 Conjectural Knowledge in Objective Knowledge is especially helpful because it describes how Popper discovered a new range of problems after he realised that the quest for justification by way of verification was unsustainable. All theories are hypothetical (conjectural) because any or all may be overthrown although that process can take a long time if the adherents of the ruling program are unwilling to give it up. Popper used the term conventionalism to describe the attempt to retain an established theory against interloping novelties (Newton vs Einstein). This indicates that he was addressing the problems of paradigms long before Kuhn entered the fray.

He became alert to the way that theories can be “immunized” against criticism by means of ad hoc hypotheses, by shifting definitions, ignoring inconvenient observations and even by challenging the competence of rival investigators.  Kuhn added the string of incommensurability to the conventionalist’s bow and on politically sensitive issues there is recourse to the charge of ideological/political bias. In Popper’s view these conventionalist strategies raised the issue of the social nature of science and the norms, traditions and conventions of the scientific community “Thus I was led to the idea of methodological rules and…of an approach which avoided the policy of immunizing our theories against refutation.” (Popper 1972, 30).

The next step in the evolution of his ideas came as he applied the critical approach to the test statements of the empirical basis and he recognised the conjectural and theory-laden nature of observation statements. That in turn led to the recognition that all languages are theory-impregnated and that called for a fundamental change in our perception of empiricism which hitherto had located the solid foundations of knowledge in sensory inputs.

It also made me look upon the critical attitude as characteristic of the rational attitude; and it led me to see the significance of the argumentative (or critical) function of language…And it further led me to realize that only a formulated theory (rather than a believed theory) can be objective and to the idea that it is this formulation or objectivity that makes criticism possible; and so to my theory of a ‘third world’. (ibid 31)

Those very important paragraphs provide the pattern of Popper’s progress from demarcation and induction to the rules of the game, to theories of language and the ideas of objective knowledge and the evolutionary link between language and critical. As Jarvie demonstrated in The Republic of Science, all those themes were present in Popper’s first published work and it took a lifetime to draw out some of their implications.

What is to be done? Popper’s Leninist turn.

Popper’s rules for the “republic of science” can be couched in the language of political demands or proposals which he suggested to replace the language of essentialism and historicism in political philosophy. The essentialist explicates the concept of democracy or the state, and the historicist looks at the history of democracy or the state, while Popper and Hayek pose questions about what is to be done – what sort of government do we want, and how do we want to change leaders,  what do we consider to be the role of the state and the limits of state activity? Given this approach the task is to discover, formulate , and critically probe the implications and modify  those principles which function as the ‘rules of the game’ in social life  (Champion 2013c Chapter 5).

The ‘rules of the game’ range from the possibly innate rules of grammar, through the tacit knowledge of local traditions and folkways to the rules of games and other codified forms of procedure. They include the laws of the land embodied in common law, statutes and constitutions. This would be essentially an ecological study with the emphasis on unintended ‘downstream’ effects of changes in the prevailing order. This approach would supplement the methods of conceptual analysis and crude ‘positivist’ empirical description of social and political systems. It would have the theoretical advantage of linking disciplines and the practical merit of being continually in touch with problems and their possible solutions.

More on Ian C Jarvie

We can be grateful for Jarvie’s The Republic of Science and there is much more, some of it unpublished material on his website. The scope is remarkable, from studies of film to sociological research and a wide range of philosophical topics. There is a paper on Popper’s rationality and  situational logic with a long list of problems which Popper addressed in The Open Society (Jarvie 1999) and a tribute to Bill Bartley (Jarvie 1989-90b). In the Bartley paper he referred to Agassi’s stalwart championship of metaphysics and his criticism that The Logic of Scientific Discovery did not take enough account of the role of metaphysics in the history of science, something which Popper addressed later, perhaps in response to Joe in his capacity as the intellectual irritant!  One of the most unfortunate consequences of logical positivism was the relative neglect of important contributors in the field of metaphysics and the history of ideas such as R. G. Collingwood , Jacques Barzun and Arthur O. Lovejoy.

The Challenge of Big Science

The world of science changed out of recognition in Popper’s lifetime and it is clear from his unpublished lectures at the London School of Economics that he was very concerned about the emergence of Big Science, driven by government money.  President Eisenhower articulated similar concerns in his outgoing Presidential address (Eisenhower 1961).  “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present.”

Popper speculated about some influences which could kill science, including the incentives offered to scientists by the newly available money for research. He foresaw a problem of too much money chasing too few ideas, the publication explosion (good buried under bad), angling for money at the expense of good science. In Section 32 of The Poverty of Historicism he advanced an institutional theory to account for scientific and industrial progress and he speculated about factors which might impede progress, such as government control of the laboratories and journals. He did not pursue his speculations but he inspired the outstanding political economist Gordon Tullock to write The Organization of Inquiry (1965). I am not aware of any reference to Tullock in Popper’s published work but some Austrian economists with an interest in Tullock found some 70 pages of correspondence between Popper and Tullock in the 1950s and ‘60s (David Levy personal communication). Tullock’s book sketched a scenario for the evolution of a field of research in a downward spiral to a point where it approached the state of pseudoscience resembling Lysenkoism in Russian genetics and plant breeding. When he wrote in the 1960s he thought that the social sciences were on that path but he considered that the natural sciences were sound. Affiliation: School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom ⨯

Popper on the Moral Framework and Religious Faiths

Popper was sceptical about moral philosophy, which he suggested could be mostly summed up in the Golden Rule. He acknowledged the importance of moral institutions and traditions, especially what he called the “moral framework” of society. In a paper delivered to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1954 he wrote:

Among the traditions that we must count as the most important is what we may call the ‘moral framework’ (corresponding to the institutional ‘legal framework’) of a society. This incorporates the society’s traditional sense of justice or fairness, or the degree of moral sensitivity that it has reached… Nothing is more dangerous than the destruction of this traditional framework. (Its destruction was consciously aimed at by Nazism) (Popper 1963 Chapter 17).

Another much-neglected part of the moral framework is the prevailing attitude towards work, business and the cluster of ideas which Deirdre McCloskey (2010) has labelled “the bourgeois virtues” such as honesty, the work ethic, business acumen, prudence and temperance.

European culture in classical and Christian times spurned work and the bourgeoisie. Yet from 1600 to 1800, startlingly, it developed a lively appreciation of the ‘bourgeois virtues’, from which came the stirrings of enterprise that made the modern world…But after 1848 the artists and intellectuals turned sharply against capitalism. From this, alas, came the events of 1914 and 1917 and all our woe. (McCloskey 2006)

Religions have been the main sources and foundations of moral frameworks and Popper held interesting and nuanced views about God and religion although he was loth to talk about them in public.  Late in life he consented to two interviews with rabbi Edward Zerin on condition that there should be no publication while he was alive. A small part of the transcript appeared in the Skeptic (US) in March 1998 and it is reprinted in a collection of papers (Popper, 2008, Chapter 5).

Another thought-provoking public contribution can be found in a lecture that he delivered in 1940 in New Zealand in a series of university extension lectures on ‘Religion: Some Modern Problems and Developments’.  One of his lectures is reprinted in After the Open Society (Popper 2008). He argued that the dispute between religion and science in the 19th century was a thing of the past because it was based on each side trespassing on the territory of the other. Science evolved out of the religious mythology that men first invented to explain the world and because most religions are “true belief” systems there is a strong and unhelpful residue of “true belief” in science itself.

Judith Buber Agassi and Charlotte Buhler

Joe Agassi has been a tireless intellectual irritant for the best part of a century. I have no doubt that a lot of the credit for his productivity and his good humour can be assigned to his equally indomitable companion for most of that long time. No doubt there will be other tributes to Judith in this volume, coming from people who have known Joe and Judith for many decades. As a feminist, a wife and a scholar she is in the mould of Charlotte Buhler, the wife of Popper’s most important teacher. She was a truly remarkable woman, as can be said of Judith and I hope they will both be remembered, along with their partners, Karl Buhler and Joe Agassi, the indefatigable intellectual irritant.

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Bartley W W 1983 The Retreat to Commitment, 2^nd edition. Open Court, La Salle Illinois.

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Champion R 2002 The Austrian school of economics as a Popperian research program. Website http://www.the-rathouse.com/RC_PopperPaper.html

Champion R 2011 In defence of fallible apriorism and the Aristotelian program for economics. Nuova Civilta Delle Machine 1-2:69-88.    Draft http://www.the-rathouse.com/WritingsonMises/FallibleApriorism.html

Champion R 2013a Hayek, Bartley and Popper: Justificationism and the abuse of reason. In Leeson R (ed) Hayek: A Collaborative Biography. Part I Influences from Mises to Bartley. Palgrave Macmillan, New York:p213-225.

