Returning to Karl Popper : A Reassessment of His Politics and Philosophy [1 ed.] 9789401210454, 9789042037977

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RETURNING TO KARL POPPER

SERIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF KARL R. POPPER AND CRITICAL RATIONALISM SCHRIFTENREIHE ZUR PHILOSOPHIE KARL R. POPPERS UND DES KRITISCHEN RATIONALISMUS Edited by Kurt Salamun and Udo Thiel VOLUME XX

RETURNING TO KARL POPPER A REASSESSMENT OF HIS POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY

Alexander Naraniecki

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Coverphoto: Photo Murauer, Innsbruck The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-3797-7 E-book ISBN: 978-94-012-1045-4 Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1

1. Out of the Haskalah

9

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Introduction The Popper Family Popper, Israel and Jewish Identity The Jewish Enlightenments Bildung

2. Was Karl Popper a Positivist? 1. 2. 3.

Introduction The Vienna Circle The renewal of Kant’s Enlightenment

3. The early philosophical problems 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction Julius Kraft: an extraordinary friendship Popper’s Friesian problematic Axioms, Definitions and Postulates of Geometry Methods used in revising Kant Theorising on the methods of criticism

9 12 15 22 27 29 29 29 41 45 45 46 49 57 61 71

4. Logic and language: Wittgenstein and Tarski 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Introduction Tarski’s theory of truth and its implications Consensus as correspondence Evolutionary cognition Demolishing Wittgenstein

5. Definitions, essences and meaning 1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction The problem of essentialism Comparison with Wittgenstein Popper’s aesthetics

6. Popper’s metaphysics 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Introduction Propensities and the metaphysical ‘turn’ The World 3 thesis Materialism transcends itself An esoteric reading

79 79 80 84 87 95 101 101 102 111 117 121 121 122 131 133 147

7. Towards an Open Rationality

151

Archival Material Bibliography Name Index Subject Index

161 169 185 189

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bruce Buchan for reading the earliest drafts of my book. I am thankful to Paul Turnbull and Regina Ganter who helped to facilitate my archival research in Klagenfurt, Austria. I would also like to thank Manfred Lube the Bibliotheksdirektor at the Universitätsbibliothek Klagenfurt for aiding my research into the materials at the Karl-Popper-Sammlung during my time at the library. His helpfulness, interest and knowledge of the collection made the months spent at the archive a scholarly experience that I will never forget. I would also like to thank Jeremy Shearmur at the ANU for advising me on the whereabouts of certain letters and lectures as well as clarifying certain arguments of Popper’s political philosophy. I would also like to thank Zuzana Parusniková for organising the “Rethinking Popper” conference at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague in 2007. Allowing me to present my findings and to discuss Popper’s thoughts with his former students and other experts was a major turning point in my research. I am greatly indebted to Arne F. Petersen’s insights into Popper’s early writings that I have gained through discussions with him. I am also grateful for my discussions in Prague with Joseph Agassi, Robert Cohen, Alan Musgrave, Ionut Isac, Michel ter Hark, John Wettersten, Ian Jarvie, Anthony O’Hear, and Alain Boyer. I have also received invaluable criticism and insights from David Miller. I would also like to thank, Dominic Hyde, Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, Jan Pakulski, Paul Moris, Baogang He, John Mandalios and Haig Patapan for the knowledge that they have imparted to me over the years. Jeff Malpas also read and commented on an earlier draft of this book. I would like to thank Andreas Berg for reading the final draft of the book. I have also benefited greatly from my discussions with Kenneth Allen Hopf. The wonderful Rabbi Fred Morgan also provided invaluable insights into the Rabbinic legal tradtion discussed in the first chapter.

viii

I am grateful to the Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University for their support while working on the final stages of the monograph during my Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. This book also owes a great deal to Geoffrey Stokes from RMIT. Malachi Hacohen was also kind enough to read through an earlier version of this book and taught me to look at Popper from new perspectives. I was fortunate enough to be invited by Hacohen to give a lecture and spend some time in 2012 as a visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies at Duke University. I wish to thank Kurt Salamun for reading through a draft of this book and for agreeing to publishi it. I’m also thankful to Masja Horn at Rodopi for seeing it through to publication. I am also thankful to Richard Colledge and the School of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University. I would like to dedicate this book to Wayne Hudson for guiding my research and overseeing my intellectual and scholarly development since my undergraduate years.

Introduction

Karl Popper is a more complex thinker than is commonly acknowledged. Trying to place him within certain intellectual traditions such as Austrian Arisotelianism, or some specific NeoKantian tradition often has typically meant siphoning off certain features of his writings as ‘un-Popperian’ or not reflective of the ‘mature Popper’ or the result of ‘the folly of old age’. This book aims to do the opposite, namely to take seriously those aspects of Popper’s writings that have received less attention and wherein he advanced metaphysical, speculative, mystical-poetic and Platonic notions. Broadly speaking, Popper at times can be seen to be Aristotelian, Kantian, Platonic, as well as Hegelian and Humean, depending on the arguments and theories he was engaging with or the methods he was supporting or indeed himself deploying. I argue that Popper, much like Wittgenstein previously has been misconstrued as an Anglo style analytic philosopher. This book provides an interpretation of Popper’s mature philosophy within his Central European intellectual context that was firstly explored in depth by Malachi Hacohen. The aim of which is to open up a fruitful line of investigation into Popper’s thought that I hope would continue over the coming years. Even though Popper himself often said that as a result of his clear and unpretentious writing style that his work does not require interpretation or third party explanation, the way he has been read, often remains neglectful of many features of his thought. Indeed, Popper’s underlying Platonism meant that he had much more in common with thinkers such as Hegel, the philosopher whom he famously called a false prophet, than has been traditionally assumed. Rather than dismissing or downplaying the Platonic bent of his later writings as the folly of old age, this book looks at them as the apotheosis of his system. Thus, the focus of this book reverses the order of importance of many of Popper’s texts, and further shows how

2

Returning to Karl Popper

many of the most important clues to his system are often hidden in the footnotes or later revisions rather. Indeed, Popper’s best known works are not surprisingly deceptive. His political ‘tract’ The Open Society and Its Enemies is more a treatise on truth and logic with the Polish logician Alfred Tarski being mentioned more in the notes than Marx. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, itself is not a discussion on such a logic, which remains ‘unknown’, rather it provides a new hypothesis on human cognition resulting from what Popper believed we know about our cognitive faculties and how these function in learning and theory formation. Discoveries are cumulative and progressive, however there is no known logic ensuring their repetition. If one reads successive works of Popper one finds the same arguments recurring over and over in different forms. I have in this study of Popper sought to analyse the groups of combinations of differentiated operations which account for Popper’s technical proficiency over such a wide array of intellectual field. What Popper was devising in The Logic of Scientific Discovery or The Poverty of Historicism or Objective Knowledge involved the conjunctions of his repertoire of differentiated operations in ever fresh combinations. Thus, an exploration of Popper’s method requires a method which can observe the normative pattern of recurrent and related operations and their yielding of cumulative and progressive results. Hence, the glaring problem in Popper’s philosophy that caught my attention was the restrictions he initially put on standards for reasonable argumentation for rational systematic inquiry through his falsificationism. This was challenged by his need to create arguments that were non-testable (or irrefutable) and did not live up to this standard itself. This problem for Popper’s philosophy came to the fore in his later more speculative and non-testable theorization on the emergence of complex social and ontological systems. Such arguments often began with the forewarning that they “could not be taken too seriously”. This turn of phrase made a literary criticism of a key problem for Popper’s philosophy possible. It was not that Popper did not regard his arguments as not serious, as they operationalized repetitive argumentative tropes that he defended with great earnestness and were applied to urgent social problems. Thus, the problem in Popper’s cognitional theory was identified by bringing to light the contradictions between the cognitional theory and the actual

Introduction

3

performance of the theorist. I suggest that this tension between actual methods applied in his work and clearly defined methodological criteria was responsible the direction in which his cognitional theory dialectally moved in redressing this dissonance. This eventuated in a moderating of his position on standards of reasonableness for rational discussions to include the possibility for non-testable hypotheses so long as the person making them understands the epistemic dangers, is capable of cultivating a self-critical and non-dogmatic attitude involving a hostility to one’s own theories and a desire to replace such a theories should any error, harmful consequence or inconsistency in them be discerned. I am not presenting a ‘revision’ of Popper here, rather proposing that a revision of the current Anglo-analytic reading is necessary, and that a revision will need to redress the concerns presented throughout this book. This book also suggests that the strength of his social thought may owe something to the strength of his cosmological thinking. This opens the room for a noetic participatory reading of Popper’s writings. This cosmological thinking enabled him to discern structural repetition at different circulatory manifolds of the whole, including the recurring schemes of material transcendence. From this we can draw out implications for what this means for an understanding of humanity’s enclaved existence within the cosmos. His late World 3 ontology has largely been overlooked in the English speaking world as a kind of folly of his old age and often dismissed as the work of a positivistic minded analytic philosopher who has gone too far and ended in some sort of Hegelian metaphysical system-building exercise. This book argues that Popper was not a positivist and that his later cosmological-ontological thought did share certain features with Hegel. However, this was not a system-building exercise in the traditional sense. Rather the similarity between aspects of his thought and that of Hegel is owing to a shared Neo-Platonism. Popper arrived at this Neo-Platonism from the ground up, through his study of evolutionary linguistics and the emergence of mind which gave him a sense of the inbuilt structures to learning and cognitive functions that he early on applied to childhood development, debates concerning the Copenhagen Interpretation and later and more famously to a critique of the social-psychology of closed societies. Thus, early in his formative years, particularly in his study of theoretical physics and the challenges of observation he was aware of

4

Returning to Karl Popper

the fundamentally deficient nature of human observation and the need for a new theory of learning and mind that better reflected this deficit. From evolutionary linguistics he became aware of the reality of nonphysical products of the human mind, such as arguments and theories that non-the-less played a fundamental role in the way humans adapt to the environment. Popper would continue to explore the role that these ‘transcending’ aspects of the physical universe play in learning, not only for the way humans learn, but the way life learns, and the way minds, including non-human ordered complex systems emerge. From a cosmological perspective learning is seen as a fundamental feature of the universe and central not only to the way we construct our cosmos, viewed from a realist perspective, but also how we ourselves, our very personalities and intelligence co-emerge alongside our world-forming cognition which is a product of our adaptive need to make our ecology more hospitable. Thus, he arrived at a kind of twentieth century Neo-Platonism informed by a scientific realism receptive to the non-proportional features of the universe, and views of being and reality that trod the same path as Plato and Hegel. Given Popper’s discussions of Plato and Hegel in The Open Society it suggests that there may be much to his attitude towards these two philosophers that has not been sufficiently explored. David Deutsch, the inventor of quantum computation has called for a return to Popper, however to his cognitional theory rather than his more famous falsificationist methodology. Deutsch has recently argued that in the area of Artificial Intelligence, computational models based upon inductivist theories of intelligence or ‘input-output’ models will never lead to anything remotely like the creation of intelligence no matter how much data is inputted and processed. Deutsch argued that scientists working in the area of Artificial Intelligence need a new theory of mind and learning, one that he suggests was outlined by Popper’s hypothetical deductivist model. Slowly but surely, the critical purchase of Popper’s theory of learning is beginning to be appreciated. However, the reasons for such renewed appreciation are often to aspects of his thought that drew acclaim during his lifetime. The sophistication of Popper’s works lend themselves to numerous and differentiated readings. As Popper himself regularly cannibalized his scientific arguments for fodder for his social and moral discussions, and his social and moral convictions provide a

Introduction

5

basis for his scientific arguments. For Popper realism was the “expression of metaphysical faith in the existence of regularities in our world…without which practical action is hardly conceivable”. 1 The world is not deterministic, yet there are law-like regularities. These non-deterministic law-like regularities are analogous to what Bernard Lonergan identified as ‘recurrent schemas’. Such an understanding that the existence of law-like regularities does not equate to a deterministic universe was a point he developed through his debates with physicists such as Schrödinger. The purpose of such theorisation was not an abstract logical exercise, but was significant because of the social and human consequences a deterministic and therefore pessimistic view of human nature and the forms of social organisation that arise out of this. As a result, we can understand Popper’s scientific thought on physics as the ‘proofs’ or prolegomena for his later social thought. Indeed his scientific arguments are fundamentally moral arguments relating to individuals and societies; however the battle at the time as Popper was it was being fought in the debates in physics. Theorising was not an abstract exercise, as central to the Bildung-mentality of personal self-cultivation and social transformation. The full development and richness of Popper's thought can be seen in his later lectures given in German. There is a depth to his later German theorisation that becomes lost in his later English writings at the LSE. Popper drew on different theorists and emphasised different aspects of his theories for the different audiences. The Anglophone world never really had access to many of the intricacies of Popper’s arguments and this often erroneously resulted in a reception of him as a positivist or a philosopher of limited analytical and social concerns. This book redressed some of this by integrating some of his key German arguments and concepts into the Anglosphere’s broader received understanding of Popper. This was no simple task as not only was Popper’s German writing very different from the way his thought is presented in English, but his early German writings in Vienna are conceptually, lexically and expressively very different from the language of his later German theorisation. There have been many books written on Popper however, his thought has never reached the kind of popularity of other twentieth                                                             1

K. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (London: Routledge,1993 [1974]), p. 150.

