Popper Cb

Popper

Bryan Magee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136223570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Karl Popper is not, as yet anyway, a household name among the educated, and this fact requires explanation. In this book, Bryan Magee gives a bold, clear outline of Popper's thought which exhibits its systematic unity.

1
Introductory

DOI: 10.4324/9780203041208-1

Karl Popper is not, as yet anyway, a household name among the educated, and this fact requires explanation. For as Isaiah Berlin writes in his biography of Karl Marx (third edition 1963), Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies contains ‘the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer’; and if this judgment is anywhere near sound, Popper is – in a world one third of whose inhabitants live under governments which call themselves Marxist – a figure of world importance. But quite apart from this he is regarded by many as the greatest living philosopher of science – indeed, Sir Peter Medawar, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, said on BBC Radio 3 on 28 July 1972: ‘I think Popper is incomparably the greatest philosopher of science that has ever been.’ Other Nobel Prize winners who have publicly acknowledged his influence on their work include Jacques Monod and Sir John Eccles, who wrote in his book Facing Reality (1970): ‘… my scientific life owes so much to my conversion in 1945, if I may call it so, to Popper’s teachings on the conduct of scientific investigations …. I have endeavoured to follow Popper in the formulation and in the investigation of fundamental problems in neurobiology.’ Eccles’s advice to other scientists is ‘to read and meditate upon Popper’s writings on the philosophy of science and to adopt them as the basis of operation of one’s scientific life’. Nor is it only experimental scientists who take this view. The distinguished mathematician and theoretical astronomer, Sir Hermann Bondi, has stated simply: ‘There is no more to science than its method, and there is no more to its method than Popper has said.’ The range of Popper’s intellectual influence, unapproached by that of any English-speaking philosopher now living, extends from members of governments to art historians. In the Preface to Art and Illusion (described by Kenneth Clark as ‘one of the most brilliant books on art criticism I have ever read’) Sir Ernst Gombrich writes: ‘I should be proud if Professor Popper’s influence were to be felt everywhere in this book.’ And progressive Cabinet Ministers in both of the main British political parties, for instance Anthony Crosland and Sir Edward Boyle, have been influenced by Popper in the view they take of political activity.

These examples illustrate, straight away, some important things besides the extraordinary range of application of Popper’s work. They show that – unlike that of so many contemporary philosophers – it has a notably practical effect on people who are influenced by it: it changes the way they do their own work, and in this and other respects changes their lives. It is, in short, a philosophy of action. Also, it has had such influence on many people who are themselves of first-rate distinction in their own fields. One could scarcely say, then, that Popper is neglected. This underlines all the more, though, the surprisingness of the fact that he is not better known – many lesser thinkers are more famous. This is due partly to chance, partly to unintended misrepresentation of his work, and partly to an aspect of his method which facilitates misapprehension of it by those who have not studied it.

Karl Popper was born in Vienna in 1902. In his early and middle teens he was a Marxist, and then became an enthusiastic Social Democrat. Apart from his studies in science and philosophy he was interested not only in left-wing politics and in social work with children under the aegis of Adler, but also in the Society for Private Concerts founded by Schoenberg. For him, as for so many others, it was a thrilling time and place to be young. After his student days he earned his living as a secondary school teacher in mathematics and physics; but his chief absorptions continued to be social work, left-wing politics, music – and of course philosophy, where he found himself, as he has tended to ever since, at variance with the fashion prevailing in his place and time, which for his generation there and then was the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. Otto Neurath, a member of the Circle, nicknamed him ‘the Official Opposition’. This made him something of an odd man out. He found it impossible to get his early books published in the form in which he wrote them. His first book remains unpublished; and his first and seminal published work, Logik der Forschung (published in the autumn of 1934, dated 1935) was a savagely cut version of a book twice as long. It contains the chief of what have since become the generally accepted arguments against logical positivism.

Beneath the surface violence of the political scene in Vienna in the 1930s the left’s opposition to fascism was crumbling. Later, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (vol ii, pp. 164-165), Popper characterized the radical Marxist view as having been: ‘Since the revolution was bound to come, fascism could only be one of the means of bringing it about; and this was more particularly so since the revolution was clearly long overdue. Russia had already had it in spite of its backward economic conditions. Only the vain hopes created by democracy were holding it back in the more advanced countries. Thus the destruction of democracy through the fascists could only promote the revolution by achieving the ultimate disillusionment of the workers in regard to democratic methods. With this, the radical wing of Marxism felt that it had discovered the "essence" and the "true historical role" of fascism. Fascism was, essentially, the last stand of the bourgeoisie. Accordingly, the Communists did not fight when the fascists seized power. (Nobody expected the Social Democrats to fight.) For the Communists were sure that the proletarian revolution was overdue and that the fascist interlude, necessary for its speeding up, could not last longer than a few months. Thus no action was required from the Communists. They were harmless. There was never a "communist danger" to the fascist conquest of power.’