Champion R 2013b  Guide to The Open Society and its Enemies. Amazon.  https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Society-Enemies-Popular-Popper-ebook/dp/B00C6RHIGO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1483093545&sr=8-2&keywords=rafe+champion.

Champion R 2013c  Commentary on Hayek. Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Commentary-Hayek-Critical-Rationalist-Papers-ebook/dp/B00E0L8AR0/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1482889945&sr=8-6&keywords=rafe+champion

Champion 2015 Reason and Imagination. Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Reason-Imagination-thoughts-William-Bartley/dp/1507512112/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1483093591&sr=8-4&keywords=rafe+champion

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Jarvie Ian C 1999  Rationality and Situational Logic in Popper’s Scientific Work. http://www.yorku.ca/jarvie/online_publications/VIENNAWD.pdf

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Popper on Strict and Numerical Universality

by Flemming Steen Nielsen

I

In his article, ”Evolutionistiske forklaringer og kritikken af historicismen” (Evolutionary explanations and the Critique of Historicism) (1), professor Mogens Blegvad raised a series of searching objections to Karl Popper’s famous critique of Historicism (2) – objections which any future treatment of historicism would do well to take into consideration. Not least, Blegvad described and criticised those of Popper’s arguments that are based upon his distinction between on the one hand stricly universal law-statements and singular statements of individual fact on the other. In the following (3) I shall attempt to clarify this distinction of Popper’s – a distinction absolutely central to his thought, but never really treated as such by his commentators and critics. Hopefully this could provide a basis for a detailed reply to some of Blegvad’s objections.

II

The main sources of the subject are Popper’s works Logik der Forschung (1934) and Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (written before Logik der Forschung but published in incomplete form as late as 1979). Die beiden … must be considered the best of these and gives us by far the the most complete description we now have of Popper’s views on the subject. Very naturally I shall base the following primarily on this work.

The first of the two problems of epistemology that Popper discusses in his book is the problem of induction, which he treats by first presenting his well-known falsificationist and fallibilist solution and then giving very detailed logical and transcendental critiques of various alternative solutions under the following five headings: (1) naïve inductivism, (2) strict positivism, (3) apriorism, (4) probability positions and (5) pseudo-sentence positions (”Scheinsats-Positionen”). He argues that the first four can be explicated and criticized in terms of a formulation of the problem of induction which in a traditional manner distinguishes between ”general” (”allgemeine”) and ”particular” (”besondere”) propositions. In connection with the fifth position, however, he finds it necessary to subject this very distinction to a closer examination. The expression ”pseudo-sentence positions” refer to epistemological positions which in order to circumvent the problem of induction assert that law-statements are not genuine sentences with truth-values, but instead a kind of ”formulae for the construction of singular sentences” (in analogy with propositional functions), or ”tools or instruments for the construction of prognoses, which cannot be true, false, or probable, but at most more or less useful.” (4)

To be able to examine the scope and validity of this view, Popper asserts, it is necessary to introduce a distinction between two kinds of synthetic, universal statements. The following example could illustrate this distinction:

(a) The trajectory of all stone’s throws (Steinwürfe) are parabolae, …

(b) the trajectory of all stone’s throws that have hitherto been measured are parabolae. (5)

There has been a tendency – not least in Classical Empiricism and Logical Positivism – to overlook the difference between these two kinds of statement, i.e. the difference between universal law-statements and empirical generalisations; but Popper in this respect like so many other respects follows Immanuel Kant. Like Kant, Popper insists that this distinction is indispensable for any attempt to characterize the theoretical, nomothetic sciences in an adequate way. Kant speaks about ”strenge Allgemeinheit” in the first case, and ”komparative oder angenommene Allgemeinheit” in the second. (6) Popper’s terminology is as follows: Statement (a) in our example is a (synthetic) strictly universal statement; statement (b) is a (synthetic), numerically universal statement. As we shall see, numerically universal statements strictly speaking are singular statements. (7)

Why do for instance Logical Empiricists overlook or reject the distinction? Popper’s explanation is that they tend to accept only such distinctions as can comfortably find expression in the their favoured logic, i.e. the logic of Principia Mathematica: ”Die Logistik”. But the distinction beween strict and numerical universality cannot be expressed in this Logistik, Popper insists. In our example both statements can be formalized as the so-called ”general” or ”formal implication”:

(Ax) (Fx  Gx). (9)

From a purely logical point of view the lack of the distinction is of no importance according to Popper; but for the purposes of epistemology and scientific methodology we most certainly need both kinds of statement.

As the statements both can be formalized as general implications, i.e. statements about all members of a class, of course the difference between tham cannot be a question of logical form. So it must be a question of (logical) ”content”, i.e. a difference between the concepts involved? In the statements. This means that we must similarly distinguish between universal and individual concepts. This distinction is, according to Popper, ”unambiguous and absolute.” (10)

III

It may surprise that Popper considers the distinction ”unambiguous and absolute”. An obvious objection would be the following: There is at least one sense of ”unambiguous” in which it would seem quite absurd to label it unambiguous. For is it not a fact that what in one context functions as an element of a class, i.e. as an individuum, in another might itself function as a class? If that is the case, would it not be more correct to characterize the distinction as ”relative”? Popper’s reply to this objection is: ”True, but irrelevant!”. A more thorough analysis of such terms as ”class”, ”element”, ”universal” etc. will make clear why:

The most important source of confusion in connection with these terms is that we confuse three different distinctions, namely those between (i) class and element, (ii) class and subclass, and (iii) universals and individuals.

Ad (i) It must be admitted that the distinction class/element is relative in exactly the above sense. For instance, the concept ”iron” could be viewed as a class of physical bodies with certain properties in common. On the other hand, any of these bodies can be viewed as elements of the class ”iron”. But ”iron” can of course in another context be viewed as an element, namely as an element of a higher class ”metal”, where ”metal” is the class of classes of certain physical bodies [the following manner of exposition is mine, not Popper’s]:

CLASS ELEMENT

metal – iron – a piece of iron

CLASS ELEMENT

Such a string of class/element-related concepts we call a type hierarchy. Popper gives us the following example:

Type hierarchy (the example taken from Carnap, though somewhat changed): ”My dog Lux” is an element of the class ”dogs living in Vienna”, that class itself an element of the class of ”dog-classes in Vienna”; ”my dog Lux” is, however, also a class, namely, whose elements are ”the states of the dog Lux”; a single ”state of Lux” is (according to Carnap) ”a class whose elements are points in the world of experiences” etc. (11)

Ad (ii) The distinction between class and element must not be confused with another distinction, namely that between class and subclass (Überbegriff/Unterbegriff), a distinction which is also relative:

CLASS SUBCLASS

mammals dogs the dogs of Vienna

CLASS SUBCLASS

A string of class/subclass related concepts is called a hierarchy of concepts (”Begriffshierarchie”):

Hierarchy of concepts: ”In Vienna living Alsations”; ”in Austria living Alsations” etc. … ”in Austria living dogs”; ”dogs” … ”mammals” … ”animals”.- All these classes are of the same type, which can be seen from the fact that my dog Lux is an element of any of these classes. (Or from the fact that you can construct the general implication: ”x is a Viennese dog” generally implies ”x is an animal”.) (12)

Ad (iii) The third distinction, that between universal and individual concepts cannot be illustrated in a similar manner as the two others. Examples are:

UNIVERSAL INDIVIDUAL

naval battle the battle of Trafalgar
star Sirius
needle this needle

It is Popper’s thesis, then, that this distinction is unambiguous and absolute in exactly the sense in which the two others are not so. It ”cuts through” the type- and concept-hierarchies in an unambiguous manner:

Right through the types and the extensions runs a boundary in such a way that it runs through every type so that every type is divided by it into two parts. This boundary divides the whole system of concept extensions into two, namely the domain of universals (examples: ”the race of dogs”, ”A large, brown dog”) and the domain of individuals (examples: ”the races of dogs in Vienna”; ”my dog Lux”).
Each of the two domains contains type hierarchies, contains classes and elements; and each of the domains contains concepts of greater and smaller extent.
This boundary between universals and individuals is according to the present point of view unequivocal: Whereas one and the same concept in different contexts can function as a class or an element, as well as as a broader or a narrower class, we must be able to answer the question whether it is a universal or an individual unambiguously. (13)