6

Returning to Karl Popper

century thinkers amongst academic philosophers and their students. The fact that Popper was hostile to “academic” or “professional” philosophers instead preferring the company of applied social and natural scientists may account for a continued undercurrent of animosity. However, another more practical reason why Popper’s thought is neglected in philosophical departments has to do with the broad array of intellectual disciplines that his work covers. Further, the way global philosophical disciplines have been demarcated in the Anglophone world is one in which Anglo-analytic and French or German orientated Continental disciplines both find it difficult to accept Popper as falling within their particular field. Rather Popper is often seen to contribute debates or problems almost as an outsider. Continental philosophers often regard Popper as analytic philosopher who at times engaged with Continental philosophers such as Marcuse, Adorno, Habermas, or Wittgenstein but has never been accepted into the Continental club. Analytical philosophers however, given the emphasis upon the analysis of particular problems to be conducted according to specific sub-disciplinary methods often fail to capture the richness of Popper’s historically evolving thought system and the need to engage with his work phronetically, by recognizing the transformative potential of his thought. There are many narratives from which Popper has been written out of. As a result of his baptism, hostility to ethno-tribalism and a universalism of a rather Pauline gleaning, he has largely been written out of Jewish intellectual history, despite his very ‘typical’ Viennese Jewish milieu and intellectual culture. He has further been written out of popular views of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna as his international fame was owing to his English language publications, even though his thought was informed by particularly unique Viennese traits. Popper has however in recent years been taken up as an object of scholarly inquiry has been in the field of the history of ideas, however, this requires the knowledge of German and the willingness to delve into obscure and often seemingly archaic nineteenth century Neo-Kantian German debates in epistemology and behavioural psychology. After some inspection these debates turn out not to be about what we understand by our contemporary usages of epistemology at all, rather the debates are about cognition (Erkenntnistheorie). Another area in which Popper’s thought continues to find a contemporary academic foothold has been in political science or political theory. A resurgent

Introduction

7

historical interest in liberal Cold Warriors, particularly Central European Jewish thinkers continues to hold interest, particularly in the United States and parts of South America such as Argentina. However, by focusing on Popper’s political tracts a large amount of his writing and thought is often ignored. Further, his social democratic arguments are often ignored by libertarians who appropriate his thought, although in a very selective and skewed manner. This book breaks with the traditional narrative, emphasizing the role of the Vienna Circle. Rather, this study focuses on the centrality of the Kantian problem of transcendental criticism, as articulated in Popper’s Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (1932-33), and tracks Popper’s life-long struggle with it. The grand narrative that is presented here is Popper’s gradual liberation from the constraints of falsificationist philosophy and his increasing legitimization of the transcendental, especially in his late ontological works. The arguments forwarded here support F. A. Hayek’s assertion that Popper’s ‘critical’ rationalism is akin to ‘evolutionary’ rationalism2. Ontology was used by Popper as a heuristic for integrating the various knowledge domains as well as guiding scientific research. Such metaphysis enabled Popper to integrate knowledge from various domains in a non-testable way that would otherwise be prohibited by his falsificationism. Thus, critical rationalism is viewed from an evolutionary perspective as both a theory of mind as well as an epistemology for guiding practical problem solving and scientific research methods. The distinctive feature of this critical or evolutionary rationalism is its ‘openness’ or emphasis upon emergent cognitive and problem solving capacities which in turn give rise to new problems. This understanding of emergent cognitive capabilities is central to Popper’s anthropology. Epistemology or a ‘theory of cognition’ or even methodology cannot be understood as entirely separate from the ‘knowing subject’. Objective knowledge can only be understood in relation to this knowing subject located within a particular problem setting. Thus, Popper’s epistemology is also a theory of action, or a praxeology. This book aims to show the way the actual intellectual networks that Popper engaged with informed the way his thought developed through a close reading of his letters. This involves an exploration of                                                             2

F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 5.

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Returning to Karl Popper

Popper’s thought within constellations of thinkers that he is not typically associated with. Popper is an interesting figure at the crossroads of European philosophy as he can be seen to interact with all the major centres of analytic philosophy in Europe. By studying Popper we can begin to see the interconnectedness between Polish analytic philosophy and the Vienna Circle in this way helping to overcome what Barry Smith regards as the narrow perception of Polish analytic philosophy in relation to British analytic philosophy and Viennese positivism. 3 The way this Polish republic of letters, particularly through Alfred Tarski related to the scholarship in Austria, not only the Vienna Circle, but also German traditions of psychology, particularly the Würzburg School of Cognitive Psychology played out in the development of Popper’s thought is also explored. Hence, Popper is contextualised within a Central European republic of letters and scholarship that cannot be categorised according to contemporary distinctions as either ‘continental’ or ‘analytic’ but rather included an array of disciplinary and methodological approaches to shared intellectual problems and concerns. This book also highlights areas in which Popper may be seen to fall within the ambit of ‘continental’ philosophy through direct or indirect engagement with the likes of Wittgenstein, Levinas and Heidegger on shared problems. The impression that I aim to give the reader is of Popper’s thought working within a Neo-Kantian framework, yet incorporating an array of arguments and support from an eclectic assortment of largely Central European intellectual traditions from which he would develop his political and metaphysical positions. Popper is seen to exemplify both the transnational and multi-linguistic reality of Central European scholarship which, as Hacohen has shown, was made possible through a particular Viennese cosmopolitan sensibility.

                                                           

3

B. Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago: Open Court, 1996 [1994]). p. 193.

Chapter One Out of the Haskalah

1.1 Introduction This chapter explores Karl Popper’s thought within the anti-nationalist cosmopolitan tradition of the Central European Jewish intelligentsia. This chapter builds upon the ground breaking study of Popper’s formative years by Malachi Hacohen (2000) by relating his particular Viennese Jewish formative context to a broader narrative. By comparing Popper’s positions with those of Hermann Cohen, another Neo-Kantian philosopher of the Jewish Enlightenment, we have access to a broader tradition which can help to explain some important aspects of Popper’s thought. This chapter presents previously unpublished statements by Karl Popper concerning Jewish matters. The question addressed is whether Popper, one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century, can be regarded as a Jewish philosopher in the tradition of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah. I do not argue that Popper was a Jewish philosopher in any religious sense nor do I agree with Joseph Agassi’s assessment of Popper being a puritan secularist and agnostic coloured by a positivist version of Christianity.1 There is much to Popper’s thought, such as a Pauline commitment to an ethical universality as identified by Alain Badiou that is indeed owing to Christianity.2 His Open Society and Its Enemies is a treatise against the Jewish ‘tribalistic’ doctrine of the ‘chosen people’ which he saw as being appropriated by the Nazi’s in the form of the myth of the ‘master race’. However, Popper can also be seen to have benefited                                                            

1

J. Agassi, A Philosopher’s Apprentice: In Karl Popper’s Workshop (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), p. 23. 2  A. Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 

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Returning to Karl Popper

from a very distinct Jewish tradition of Haskalik or Enlightenment cultural and educational milieu and can perhaps be seen to influence certain intellectual attributes and concerns that one would expect of a Viennese non-Jewish Jew. Both Christian and Jewish ideas play a role in his thinking that require further exploration. I argue that the Jewish influences on Popper’s thought can be found by looking at the ways in which Jewish religious beliefs and attitudes reappeared in secularized forms and arguments following the Jewish Enlightenment. The Jewish Enlightenment not only had direct consequences for the culture and values of the Popper household but can also explain certain idiosyncratic features of his political philosophical writings. Popper can thus be seen as a case study exemplifying how particular sets of Jewish Enlightenment ideas came to prominence within a Viennese setting. As well as shedding new light on Popper’s philosophy, it suggests the importance of looking to Bohemia for the origins of the values that prevailed among Vienna’s middle-class and progressively minded Jewry of the fin-de-siècle. An important feature of the middle-class central European Jewish identity was its cosmopolitanism and hostility towards any expressions of Jewish nationalism. As such, many middle-class Jews in Vienna, and in other central European sites of cosmopolitanism, had a negative attitude towards Zionism, particularly to its “revisionist” variety. Popper was no exception. As he saw it, Zionism was incompatible with the liberal cosmopolitan culture that the Popper family so well exemplified. As Popper was opposed to nationalism, even in its most innocuous guises, a Zionist culture that put the state in the place of the divine was antithetical to his Kantian inspired humanism. Although he did not regard himself as Jewish or Christian in any religious sense, Popper saw the moral substance of religion and the respect for a divine being as important. For him, all humans are fallible, yet where our knowledge in the objective sense cannot venture, we must remain silent and duly respectful. Putting his “faith in reason” over and above revelation was fundamental to his refusal to identify with any positive religious doctrine. Yet Popper did not choose either of the two opposing forms – atheism or Spinozistic natural theology. Here the centrality of Kant in his thought is clear – for he would not allow reason to overstep itself; at the same opening a space for faith (Glauben). The result was a respectful silence in relation to a transcendental subject, an ontology

Chapter One

11

that was teleologically “open,” a Voltairian epistemological repudiation of theology, of the doctrines of positive religion, and of religious authority. Infallible historicisms such as Zionism, whether in its religious or secular variety, was in modern parlance, a moral hazard that failed to learn the lessons of the century. As a consequence, Popper, who remained very Jewish in his secular, cosmopolitan Viennese high culture, was unable to deal positively with any mode – religious or nationalistic–of Jewish identity. The closest he could come to a positive attitude to Jews who did not follow his cosmopolitanism was to show his sympathy for their unfortunate circumstance of being a national minority. As Theodor Gomperz, himself an assimilated Jewish classicist, remarked, the Judaism of the class that Popper belonged to amounted to little more than “un pieux souvenir de famille”.3 Popper’s views and attitudes to Judaism and Jewish nationalism are rooted in his assimilated Jewish Viennese family background. The Haskalik elements in his cosmopolitan outlook can be discerned by comparing his view with those of another Jewish Neo-Kantian, Hermann Cohen. Popper’s attitude towards his own Jewish identity can be seen as an embodiment of the failure of Cohen’s cosmopolitan ideal. Whereas Cohen went to great lengths to weave Judaism and cosmopolitanism together, Popper opted to keep them apart. The result was a negative attitude to Judaism that was pitted against a very sober cosmopolitanism. Cohen argued for an intimate relationship between the German and Jewish cultures resulting from a shared cultural spirit.4 But the failure of this ideal of cultural synthesis can be seen in the way Popper distanced himself from his Jewish ancestry whilst aspiring to a distinctly and traditionally Germanic Austrian aesthetic culture. Dialectally, however, this effort at Germanization is itself the legacy of Jewish Enlightenment traditions. Although the Jewish aspects of Popper’s thought are residual rather than overt, they reflect a Viennese Jewish cultural tradition that was noticeably nonJewish in response to the threat of anti-Semitism.                                                             3

 C. Schorske, Fin-de-siécle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books. 1981), p. 147.  4 A. Poma, “Hermann Cohen: Judaism and Critical Idealism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael Morgan and Peter Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 93.

