Karl Popper: Philosopher of Science and Society

...Who was responsible for the obvious erasures on the tapes ? Nevertheless, these are Khrushchev's memoirs, and no student of Soviet politics can afford to ignore them...

...Scientific progress results not from multiplying easily discovered confirmations of previously held theories but from searching diligently for the one jarring note, the instance that cannot be explained in the old terms, that demands a new conjecture concerning the nature of reality...

...Theories and statements concerning reality are conjectures which we measure against our experience which may corroborate them, though only provisionally, or may refute them, often conclusively...

...One hears little of de-Stalinization nowadays...

...Thus what is life and death to other species, successful or unsuccessful solution of survival problems through adaptation, can be in human terms the development of theories and ideas...

...The telegram inviting Popper to take up a readership at London University was signed by Professor Hayek...

...Now, more than two decades after the event, is a good time to reconsider the meaning of the Soviet crusade against Stalin...

...The view that truth is something that may be approached without ever being certainly reached is central to Popper's thought, and it is a view which he traces back to the pre-Socratic Xenophanes who wrote: The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, All things to us, but in the course of time Through seeking we may learn and know things better...

...But with the consolidation of the regime of Leonid Brezhnev, who overthrew Khrushchev in 1964, there has been increasing repression of "dissident" movements-movements that came into being largely in consequence of the confusion engendered by Khrushchev's attacks on Stalin...

...What made the Marxism of Popper's contemporaries pseudo-scientific was that instead of critically reexamining their theory they chose to save it by aa 1/2oc additions and modifications which really did make it irrefutable...

...Yet the overall pattern of truth, half-truth, and untruth is revealing...

...Nor even if by chance he were to utter The final truth, he would himself not know it: For all is but a woven web of guesses...

...Now 74 and retired from his professorship at the London School of Economics, where he worked from 1946 onwards, Popper .lives at Penn in Buckinghamshire still "happy in finding new problems, in wrestling with them, and in making some progress...

...The young Popper asked himself whether such a calculation could ever be supported by "science" and, more significantly for the later development of his thought, he began to examine critically the Marxist claim to scientific status...

...Popper was to find the same characteristics in Freudian psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler's individual psychology, and it led him to his celebrated demarcation of scientific from pseudo-scientific theories...

...Popper is the first to admit that his Darwinian view is not susceptible to tests of falsification and cannot therefore be regarded as a scientific theory...

...Thus," writes Popper, "I arrived, by the end of 1919, at the conclusion that the scientific attitude was the critical attitude, which did not look for verifications but for crucial tests...

...Marxist theory demands that the class struggle be intensified, in order to speed up the coming of socialism...

...For, as Popper argues, while it is often possible to identify the causes of misfortune and to act to eliminate them, it is quite impossible to specify what would constitute "the greatest happiness" or to balance the happiness of a majority against the misery of minorities...

...Thus the electoral process, though by no means infallible, serves as the locus of judgment in the political process...

...At secondary school he belonged to an association of socialist pupils and for a brief period in 1915) he considered himself a Communist...

...Books, paintings, music, scientific and philosophical theories all belong to World 3, and Popper believes that it is through our interaction with such realities that we develop...

...The Secret Speech marked the beginning of the public attack on the "personality cult" of Joseph Stalin, a crusade that came to be known in the West as"'de-Stalinization...

...The scientist observes his data and from the evidence of the data formulates a hypothesis which is then confirmed or verified by further observation...

...Or was there from the beginning less to the attack on Stalin than met the eye...

...20 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976...

...18 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 his youth...

...For ultimately Popper believes that science, and philosophy as well, are rooted in cosmology and cosmogony, the attempt to make sense of the universe in which we find ourselves...

...Much of Popper's recent work is based upon the investigation of what he calls the three worlds of reality...

...For I felt that as a Marxist I bore part of the responsibility for the tragedy--at least in principle...

...The classic case is that of Newtonian physics, which was astonishingly successful in predictia~g ~'~e character .,.,f future discoveries in the fields of physics and astr~,;~orny but which nevertheless was shown to be no more than an approximation to truth by the discovery of an instance that could not be explained in its terms...

...For the year of Popper's disenchantment with Marxism was also the year in which he heard Einstein lecture in Vienna...

...Though their work has overlapped in various fields, in many more it has been complementary...

...Like Kant, Popper believes that our theories are imposed by us upon experienced reality and not derived from it, but unlike Kant he is always clear that reality has a way of throwing off our impositions through falsifying instances...