Included in the historical reality behind this passage were agonized debates about political strategy and morality in which Popper was involved, and which were the seedbed of much of his later political writing. He came to foresee, with depressing accuracy, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, to be followed by a European war in which his native land would be on the wrong side; and he determined to leave before this happened. (This decision saved his life: for although his childhood had been a Protestant one, and both his parents had been baptized, Hitler would have categorized him as a Jew.) From 1937 to 1945 he taught philosophy at the University of New Zealand. In the earlier part of this period he virtually taught himself Greek in order to study the Greek philosophers, especially Plato. In the middle part he wrote, in English, The Open Society and Its Enemies – ‘a work,’ as Isaiah Berlin says in the source quoted earlier, ‘of exceptional originality and power’. Popper regarded this as his war work. The final decision to write it was made on the day he received the news he had so long dreaded, of Hitler’s invasion of Austria. This and the fact that the outcome of the Second World War was still uncertain in 1943, when the book was finished, added to the depth of passion which informs this defence of liberty and attack on totalitarianism, whose development and appeal it also attempts to explain. It was published in two volumes in 1945, and brought Popper his first real fame in the English-speaking world.

In 1946 he came to England, where he has lived ever since. In philosophy the prevailing orthodoxy he found on his arrival, in so far as there was one at all, was the logical positivism he had left behind him in Vienna before the war. This had been imported into England in A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, which had been published in January 1936. Popper’s own Logik der Forschung was still untranslated and virtually unknown; indeed, in so far as it was known about, its contents were usually misapprehended. It did not appear in English until the autumn of 1959, a quarter of a century after its original publication, under the title The Logic of Scientific Discovery. This translation contained a special preface in which Popper dissociated himself from the (by this time) newly fashionable linguistic philosophy, but Mind, the chief journal of linguistic philosophy, reviewed the book uncomprehendingly and without referring to the preface. In his middle age Popper found himself odd man out again in England, just as he had been in Austria in his youth. Nevertheless the solitary international reputation he had long since begun to acquire continued to expand, and he received social recognition in England (he was knighted in 1965). But neither Oxford nor Cambridge wanted him as a Professor. However, he spent the last 23 years of his university career at the London School of Economics, where he became Professor of Logic and Scientific Method.

It was during these years that he released his next two books, both of them collections of articles most of which had already been ‘Published. When The Poverty of His toricism came out in 1957 Arthur Koestler wrote in The Sunday Times that it was ‘probably the only book published this year which will outlive this century’. (The set of articles of which it consists had been rejected by Mind.) It can be regarded as a pendant to The Open Society and Its Enemies. Similarly Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, published in 1963, can be seen as a pendant to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. He has published one more book since his retirement in 1969, another collection of essays called Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, which came out in 1972. There will probably be several more, for some unpublished books are complete in manuscript; and in addition to the articles, over 100 of them, which have appeared in academic journals, he has an even greater number of articles and written lectures which he has not published. Throughout his life he has been excessively reluctant to let his work go to the printer: there has always been room – and time – for a few more improvements, a few more corrections.

At the beginning of his career the logical positivists saw him as being concerned with essentially the same problems as themselves, and interpreted his work in the light of this assumption. Linguistic philosophers have since done much the same. Both have therefore sincerely believed, and asserted, that his work is nothing like as different from theirs as he himself insists, and they find his insistence tiresome. I shall come to the substance of these misunderstandings in due course. The point I want to make here is that Popper’s work itself contains a feature, unavoidable when rightly understood, which has got between him and potential readers – who, being only potential, are not yet in a position to understand it. He believes, in a sense which will be made fully clear later, that only through criticism can knowledge advance. This leads him to put forward most of his important ideas in the course of criticizing other peoples’: for instance, most of his arguments in The Open Society and Its Enemies are advanced in criticism of Plato and Marx. One consequence of this is that generations of students have plundered the work for these critiques without reading the book as a whole. It has even come to be widely thought of as being a critique of Plato and Marx – with the result that many people who have heard of it but not read it have a mistaken conception of it. Some even assume it, because of its attack on Marx, to be a work of right wing tendencies. The academic controversy it has stirred up has centred not on Popper’s positive arguments but on whether his view of other philosophers is valid. Whole books have been written on this, like In Defense of Plato by Ronald B. Levinson, and The Open Philosophy and The Open Society by Maurice Cornforth. Argument has ramified through the pages of academic journals about whether Popper’s translation of this or that Greek passage faithfully preserves Plato’s meaning. The defence of democracy which the book also contains has not received a fraction of this academic attention. Yet even if it could be shown that the treatment of both Plato and Marx is misconceived, the argument in favour of democracy would still be the most powerful in the language. Any intellectually serious criticism of The Open Society and Its Enemies should be chiefly concerned with appraising its arguments, not its scholarship – though as I shall illustrate later the scholarship is in any case respectable.