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Returning to Karl Popper

1.2 The Popper family An understanding of the Popper family background may yield some insights into how Karl Popper came to hold particular ideas and values, some of which had a prophetic dimension, which propelled his thought. Despite Popper’s desire to separate himself from the Jewish tradition and his ancestry and his desire to embrace the Austrian (and emphatically not German) cultural identity and the universal Kantian community, his early social milieu was decidedly Jewish. The lasting effects of any early Jewish influence are not immediately evident as there was little in his formative years that were overtly Jewish in a religious sense. This lack of any distinctive Hebraic cultural or religious traits was the legacy of a complex and lengthy process of intellectual and social development instigated by the European Enlightenment. Popper, through a number of complex historical avenues, was heir to the Jewish Enlightenment thought that culminated in mass apostasy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was heir, more specifically, to the Bohemian Jewish Enlightenment that flowered into the golden age of Vienna’s baptised Jews. Popper’s father converted to Christianity, becoming a Protestant (Lutheran) as a result of the belief that a person living in a predominantly Christian society had an obligation to give as little offence as possible.5 Such conversions were common among Vienna’s upwardly mobile Germanized Jews, many of whom traced their origins to the regions of Bohemia and Moravia of the Austrian Empire. This process was given further impetus by the Josephinist reforms of the 1780s which saw the creation of the German-Jewish school system that was introduced into these regions. 6 Popper’s parents were typical members of this newly affluent and professionally and socially successful segment of Vienna’s Jewish community. Simon Popper, Karl’s father, came from a German speaking household from Bohemia, and his maternal grandparents came from Silesia in Poland and from Hungary.7                                                            

5

K. Popper, Unended Quest, op. cit., p. 105. M. Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years 1902-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 28. 7 D. Edmonds and J. Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 83. 6

Chapter One

13

The Popper name (‫ )פאפרש‬was common in Bohemia. According to Malachi Hacohen, Karl’s paternal grandfather Israel Popper (1821– 1900) came from the backwaters of Kolin, but then moved to the more prosperous town of Raudnitz and eventually to Vienna. Karl Popper’s father became a partner in a successful legal practice and then master or Meister vom Stuhl of the Masonic lodge Humanitas.8 Freemasonry played a crucial role in enabling the upward social mobility of Vienna’s increasingly influential bourgeoisie. This was the case as far back as the 1780s when The Order of Asiatic Brethren, Die Ritter vom wahren Licht, actively accepted Jews as members.9 Simon Popper’s eventual apostasy is not surprising as Masonry and other movements such as the Frankists attracted Jews who sought a more prominent position in the broader Christian society and greater freedom from rabbinical authority.10 Jenny Schiff, Karl’s mother, was representative of a Jewish Viennese haute bourgeoisie idea. 11 Both of Karl’s maternal grandparents were founding members of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Music Association), which had built the Musikvereinssaal in Vienna. This put the Schiff family in the upper echelons of the Viennese bourgeoisie that sought to emulate the cultural world of Fanny Arnstein, daughter of the leading Prussian banker who was also a founding member of Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Indeed, it was Arnstein’s salon of the 1770s that provided the ideal that inspired Karl’s mother’s music concerts. Further, Karl’s maternal grandmother, née Schlesinger, also came from a musical family, one of whose members was Bruno Walter, for whom Karl performed in a production of Bach’s St Matthew Passion.12 The Popper household, according to Hacohen, was built on the virtues of Besitz (property), Recht (law), and Kunst (culture).13                                                            

8

Malachi Hacohen relates how Humanitas was the oldest and largest lodge in Vienna, which was heavily represented by Jews seeking an alternative to the established social hierarchy. See M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., pp. 26-27, 41-42. 9 W. McCagg, A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670-1918 (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 39. 10 Frankism or the followers of Jakob Frank (1728-91) was an influential messianic movement amongst Central European Jewry which had strong Masonic connections. 11 D. Edmonds and J. Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker, op. cit., p. 83. 12 K. Popper, Unended Quest, op. cit., p. 53. 13 M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 29.

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Returning to Karl Popper

Karl wanted to see himself as belonging to the Germanophone Viennese high culture and only incidentally to his Jewish ancestry. David Weinstein and Avihu Zakai contend that Popper exemplified what Leo Strauss called the “problem of the Western Jewish individual who or whose parents severed his connection with the Jewish community in the expectation that he would thus become a normal member of a purely liberal . . . universal human society, and who is . . . perplexed when he finds no such society.”14 It is in this light that Popper’s ideal of the “open society” should be framed. As stated in a profile published in The Times, Popper was “an assimilated German Jew,” for the fact was that “many Jews did merge with the population–Assimilation worked.” The editor of The Times provocative response to this was: “I feel sure The Führer would have readily agreed with him when he sent all the assimilated German Jews, no doubt contemporaries of Sir Karl’s to the Gas chambers.” Popper was incensed by this, and wrote: I do not consider myself “an assimilated German Jew”: I think this is how “the Führer” would have considered me. In fact, I was born, (like the Führer) in Austria, not in Germany, and I do not accept rationalism, [sic] even though it is a fact that I was born in a family 15 that had been Jewish.

As Hacohen points out, Popper indeed saw himself as a Lutheran. He’d been baptised at birth and his parents were baptised in 1900 before he was born.16 He had never belonged to the Jewish faith and as such saw no grounds to consider himself a Jew. As he explained in a 1969 letter to Michael Wallach, editor of the Jewish Year Book, he stressed his Jewish origin in an effort to show his sympathy with minorities, rather than from any cultural attachment.17

                                                           

14

D. Weinstein and A. Zakai, “Exile and Interpretation: Popper’s Re-invention of the History of Political Thought,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11.2 (June 2006), p. 201. 15 Popper to Smith; 28th July 1982. Karl-Popper-Sammlung. Box 407.17. 16 Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 31. 17 Karl Popper to Michael Wallach, Editor, Jewish Year Book, (Jewish Chronicle, 6 January 1969).

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1.3 Popper, Israel and Jewish identity Hacohen sees Popper as a typical member of the class of acculturated Viennese Jews, characterised by a German education, Enlightenment ethos, and liberal politics.18 There is no evidence that Popper regarded himself as a Maskil (‫)משכיל‬, an adherent of the Haskalah movement, or in any way a descendant of the Haskalah. It is safer to say, as Hacohen does, that Popper embodied the spirit of Spätaufklärung of the late Enlightenment.19 Notwithstanding this, when Popper is seen in the context of the Haskalik tradition, certain tendencies of the Jewish Enlightenment as well as the social roles and attitudes of the Maskilim may go some way toward explaining the kinds of Enlightenment ideas found in his thought. The difficulty in pursuing this line of inquiry lies partly in the lack of direct evidence on specifically Jewish aspects in his works. The German-Jewish intellectual tradition, particularly in the Viennese context, had certain common features many of which continued to play a dominant role in Popper’s thought, despite his sense of having extricated himself from it. It is evident from Popper’s personal letters that his attitude towards his own Jewish ancestry was complex and uneasy. The remarks he made on Jews and the Jewish tradition were neutral at best, hostile and antagonistic at worst. For example, in a letter to Ernst Gombrich, he stated: “I suppose that successful Jews are often not so nice.”20 Such remarks and hostility to what he saw as the “tribal” underpinnings of Jewish peoplehood can also be understood in the Viennese Jewish context. Like many Jewish families, the Popper household (at least in the interwar period) were ardent in their social democratic political beliefs which were based on assimilationist and progressivist ideals. Karl’s father, Dr. Simon Siegmund Carl Popper, was greatly interested in social problems as attested by his personal library that included works by Marx, Engels, Lassalle, Kautsky, and Bernstein. Popper also referred to Max Adler as a “firstrate” politician, despite his objections to his party’s policy derived                                                            

18

M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., pp. 32-33. M. Hacohen, “Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism: Karl Popper, Jewish Identity, and ‘Central European Culture’,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 71, No. 1 (March 1999), p. 114. 20 Unpublished letter of correspondence: Karl Popper to Ernst Gombrich, 25 September 1969, Karl-Popper-Sammlung. Box. 3005 Letters. Gombrich, Ernst 195683. 19

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Returning to Karl Popper

from Engels of using violence as a threat.21 While universalist ideals underpinned Jewish emancipation and German assimilation they also fostered an unintended negative attitude towards the Jewish tradition, as was apparent in some of Vienna’s most prominent Jewish intellectuals such as Karl Kraus, Otto Weininger, and Arthur Trebitsch. Thus, Popper’s intellectual hostility towards Jewish beliefs and his distancing himself from Jewish traditions and customs can be seen as a lingering vestige that accompanied the drive of his social class to attain status and prestige in Viennese society. But despite distancing himself from Jewish culture, Popper could not naively look to cosmopolitanism as the opposite ideal of Jewish nationalism and “tribalism” on the one hand, or of antiSemitism on the other. In the first draft of his autobiography, Popper was adamant that Jews were “guests” in Austria who were treated “as well, or better, than one could expect.” However the progressive acceptance of Jews into Austrian society both legally and politically, particularly after 1918, exposed the fundamental problems of the cosmopolitan ideal. Hacohen states that Popper thought that the Jews: understandably but not wisely, invaded politics and journalism. . . . The influx of the Jews into the parties of the left contributed to the downfall of these parties.” For him “living in an overwhelmingly Christian society imposed the obligation to give as little offense as possible . . . anti-Semitism was to be feared, and it was the task of all 22 people of Jewish origin to do their best not to provoke it.

Such statements reveal Popper’s concern with the ethno-political realities, the particular social position of the Jews, and the ever persistent fear of anti-Semitism. As long as there are chauvinistic forms of nationalism, such as anti-Semitism, cosmopolitanism can never attain its ideal. Thus, Popper’s Kantian inspired cosmopolitanism functioned as a regulative ideal restricted by practical social reality. In a letter to the editor of The Times, Popper stated that he regarded all nationalism as evil, including Jewish nationalism.23 This                                                            

21 K. Popper, Unended Quest,op. cit., pp. 11, 109. Also see K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, [1962], 1945), chap. 18, n. 22; chap. 19, nn.35-40, chap. 20, n. 44. 22 M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., pp. 306-307. 23 Karl Popper to Smith; Penn–7– 82. Popper Archive, 407.17.

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attitude may guide our understanding of Popper’s relationship to Isaiah Berlin, the Russian Jewish philosopher with whom Popper is often associated. While in terms of political philosophy Popper was in agreement with Berlin’s views of liberty and historical inevitability,24 in relation to matters of culture and tradition shared many of the concerns of Austro-Marxists, such as Max Adler, regarding individualism and personal development. He feared the Austrian Volk, their drunkenness, violence and xenophobia. The difference in their immediate situations explains this: Berlin, working in Oxford, had married into a rich banking family, held liberal views that Popper, in economically depressed Red Vienna, did not share. In their letters, Popper never expressed any willingness to comment on or get involved in the then newly established State of Israel.25 Despite their shared commitment to a secularized cosmopolitan lifestyle, Berlin, unlike Popper, saw himself as a secular Jew who participated in Jewish cultural life, saw himself as part of the Jewish people, and maintained a Jewish identity. Berlin, for example, often attended a Synagogue when in a new city as a way of identifying himself with its local Jewish community. Popper, by contrast, did not allow himself any feeling of belonging to a collective of any sort, as a matter of principle, and expressed his particular dislike of collectives that he thought were based on religious or racial myths. Popper, in this regard, avoided all personal associations that conflicted with his Kantian universalist social aspirations. Although Popper may not have exhibited any feelings of kinship with the Jewish people, in the way Berlin did, unlike the latter, Popper’s agnostic religiosity left some room for theism. For Popper: “[Moses’ Torah] was the source of religious intolerance and tribal                                                             24

For Popper’s support and criticism of Berlin’s famous lecture on the two concepts of liberty, see Popper to Berlin, 17 February 1959, Karl-Popper-Sammlung, Box 27610. For their similar positions on the problem of historical inevitability and the friction that this caused, see J. Agassi, A Philosopher’s Apprentice, op. cit., p. 12. Also see I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 41-117. 25 Karl Popper to Berlin, 16 February 1954. Karl-Popper-Sammlung, Box 276-10. In this letter Berlin required Popper’s assistance in the settling and educating in England of Yisrael Galili (1911-86), an Israeli member of the anti-communist left wing faction, who was later a member of the Knesset and a minister. The letter is imploring in tone and aimed to convince Popper of the righteous duty of helping such a man. Unfortunately, there is no known written response by Popper, which suggests that he probably refused any help.