What this last assertion means I shall discuss in quite a detailed manner in section VII. But first I shall present something the Popper never gives us, namely a systematic illustration of the way in which the distinction universal/individual cuts through the two other distinctions:

A. Type hierarchy of universals:

¬¬¬¬_ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _
”metal” as a class of classes of bodies
”iron” as a class of physical bodies
a physical body as the class of its states
the states of a class of molecules
_ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _

B. Concept hierarchy of universals:

_ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _
body of metal
body of heavy metal
body of iron
body of cast iron
_ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _

C. Typehiearchy of individuals

_ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _
the animal classes of Vienna
dogs living in Vienna
my dog Lux
the states of Lux
_ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _

D. Concept hierarchy of individuals
_ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _
in Europe living mammals
in Austria living Mammals
in Austria living dogs
in Vienna living dogs
_ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _

IV

The distinction universal/individual cannot be defined in a non-circular way, Popper admits. Accordingly, he considers these concepts ”indefinable, logical primitives”. Nevertheless, it is possible to set up a ”simple and unambiguous criterion” for the application of them. There is an old logical rule to the effect that a given individuum cannot be characterized without the use of proper names or expressions functioning as proper names. This means that the individuum cannot be adequately characterized by general terms, but that proper names will have to be used. Universal concepts (Universalbegriffe) can therefore be defined as concepts which can be defined without the use of proper names, and individual concepts (Individualbegriffe) as concepts that need at least one proper name for their definition.

The term ”proper name”, however, is itself indefinable, he admits, but it is possible to say quite a lot about how to use it in a fruitful and satisfactory way:

A proper name is a sign which if necessary can be directly attached to the object (for instance like a dog tag) and which if necessary is used once and for this object only. (If the object is such that an actual attachment is impossible – for example a name of a country and things like that – the proper name nevertheless can be ascribed to the nation’s borders; or it can be defined by veritable proper names like ”The Conference of February 8., 1893” [….]). Proper names are at the same footing as (demonstrative) references like ”this dog”, ”today” etc. 14)

Two ”guiding propositions” can be formulated in order to make quite precise the relation of irreduceability among universals and individuals:

(1) An individual object cannot unambiguously be characterized in its individuality by universal concepts alone, i.e. without proper names.
(2) A universal cannot be defined solely by proper names or by a class of individual concepts.

V

Guiding proposition (1) can be explained in the following manner: Let’s take the individual thing ”Lux”. If we attempt to characterize the dog Lux in general tems – i.e. universals – we soon discover that what we end up with will always be a class – not an individuum. We might try describing Lux as a poodle, a black poodle, a two years old poodle etc.; but unless we use proper names the result will always be a class. In fact, even if we narrow our description so much that only a single dog (or even no single dog) actually exists, we will only have arrived at a ”kind” of objects – a class!

By contrast, we can easily characterize an object in an unambiguous manner if we introduce proper names og terms functioning as proper names, for instance ostentative expressions. For instance, we can refer to it by applying expressions like ”Lux”, ”my dog Lux”, ”the dog which in 1930 carried dog tag no. 17948” etc. Even if we make use of space/time coordinates the use of proper names is implied:

Especially definite specifications of space and time make unambiguity possible. This is an important point. One must not overlook the fact that it must be specifications of a particular place or a particular moment of time; these again always involve proper names. The point of origin of a space/time coordinate system can only be determined by proper names (for example Greenwich or the Birth of Christ) or – what is actually the same – by direct (”demonstrative”) reference. (Only a reference to an ”individual coordinate system” specified in this way could work as ”principium individuationis”). Also, a particular human being, for instance Napoleon, can be characterized in an unambiguous way by giving his place and time of birth: but thereby individual concepts are being used. (15)

Two important aspects of Popper’s concept of an individual concept might seem to conflict with ordinary usage. First, he stresses that an individual concept according to his chosen way of speaking doesn’t have to be a well-defined physical body. Thus he considers ”The Battle of Waterloo” an individual concept , whereas ”iron cube with sides of 1 cm” is a universal concept. (16) Secondly, an individual concept need not refer to single ”objects”. ”All persons leaning out of a window in Copenhagen just now” or ”all persons who have ever been leaning out of this window” are individual concepts according to his definition. They need proper names or indexical terms to be formulated.

VI

Analogously, according to the second guiding proposition universal concepts cannot be defined by proper names or by reference to a specific class of individuals. This principle is of the greatest epistemological importance – not least because it implies that even if universals may stand in a class/element-relation to individuals they cannot be ”reduced to” or ”constituted by” concrete classes of individuals.

Although we find this point expressed both in Die beiden … and in Logik der Forschung, I prefer illustrating it by the far more elegant and clear treatment in the important article ”The Demarcation Between Science and Metaphysics” from 1955. (17) Here Popper has collected his arguments against Rudolf Carnap’s various theories of demarcation and meaning. In his critique of what he calls ”Carnap’s first theory of meaninglessness” Popper attempts to show that Carnap presupposes a particular, extremely simple kind of radical nominalism which can be shown to be untenable. According to this, all non-formative words (i.e. all words which are not logical constants) are names. This implies that not only proper names like ”Fido” are names, but that even a word like ”dog” strictly speaking is a kind of name, namely the name of, for instance, Fido, Candy and Tiffin. In a language constructed according to this assumption the meaning of general terms is given by an enumeration of the individual things denoted, i.e. through an enumerative definition. However, such a language can be shown to be totally inadequate as the language of science, Popper objects. This is because it has the absurd property that all its sentences are analytic – either analytic truths or contradictions. No synthetic sentence can be formulated in it, simply because the truth or falsity of all its sentences can be decided by a simple inspection of the enumerative definitions giving the meaning of the non-logical words used:

That this is so may be seen from our example. ”Fido is a dog” is true because Fido was one of the things enumerated by us in defining ”dog”. As opposed to this ”Chunky is a dog” must be false, simply because Chunky was not one of the things to which we pointed when drawing up the list defining ”dog”. Similarly, if I give the meaning of ”white” by listing (1) the paper on which I’m now writing, (2) my handkerchief, (3) the cloud over there and (4) our snowman, then the statement ”I have white hair” will be false, whatever the colour of my hair may be.
It is clear that in such a language hypotheses cannot be formulated. It cannot be a language of science. And conversely, every language adequate for science must contain words whose meaning is not given in an enumerative way. Or, as we may say, every scientific language must make use of genuine universals, i.e. of words, whether defined or undefined, with an indeterminate extension, though perhaps with a reasonably definite intensional ’meaning’. (18)

This also shows that any attempt to define universals enumeratively from individuals is doomed to failure. Let me add here that it would be no use to try a definition like such as ””dog” =def. ”Fido, Candy, Tiffin and all things similar to these”. For even a cat or a turtle are similar to Fido, Candy and Tiffin in some respects, of course. And a suggestion like ””dog =def. ”Fido, Candi, Tiffin and all things similar to these in respect to dogness” would of course lead us right back into the use of a universal concept.

These considerations are also destructive of any idea of a ”logical process of abstraction” which is supposed to make it possible for us to move from individual to genuinely universal concepts, although of course there is a method by which we can construct classes through ”abstraction” (- but these classes will remain individual concepts). (19) In fact we would do well to stop talking about a ”method of abstraction” or a ”process of abstraction” and to speak instead of a problem of abstraction in analogy with the classical problem of induction. The problem of induction arises from the relationship between singular end strictly universal statements. Strictly universal statements, according to Popper, are such that only involve universal concepts. Singular statements are such that involve at least one individual concept. The problem of abstraction, accordingly, is a problem about the relationship between universal and individual concepts. Both problems underline the hypothetical, tentative, almost groping nature of human knowledge. In science we work with genuine, strictly universal law-statements. These cannot be verified from our singular, experiental statements. Analogously, we have to make use of genuine, universal concepts; but we have no method – by way of ”reduction”, ”constitution”, or ”explication” – for once and for all securing an entire arsenal of absolutely unambiguous and, at the same time, concretely applicable universal concepts.