...His mother, a great lover of music, introduced him to his life-long musical interest (at one time Karl thought of a career as a professional musician and was admitted to the school of church music in Vienna on the basis of a fugue he had written...

...Out of such considerations arose Popper's celebrated criterion of falsifiability...

...should act on the limited and apparently negative program of eliminating identified causes of misery rather than pushing any positive, all-inclusive conception of the great society onto the population...

...A lifetime spent in the criticism of other men's theories and his own is continued in the investigation of an area of problems that he himself has opened up...

...But for certain truth, no man has known it, Nor shall he know it, neither of the gods Nor yet of all the things of which I speak...

...The conclusion that Popper draws is not that governments should do nothing at all to remedy evils and abuses, but that remedial action should be aimed at quickly attainable goals and not tied to any particular long-term scheme of action that may prove, for technical or political reasons, impossible to modify...

...Obviously the document is full of factual errors and self-serving lies, most of which are noted by Edward Crankshaw in his helpful notes and commentary...

...they exist as an objective characteristic of a man-made but now independent reality...

...That universe presents us with problems which we try to solve...

...Help is available in this project from an unlikely source, namely the two volumes of memoirs by the de-Stalinizer himself, Nikita Khrushchev, which were published in the West in 1970 and 1974...

...I was horrified and shocked by the brutality of the police, but also by myself...

...He calls Darwinism " a metaphysical research program," a theory which presents us with a framework of intelligibility within which interesting and vital problems arise for investigation...

...It is hard to realize in reading his more recent work that we are reading the prose of a man to whom English was once a foreign language...

...Where did de-Stalinization go wrong...

...The attachment to a liberal, or "open," society pervades Karl Popper's political writings, holding him back from even the moderate social-democratism which Magee sees as the natural political corrollary cf his thought, as welt as from a glorification of the more or less transient will of the majority...

...This in itself is important, for with Popper above all thinkers we should approach the work in the critical spirit which he himself encourages...

...By "democracy" Popper does not mean a state in which the will of the majority (whatever that may be) always prevails, still less a theory that the majority is always right...

...He is, in the best sense, a very plain-speaking philosopher who uses the English language with a skill that would be exceptional even in one born into its heritage...

...Popper's new Xenophanism arises from what he regards as the breakdown of the positivist myth of science as a body of certain inductive knowledge--" the Baconian myth," as he calls it--in the wake of Einstein's revolution in physics...

...I t happened shortly before my seventeenth birthday...

...The New York Times reported on November 17, 1970, that the Times of London had printed an unconfirmed report that the KGB was in possession of some 400,000 words of manuscript, of which 275,000 words had been released to the West...

...This is as it should be, for Popper's is an open-ended philosophy, one which welcomes criticism, which regards every conclusion as the locus of new problems to be investigated, and which by the force and clarity of its arguments challenges even those who find some of its content unacceptable...

...Bryan Magee, author of an excellent brief introduction to Popper's thought (Karl Popper, Viking Press, 1973), calculates that almost half his work still remains to be published, quite apart from the new work which will emerge from the problems to which he is now devoting his attention...

...Hayek later helped Popper to find a publisher for the book of that name as well as for its twovolume companion The Open Society and Its Enemies...

...rather, we approach reality with the inborn expectation of finding regularities...

...In a peculiarly unfortunate phrase Popper calls his approach "piecemeal social engineering" to differentiate it from the "utopian social engineering" of those who believe that the remodelling of the whole of society in accord with some preformed plan or blueprint is the only task worthy of the politician...

...He was sixteen at the time, but there is no~hing like the crisis of war and defeat for forcing untimely decisions on intelligent youth...

...My impression is that Popper's name and work is relatively little known in the United States outside the ranks of the professional philosophers of science, and this is surprising when it is compared with the widespread attention accorded to the writings of his friend and colleague F. A. Hayek...

...It was Hayek, too, who helped Popper to establish himself in the Englishspeaking academic world, first during the war at Canterbury University College, Christchurch, New Zealand, and later in London...

...Hence the importance which he attaches to the critical (including self-critical) attitude...

...If the evidence was not immediately apparent in the way the news was presented, that told you nothing about the insufficiencies of Marxism and everything about the class bias of the editor...

...In this we are not alone: all organisms, in Popper's view, are problemsolving beings which either solve the problem of their survival through adaptation to their environment or are extinguished...

...The earlier writings remain as challenging as ever...

...The year 1962 saw the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story One Day in the Life o f Ivan Denisovicb...