18

Returning to Karl Popper

nationalism, and nationalism is a terrible danger, especially the connection between religion and nationalism.” 26 However, in a posthumously published interview, not previously discussed by scholars, we can detect an affirmation of an aspect of Jewish values. Asked by Edward Zerin whether God had a place in his thinking, he responded: Although I am not a Jew by religion, I have come to the conclusion that there is great wisdom in the Jewish commandment “not to take the name of God in vain.” My objection to organized religion is that it tends to use the name of God in vain. I don’t know whether God exists or not. We may know how little we know, but this must not be turned or twisted into a positive knowledge of the existence of an unfathomable secret. There is a lot in the world which is of the nature of an unfathomable secret, but I do not think that it is admissible to make a theology out of a lack of knowledge. . . . Some forms of atheism are arrogant and ignorant and should be rejected, but 27 agnosticism–to admit that we don’t know and to search–is all right.

Here, then, is a rare written example of Popper explicitly affirming a Jewish tenet. There is another famous instance in which Popper referred to a Jewish religious idea; however, he ascribed the source of it to the more famous Popper of Vienna in the fin-de-siècle, namely Joseph Popper, also known by the pseudonym Lynkeus, a distant relative of Karl’s, developed a radical “half-socialist” theory that prevented him from gaining an academic position. Popper wrote that Lynkeus was called a “half-socialist” because he envisaged a private enterprise sector in his society, limiting the economic activity of the state to the care of the basic needs of all citizens. Popper’s social thought was greatly influenced by Lynkeus’s, especially in its emphasis on negative utilitarianism. 28 Popper-Lynkeus based his social thought on the Talmudic cornerstone: “If you kill a man you have killed the world; when you support a man you support the                                                            

26

M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 67. K. Popper, After The Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings, ed. Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 48-49. 28 According to Hacohen, Joseph Popper-Lynkeus came from Kolin, the same city that Karl’s paternal grandfather Israel Popper came from. See: M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p, 26. For Popper’s familiarisation with Lynkeus’s social thought, see K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 321, n. 7. 27

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world.” 29 While Popper accepted this wisdom, considering his later “Three Worlds Ontology” and evolutionary writings, it is clear that he rejected the mystical interpretation of this Talmudic saying. In the Babylonian Talmud it is written: “Whoever destroys a soul from Israel, the Scripture considers it as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life from Israel, the Scripture considers it as if he saved an entire world.”30 We can see that the ethno-culturally and religiously specific language is not in keeping with Popper-Lynkeus’s “half-socialism” and humanistic and universalistic beliefs. Hence, Popper-Lynkeus appropriated the version of this saying that appears in the Jerusalem Talmud: “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”31 What we are left with is the Neo-Platonic idea that we contain within ourselves and intellectual cosmos. Clearly, this second Jerusalem version, in omitting reference to Scripture and Israel, is an example from within the Jewish tradition of an ethics that accords with Popper-Lynkeus’s secular humanism. Popper-Lynkeus’s use of this passage had a profound impact on how Karl Popper, reworked this passage so as to reflect the particular epistemological orientation of his own philosophy. In The Self and Its Brain (1977) Popper opens with a paraphrase of Popper-Lynkeus’s “every time a man dies, a whole universe is destroyed. (One realizes this when one identifies oneself with that man).”32 It is evident that Popper’s interpretation is not concerned with the original Rabbinic or social signification but rather with existential and epistemological concerns. This is the only written instance where Popper shows an overt yet far removed connection to the rabbinic scholarly tradition. When we turn to matters concerning the state of Israel, Popper’s non-receptiveness can best be gauged by a statement documented by his former student Joseph Agassi, according to which Popper said that “the U.S. should grant free admission to all Israelis so as to reverse the                                                            

29

“Wenn du einen Mensch tötest, hast du die Welt getöten, wenn du einen Mensch erhältst, erhältst du die Welt.” S. Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge University press, 1989), p. 111. 30 Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a. 31 Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 4.1.23a. 32 K. Popper and J. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 3.

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Returning to Karl Popper

process.”33 In Exile and Interpretation: Popper’s Re-Invention of the History of Political Thought, David Weinstein and Avihu Zakai offer an even more negative example: Popper’s ambivalence about being Jewish, despite being victimized by anti-Semitism and being forced into exile, was not accompanied by analogous ambivalence about Zionism. Jewish nationalism was both “stupid” and “wrong” racial pride like so many other nationalisms. Zionism was just the “petrified” tribalism of the European Jewish ghetto displaced to Palestine. Israel’s treatment of 34 Palestinians made him “ashamed in [his] origin.”

When seen within Popper’s Jewish, progressivist Viennese context his strong opposition to Zionism is no surprise, for as Zohn has noted, the majority of Viennese Jews were opposed to the Zionist movement. Vienna’s professional Jewish class was looking forward to greater assimilation, as reflected in the Neue Freie Presse, the foremost newspaper at the time. The radical Zionist positions tended to find favour with the more recently arrived and less affluent Galizianer Jews who had emigrated from the region of Galicia.35 For the cosmopolitanism that Popper idealized the aim of humanity was to work towards the creation of a global “state” (or “federation,” given his adherence to Kant’s Perpetual Peace) that would make the existing state system and its emphasis on ethnic homogeneity obsolete. Such sentiments are admirable enough; yet this kind of cosmopolitanism seems unable to confront the fact of the creation of the state of Israel. In Popper’s case this impasse resulted in a near silence in his engagement with Israel and Zionists. Popper’s unwillingness to engage in dialogue with those holding fundamentalist and exclusivist political views was reminiscent of the experience of his idol, Albert Einstein, who shared a similar cosmopolitan outlook and social milieu. Einstein directly confronted what he saw as the “narrow nationalism” of the followers of Zabotisky’s “revisionist” right-wing Zionism. It is evident from                                                            

33

J. Agassi, A Philosopher’s Apprentice, op. cit., p. 128. D. Weinstein and A. Zakai, “Exile and Interpretation”, op. cit., p. 188. 35 H. Zohn, “Fin-de-siècle Vienna : the Jewish contribution” in (eds.) Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry, Brandeis, 1985), p. 140. 34

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Einstein’s correspondence that not only did rational discussion and engagement fail in all its objectives but that basic congeniality also proved impossible. Einstein summed up the dilemma of Jewish intellectuals, like Popper, who held cosmopolitan world-views: The problem is made even more difficult by the fact that the best and finest Jews, the prophets together with Jesus Christ, as well as our best philosophical teachers, were for the most part cosmopolitans whose ideal was guided by the human condition in general. How can fidelity to the Jewish community be combined with a general 36 humanistic outlook, with the concept of world citizenship?

Einstein describes here a central problem of political liberalism—that of relating communitarian and individualistic ethics to a cosmopolitan world-view. According to Malachi Hacohen (2009), Popper regarded Zionism as a colossal mistake and Israel as a tragic error. Zionism prevented an effective solution to the Jewish question and incited a national conflict between Jews and Arabs. However, once the state of Israel was established, Popper realised the need to prevent the annihilation of the Jews living in Israel and to oppose those who sympathised with Arab attempts to expel them.37 Despite his lifelong distancing himself from the Jewish people, Popper nevertheless seems to have felt that he shared their fate, as for example, when he invokes his Jewish or minority ancestry when supporting minority civil rights or opposing anti-Semitism. Thus, in an interview in 1984, it was the problem of Jewish nationalism rather than anti-Semitism, which drove Popper’s continual involvement with Jews issues: Jews were against Hitler’s racism, but theirs goes one step further. They determine Jewishness by mother alone. I opposed Zionism initially because I was against any form of nationalism, but I never expected the Zionists to become racists. It makes me feel ashamed in 38 my origin: I feel responsible for the deeds of Israeli nationalists.

                                                           

36

See Einstein’s “Address at the Opening of Congress House for Refugees,” 30 October 1938, in: F. Jerome, Einstein on Israel and Zionism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), pp. 121-22. 37 M. Hacohen, “’The Strange Fact That the State of Israel Exists’: The Cold War Liberalism Between Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism”, Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2. (Indiana University Press, Winter 2009), p. 58. 38 M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 305.

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Returning to Karl Popper

Notwithstanding such sentiments, it is possible to argue that Popper’s philosophy exemplifies typical Jewish traits indebted to the midrashic tradition. Popper shared with the rabbis an appreciation that the West is a scriptural tradition and that it’s most important artifact is the book. The radicalism of The Open Society can be seen as an exercise in attempting to ‘open’ the way we read the sacred authoritative texts of the West, particularly the works of Plato. In keeping with the Rabbinic tradition, scripture is understood in an antitotalitarian light as an ‘open book’. Popper’s opposition to totalitarianism, authoritarianism and persuasion and his support for open disputation via the method of conjecture and refutation. is a continuation of this quintessentially Rabbinic legal tradtion of “questions and responces”: she'elot ut'shuvot. 1.4 The Jewish Enlightenments To gain a clearer view of Popper’s Jewishness we must look to the sources from which his modern Jewish intellectual milieu emerged. More specifically, we must look to the Enlightenment, the particular intellectual processes that transformed much of Europe’s Jewry. It can be argued that there were two major centres of Jewish Enlightenment: the first originating in Berlin and associated with Mendelssohn, and the later culminating in the golden age of Vienna’s Jewish intellectuals, exemplified. 39 Further, the categorization of Jewish Enlightenments is not necessarily limited to the instances outlined above. Königsberg and Prague were also early centres of Haskalah, and important centres of Haskalah would follow in the commercial towns of Galicia, Odessa, and elsewhere throughout Poland and Russia. The Haskalah began in Berlin with Mendelssohn’s translation of the Torah into the vernacular German in 1778. For Moses Hess (1812-1875) the Socialist-Zionist who was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Bonn, Mendelssohn showed that one could remain a Jew while embracing cultural and intellectual vistas that were far removed from Judaism. For Mendelssohn there was a link between                                                            

39

I am not arguing that these are the only Jewish Enlightenments; other Jewish Enlightenments, such as that associated with Isaac Baer Levinsohn, the father of the Jewish Enlightenment in Russia, are beyond the scope of this study.

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Jewish loyalty and an inner freedom to discriminate between the various layers of Jewish tradition, not all of which he believed carried the same validity. He believed that a religion could not be a religion if it was in anyway coercive. Alexander Altmann states that as a result of emancipation, Mendelssohn envisaged a Judaism that was a pure religion, free of all attributes of power.40 It was this denominational rather than national view of religion that became the prevalent view among Vienna’s educated Jewry. Mendelssohn thus represents a tradition of Jewish Enlightenment thought which would continue in the work of modern German Jewish writers such as Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig. However, Cohen’s embracing of Kantian philosophy would open up new theoretical possibilities for Viennese Jews with the abandonment of Judaism altogether. Bildung and various Neo-Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical traditions would come to fill in the social and spiritual space left open by abandoning Jewish national sentiment, monotheism, alongside an acceptance of Christian morality, particularly an ethical universalism, however without doctrinal articulation. To understand the role of Kant’s thought in providing a secular faith for baptised Jewish intellectuals I turn to the work of Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), founder of the Marburg School of NeoKantianism. Popper’s doctoral supervisor, Karl Bühler, was a member of the Würzburg School of Cognitive Psychology, a research project that grew out of Cohen’s Marburg School. In Cohen’s writing we see a markedly Jewish approach to a number of Kantian philosophical ideals. As a pre-eminent German-Jewish Enlightenment representative Cohen can help us understand the residual Jewish elements, whether overt or latent, that guided Popper’s thought in a particular direction. Although Popper did not profess his faith in Judaism or in Christianity, he did not profess atheism. His belief that human knowledge (doxa, Erkenntnis) was incapable of knowing the deity, whose name he was cautious not to invoke, points to a Jewish understanding of God that is wholly transcendent and beyond our reach, which, in response, frames a Jewish mode of secularism. However, from a cultural perspective, Popper was clearly a                                                            

40

A. Altmann, “Moses Mendelssohn as the archetypal German Jew”, in Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry, Brandeis University Press, 1985), pp. 23-24.