VII

Now let us return to the question about what Popper might mean by characterizing the distinctions between universal and individual concepts – as well as that between universal and singular statements – as unambiguous. Some of his formulations might give the impression that what is meant is that a simple inspection of what we could call ”the grammatical character” of a given formulation makes it possible for us to decide once and for all whether a statement is strictly universal or not. The frequent talk of ”proper names” points towards an interpretation like that. Despite the somewhat heavy-handed formulations used by Popper when introducing the distinction in a general way, many of his later formulations make it clear that he has a more subtle view in mind. Far from maintaining that the grammatical form unambiguously reveals the universal or individual character of a statemement, he is quite aware that interpretation involving context almost always is necessary.

For instance, he points out, it is not possible simply to say whether a word like ”pasteurized” is an individual or a universal concept; for of course it can function as both:

”Pasteurized” can be defined either as ”treated according to Louis Pasteur’s instructions” (or something like that), or as ”heated to 80 degrees Celsius and kept at that temperature for ten minutes”. By the first definiton ”pasteurized” is an individual concept; by the second it is a universal concept. (19)

So context is decisive: In a historical discussion of the historical development of medical science, the expression might well be used as an individual concept, while in a theoretical discussion of the resistance of various micro-organisms it would be natural to use it as a universal concept. Another of Popper’s examples is the following, which introduces what we might call ”intended meaning”:

The use of the word ’mammals’ as an example of a universal name might possibly cause misunderstanding. For words like ’mammal’, ’dog’, etc., are in their ordinary use not free from ambiguity. Whether these words are to be regarded as individual class names or universal class names depends upon our intentions: it depends upon whether we wish to speak of a race of animals living on our planet (an individual concept), or of a kind of physical bodies with properties which can be described in universal terms. (20)

Both examples show that when Popper characterizes the distinction between individual and universal concepts as unambiguous he certainly does not think of ”unambiguity of a formulation” – a kind of unambiguity which would make it possible for us unambiguously to decide the question by sheer inspection of sentences. On the contrary, both ”pasteurized” and ”mammal” are ambiguous in that sense. We might express this important difference by saying that while the distinctions admittedly are ”grammatically ambiguous”, they are asserted by Popper to be ”logically unambiguous”. Exactly for that reason it is important to distinguish between their strictly universal and their individual uses. Popper might be said to defend the logical distinction by simply challengeing any opponent to explicate these and similar examples without applying it. In fact, this is exactly what Popper does in the epistemologi, methodological and metaphysical parts of his philosophy. Let me conclude this paper by illustrating this by offering a few more examples.

VIII

In The Poverty of Historicism Popper stresses the importance of distinguishing between theoretical and historical sciences. Theoretical physics is, of course interested in finding and testing universal laws; the historical sciences are interested in actual, singular, or specific events, rather than in laws and generalisations. (21) A historical explanation takes all kinds of universal laws (for instance those of economics) for granted when attempting to explain its singular statements. Both kinds of science use the hypothetical-deductive model when trying to offer, test, and predict causal explanations:

In the sense of this analysis, all causal explanations of a singular event can be said to be historical in so far as the ’cause’ is always described by singular initial conditions. And this agrees entirely with the popular idea that to explain a thing causally is to explain how and why it happened, that is to say, to tell its ’story’. But it is only in history that we are really interested in the causal explanation of a singular event. In the theoretical sciences, such causal explanations are mainly means to a different end – the testing of universal laws. (22)

The distinction is also, as might be expected, of great importance in connection with Popper’s discussion of the question whether the Theory of Evolution gives us reason to believe that there is such a thing as a law of evolution. Here Popper distinguished between (a) a theory about what might be called ”the Darwinian or Neo-Darwinist mechanism of evolution” and what he calls (b) ”the hypothesis of biological evolution” as a theory about an individual, though enormously complex occurrence. (23) (b) is not, as many seem to believe, a universal law, as many believe. Rather it must be viewed as a rather complex singular historical statement quite analogous to, for instance, ”Charles Darwin and Francis Galton had a common grandfather”. So even if an expression like ”all vertebrates” might look like a universal concept, in this context it is used as an individual concept, for ”all vertebrates” refers only to all vertebrates existing on Earth – ”… rather than to all organisms at any place and time which have the constitution which we consider as characteristic of vertebrates”. (23)

What we call the evolutionary hypothesis is an explanation of a host of biological and paleological observations – for instance, of certain similarities between various species and genera – by the assumption of the common ancestry of related forms. This hypothesis is not a universal law, even if certain universal laws of nature, such as laws of heredity, segregation, and mutation, enter with it into the explanation. It has, rather, the character of a particular (singular, specific) historical statement. (24)

This view of Popper’s might be seen as challenging anybody who disagrees to develop a version of the hypothesis of evolution in a form not using ”proper names or terms functioning as proper names”.

An analogous situation is found in a well-known cosmological debate between Popper, Adolf Grünbaum, and others. (25) At a particular stage of the discussion, Popper defends the use of egocentric particulars such as ’I ’, ’here’, and ’now’. Admittedly, they do not have a place in theoretical physics in a narrower sense; but this doesn’t mean that they don’t rightfully belong in cosmology:

”The present state of the surface of the moon suggests that …” is a phrase which is fully legitimate in science, though it is not likely to occur in theoretical physics. ”The present age of the universe” is a perfectly good term in cosmology, and one which it would be quite unnecessary and pedantic, if not downright misleaning, to replace by ”the age of the universe on October 14, 1970”. In other words, the past, present and future are perfectly good terms in cosmology and astronomy, two excellent examples of (to some extent historical) physical sciences. It is fully legitimate to remind the astronomer that what he observes, in certain cases, is the state of star 1,000 years ago, or of a gallaxy 100,000 years ago, where ”ago” is just a synonym of ”before the present”. The fact that these notions do not occur in theoretical physics, and that we replace them by names and dates in history, does not show that they are to be expunged.
Nor are they expungeable. It is perfectly true that astronomers can use coordinates instead of speaking of the Great Nebula in Andromeda. But the coordinates go back to the axis and equator of the Earth, to here-and-now terms. (The Earth changes its axis in time; and although we may speak of the north pole as the sky on ”October 14, 1970” we must not forget that ”October 14, 1970”, though in many respects preferable to ”now”, refers to a zero date which is highly conventional and anthropomorphic. Nobody claims to know even the precise year of the birth og Jesus Christ.)
Thus my thesis is that notions like ”the present” are needed, if not in theoretical physics, at any rate in physical science. But I want to claim even more. Theoretical physics uses all the time spatiotemporal variables; and without applications in which these variables are specified (in the last instance with the help of ”here and now”), they would have no reasonable function whatsoever. (26)

The importance of Popper’s distinction is seen elsewhere in his philosophical writings. To mention only a few examples, the impossibility of reducing strictly universal law-statements to a finite number of singular statements is of course decisive for his epistemological deductivism and fallibilism. The distinction is also used by him in his arguments concerning free will. (27) Likewise, of course, in his critique of determinism and in his radical emergentism with its daring idea that our natural laws might not, after all, be strictly universal because they after all seem to be the result of an ’evolution’ of our individual, open universe. (28)

———————–

Notes:

Translated with some changes from: ”Begrebet streng universalitet hos Karl Popper”, FILOSOFISKE STUDIER, vol. 9, Copenhagen 1987, pp. 125-142, Copenhagen 1987.

Dedicated to Mogens Blegvad

(1) FILOSOFISKE STUDIER, vol. 5, Copenhagen 1982, pp. 7-32.

(2) See especially Karl Raimund Popper: The Poverty of Historicism, 1944-45, 1957; K.R.Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945.

(3) A shorter version of this paper was read at the Polish/Danish philosophical seminar, Copenhagen 1983.

(4) K.R.Popper: Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie. Aufgrund von Manu-skripten aus den Jahren 1930-33 herausgegeben von Troels Eggers Hansen, Tübingen 1979, p. 159 ff.

(5) Ibid. p. 228.

(6) Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2. Aufl. 1787, p. 3.

(7) In Logik der Forschung, § 13 Popper uses the expression ”spezifische Allgemeinheit” for Kant’s ”strenge Allgemeinheit”. In the English version (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959), he prefers the expression ”strict universality”.

(8) See for instance Rudolf Carnap: ”Eigentliche und uneigentliche Begriffe”, Symposion Vol. I, 1927; Der logische Aufbau der Welt, 1928, p. 213.

(9) Logik der Forschung, § 14.

(10) Die beiden Grundprobleme, p. 234.

(11) Ibid. pp. 233-34.

(12) Ibid. p. 233.

(13) Ibid. p. 234.

(14) Ibid. pp. 234-35.

(15) Ibid. pp. 235-36.