...There is nothing arbitrary in the i,ltroduction of Hayek's name at this point, for the similarity of outlook of the two men is close and recognized by both...

...Not surprisingly, then, Popper's collection of essays Conjectures and Refutations bears the dedication "to F. A. yon Hayek," while Hayek's collected Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics is dedicated to Karl Popper...

...In contrast to the Marxists or Adler, Einstein was prepared to specify the condition under which he would regard his theory as untenable...

...According to Eric Voegelin the surviving fragments of Xenophane.~ reveal a new outlook arising from the disintegration of the world of mythical consciousness found in Homer and Hesiod...

...Popper's view is that no number of confirming instances ever verify a hypothesis, but that one falsifying instance can cause us to abandon a hypothesis and look for a new one...

...Thus Popper holds that while the Marxism of Marx himself was a scientific theory it is one that has been empirically refuted, while later Marxists have purchased the survival of their beliefs at the cost of abandoning all claim to being considered scientific...

...In this way Popper builds on his view of science as a matter of conjecture and refutation to a Darwinian view of evolution...

...No one actually built those problems into the theory...

...On the contrary, there has been extensive rehabilitation of Stalin in the USSR since the anti-Stalin wave crested in 1961 and 1962...

...For it is one of Popper's strongest contentions that our statements and theories, though made about physical (World 1) objects because of our subjective experience (World 2) of them, develop an independent existence once made...

...It was in Hayek's seminar at the London School of Economics that Popper first read his paper The Poverty ofHistomcism...

...The heart of the Marxist argument, Popper concluded, "consists of a historical prophecy, combined with an implicit appeal to the following moral law: Help to bring about the inevitable...

...As a liberal in the traditional sense, Popper believes the state to be a necessary evil whose role should be largely confined to holding the balance between competing interests and to setting the limits beyond which one may not trespass on another's rights...

...Beyond this the state and its resources should be employed in combatting identifiable evils--poverty and hunger for instance--rather than in pursuit of vague and incalculable goals like "the greatest happiness for the greatest number...

...Popper's family were of Jewish origin but were converts to Protestantism and he grew up in the intellectual circles of pre-war Vienna, in that "atmosphere of liberalism in Europe west of Czar;st Russia: an atmosphere which also pervaded Austria and which was destroyed, forever it now seems, by the First World War...

...In his intellectual autobiography Unended Quest (published this year in England by Fontana/Collins), he recounts the incident that turned him against Communism and Marxism...

...According to the traditional view scientific theories are distinguished from others by their inductive character...

...But however unfortunate Popper's self-applied label may be, his arguments in The Poverty of Histom'cism and elsewhere provide anyone who absorbs them with a potent inoculation against the hubristic enthusiasms of those who plan for paradise in the government bureaus of Washington or London...

...In 1961 the old dictator's body was removed from the Red Square mausoleum...

...World 1 is the world of physical objects, World 2 the world of subjective experiences, and World 3 the world of statements in themselves...

...Popper never tries to disguise his disagreements with other thinkers, nor hide his revulsion from certain actions...

...Did the policy simply fall victim to Khrushchev's mismanagement...

...The fortunate author of that sentence is Sir Karl Popper, a man variously described as the author of"the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer" (Isaiah Berlin) and "incomparably the greatest philosopher of science that has ever been" (Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine...

...We shall all discover points of dissent (my own most basic ones relate to Popper's criticism of what he calls "essentialism") but no one can fail to be stimulated by what he finds...

...How could it have gone right...

...Thus while we can never justify any scientific theory by appealing to an imagined confirmation of its truth, we can justify a preference for one theory over another by pointing to its greater explanatory power and the higher degree of corroboration it has received...

...Victor Baras "Your Mama Won't Let You Scratch Where It Itches" Nikita Khrushchev used peasant humor to gloss over Soviet tyranny...

...He views the human mind as an organ that produces and interacts with such objects...

...The clarity of his expression highlights the power of the argument, but it does more than that in pinpointing the moments at which we may wish to disagree with Popper's premises or conclusions (the intervening steps are usually faultless...

...Governments, he believes...

...In The Open Society and Its Enemies Popper distinguished the psychological theories of Freud and Adler, which were cast so imprecisely as to make it impossible to refute them, from the writings of Karl Marx, who made a number of predictions--e.g., that revolution would break out in the most industrialized nations, and that the proletariat would become increasingly impoverished-that had already been refuted...