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Returning to Karl Popper

progressive German-Austrian. Within his distinctly Jewish formative environment there was a tension between the Germanic aesthetic and intellectual side of his personality and the non-Jewish Jewish mentality it engendered. Popper is a twentieth century example of Hermann Cohen’s failed synthesis between Judentum and Deutschtum, which attempts to find its tertium comparationis in Greekness. This Greekness, especially Platonism, was seen by Cohen to provide a nexus between the two cultures, the Jewish and the German. For Popper, this Greekness was also a way to transcend the incommensurable ethno-cultural world-views of the Jewish and German peoples. Greekness, in Popper’s thought, manifested itself as a philosophical commitment to Kantianism, Socratic fallibilism, a Platonic doctrine of an independent realm of ideas, and a view of the Homeric epics. The West need not rely exclusively on the Bible for its foundations. Although Cohen’s synthesis was regarded as a failure even during his lifetime, the attempt at this synthesis provided new creative possibilities for central European Jewry. However, the failure of this synthesis, at least at the level of the individual, was to see the sublimation of Judentum by Deutschtum, which may explain Popper’s hostility towards Israel and his anti-Semitic remarks. His deep Jewish roots were hidden behind a thick Austro-German culture. The major differences between Cohen and Popper reflect the different eras in which they lived. While Cohen was imbued with the ideas of German idealism and romanticism, he was among the first to raise the cry “Back to Kant!”, much like Popper’s later “Back to the Presocratics!”41 For Cohen, following Kant, the fundamental concept of ethics was mankind, though he perceived “mankind” as being reflected in the ethical notion of Deutschtum. According to Nathan Rotenstreich, for Cohen there was an affinity between Deutschtum and humanity, for he did not regard hatred to be a characteristic passion of the German soul.42 It was as a result of this romantic belief that Cohen sought to link Deutschtum with Judentum.43                                                             41

K. Popper, The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment, ed. A. F. Petersen and J. Mejer (London: Routledge, 1998). 42 N. Rotenstreich, “Moses Mendelssohn as the archetypal German Jew”, in Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, (Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry, Brandeis University Press,1985), p. 55. 43 H. Cohen,“Deutschtum und Judentum” (1915), in Jüdische Schriften, ed. Bruno Strauss (Berlin, 1924).

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Building upon Mendelssohn’s attempt to free Judaism from coercive elements of its religious tradition, Cohen sought to separate the Jewish national spirit from nationalism. For Popper, however, even such ideas of a national spirit were to be rejected as essentialist, unfalsifiable, and as reflecting the final stages of the scientific turn that Neo-Kantianism was going through. Further, Vienna’s Jewish bourgeoisie had since found a new ancient tradition to accompany their mass apostasy – the revival of interest in classical Greek culture – that swept through German intellectual life. No Viennese family exhibited this fervent appropriation of an alternative Greek tradition more than the Gomperz family, with whom Popper was on close terms. It was Theodor Gomperz who had written Griechische Denker (Greek Thinkers), which, as Hacohen observes, popularized classical philosophy throughout the German and English speaking world. 44 Franz Rozenweig may have lamented that families such as the Gomperz had an excess of Bildung, which coincided with a paucity of Jewish substance.45 Once we take Cohen’s belief in a people’s national spirit, such as Deutschtum or Judentum, out of the equation, we can better see a common Kantian inheritance. Cohen maintained a Kantian concern for the supreme importance of conscience and personal autonomy. Like Popper, he envisaged a society of autonomous individuals, governed by the rationality of such individuals. Humans are comprised of both a rational and non-rational part and it is for the betterment of society that individuals exert their rational capacity in matters of social organization; hence the emphasis upon individual and moral responsibility. The Kantian stress on the importance of personal autonomy requires a socialist dimension to provide order and social cohesion and to prevent the degenerative tendencies of excessive individualism. According to Wendell S. Dietrich, the “socialist” dimension of the prophetic ethos would direct individuals to develop a sense of empathy and responsibility for others in need. This idea is expressed in Cohen’s thought as a social goal of his prophetic messianism.46 In a similar way, Popper’s socialist leanings could be seen as originating in Jewish messianic ethical attitudes that                                                            

44

M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 150.  A. Altmann, “Moses Mendelssohn as the archetypal German Jew”, op. cit., p. 21.  46 W. Dietrich, Cohen and Troeltsch: Ethical Monotheistic Religion and Theory of Culture (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), chap. 1. 45

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were common among progressivist Viennese Jewry. The same prophetic quest that was expressed in Cohen’s notion of the Rechtsstaat, and later it works such as Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (1918), and Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism (1957) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). These may all be seen to share a common ethical standpoint – a convictional imperative that derives from a Jewish prophetic messianism. The dissimilarity between Popper and Cohen can be largely put down to the different historical contexts in which they lived. Cohen was both a German and a Jewish patriot whose cosmopolitanism was based on the idea of the nation state; Popper, on the other hand, was an assimilated Viennese Jew, for whom cosmopolitanism was part of the complex social reality of a multinational empire, the various national groups of which were often bitterly antagonistic to each other. We can take from Popper a sober view of cosmopolitanism, where the social realities of regionalism give rise to the pressures put on minorities to assimilate, to renounce differences, as a better alternative to conflict. Cohen’s search for an overarching set of values by which to unify people of incommensurable cultural and religious traditions can be seen as the perpetual, if never fully attainable, task of a Kantian cosmopolitan intellectual. Joseph Agassi thought that secular puritanism and the protestant ethic where characteristic for Popper. For Agassi, Popper was an agnostic par excellence who preached a modern positivist version of Christianity emptied of all religion. Agassi further states that “In addition to the vulgarity of his efforts to appear a Christian in some sense of the word, he managed this way to endorse a version of Antisemitism, peculiar to Vienna of his early days”.47 I do not indorse Agassi’s views here. Popper’s Christianity was far from being a religionless or some kind of Christian positivism. Rather, Popper was imbued with a deeply pious Christianity of what we would now call a post-secular non-doctrinal variety. Popper’s ethical writings echo the Christian moralism of Kierkegaard and of Dostoyevsky both of whom had a profound moral impact upon his formative sensibilities. Popper’s fondness for Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion also attests to a deeply Christian moral sensibility which he gave expression to in his writings in very non-confessional and secular ways. In the Open                                                             47

J. Agassi, A Philosopher’s Apprentice, op. cit., pp. 25-26.

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Society he referred to Kierkegaard as “the great reformer of Christian ethics, who exposed the official Christian morality of his day as antiChristian and anti-humanitarian hypocrisy”. For Popper, what matters to Christianity is not the historical deeds of the powerful Roman conquerors, that is a theistic interpretation of history, rather what matters to Christianity is what Kierkegaard referred to as ‘what a few fishermen have given the world’.48 It is not that Popper preached a version of Christianity emptied of all religion as Agassi stated, rather it was an intensely religious Christianity stripped of politics, doctrine, institutional servitude and irrational emotivism or anything that may contribute to material or psychological gain or exploitation. Indeed, it was a religiosity associated with an intellectual meditation upon the moral kern of the ‘few fishermen’ and expressed in Bildung or the phronetic transformation of intellectual labour. Popper exaltedly described this state of felicity as his Freude an der Arbeit. 1.5 Bildung The ideal of Bildung, the German language, Kantianism, and the Greek tradition – all of which together defined Popper’s cultural milieu – meant that there was no longer any need to explicitly use Jewish terms in defining his identity. Popper, as was common for intellectuals in Mitteleuropa, was supportive of a restricted esoteric illuminati. This was a common feature expressing itself in an array of manifestations ranging from the mystical naturalism of members of the Vienna Circle such as Neurath before the logical-positivistic turn, to crypto-Polish Messianic aspects of the Lvov-Warsaw School thinkers or even the Protestant Kabbalistic tradition of Viennese Freemasons to which Karl’s father Simon Popper belonged. Popper’s open society was not as open as the title suggests and Bildung needs to be appropriate to one’s station in life. From his personal letters we can get a sense of the restrictions that Popper placed on the desirable social activities and knowledge that are permissible for individuals in a highly differentiated society. In Vienna he supported a ‘living-wage’ for everyone in order that each individual would have the capacity to develop their personal character through the appropriate activities and Bildung for their station. This was very much the Austro-Marxist                                                            

48

K. Popper, The Open Society, op. cit., pp. 200, 273. 

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attitude to personal development. Hacohen also identified the Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard as playing a role in this attitude. Popper became familiar with Kierkegaard’s works, including Stages on the Way of Life from his father’s personal library. 49 Kierkegaard’s introspective description of the transition from aesthetic to ethical and finally to religious life had a profound influence on Karl. Popper spoke often of his aspirations for human cultivation that reflects his Kierkegaardian ideals. For instance, he preferred the masses to take an interest in sport and in sporting or nature related activities rather than the drinking and fighting of his early Viennese years. Later in life he expressed similar sentiments relating to the under regulated consumption of popular media such as television, along with a distain towards unrestricted social climbing. Popper’s life’s work as a Bildungsweg sought an inward integration of art, science and ethics directed toward self-cultivation and all of his writings from the most symbolic works of his logic to his exegesis of Presocratic poetry need to be viewed in this context. This ideal of the élite die Wissenden that prevailed in Popper’s milieu was exemplified in his formative years as previously shown by Hacohen. Bildung is a term that is historically particular to its German historical context and has no real cultural parallel in English. Cultivation does not seem to capture the cult-like devotion to art and a religious and fervent belief in its transformative capacities that enraptured the German bourgeois. However, Bildung also resulted in crass populist versions associated with social climbing, that Popper found distasteful. According to Carl Schorske Bildung became a “term denoting the acquired high culture which accorded a mark of social substance if not social grace to its possessor”.50 The Popper family rather can be seen to be purveyors of Bildung rather than imitators. Indeed, Popper’s autobiography Unended Quest can be read as a Bildungsroman.

                                                            49 50

M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 83. C. Schorske, Fin-de-siécle Vienna, op. cit., p. 283.

Chapter Two Was Karl Popper a Positivist?

2.1 Introduction This chapter argues that we need to explore more closely the various Kantian influences upon Popper’s thought. It contributes to this by suggesting new ways of looking at the Vienna Circle’s relation to the Kantian tradition. The complexity of Popper’s relationship to the Vienna Circle is often a point of confusion as some view Popper as a member of the Vienna Circle while others minimise Popper’s association with this group. This chapter argues that Popper was not a member of the Vienna Circle or a positivist but shared many NeoKantian philosophical tendencies with the members of the Circle as well as many of their philosophical problems and interests. By better understanding the influence of the Circle’s members upon Popper, we not only remove the myths surrounding Popper’s positivism, but also recontextualise the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. This chapter further argues that it was Popper’s friend during his formative philosophical years in Vienna, Julius Kraft (1921–1960) who was responsible for the way in which Popper approached Kant. Through Kraft, Popper was introduced to the thought of Leonard Nelson (1882–1927) and Jakob Fries (1773–1843) as well as a tradition of critical rationalism which Popper would continue both in his methodological orientation as well as through his late German Enlightenment intellectual values. 2.2 The Vienna Circle Popper’s intellectual and social connections to the Vienna Circle were complicated and this makes interpreting his early thought notoriously difficult. This section looks at the way that Popper’s early thought

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incorporated Kantian elements from the Vienna Circle as well as some non-Kantian positions that Popper received through intellectuals of the Lwów-Warsaw School. Despite this, Popper disagreed on many of the central premises held by the Vienna School ‘neo-positivists’. Possibly as a result he was never privileged with a personal invitation to attend Schlick’s seminar, thus was never officially a member.1 Popper was not, as Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) described, one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Circle, 2 nor was he a logical positivist as Feyerabend stated.3 Despite this, his writings and actions were seen to directly contribute to the reputation of the Circle. It is out of this complex social and intellectual environment that much of the confusion concerning Popper’s positivism arises. It was largely through the work of Otto Neurath (1882–1945) that the group of Viennese analytical philosophers known as the Vienna Circle achieved fame, especially through Neurath’s journal Erkenntnis. 4 The Vienna Circle has tended to be seen as a homogenous group devoted to a focus upon Russellian and Wittgesteinian doctrines adhered to in a logically positivistic manner. Popper perceived that his reputation abroad during the years in New Zealand (1937–1945), in which he wrote The Open Society (1945), and after would hinge upon his association with the Circle. Subsequently, Popper relied heavily upon the endorsements and testimonies of the members of the Circle in the years before taking the post at the London School of Economics in 1946 and did much to sustain his seminal influence in the Circle. This can be seen in Unended Quest (1974) in which Popper claimed responsibility for killing logical positivism and sealing the Circle’s fate.5 However, through Popper’s private correspondence we get a remarkably different picture of his relationship to the members of the Circle. Due to the Vienna Circle’s importance in Vienna, Popper was invariably drawn towards them. He formed life-long intellectual relationships as well as close friendships with members of this group. If he were to build an international reputation, Popper knew it could                                                             1

K. Popper, Unended Quest, op. cit., p. 84 Also see: M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., pp. 186–195. 2 L. Kołakowski, Positivist Philosophy: From Hume to the Vienna Circle (Pelican Books, 1972), p. 209. 3 P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1975), p. 112. 4 K. Popper, After The Open Society, op. cit., p. 29. 5 K. Popper, Unended Quest, op. cit., p. 88.