(16) Die beiden Grundprobleme, pp. 238-41; Logik der Forschung, 4. Ausg. 1971, pp. 27-28.

(17) K.R.Popper: Conjectures and Refutations, 1963, Ch. II.

(18) Conjectures and Refutations, p. 226.

(19) Logik der Forschung, p. 37 note 1.

(20) The Logic of Scientific Knowledge, p. 59.

(21) The Poverty of Historicism, pp. 143-147.

(22) Ibid, p. 144.

(23) Ibid. p. 107 note.

(24) Ibid, § 30. For a closer treatment of this distinction as well as the problem of the respective falsifiability of these two kinds of ”theory of evolution”, see my ”Karl Poppers som evolutionistisk filosof”, (”Karl Popper as an Evolutionist Philosopher”) in: Niels Bonde, Jesper Hoffmeyer and Henrik Stangerup: Naturens historiefortællere, II: Udviklingsideens historie, Copenhagen 1987, Ch. 15.

(25) Adolf Grünbaum: ”Popper’s Views on the Arrow of Time” and Popper: ”Grünbaum on Time and Entropy” in Schilpp (ed.): The Philosophy of Karl Popper, p. 775 and p. 1143.

(26) Ibid. p. 1143.

(27) For instance, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, Dritte Auflage pp. 481 ff; The Open Universe, pp. 41 ff, pp. 128 ff.

(28) The Open Universe, p. 143.

From: Sandhedens Sider, Institute of Philosophy, Copenhagen, Autumn 1994

Happy Acquaintance With a Difficult Person
In memoriam Karl Raimund Popper, 26.7.1902-17.9.1994.

By Flemming Steen Nielsen

One morning a few weeks ago my friend Troels Eggers Hansen (theoretical physicist, editor of Karl Popper’s Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie) telephoned to tell me that our friends in London had called to inform us that Popper had just died. The conversation which followed was not, of course, a particularly cheerful one. On the other hand it was not dominated by grief – rather by a quiet sadness and a strange feeling of emptiness (’one somehow feels like an orphan’ as Troels put it). After all it could hardly be considered very tragic when a person dies at the age of 92 – of sound mind till the end, and after an extremely eventful and productive life. Starting out as an out-of-work school teacher around 1920 and ending up a friend of and discussion partner with many of the world’s most brillant scientists; the creator of philosophical arguments and theories of wide-ranging importance; the inspiration of statesmen and cultural celebrities; knighted and highly decorated by nations and universities; and, not least, loved and admired by his many readers – this must surely have been a good life. The following days many thoughts and images whirled around in our heads: About the joy, many years earlier, of discovering the works of this amazing thinker; about the exciting days when ’a new Popper’ appeared in the bookshops or arrived by mail with his signature; about the fascination of meeting him in person etc. So when Sandhedens Sider asked me to write a few pages on the occasion of the death of this strikingly original philosopher I decided to offer some hints about those thoughts and images rather than attempting a solemn obituary.

1

On my way to a summer holiday tour in Jutland in June 1961 I looked in at the Institute of Philosophy, then situated at Copenhagen Cathedral Square, to look for one more book to bring with me (- I already brought Viktor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom, (1946)). Here I came across a stout volume with the title The Open Society and Its Enemies, (1945). Who could resist a title like that? Not I, and so I brought that one too. Incidentally, Popper’s book complemented Kravchenko’s splendidly, so every day during the two weeks’ tour from one beautiful Jutland locality to another, some chapters of the one were read in combination with some chapters of the other. The horrible experiences of a Russian engineer under Stalin’s terror and his later escape to the West made acutely real and concrete the bloodshed and sufferings caused by the totalitarian state. And Popper’s diagnosis of the collectivist and utopian ideas from more than 2000 years’ philosophical tradition, which have constantly been used as standard ammunition against liberty and democracy – and resulted in world wars and tyranny – was enough to remove from my mind the few remnants of utopianism and ’philosopher king’-ways of thinking that might have survived many years’ discussions with my father or my wonderful history teacher at school.
Apart from the book’s passion and moral force – an emigrant to New Zealand, Popper began writing on the day of Hitler’s inclusion of his native Austria into the German Reich and finished the book during the War – it was its manner of arguing that made an impression on a young philosophy student. The book showed that it is indeed possible to do philosophy the old way: attacking important metaphysical, moral and political problems with substantial, general arguments. You have to remember that at the time of my first reading it there was a strong tendency within the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries to remove philosophy from its original cosmological and ethical context and into one of two directions: (1) Viewing it as ’linguistic analysis’; i.e. treating it as the study of pseudo-problems originating in a perverse misuse of ’ordinary language’ – problems that could only be cured, not solved, by a sort of linguistic psychoanalysis (see Ernest Gellner’s critical diagnosis of the phenomenon in his brillant Words and Things from 1959). Or (2) replacing philosophy by the construction of formal systems representing scientific theories and the ’evidence’ supporting them – often resulting in desperate inductionist or confirmation-logical attempts to clarify that elusive relation of ’support’. How refreshing on this background to encounter a philosopher who took a stance against these tendencies and explicitly chose to do philosophy in the traditional manner!
The Open Society shows how important the theory of knowledge is to political philosophy according to Popper. If, for instance, you accept an epistemology according to which we are able to reach authoritative, apodictic knowledge about both descriptive and normative questions you will quite naturally tend towards elitist and anti-democratic ways of thinking. If you reject the idea of expertise concerning normative questions, but all the same believe in the possibility of apodictally certain and detailed knowledge about societal processes, then what Popper dubs holistic utopian engineering, or at least central planning of the economy, will seem within reach and basically desirable – and the possible advantages of the rule of law and market economy will become invisible. And thus it is evident how indebted his philosophy of the open society is to the well-known ideas of his epistemology and philosophy of science. His view of knowledge as basically a trial-and-error process, his fallibilism, his model for testing, explanation and prediction, and his view of rationality as comprehensive critical discussion – all are ingredients of his critique of totalitarianism, revolutionism and historicist prophecy as well as his arguments for democracy, individualism and political reformism.

2

I had the priviliege of living at the old ”kollegium” (students’ dormitory) Regensen at the time. On returning there after my tour I told the other members of our ’Regens-club’ (a sort of small beer and debating society) – a physicist, a mathematician, an astronomer, a historian and a literature guy – about Popper, and we decided to study his Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934, 1959) together. One thing strikes me when I think back to our discussions about that book. The objection which nowadays in broad circles is considered an absolutely devastating refutation of it, and which has given rise to a series of ’new and better’ philosophies of science, never had an important place in our discussion. I’m referring to the objection that Popper’s view of testing as attempted empirical falsification af strictly universal theories, must be wrong because it is just as impossible to falsify a theory as to verify it – all because of the point made by Popper himself that it is impossible to give unambiguously applicable criteria for certain and unrevisable verification of observation statements (because they themselves must refer to strictly universal laws). We were aware of this objection, but did not take it seriously. As we read Popper’s book, it attempted to give a Logic of Science, i.e. a set of abstract rules and proposals for how we can make our theories as critisizable as possible, how we can compare their informative strength, which objections concerning initial conditions and auxiliary theories are relevant in a discussion about concrete test results, etc. etc. The analogy to the regulative application of formal logic’s schemata and principles to discussions in general seems clear. For this purpose we found Popper’s version of the hypothetico-deductive method eminently superior to for instance positivist-inductivist or con-ventionalist models of scientific debate. What we certainly could not read from the text was that it (1) presumed to describe how and why actual scientists actually choose or chose to believe in individual theories; nor (2) that it pretented to give us a set of unambiguous criteria to tell us when a given empirical theory is conclusively falsified. Could Popper really be supposed to think that he had given us a kind of touchstone – a veritable ’philosopher’s stone’ – which would make it possible for us to go around from laboratory to laboratory and authoritatively and conclusively in-form scientists about which particular experimental results must be considered firm and final, and consequently which theories are falsified once and for all? Of course not.
Popper also gave os (in ”Appendix X” as well as in the article ”Science: Conjectures and Refutations”) a psychological and logical critique of Hume’s idea of repetition as a basis for induction, as well as an effective, rational strategy against various phenomena we considered pseudo-scientific, for instance astrology, para-psychology, and Freudianism. Until then we had been forced to take shelter in the usual positivist critique that these theories couldn’t be verified empirically – some-how hoping that their proponents would not point out to us that neither could the best physical theories! Now we could attack them by arguing that they did not specify any possible phenomenon which – according to the theory itself – could not happen; or we could at least challenge their proponents to identify at least one possible event that they themselves would admit to be a decisive falsification of their theory if it ever happened.