...In Vienna, shooting broke out during a demonstration by unarmed young socialists who, instigated by the communists, tried to help some communists to escape who wese under arrest in the central police station in Vienna...

...In other words there was no possible way that the Marxist analysis could be refuted--the whole world was full of confirming evidence of the theory...

...Our theories are, he argues, not derived inductively from observation...

...Einstein himself regarded his theory in this light, searching throughout his life for a more comprehensive theory that would improve on his own work...

...But twenty years after his "Crimes o f Stalin" speech, Khrushchev's memoirs can help us understand the limits o f ' 'de- Stalinizatio n. " Twenty years have passed since Nikita Khrushchev delivered his now famous "Secret Speech" at a closed midnight session of the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in February 1956...

...What motivated the official or semi-official complicity with the memoir project by authorities in Moscow...

...Why did the former ruler of the Soviet Union prepare material for publication abroad, a measure which even many Soviet dissidents view as a distasteful last resort...

...The evidence for this is to be found in the unforeseen problems that arise in man-made theory...

...Human problem-solving differs from that of other organisms in an absolute sense because, largely through our possession of a linguistic faculty that includes descriptive and argumentative functions, we are able to approach our problems consciously, renewing our efforts to solve them whenever our previous solution breaks down...

...It became clear to me that what made a theory, or a statement, scientific was its power to rule out, or exclude, the occurrence of some possible events--to prohibit, or forbid the occurrence of these events...

...Its thesis is that although the revolution may claim some victims, capitalism is claiming more victims than the whole socialist revolution...

...tests which could refute the theory tested, though they could never establish" it...

...Whatever this degree may be, we are never justified in regarding the accepted theory as final: the only fruitful approach to scientific research is to look on our theories as hypothetical/oci for new problems whose solution may entail the abandonment of the original theory...

...In Karl Popper's life that advance still continues...

...Xenophanes' phrase " a woven web of guesses" well expresses Popper's view of the content of science...

...Since his own theories concerning the psychology and logic of discovery were set off by his curiosity about the invention of polyphony in early mediaeval music, an invention unparalleled in other musical cultures, it is easy to see what he means when he argues that it is the encounter with the objects of World 3 that provides the main spur to intellectual advance...

...Although the voice on the tapes has been electronically verified as Khrushchev's, many questions remain unanswered...

...The careful reader may not expect to learn much Victor Baras teaches poh'tical science at the New School Jbr Social Research...

...I have been, I suspect, the happiest philosopher I have ever met...

...Because we can change our minds and act consciously on our understanding of the universe our falsified theories can die The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 19 while our species survives...

...Popper's assault on the vanity of historical prophecy backs up Hayek's analysis of the selfdefeating consequences of overall economic planning, while the force of Hayek's argument against the economics of central planning underlies Popper's present conviction that socialism is incompatible with personal liberty_9 Karl Popper was born in Vienna in 1902...

...Several young socialist and communist workers were killed...

...Democracy, in Popper's view, is an institutional arrangement that permits the peaceful transfer of power between groups that respect individual rights in society...

...DavidLevy Karl Popper: Philosopher of Science and Society KarI Popper does not enjoy the celebrity hts friend and colleague Friedm'ch Hayek has gained in this country, but he mchly deserves acclaim for /sis contributions to the philosophy of science and politics...

...Thus the more a theory forbids, the more it tells us...

...Knowing the inevitable course of the historical process Marxists could not open a newspaper without finding confirming evidence to back up their beliefs...

...Political action is beset by incalculable circumstances, and failure to take account of these always leads to unintended consequences...

...Khrusbchev Remembers is in many ways, of course, an unsatisfactory source...

...His father was a lawyer, a liberal and learned man who read the works of Sigmund Freud as they were published...

...It is based primarily on tape recordings dictated by Khrushchev shortly before his death in 1971 and smuggled out of the USSR...

...Karl Popper's present political outlook has developed gradually out of his disenchantment with the ideologies that tempted him in David Levy teaches sociology at Middlesex Polytechnic, in England...

...Early press reports linked the Khrushchev memoir with the name of Victor Louis, the shadowy Soviet journalist who is rumored to work for the KGB (the Soviet secret police...

...New York Times, November 7 and December 28, 1970...

...Einstein's theory, which replaced Newton's, has no more claim to be considered as true in an absolute sense, but, argues Popper, it approaches truth more nearly through being able to explain everything that Newton's theory explained and more in addition...

...He is fond of quoting Pericles' remark, "although only a few may orig;mate a policy, we are all able to judge it...