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be done through this group. In Unended Quest Popper gave as one of his reasons for writing Logik der Forschung (1934): a desire to travel abroad due to a feeling that central Europe would once again be plunged into another catastrophe. 6 Thus, Popper built his career around the Vienna Circle and relied heavily on the recommendations of its members in building his international reputation and securing employment abroad. The letters of correspondence between Popper and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) from 1940 to 1950 deserves greater scholarly attention. These letters may help to break down certain naïve myths of the Vienna Circle intended for public consumption that Neurath, the ideologue of the Circle, for political reasons and Popper for professional reasons helped to create.7 The letters between Popper and Carnap reveal a congenial and collaborative friendship of two scholars with similar scientific concerns and both imbued with the thought of Kant. Carnap stated in one of his letters that he believed that his views in questions of semantics largely agreed with Popper’s.8 Politically the two held similar positions in relation to the problematic reception and understanding of Hayek’s thought in the U.S.A. Both felt that aspects of his thought opposing unrestricted capitalism had been neglected.9 Carnap also felt the need to criticise Marx carefully in order: ‘not to furnish arguments to those who not only differ with his views but also reject his goal’.10 From these letters we get a sense of the common concerns over political and social problems that united Popper with Carnap. We can also see that Carnap was ready to provide advice and criticism of Popper’s political arguments. Within the breadth of intellectual concerns that characterised the thought of members of the Vienna Circle it is clear that Popper stands in close proximity. However, defining such a place

                                                           

6

Ibid., p. 107. K. Popper, After The Open Society, op. cit., pp. 85–108. Also see: Karl-PopperSammlung, Klagenfurt, Box 282–24 Carnap Rudolf. 8 Letter of correspondence: Carnap to Popper, January 29, 1943. See: Karl Popper (2008), 88. 9 Letters of correspondence: Popper to Carnap, 25 April 1946. Carnap to Popper, 17 November, 1946. 10 Letters of correspondence: Carnap to Popper, January 29, 1943. Popper to Carnap, 31 March 1943. See: K. Popper, After The Open Society, op. cit., pp. 88–107. 7

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amongst the Vienna Circle has been a matter of considerable scholarly debate.11 David Frisby also locates Popper’s thought within the positivist camp of the Vienna Circle however, he also hints at an alternative locating of Popper’s thought within a Neo-Kantian camp. Frisby stated that the analytical theory of science associated with logical positivism moved beyond its radical phase into two separate yet sometimes overlapping directions. The first direction concerned the logical reconstruction of scientific languages and the second with the logico-methodological reconstruction of the research process itself. The former tradition Frisby associates with Carnap’s work which led to what became known as ordinary language philosophy, the latter, Frisby associates with Popper’s concept of falsificationism. Frisby then states that Popper broadened his theory of scientific method to incorporate the social and political world.12 At this point it is important not to oppose the Vienna Circle to the Neo-Kantians. Rather it is the case that Popper’s thought reflects the complexity of the Viennese intellectual environment in which the two trajectories along which logical positivism developed were themselves due to a broader Neo-Kantian inheritance. Frisby makes indications towards this complex inheritance by stating that the NeoKantian conception of science ‘reduces science to methodology in such a way that what characterizes science is its methodology in the abstract. This is stated to be the position of both the South West School and the Marburg School, both of which isolated methodology from its object in the development of their approaches to science. Thus we see two Neo-Kantian positions underpinning an aspect of neo-positivism that Popper’s thought was seen to characterise. In this regard it is safer to understand Popper’s thought as resulting from a Neo-Kantian tradition to a greater extent than a neo-positivist one. Popper’s understanding of science is remarkably Neo-Kantian and reflects aspects of both the South-West School and the Marburg School. Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) of the South-West School                                                            

11

It should be noted that by 1935 Carnap rarely took part in the meetings of the Vienna Circle. See: D. Miller, Out of Error: Further Essays on Critical Rationalism (Aldershot, Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), p. 9. 12 D. Frisby, “Introduction to the English Translation” in Theodor Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1976), pp. xxvi–xxvii.

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made the distinction between a science generating laws from a science of individual events: the former are considered to be nomothetic and the later to be idiographic. Popper’s understanding of science is a modification of the nomothetic understanding which holds laws as existing in nature and it is our task to discover them through the generation of hypotheses which aim at a high degree of ‘verisimilitude’ or likeness to the truth. However, it is to the Marburg School of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) and Paul Natorp (1854–1924) to which we must turn to appreciate the greatest debt that Popper owed to Neo-Kantian science. The Marburg School was primarily interested in scientific knowledge and took scientific cognition to be the prototype of all cognition. For them, epistemology was the analysis of the logical foundations (or in Popper’s case lack thereof) of the exact sciences. Frisby suggests that in some respects modern positivism has its roots in this tradition. 13 If this is the case, then Popper had a unique advantage over the other members of the Vienna Circle as his early education was directly influenced by Marburg School cognitive theory through the cognitive psychology being conducted by the Würzburg School of which Popper’s supervisor Karl Bühler was a member. A different picture is drawn by Friedrich Stadler who argued that viewed from a greater distance, Popper’s work can be seen to be closer to that of the Vienna Circle than Popper himself cared to admit, and that the Vienna Circle members would not have perceived such a great separation between themselves and Popper. Stadler has shown that Popper, despite his intellectual disagreements, was on good terms with its members many of whom he met with regularly. 14 The similarity of Popper’s thought with that emanating from the Vienna Circle can be supported from a number of different standpoints. It may be the case that, the most important theoretical similarities between the two do not pertain to the unique features of the Vienna Circle’s logical positivism and language philosophy, but are the result of the shared Kantian epistemological mindset found in both Popper and the early works of the members of the Circle such as Schlick and Carnap. However, recent work on the Vienna Circle supports the need to                                                             13

Ibid., p. xx. F. Stadler, Studien zum Wiener Kreis. Ursprung, Entwicklung und Wiurkung des Logischen Empirismus im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997), pp. 489–545. 14

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appreciate the fundamentally Kantian mindset that underpinned the way its members approached the philosophy of science and influenced the broader conceptual distinctions that they formed. According to Friedman in Foundations of Space-Time Theories (1983), the Vienna Circle itself started as a Neo-Kantian movement whose observationaltheoretical distinction was actually a continuation of the Kantian form-content distinction; as a result much of the Circle’s philosophy of science remained ‘indirectly Kantian’.15 Despite the similar problem situations and Neo-Kantian undercurrents that united Popper with the Vienna Circle, his work nonetheless contains many different technical features to that of the Circle’s other members. To appreciate the scientific methodological and epistemological points of divergence between Popper and the Vienna Circle, it is fruitful to compare Popper’s work with that of another central European school of analytical philosophy, namely the Lvov-Warsaw School. Through the use of Alfred Tarski’s (1901– 1983) work as well as that of other members of the Lvov-Warsaw School, it may be the case that Popper used one tradition of analytical philosophy to counter the arguments of the Viennese analytical philosophers such as, Carnap, Schlick as well as Hans Reichenbach from the Society of Empirical Philosophy which formed the ‘Berlin Group’, and Wittgenstein in Cambridge. However, as BurdmanFeferman and Feferman have shown, the members of the Vienna Circle themselves, particularly Carnap, were directly influenced by Tarski and through him were influenced by the other prominent figures of the Lvov-Warsaw School.16 However, Popper was also familiar with the writings of other members of this school and his personal library contained books both in English and in Polish by the figures of this school. 17 Popper’s understanding of rationality has closer affinities with the antiirrationalism of one of the school’s leading thinkers Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) than with any of the Viennese ‘positivists’. For Ajdukiewicz, every rationally accepted proposition ought to be                                                             15

M. Friedman, Foundations of Space-Time Theories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 7. 16 A. Burdman-Feferman and S. Feferman. Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Ch. 4, 5. 17 For instance, Popper wrote inside the front cover of Jan Łukasiewicz’s Aristotle’s Syllogistic, that ‘This is the first competent book in English on Aristotle’s Syllogistic’. See: Karl-Popper-Sammlung, University of Klagenfurt Library, Austria.

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inter-subjectively communicable and testable. This emphasis upon the link between standards of rationality, testability and inter-subjective requirements for objectivity reflect the central pillars of Popper’s critical rationalism.18 More broadly, Popper’s methodological approach to analytical philosophy can also be seen to be closer to the Lvov-Warsaw School than to the Vienna Circle. In opposition to Wittgenstein and his influence upon the Vienna Circle, Popper much like the Lvov-Warsaw School, saw the task of analytical philosophy as not primarily concerned with linguistic analysis. Popper (at least after the Logik) in accordance with Kazimierz Twardowski (1866–1938), the School’s founder, saw that philosophy should concern itself with problems rather than distinguishing between different modes of ‘good’ (scientific) and ‘bad’ (metaphysical) knowledge. 19 Although Popper made such a distinction in his falsificationist methodology, reflecting the concerns that he shared with the Vienna Circle (namely a methodological formalism that he could never overcome and which Feyerabend strongly criticised),20 he nonetheless saw the need to solve concrete problems as being a more pressing concern. Popper understood that metaphysics played an important role in problem solving and could not be abandoned; however, it must be regulated by reason and guided by our background store of conjectural knowledge. In this way, Popper’s dissent from what he believed to be the antimetaphysical insistence of Wittgenstein’s linguistified Kantianism and finitism, that was shared in variable measure by the logical positivists                                                            

18

See: D. Miller’s, Out of Error, op. cit., p. 13: ‘There is…the explanation of scientific objectivity in terms of inter-subjectivity…which acknowledges that individual scientists are not objective, but maintains that in a milieu of free critical discussion, possible only in an open society, subjectivity, where it is dangerous, may be largely neutralized’. 19 For Twardowski’s understanding of the role and method of philosophy see: Jan Wolenski, Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov-Warsaw School (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1989), 36–41. Twardowski like Popper rejected the unscientific treatment of metaphysical problems not the problems themselves. Twardowski developed the distinction between metaphysics (which is reflective of Popper’s attitude towards the importance of metaphysics for scientific theory formation) and metaphysicism. The latter is defined by Wolenski as any manner of investigating philosophical problems which in advance assumes a definite metaphysical solution. 20 For Feyerabend’s criticism of Popper’s formalism or methodological idealism see: Against Method, op. cit., Ch. 17, 18.

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of the Vienna Circle, reflected the standpoint of another leading member of the Lvov-Warsaw school, namely Tadeusz Kotarbiński (1886–1981). Kotarbiński saw the metaphysical discipline of ontology, as being indispensable for philosophical inquiry. 21 For Popper, metaphysics was intrinsic to science, insofar as explanatory theories transcend experience. Metaphysics is unavoidable as every ‘fact’ for Popper contains ‘universals’ which entail ‘law-like’ behaviour. 22 These ‘universals’ which played a greater role in Popper’s latter thought are reflective of Aristotle’s description in Book M of the Metaphysics of Plato’s Ideas as being Socrates’ universals made transcendent. The argument that metaphysics are intrinsic to science and not something in opposition to it is central to the way Popper in his mature post-Logik thought, construed what Victor Kraft (1880–1975) believed to be the common tenet of the Vienna Circle: ‘that philosophy ought to be scientific’.23 It is perhaps in regards to this broad tenet that Popper can be regarded as being philosophically akin to the Vienna Circle. Popper’s anti-positivist analytical approach to philosophy took time to develop. 24 The elements of Popper’s later realist and objectivist interpretations of scientific theories can be seen from his earliest works. He would not develop his realist and objectivist theories to their full and mature extent until after the Logik when he was able to change his opinions on the rational arguability of nonfalsifiable theories which coincided with a practical appreciation of the benefits of transcendental criticism. Popper’s early thesis ‘Gewohnheit’ und ‘Gesetzerlebnis’ in der Erziehung (1927) written for the Pedagogic Institute, reveals that although he was studying under Karl Bühler, the lure of neo-positivism was great and he was not yet in a position to theoretically combat it.25 In this 1927 thesis it is stated: ‘Although this work is highly theoretical in its main parts, it is nevertheless the result of practical experience and shall in the end come to be used in practice. Its method                                                            

21 K. Ajdukiewicz, Problems and Theories of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. xi. 22 K. Poppper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper and Row, 1968 [1959]), p. 444. 23 V. Kraft, The Vienna Circle (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1953), p. 15. 24 K. Popper. Unended Quest, op. cit., pp. 10–19. 25 K. Popper, Frühe Schriften (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), p. 87.