3

Some years later I wrote Popper to tell him about my interest in his ideas as well as a little about the state of philosophy in Denmark. His reply was extremely kind and encouraging, although he gave me a – probably well-deserved – rap on the knuckles for a youthfully arrogant remark I had made about Niels Bohr’s philosophical efforts. Popper had met Bohr in Copenhagen at a congress in 1936 and had had a somewhat overwhelming conversation with him about the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. This led him to characterise Bohr as ”… everything a great man should be!”
In the summer of 1967 Troels and I finally got the opportunity to meet Popper at a congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science in Amster-dam. At the opening cocktail party we went around eagerly looking for him – com-paring the many new faces with our only source: a perfectly awful portrait from a book about Popper, which made him look very angry and strangely Prussian. A poor little man who had some resemblance to this portrait, got visibly flustered by our youthful interest and almost fled the scene. Later we found out that he was an extremely nice professor fra Roumania, otherwise having a perfectly wonderful time in beautiful, free Amsterdam. Little did we know that Popper never attended occasions like that, but only lectures, seminars etc., where a total ban of smoking could be effectively upheld. Allergy or no allergy,- as one of his colleagues at the London School of Economics once told me with a wry smile, Popper’s insisting on his right to avoid tobacco smoke had at least excused him from taking part in countless dull faculty meetings.
Then came the great moment when we would be able to see and hear our hero. Strangely enough, Popper had been given the honourable task of giving the plenum talk. ’Strangely enough’ because the congress to our great surprise proved to be dominated by a not very pleasant cliquishness – a remarkably scientistic at-mosphere, as if we were a gathering of Logical Positivists in the Thirties. Incessantly, the tough-minded ’real’ philosophers distanced themselves from all the ’metaphys-icians’ (to be pronounced with a sneer) and all the formal-logical illiterates, i.e. more or less all other schools of philosophy.
Perhaps a brief remark may help to explain what followed: as hinted at in my title, Popper was by many of his philosophical colleagues thought to be a particularly difficult person. Bill Bartley’s article ”Ein schwieriger Mensch” elabor-ates upon this and explains it by the fact of his being extremely critical of his opponent’s often very superficial interpretations of his writings and by his never compromising in theoretical debates in order to politely smoothe out what he thought were genuine disagreements. In this particular gathering his conviction that he had ’killed Positivism’ hardly made things easier, of course (see his intellectual autobiography Unended Quest (1976), Section 17). His habit of mischievously doing the exact opposite of what his audience expected may have played a role, too.
For no sooner had the rather short man with the strongly marked features and a gentle smile sat down in front of the hundreds of participants before he started something like this: ’Today I’m going to set forward and defend a metaphysical theory in important ways similar to Plato’s Theory of Ideas and Hegel’s doctrine of the Absolute Idea.’ A shiver went through the audience and eyes glazed. ’What’s going on? Is he making fun of us?’ people seemed to ask. Well, he wasn’t; and for the first time we heard about Popper’s metaphysical theory of the three worlds: World 1, the physical world; World 2, the mental world; and World 3, the world of abstract entities and theories like for instance the natural numbers. These World 3-en-tities are created by World 2, i.e. our thoughts and our imagination; but when they have been thus created they possess a certain autonomy and objectivity. For instance, we evidently cannot place the prime numbers where we want them. Theories about World 1, too, are World 3-entities, but can be used to influence the physical world (think of nuclear physics and Hiroshima) – though not directly, only via World 2.
Next day I introduced myself to him. Great was my astonishment when he was immediately quite clear about who I was and about the content of our letters. ’Let’s get out of here’, he said, crinkling his nose at the tobacco smoke in the foyer of Hotel Krasnapolsky. He then took a firm grip of the sleeve of my jacket and led me out into the sunshine. So here I was, with this famous, busy and much sought after celebrity firmly attached to my sleeve, walking briskly round and round the central square of Amsterdam, with his eyes permanently fixed on me as he asked questions about my interests and plans, criticised my ideas, made suggestions, joked – as if the whole situation was the most natural thing imaginable. When, after about an hour, he was fetched for other duties by Imre Lakatos who in those days rather humbly functioned as a kind of secretary to him, the young Danish philosopher was sweaty and exhausted – the 65 years’ old still quite fresh and brimming over with energy.
On this as on other occasions I met him – in his and Lady Poppers beautiful home Fallowfield in Buckinghamshire, at the L.S.E., or elsewhere – Popper never wasted time on small talk or polite conversation: ’Here is some tea and some pastry, what’s the situation about drugs and Danish youth?’; or, ’Let’s get away from all these people, what do you say about Lakatos’ statement that Newtonian me-chanics is no more falsifiable than Freud’s psychoanalysis?’ these were typical Popper openings. A difficult person? Not in my experience. Perhaps a bit intense and demanding, in fact wonderfully so!
The delight of discovering Popper the philosopher was of course primarily one of living with his books – but also one of teaching his ideas. In Denmark we have been a handful of persons who by teaching his views at universities, peoples’ universities, peoples’ high schools, and also through various publications have done our best to make sure that his ideas did not remain unknown in this country. Already in the beginning of the seventies we must have had a certain succes. For when we made an official proposal that Popper should receive the Sonning Prize (’for Contribution to European Culture’), there was great support from many sides. He received the prize during his particularly successful and pleasurable stay in Copenhagen in 1973. At a solemn occasion in the University’s ’Solennitetssal’, professor of philosophy Mogens Blegvad gave an impressive motivation speech about Popper’s many contributions to European thought (’very well-informed’, Popper whispered to me). His own lecture was formed as a critique of the then as now extremely influential ideas of closed conceptional frameworks, the incommensurability of paradigms, and cultural relativism. The publication of Popper’s that comes closest to that lecture is the article ”The Myth of the Framework” from E.Freeman’s Schilpp-volume (see below). He also gave a seminar on the subject at the Institute of Philosophy.
Popper gladly accepted an invitation from my wife and me to take part in a less solemn occasion in our new home – not least because I mentioned to him that he could meet many students and others who actually knew his ideas, but had not been present at the grand dinner at the Hotel D’Angleterre or similar gatherings. Fortunately it was a lovely, sunny day as there would hardly have been room for all invited indoors. Popper went round for some minutes’ talk with almost every one present and seemed to enjoy himself enormously. During his four day’s stay in Copenhagen he gave the impression of being grateful for his reception in Denmark as well as for the considerable sum of money involved. His attitude to the honour and the host country was markedly different from that of two other philosophers who had received the prize: the Norwegian Arne Naess (Sonning Prize 1977) who not even gave a lecture or a seminar, and Bertrand Russell (1960) who wrote a friend before going to Copenhagen, ’We’re just going over to pick up the money and come straight back again.’ (R.Crawshay-Williams: Russell remembered, Oxford 1970, pp. 127-28).