Related to this is another, much slighter obstacle between Popper and possible readers. He believes that philosophy is a necessary activity because we, all of us, take a great number of things for granted, and many of these assumptions are of a philosophical character; we act on them in private life, in politics, in our work, and in every other sphere of our lives – but while some of these assumptions are no doubt true, it is likely that more are false and some are harmful. So the critical examination of our presuppositions – which is a philosophical activity – is morally as well as intellectually important. This view is of philosophy as something lived and important for all of us, not an academic activity or a specialism, and certainly not as consisting primarily in the study of the writings of professional philosophers. Nevertheless it does mean that most of Popper’s work consists of the critical examination of theories, and in consequence there is a great deal of discussion of ‘isms’, and a great many allusions to thinkers of the past, especially in the first works he wrote in English when he was still under the influence of the German academic tradition.

On the other hand few philosophers have taken so much trouble to be clear. The writing is so clear as to disguise its own depth, and a few readers have mistakenly supposed that what was being said was rather simple, perhaps even a bit obvious. They have missed the thrill of illumination and the excitement to be got from it. The prose itself is massively distinguished: it is magnanimous and humane, with a combination of intellectual and emotional pressure reminiscent of Marx’s – there is the same driving force behind the argument, the same sweep and bite, the same bigness and self-confidence, yet a tighter logical rigour. Once the reader has accustomed himself to the terminology it is exhilarating, and has great holding power. Above all – and this is a striking feature of all Popper’s work – it is superabundantly rich in arguments.

Popper’s is a systematic philosophy in the great central tradition of the subject. But only the most painstaking and unparochial of students could be expected to have read all the various lectures and publications in which it has been presented, in different languages, journals, countries and decades, let alone to see that these are interconnecting parts of a single explanatory framework which extends to the whole of human experience. To take a single example: Popper is an indeterminist in both physics and politics. His argument that it is logically impossible to give a scientific prediction of the future course of history was first put forward in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in a paper called Indeterminism in Quantum Physics and in Classical Physics. Its development in one direction became part of his defence of political freedom and his critique of Marxism; in another it led him to work on a propensity theory of probability which, applied to quantum physics, offers a solution to certain problems in the theory of matter which connect with the historic schism between Einstein, de Broglie and Schrödinger on the one hand and Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Max Born on the other. Only very few fulltime students with the necessary technical equipment are likely to have followed these connections through, and related them to each other.

What I have tried to do in this book is give a bold, clear outline of Popper’s thought which exhibits its systematic unity. This involves, for reasons which will become obvious, starting with the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science. I beg readers who perhaps regard themselves as uninterested in these fields but have opened this book out of an interest in the social and political theories not to skip, for Popper has extended ideas originally worked out in the natural sciences to the social sciences, and a knowledge of the former is indispensable to a deeper understanding of the latter. What is more, I shall be trying to show how the two are parts of a single philosophy which embraces both the natural and the human worlds. I hope also to make it clear why this philosophy has the special influence it does, and in broad terms why it is at odds with other contemporary philosophies – though in a book as short as this it is not possible to go into specific controversies. Nor is it feasible to go into the more technical aspects of physics, probability theory or logic, so I shall not attempt to examine the detailed support from these fields which Popper brings to his general arguments. My concern will be solely with the latter.

2
Scientific Method – the Traditional View and Popper’s View

DOI: 10.4324/9780203041208-2

The word ‘law’ is ambiguous, and anyone who talks of a natural or scientific law being ‘broken’ is confusing the two main uses of the word. A law of society prescribes what we may or may not do. It can be broken – indeed, if we could not break it there would be no need to have it: society does not legislate against a citizen’s being in two places at once. A law of nature, on the other hand, is not prescriptive but descriptive. It tells us what happens – for instance that water boils at 100° Centigrade. As such it purports to be nothing more than a statement of what – given certain initial conditions, such as that there is a body of water and that it is heated – occurs. It may be true or false, but it cannot be ‘broken’, for it is not a command: water is not being ordered to boil at 100° Centigrade. The pre-scientific belief that it was (by some god) is the reason for the unfortunate ambiguity: the laws of nature were thought to be commands of the gods. But nowadays no one would dispute that they are not prescriptions of any kind, to be ‘kept’ or ‘obeyed’ or ‘broken’, but explanatory statements of a general character which purport to be factual and must therefore be modified or abandoned if found to be inaccurate.

The search for natural laws has long been seen as the central task of science, at least since Newton. But the way scientists were supposed to proceed was first systematically described by Francis Bacon. Although his formulation has been much qualified, added to, refined and sophisticated since his day, something in the tradition he pioneered has been accepted by nearly all scientifically minded people from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. It goes like this. The scientist begins by carrying out experiments whose aim is to make carefully controlled and meticulously measured observations at some point on the frontier between our knowledge and our ignorance. He systematically records his findings, perhaps publishes them, and in the course of time he and other workers in the field accumulate a lot of shared and reliable data. As this grows, general features begin to emerge, and individuals start to formulate general hypotheses – statements of a lawlike character which fit all the known facts and explain how they are causally related to each other. The individual scientist tries to confirm his hypothesis by finding evidence which will support it. If he succeeds in verifying it he has discovered another scientific la...