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is therefore largely inductive’. 26 This work as a whole is a rather unusual piece, in which inductivism is quite naturally given as the obvious choice of method. As his thesis progresses the types of evidence used to support his psychological arguments concerning the fear of the known and angst for the unknown include Kierkegaard,27 Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Shakespeare, alongside the expected Würzburg School psychologists and Kant. It is a remarkably unPopperian work indeed, that is, if we were to misunderstand Popper as one of Kołakowski’s positivists. It is apparent that this thesis reflects his early and broad philosophical interests and his early attempt to bring his thought into line with the trends of the Vienna Circle and the scientific concerns of the Würzburg School. Only a year later, however, we can see the beginnings of a Popperian philosophy and a system of thought, based upon arguments which would be developed throughout his life. This is first clearly evident in his 1928 dissertation Zur Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie. In this work, Popper developed Bühler’s attempt in Die Krise der Psychologie (1927) to reform psychology through the ‘die Axiome der Sprachtheorie zu finden’. 28 As Bühler’s book was only published in 1927, it indicates that the shift from Popper’s unusual 1927 inductive thesis to the first real Popperian work in 1928 may be owing to a greater familiarisation with Bühler’s work. Thus, one can speculate that Bühler’s Die Krise der Psychologie, may have been a significant, but by no means only, source of Popper’s opposition to the Vienna Circle’s inductivism and neo-positivism. It may be the case that through this book Popper’s earlier leanings towards Kant in his 1927 thesis could be developed for a methodological program. Bühler’s 1927 book reflects Popper’s similar concerns with a biological factor underpinning methodology. 29 Further, as a result of the impact of a biologically oriented theory of communication, a methodology that is built upon this for Popper                                                            

26

‘Die vorliegende Arbeit, obwohl in ihren Hauptteilen im hohen Grade theoretisch, ist dennoch ganz aus praktischer Erfahrung heraus entstanden und soll letzten Endes wieder der Praxis dienen. Ihre Methode ist daher im wesentlichen induktiv’. K. Popper, Frühe Schriften, op. cit., p. 87. 27 Ibid., pp. 118, 120, 122-4, 139, 141. 28 Ibid., 190. Also see: K. Bühler. Foundations of Semiotics (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1990 [1927]), p. 29. 29 K. Popper, Frühe Schriften, op. cit., p. 255.

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would have to be deductive and have a transcendental component.30 Popper would later extend these features that were originally developed by Bühler from what was then the cutting edge science of Denkspsychologie or cognitive psychology to scientific philosophy as a whole. An attempt was made by Popper to explain this argument for the deductive and metaphysical basis behind all of our knowledge in a letter to Victor Kraft (1880–1975) of the Vienna Circle in 1967. 31 From this letter it can be seen how Bühler’s work in finding a linguistic solution to the problem of method in psychology remained the feature at the centre of Popper’s philosophy throughout his later years. Arne Petersen has suggested that the real breakthrough came in 1929 with Axiome, Definitionen and Postulate der Geometrie where Popper realised that logic rather than psychology, was of fundamental concern for scientific discovery. 32 This early development from psychological to biological then to logical concerns in Popper’s approach to methodological problems is an important feature of his early thought. Ultimately, Popper’s movement away from the positivist influences of the Vienna Circle can be seen to be part of a broader trajectory away from logical positivism within the Circle itself, partly resulting from an increasing interaction with the ideas of the LvovWarsaw School. In Unended Quest Popper famously responded to the question of who killed logical positivism with a feigned confession: ‘I fear that I must admit responsibility’. 33 The logical positivists themselves never accepted Popper’s infamous assertion. Artur Rojszczak cites a letter from Tarski to Neurath from 1936 in which Tarski stated: ‘And now Carnap was of the opinion, that just the liberation from this hindering influence of W.[ittgenstein] is due to the Varsovians…’.34 Among the various reasons for the abandonment of a                                                             30

Ibid., p. 130. Letter of Correspondence. Popper to Victor Kraft. 9 June 1967. Karl-PopperSammlung 3.16, 24 Victor Kraft 1945-74. 32 This point was made to me by Arne F. Petersen in response to a question about Popper’s pre-deductivist methodology, Friday, 29th May, 2009. Also see: A. F. Petersen, “Popper’s Gewöhnungstheorie Assembled and Faced with other Theories of Learning”, in Anuarul Institutului de Istorie "George Bariț" din Cluj-Napoca, Series Humanistica (2008). Vol. VI: 265-287. For “Axiome, Definitionen and Postulate der Geometrie” see: K. Popper. Frühe Schriften, op. cit., pp. 263–390. 33 K. Popper, Unended Quest, op. cit., p. 88. 34 A. Rojszczak, “Philosophical Background and Philosophical content of the Semantic Definition of Truth”, in Erkenntnis, 56. (Netherlands: Kluwer, 2002), p. 37. 31

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certain view of the ‘early’ Wittgenstein and failure of logical positivism in Vienna it seems that Tarski’s lectures in Vienna and the discussion which they provoked bear a measure of responsibility. However, further on in Unended Quest, Popper made another assessment of the demise of the Vienna Circle that is often overshadowed by his more ostentatious confession cited above. In opposition to Popper’s claim to have killed logical positivism he stated: I may perhaps say here that what I regard as the ultimate cause of the dissolution of the Vienna Circle and of Logical Positivism is not its various grave mistakes of doctrine (many of which I had pointed out) but a decline of interest in the great problems: the concentration upon minutiae (upon ‘puzzles’) and especially upon the meanings of words; in brief, its scholasticism. This was inherited by its successors, 35 in England and in the United States.

This criticism of the ‘scholasticism’ into which the Vienna Circle degenerated would become a reoccurring criticism that Popper would level against academic philosophers later in life. Such a fear of ‘scholasticism’ or the abstraction of the concerns of philosophers from the real problems facing humanity would become a characteristic ideal of Popper’s critical rationalism. Popper perceived Russell’s vision of the philosophy of science as ‘providing a possible cure for the diseases of the modern world’, as losing its focus in the twentieth century, which was in no small part due to the cult-like influence of Wittgenstein.36 It appears to be the case that Popper received his understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy from the way he was misconstrued by the Vienna Circle as a positivist. However, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin in their book Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1973) have provided a contextual picture of Wittgenstein which they contend shows that he was not at all a positivist or a linguistic philosopher. While in English the real Fichtean nature of Wittgenstein’s thought has yet to be written about, Janik and Toulmin’s book is an illuminating first step, and                                                            

35

K. Popper, Unended Quest, op. cit., p. 90. A. Burdman-Feferman and S. Feferman. Alfred Tarski, op. cit., p. 96. Also see Unended Quest where Popper stated that the positivism developed by the Vienna Circle became influenced by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in ‘a very dogmatic form’. Unended Quest, op. cit., p. 97.

36

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raises many issues for our understanding of Popper. If we accept Janik and Toulmin’s argument then even an anti-positivist reading of Popper still makes him look more the positivist than the more mystical Wittgenstein. For Janik and Toulmin: Wittgenstein’s insistence that the relationship between language and the world was fundamentally “ineffable,” that the mode of projection of a map cannot itself be “mapped,” any more than we can see the light rays we are seeing with—this insistence, which he had expressed in the closing proposition, Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen, was interpreted by his Viennese associates as the positivist slogan “Metaphysicians, shut your traps!”

Janik and Toulmin cite Paul Engelmann as identifying the deceptive points of convergence and divergence that lead to this mistaken uptake of Wittgenstein: …he draws the line between what we can speak about and what we must be silent about just as they do. The difference is only that they have nothing to be silent about. Positivism holds—that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about.

This is an interesting instance of how the same standpoints can be used to argue for radically different arguments. The way the evidence is understood having more to do with the subjective attitudes and cognitive and moral development of those who engage with the particular knowledge in question. Once again Janik and Toulmin provide an apt description: To young Central European intellectuals growing up in the political and cultural wreckage of the Habsburg Empire, this philosophical reformation came like a breath of fresh air…As these young men read it, the book was a grand, highly professional, and seemingly final 37 denunciation of superstition…

                                                            37

A. Janik and S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster. 1996 [1973]). pp. 219-220. 

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The sentiments which lead the Vienna Circle to read the Tractatus as a positivist tract epitomising Genauigkeit  (Exactness)  were also those that Robert Musil expressed in The Man Without Qualities when a 32-year old mathematician named Ulrich who is set against the Gefühlskultur (sentimental culture) of the Viennese bourgeoisie and metaphysical and romantic musings of the Christian nationalist youth who meet at the house of the part-Jewish Gerda Fischel.38 One can imagine the shock that must have been felt by the member of the Vienna Circle when upon meeting them, Wittgenstein preferred to read to them the poems of the mystic  Rabindranath Tagore. Even Popper would not allow himself such open displays of mystical thinking, rather restricting any outpouring of such esoteric illumination to veiled cosmological theorising. In this light, Popper may be construed as being the stricter disciplinarian in matters of sayable known-knowledge. If this is the case, what we know about the Popper-Wittgenstein nexus needs serious rethinking. 2.3 The renewal of Kant’s Enlightenment It is pertinent that I make a short digression into Popper’s Kantian understanding of Enlightenment thought. The philosophy of Karl Popper can be seen as a continuation of the German Aufklärung tradition. This point has previously been raised by Kurt Salamun who argued that the ethos of Popper’s critical rationalism was fundamentally that of the Aufklärung. 39 Popper’s credo: ‘I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth’,40 ought to be taken as a reaffirmation of this Kantian lateEnlightenment ethos in the twentieth century. Locating Popper’s thought within the German Enlightenment ought not to prevent us from perceiving similarities with other Enlightenment figures, particularly those of France and Britain. Direct reference to French                                                             38

 It is interesting to note that Popper and Musil both studied under Karl Stumpf however went on to fill out their world-views via different intellectual mediums. This point is demonstrative not only of the interconnectedness of Viennese intelligentsia, but also their versatility and intellectual roundedness.   39 K. Salamun, ed. Moral und Politik aus der Sicht des Kritischen Rationalismus (Amsterdam: Rodopi B. V., 1991), p. 95. 40 K. Popper, The Myth of the Framework: In defence of science and rationality, M. A. Notturno, Ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 82–111.

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Enlightenment figures and their thought is sparse in Popper’s work. Despite the ease with which Popper discussed Kant, his discomfort with lengthy discussions on other Enlightenment figures was clearly evident. This was particularly evident when he declined Hayek’s recommendation to write a middle part for The Open Society dealing with figures such as Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes and Rousseau. Hayek even suggested to him in a letter that Popper was uncomfortable in systematically treating the figures of the English, Scottish and French Enlightenments.41 A familiarity with the works of J. S. Mill (which he inherited from his father), as well as the central arguments in Locke and Hume’s philosophies of science remain notable exceptions. Popper clearly saw himself as heir to a tradition epitomised by Voltaire. Rather than looking at his better known political works for evidence of this, I will turn to Woran glaubt der Westen? 42 This lecture given in Zürich in 1958, reveals much about Popper’s philosophical attitude, yet remains unknown to political theorists outside a small contingent of Popper scholars. Here Popper emphasised the role of Voltaire for the Enlightenment which was characteristic of the type of rationalism which he sought to revitalise for a post-war Europe: We must remember that the Enlightenment started with Voltaire’s letter which attempted to bring to the European Continent the intellectual climate of England which had a dryness sharply in 43 contrast to its physical climate.