4

Apart from the moral and intellectual strength of his critique of totalitarianism, collectivism, historicism, and utopianism (a critique which made many of my students burst out: ’If only I had known these arguments when I was on the defensive during discussions with my Marxist friends or fellow students!’) the aspect of Popper’s philosophy that has especially made an impression on the general public is that he was an ’old-fashioned’, rarely very technical thinker of the kind that non-professional philosophers are attracted to. His philosophical writings have a science-oriented but also common-sense character which makes it a pleasure to teach them. His approach is, as he often stressed himself, basically an ontological one: Is there, apart from material things, also such a thing as consciousness – if, indeed, there is such a thing as matter at all? Has the world always existed or has it had a beginning? Is it divinely created or perhaps just evolved from nothing? Does human consciousness have en influence on physical or economic reality, or is it in every detail determined by these? Do we have free will? Is our biological evolution teleologically directed towards a perfect final state; is it determined by an absolute ’law of evolution’, or is it a process of ’emergence’ involving real novelty? Do ’time’s arrow’ and the given ’now’ have ontological reality or are they the result of a human Anschauungsform? etc. etc.
But how can Karl Popper, being a well-known proponent of Positivism, express an interest in such metaphysical questions as these? – you might ask. In fact, Popper is not a Positivist at all. On the contrary, he is one of the greatest and most explicit critics of that philosophy. Not only does he refute Logical Empiricism’s criterion of meaningfulness with devastating reflexivity-arguments, but his view of scientific theories as systems of strictly universal statements makes evident the futility of its probability-inductivist attempts. A large part of his works are on metaphysics: In The Self and Its Brain (1977), (another lovely title, I think!) he critizises different versions of materialism and develops his interactionist Three World-Theory as well as giving interesting hints about how we humans have to ’learn to become selves.’ In The Open Universe (1982) and Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics (1982) he takes on determinism: There is ample room for rational, free acts in a universe that shows its fundamentally creative and open character every time a new argument, a new work of art, a new theory, even a new piece of prediction, is created; for aren’t we ourselves a part of the Universe? In Realism and the Aim of Science, (1983) Unended Quest (1976), and Objective Knowledge (1972) he defends philosophical realism against phenomenalism, instrumentalism, relativism etc. In A World of Propensities (1990) we find an elegant survey of his view of objective probability and of his evolutionary metaphysics and theory of knowledge.
His views on evolution make his deductictivist theory of knowledge perfectly understandable. According to Popper’s version of Neo-Darwinism our bio-logical evolution is such that, at no point in Evolution, a ’direct (’Lamarckian’) instruction’ takes place from Nature to organisms. Analogously, we humans have no ”hotline” to reality in itself or to any other ’source of knowledge’. We have to do with a secular view of human knowledge, you could say. Mankind is episte-mologically alone in the world: we can never receive instruction or communication ’from outside’ to the effect that this or that set of statements are irrevocably true and certain or even that this particular theory is inductively probable to a certain degree. What, then, would be the rational strategy if this is our situation? Free critical dis-cussion of (logically speaking) freely invented hypotheses – metaphysical as well as scientific – but, importantly, a discussion not allowing typically ’philosophical’ objections to the effect that the opponent’s thesis has not been proven. For the demand for proof and the ideal of perfect certainty entail either logical circularity or infinite regression or irrational adherence to fundamental dogma. ’Apodictic certainty’ is not something inherently desirable, but something we can always get hold of, for instance through passionate subjective belief, effective censorship, immunisation of paradigms, or whatever. Paradoxically, if we strive to understand Reality, we will have to make do with fallible hypotheses and the critical comparison of fallible hypotheses.

5

In his later years, Popper concentrated his efforts in the fields of evolutionary epistemology and objective indeterminism; but his worries concerning the fate of Mankind led him now and then to speculations about politics and social matters. Among university philosophers he soon lost whatever influence he might have had (very little, he sincerely thought); but in broader intellectual circles he increasingly acquired the status of a sort of wise old man who was always worth listening to, not least because he – whether as a lecturer or as an interviewee – was often ready with surprising and often provoking statements. For example, he never accepted the common talk of the West’s, and especially USA’s, ’cultural imperialism’. That Western Civilisation in important respects is ’objectively superior’ to other cultures could be rationally argued, he said, as well as seen from the fact that individuals all over the world adopt it to an increasing extent or even vote for it ’with their feet.’ There is no question of compulsion there.
The greatest dangers for world peace, he argued, is the growing number of well-armed pocket-dictatorships (he unhesitantly supported the role of Western countries in the First Gulf War) and the spread of plutonium and nuclear scientists from the former Soviet Union. We must create international task-forces to fight this particular problem; and, in general, democracies must be ready to ’go to war for peace,’ as he put it. Areas of Free Trade is a good thing and ought to be steadily extended for the sake of peace and prosperity; but new, big state-constructions such as an European Union are definitely harmful.

There is some encouragement to be derived, I think, from the fact that one of the last tasks of this great philosopher of freedom was overseeing one more edition of The Open Society and Its Enemies – in Russian.

Further references.
Bartley, W.W.Bartley III: ”Ein Schwieriger Mensch: Eine Porträtskizze von Sir Karl Popper”, in: Nordhofen. E. (ed.): Physiognomien: Philosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Portraits, 1980.
James, Roger: Return to Reason. Popper’s Thought in Public Life, 1980.
Nielsen, Flemming Steen: ”En kritik af den totalitære statstanke”, in: Svend Erik Stybe (ed.): Politiske ideologier, 1972.
– – : ”Karl Popper som evolutionistisk filosof”, in: Hoffmeyer & Stangerup (eds): Naturens historiefortællere II: Fra Darwins syntese til nutidens krise, 1987.
– – : ”Begrebet streng universalitet hos Karl Popper”, in: Filosofiske Studier fra Filosofisk Institut, København Universitet, bd. 9, 1987.
Karl Popper: Conjectures an Refutations, 1963.
– – : ”The Myth of the Framework”, in: E.Freeman (ed): The Abdication of Philosophy. Essays in Honour of Paul Arthur Schilpp, 1976.
– – : In Search of a Better World, 1990.

One of the themes which I developed some years ago concerned the way ideas take hold and exert an influence on our thoughts and our research projects which is very hard to identify, to subject to critical appraisal and to change. I used the term “railway lines of thought” to capture the image of a vehicle that has to stay “on track” more or less regardless of the  wishes of the passengers.

The late Liam Hudson dropped onto the same theme in his wonderful book The Cult of the Fact and he gave me permission to reproduce several chapters on my web site. This material is now an appendix to the collection “Jacques Barzun and Others“. I urge you to read it!

Here is the Preamble to convey the flavor.

This is a book about professional psychologists and the visions they pursue. It expresses a growing dissatisfaction with the self-consciously scientific psychology in which I myself was trained – an activity that, increasingly over the last ten years, has taken on the air of a masquerade. It has been written in the hope that, somewhere behind the paraphernalia of false science and apparent objectivity, there lies the possibility of a more genuinely dispassionate study of human nature and human action.

Such a book is bound to some extent to be autobiographical; and it is bound also to concern itself not simply with the ‘facts’, but with the unspoken assumptions that we all use when deciding which facts are interesting, and which trivial, a bore…One must question not so much what university teachers think they teach, nor what students think they are learning, but the more subterranean traffic in ideals and prejudices that all powerful teaching institutions create, and that governs thereafter the intellectual lives their products lead.

In attempting this, I have set myself to transgress certain barriers that at present hem in academic discussion, and render much of it inconsequential. Each of these barriers takes the form of a distinction, persuasive but false. The first is that between Science and Art: my belief, unfashionable though this may still be, is that all arguments bearing on human life deserve to be heard within the same arena of debate. The second is between the Serious and the Frivolous: we are moving, if the tastes of the student body are any guide, from an era in which wit, like Art, has been seen as an irrelevant frill, into one – at once gloomier and more Teutonic – in which wit is outlawed as an affront to moral rectitude. The systematic, technical and cheerless are automatically preferred to the literate and humane. Although this new Calvinism satisfies simple psychic needs, I have written in defiance of it – also on the chance that the tide of piety is one that can still be turned.

Lying behind these false distinctions, and serving to unite them, is a further and more general distinction, itself false: that between Style and Content. In the entrenched sciences, it is possible to transmit the truth in prose that is as crabbed as it is evasive. But where foundations are shakier, style not merely limits what we find it natural to express; it is, in important respects, the very essence of that expression. For it is through our style, our mode of address, that we transmit all those messages that lie beyond the literal meaning of our utterance. And it is precisely on such ‘meta-messages’ that the focus of this book lies.

My account begins, conventionally, with the circumstances of its own conception. Also, less conventionally, with a foray into literary criticism, and into the history of a particular myth. This may seem at first sight irrelevant, a diversion. But if I have judged matters aright, this brief literary exploration heralds my main theme – Myths, Ancient and Modern – and also serves to identify the metaphorical nature of its own motive force: the spring that moves the mechanism along. My assumption is that human thought, before it is squeezed into its Sunday best, for purposes of publication, is a nebulous and intuitive affair: in place of logic there brews a stew of hunch and partial insight, half submerged. And although we accept that our minds’ products must eventually be judged by the puritan rules of evidence and insight – the strait gate through which they must pass – we seem in practice to draw what inspiration we possess from a hidden stockpile of images, metaphors and echoes, ancient in origin, but fertile and still growing. This work is no exception. Its energy is drawn from a clutch of human sentiments that, over and again down the centuries, have found expression in potent, metaphoric form. What these sentiments are, and what their relation is to a putative science of human life, should with luck become clearer as the narrative progresses.

To begin with, though, the story is simple enough – in fact, it has about it the beguiling air of a fable. In it, the intrepid young psychologist is packed off by his mentors across the deserts of ignorance and superstition. In mid-journey, with rations running low and a dead-line approaching, this outrider of the rational order is set upon – or so it seems – by the agents of unreason. Bloodlessly, as on the silver screen, his assailants tumble to the ground. But the dead will not lie still. They dust themselves down, and demand to be heard. Our hero finds that parley he must, and around the camp-fire all wax philosophical.

A long thread on the Critical Rationalist facebook page began by drawing on  von Mises’s criticism of Popper in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science “he [von Mises] addressed the claim of Karl Popper that scientific propositions must be falsifiable. Although Popper was not a positivist, he intended his falsification criterion to separate scientific from non-scientific statements.”

That is not a helpful statement without providing an account of the problem situation which the positivists and Popper addressed. For the positivists, the use of the inductive method was a distinctive feature of science, but Popper considered that induction was logically incoherent.  Instead, he was looking for a convention make a clear distinction between (a) theories that claimed to be scientific (due to their alleged basis on evidence) which are nevertheless not refutable and (b) theories that do lay themselves open to falsification (in principle).

As described in The Guide to The Logic of Scientific Discovery,  he made a significant departure from the usual approaches to decide these matters, either by logical analysis or by observation of the way scientists work (the naturalistic approach). He articulated the “rules of the game” or “conventions” approach. This is closely related to his rejection of certainty as an aim of science . He introduced the theme of conjectural knowledge as a permanent feature of scientific theories and not a transient situation or a “bug” in a new theory, to be superseded by further investigation and “confirmation”.

His criterion of demarcation is a proposal for an agreement or convention. He noted that his convention will be rejected by people who think that science can generate a system of “absolutely certain, irrevocably true statements”.

The test for his proposals is to examine their logical consequences, and to explore their fertility in solving problems in the theory of knowledge and scientific investigation. Essentially, it is a test of practice and practical results.

One of the practical implications of  Popper’s criterion is that it can be used early in an argument to discover where the various parties stand on the use of evidence in the debate. It also prompts scientist to be constantly mindful of the importance of testing, with all that implies for the design of experiments and the attitude adopted towards adverse findings.

Popper’s program was radically different from the positivists, a fact obscured by people who can only see Popper’s falsifiability criterion as a rival of the positivists criterion of MEANING  (they royally confused the issue by taking up testability as a criterion of meaning, as though Popper was working on the same problem).

Part of the problem here is the great significance ascribed to Science in the wake of Newton, when Science gained the reputation for finding ultimate truths. Previously the terms science or scientific merely implied  systematic investigation with a view to  obtaining useful principles, and so there was the science of angling and every other thing.

Part of the power of Popper’s program was to get away from the hopeless quest of the positivists/empiricists for a criterion of meaning (or cognitive significance) and the attempt to save inductive logic. The falsifiability criterion had logical coherence which the verification  criterion lacked, and although falsification could not be decisive in practice, it did have the practical effect of pointing up the need for more critical attention to conventions to guide scientific practice (hence the program charted by Ian Jarvie).

One more important point: the focus of critical discussion for Popper was/were the laws of science, expressed as universal generalizations. That is what makes the logic of testing so strong (compared with verification).  I don’t understand how  a pure logical analysis  can demonstrate  that both the verification criterion and the falsifiability criterion are worthless.   What is the point of Popper’s demarcation principle, given the larger contours of his program? Where is the universal statement that is tested by the basic statement “there is a chair in this room”? Is it a universal statement of any interest in the real world of scientific investigation?

This is the original argument.

In point of fact, the criterion is worthless, since every statement comes out verifiable under it. Suppose that “p” is a non-controversially verifiable statement, e.g., “there is a chair in this room.” Let us take “q” to be a statement logical positivists reject as meaningless. A good example is one that Rudolf Carnap held up to ridicule when he called for an end to metaphysics. He cited the following from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927): “The not nothings itself.” I shall not attempt to explain this: one can see why Carnap presented it as a paradigm instance of a meaningless statement.

Does the verification principle eliminate it? Surprisingly, it does not. From p, we deduce p or q. (This step is non-controversial.) Assuming that a logical consequence of a verifiable proposition is itself verifiable, (p or q) is verifiable. Further, if p is verifiable, then the negation of p is verifiable; this principle seems difficult to question. Now, consider this argument:

p or q not -p ______ q
This argument is valid, and each of its premises is verifiable. Then, q is a logical consequence of verifiable propositions, and it, too, is verifiable. Clearly, if the verification criterion cannot eliminate “the not nothings itself,” it is not worth very much.

A falsification criterion fairs no better. If p is falsifiable, then (p and q) is falsifiable. Once more, not-p should be falsifiable if p is, though Karl Popper has implausibly denied this. By an argument parallel with that for verification, we conclude that q is falsifiable.

One might think that this is a mere trick, readily avoidable through slight modification of the principle. There have been many attempts to formulate a criterion that comes up with the “right” results, but so far all have failed to withstand criticism.

What is the “right result”  or the criterion for a “right result”?

When the linguistic philosophers inspired by  Ryle, Wittgenstein and Austin ruled the roost in some universities, notably Oxford, critics sometimes referred to “distinctions that don’t make a difference”. What about the distinction between justificationism and non-justificationism? A critic of Popperism in the Critical Café (email list)  was prepared to read widely and he complained that the Popperians were the only people in the world who used this term non-justificationism. He wondered why we should be bothered with it, given that it was not a topic of interest or concern in the wider philosophical world. That was a decade or so ago and the ensuing discussion did so little to change the minds of the critics that some of us have not been back to the Café on a regular basis since that time. I suppose we decided that life is too short to spend a lot of it engaging with people who appear to be completely closed to the ideas of critical rationalism. I will add to this later and I just want to put this ball in play before I go out. The point is to take up a challenge that Bruce and I offered to each other, to be more hospitable to critical visitors to the site and take some time to explain more carefully the things that we have been taking for granted for a long time. Things like non-justicationism, inductivism  objective knowledge.

to be continued

I am preparing to publish Misreading Popper and some other of my ebooks as print-on-demand paperbacks. This facility is available through a publishing associate of Amazon called CreateSpace.

There are still people out there who want books to hold in their hands and I want  to give them that opportunity at a price  that is not much more than the ebook

The reason for this notice is to ask people to let me know about (a) mistakes of all and any kind that you have noticed and (b) any kind of improvements that you think can be made. Please use my email address for this,  not the comments here. The email is rchampATbigpondDOTnetDOTau

The order of publication will probably be

Misreading Popper

Reason and Imagination

The five guides in one volume.

So please focus on those books if you can find the time to dip into some of them again (or even for the first time!).

The full set.

A copy of Karl Popper and the Two New Secrets of Life has arrived, courtesy of the author. This books is a fine addition to Popperian exegesis,  just when you thought the  cottage industry on the intellectual development of KRP was running out of material.  Check it out on Amazon, I agree with Luc Castelein that it is a five star performance! Unlike some of the over-priced books on the market this one is affordable and real value for money.

I am short of time and I would like to do a slow read, chapter by chapter to explain the new information and the insights of this wonderful book, but I will have to spread this over several days or even weeks.

There is a handy summary.

The story of how humans and all living things came into existence is told in two widely believed versions: the Book of Genesis and Darwin’s Origin of Species. It was the philosopher Karl Popper who presented us with a third story, no less important. His New Interpretation of Darwinism denies the creative power of blind chance and natural selection and establishes knowledge and activity of all living beings as the real driving forces of evolution. Thus, spiritual elements are back in the theory of evolution, and in Popper’s view “the entire evolution is an adventure of the mind.”

In this book, Hans-Joachim Niemann establishes Karl Popper as an eminent philosopher of biology. In the first chapter, biographical details are unearthed concerning how Popper’s biological interests were inspired by a biological meeting in the old windmill at Hunstanton in 1936. The second chapter focusses on the year 1986 when Popper, in several lectures, summarized the results of his life-long biological thinking. The most important of these, the Medawar Lecture given at the Royal Society London, was lost for a long time and is now printed in the Appendix. A new world view begins to emerge that is completely different from Creationism or Darwinism.

Twenty years after Popper’s death, the last chapter looks back on his biological thoughts in the light of new results of molecular biology. His then attacks on long-lasting dogmas of evolutionary theory turned out to be largely justified. The new biology seems even well suited to support Popper’s endeavour to overcome the gloomy aspects of Darwinism that have made organisms passive parts of a machinery of deadly competition. Neither blind chance nor natural selection are the creative forces of all life but knowledge and activity. How they came into existence is still a secret and a worthwhile research programme.