The connection that Popper refers to here is an understanding of rationalism associated with the ‘great prophets’ espoused by the likes of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. This latter type of rationalism is well known to readers of The Open Society as being a central point of opposition to the ‘critical rational’ or empirical-deductivist philosophy                                                            

41

Letter of Correspondence: Hayek to Popper, 17th February 1963. Karl-PopperSammlung. 305. 15. 42 K. Popper, After The Open Society. op. cit., p. 233. 43 ‘Man muß sich in diesem Zusammenhang daran erinnern, daß die Aufklärung mit Voltaires Briefen aus London über die Engländer anfing: mit dem Versuch, das intellektuelle Klima Englands, jene Trockenheit, die so merkwürdig mit seinem physischen Klima kontrastiert, auf dem Kontinent einzuführen’. K. Popper, Auf der Suche nach einer besseren Welt: Vorträge und Aufsätze aus dreißig Jahren, (München: Piper Verlag GmbH, 2004 [1984]), p. 233.

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that Popper espoused. This however, does not mean that Popper was not a rationalist; he was, both in the sense of being anti-irrationalist and an apriorist. Popper’s later ontology, evident in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972), is a testament to the apriorism, albeit hypothetical, that existed alongside his empiricism. The opposition between empiricism and rationalism for Popper was not as pressing as the opposition between one mode of ‘prophetic’ rationalism and another Voltairean ‘sober’ rationalism of a ‘give and take’ attitude. Indeed, by coming to the position in Die beiden Grundprobleme that all knowledge is theory impregnated, he believed he had found a way around the empiricism-rationalism dichotomy. Popper’s critical rationalism has been summarised by David Miller in Out of Error (2006): Rationality, according to critical rationalism, is wholly a matter of method; and this rationality in no way rubs off on, or has any effect on, the outcomes of our intellectual activity. It is not our beliefs, or our theories, that are rational, but the manner in which we handle these beliefs and these theories. To be sure, this emphasis on methodological issues is not all that there is to critical rationalism, since the word ‘critical’ too is central. What critical rationalism claims is that the only way in which our theories are to be 44 investigated is critically, negatively.

This book however, aims to develop the argument that Popper’s understanding of rationality developed in a way that opposes Miller’s view of critical rationalism. I argue that Miller’s interpretation does not pay sufficient attention to the praxiological and phronetic aspects of Popper’s philosophy. The Enlightenment values and strictures that Popper held were those most conducive to promoting a society and a scientific culture which adhere to the logical structure of cognitive activity. Criticism is not only an Enlightenment value but also a mode of conjecture, the content of which comprises a set of logical consequences associated with the structural features of the way an organism adapts to its environment. In this way the link between the metaphysical, cosmological and social and moral thought which are both grounded by his epistemology is reflective of Lonergan’s position that “For just as the dynamic structure of our knowing                                                             44

D. Miller, Out of Error. op. cit., p. 50.

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grounds a metaphysics, so the prolongation of that structure into human doing grounds an ethics”.45 Lonergan’s apt description of the ‘parallel interpenetration of metaphysics and ethics’ suggests that we should not be looking for an ‘ethical underpinnings’ as many Popper scholars have attempted to do, rather there is a kind of transformative ascent to Popper’s life’s work that gives even his most technical arguments on logic and physics a moral gleaning. To say more of such a Neo-Platonic ascent remains beyond the scope of literary criticism presented in this book as it would not be possible without doing untold damage. However, what this book aims to do is accompany the reader through passages in Popper’s writings where this ascent radiates most ingeniously and erotically in often seemingly mundanely technical arguments, such as his discussions on logic and semantics or his more obscure and imaginative later works.

                                                            45

B. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 126.

Chapter Three The early philosophical problems

3.1 Introduction This chapter explores Popper’s thought on synthetic knowledge, that is, the relationship between what he called ‘transcendentals’ and reality, by which he meant the physical world we occupy. What was of particular concern for Popper was the way the two are linked by our cognition and the way various scientific methods attempt to understand this through subjective experience (Erfahrung versus Erlebnis) or objective cognitive architecture (Geltungslogik). The problem of identifying a “breakthrough” leading to a recognisably Popperian Popper is far from easy to discern. Ter Hark has looked at the role of Otto Selz.1 Hacohen has explored the Fries-Nelsen problem setting. 2 Others such as Petersen have looked at the importance of Popper’s supervisor Karl Bühler and the work of the Würzburg School. Gattei also suggests that a decisive breakthrough occurred during his study on geometry.3 Trying to isolate a single “Copernican” moment in Popper’s thought is something that Popper scholars continue to dispute. However, it was Kant as early as 1933 for Popper in Die beiden Grundprobleme in which the link between intersubjective                                                             1

See; M. ter Hark, “The Psychology of Thinking, Animal Psychology, and the Young Karl Popper,” in Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, Vol. 40. No. 4. (Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 2004a), pp. 375 – 392. And; M. ter Hark. Popper, Otto Selz, and the rise of evolutionary epistemology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004b). Chapter 5. And; M. ter Hark, “Searching for the Searchlight Theory: From Karl Popper to Otto Selz”, in Journal of the History of Ideas. Academic Research Library. Vol. 64, No. 3, (July 2003), p. 465. 2 M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 220. 3 S. Gattei, “Karl Popper’s Philosophical Breakthrough”, Philosophy of Science, 71, (2004), pp. 448-466. Similar sentiments have been made to me by Arne Petersen and Jeremy Shearmur in conversations concerning Popper’s early work on geometry.

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communication and our capacity to gain objectively valid knowledge of external reality (despite our “anthropomorphic framework”) was argued to be possible. Against the sceptic’s ‘semantic view of knowledge’ Popper follows Kant in forwarding an alternative antiessentialist view capable of asserting objectivity in relation to empirical reality. Popper came to the conclusion that: The objectivity of knowledge cannot therefore be sought in any knowledge that grasps its object “in itself”; rather, it consists in scientifically determining the object according to the universally valid (intersubjective) methodological principles (for the use of our understanding).4

Once Popper reached this view in Die beiden Grundprobleme it enabled the development of his later arguments on truth and objectivity within an anti-essentialist framework which Part II of this book is devoted to exploring. 3.2 Julius Kraft: an extraordinary friendship In order to contextualise the problematics of Die beiden Grundprobleme I will now discuss an obscure early influence upon Popper’s early intellectual development, namely, his close friend Julius Kraft (1898–1960). According to David Miller, Popper had many informal conversations with Kraft during 1924-1925.5 Popper wrote that at the time in which he met Kraft he had been studying philosophy for some years without actually having contact with a teacher of philosophy or anybody with knowledge of the subject in any depth. Popper stated that Kraft was a ‘wonderful teacher’ and that they discussed problems “for hours, for days and nights”. Kraft was clearly the more proficient philosopher of the two during the years following the First World War in Vienna, at least in terms of qualifications and publications. The extent to which Popper not only shared philosophical positions and problems with him, but also deeper philosophical attitudes and interests, is a testimony to the centrality of                                                             4

K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, (London and New York: Routledge, 2009 [1979]), p. 100. 5 D. Miller, Out of Error, op. cit., p. 5.

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Kraft for Popper’s intellectual development. It was Kraft who Popper stated ‘never ceased to study, and to ponder about, Kant’s three Critiques, especially the first. Kant’s resolution of the antinomies – his “transcendental idealism”’. As Popper understood it, for Kraft, Kantian critical rationalism meant that all reasoning is discursive rather than intuitive as Kant stipulated that there is no such thing as an ‘intellectual intuition’ which is an ‘authentic source of knowledge’, in the sense that what is intellectually intuited is true. For Kraft, ‘the intuitionist philosopher is an authoritarian philosopher’. 6 Kraft’s arguments against intuitionism in Von Husserl zu Heidegger (1932 [1957]) would become a central feature of Popper’s philosophy and would significantly influence Popper’s negative attitude towards Heidegger. This belief in the discursive (theory centred) character of human reason would become one of Popper’s fundamental beliefs and is the basis for his philosophical concern for the particular needs of rational argumentation in relation to the complexity of intellectual and social problems that we face. Hacohen stated that Kraft’s Von Husserl zu Heidegger in which he attacked phenomenology, existentialism and Hegelianism, as well as Kraft’s Die Unmöglichkeit der Geisteswissenschaft (1934) almost read as sequels to The Open Society. 7 Kraft’s works significantly predate the publication of Popper’s major social and political works and reflect Kraft’s pivotal role within the Fries-Nelson critical rationalist tradition. As such, Kraft’s works ought not to be seen as sequels but more appropriately, as having a greater significance in foreshadowing The Open Society than Popper himself acknowledged. A reassessment of Popper’s positions in relation to the works of his ‘teacher’ and ‘friend’ Julius would be a valuable exercise in order to better understand Popper’s originality. Such an exercise would also bring to the fore an often neglected aspect of the Popper story in the public imagination, that is the friendship, understood in the finest Aristotelian sense, which the two shared. We can see from the correspondence between Popper and Kraft that at the time when Popper was in the process of publishing his work on the problems of induction and demarcation in what would later appear in Grundprobleme and Logik der Forschung (1935), that Popper was                                                            

6

K. Popper, After The Open Society, op. cit., pp. 16-17, 19. Also see: J. Kraft, Von Husserl zu Heidegger (Frankfurt: Öffentliches Leben, 1957). 7 M. Hacohen. Karl Popper, op. cit., pp. 123-124.

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constantly seeking Kraft’s advice and feedback in relation to his work. 8 For instance, the letters of 1933 show that Popper was particularly concerned with Kraft’s opinion on his chapter on Fries which included Kraft’s criticism of Kant. Chapter Five on Fries and Kant was perhaps the most important chapter in the original manuscript for Die beiden Grundprobleme as it contained the discussions on the dilemmas of truth and Kant’s transcendental method necessary for Popper to propose a solution to the problem of induction.9 This is also the chapter which has become a scholarly field in itself, and continues to raise many questions due to the obscurity which surrounds this pivotal formative work. Kraft’s criticism of Popper’s positions on questions concerning the ‘existence’ and ‘possible modes of validation’ of Kant’s a priori synthetic propositions, and Fries’s psychological deduction and whether or not it was an improvement upon Kant had a lasting effect on the trajectory of Popper’s theoretical concerns. Kraft’s main concern was that Popper’s attitude implied that we should give up the idea of objective truth, a position which Popper believed was unavoidable until after writing the Logik when in 1935 Tarski explained his ‘clarification of the correspondence theory of truth’ to Popper.10 The problems concerning Popper’s theorising on truth and the relativist and sceptical leanings are evident in an early discussion in Die beiden Grundprobleme just before Popper begins a discussion on Fries which relied heavily on Kraft’s Von Husserl zu Heidegger. The importance of resolving this criticism from his friend may have been responsible for the immediate and emphatic manner in which Popper accepted Tarski’s thought. The trajectory in which Popper later developed his theorising on truth and objectivity may to also be seen as part of a life-long response to Kraft. Without this friendship it is doubtful whether Popper would have written anything like The Open Society. Much of the lack of attention that Kraft receives in regards to discussions of Popper may be due to the way he referred to Kraft. On top of this there is a lack of familiarity with Kraft who is                                                             8

For a discussion on the lost Grundprobleme II manuscript and its relationship to the Logik see M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., Ch 6. 9 See: Letters of correspondence, Popper to Julius Kraft, 25th May 1933, 11th July 1933, Karl-Popper-Sammlung. Box 316-23. Also see: K. Popper, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1979), Ch. 5. 10 K. Popper, After The Open Society, op. cit., pp. 17-18.

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now largely a forgotten thinker. Popper did not mention Kraft once in the text of his discussion of Fries and Kant in Chapter Five of Die beiden Grundprobleme despite extensively citing Kraft in the footnotes. Later in The Open Society Popper would treat Tarski in much the same way, reflecting a pattern of referencing that would have a lasting impact on our appreciation of the influences on Popper’s thought. 3.3 Popper’s Friesian problematic Before discussing the technical aspects of Popper’s philosophical “breakthrough”, what I otherwise refer to as his revision of Kant, it is necessary to provide a sketch of the various Kantian problematics and traditions that framed the way that he approached Kant’s thought. The two major strands of post-Kantian thought that have greatly influenced Popper’s epistemology are the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School and the Würzburg School of Cognitive Psychology, and the post-Kantian thought handed down through Jakob Fries, Leonard Nelson and Julius Kraft. However, the situation is not as neat and straightforward as this. Nelson himself was a disciple of the social democratic teaching of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp and August Stadler of the Marburg School. 11 William Berkson and John Wettersten have done much to situate Popper’s thought within the Würzburg School of Cognitive Psychology.12 The most important of these Kantian influences was the thought of Jakob Fries (1773–1843) that he received from Julius Kraft ((1921)1898–1960). Fries’s influence upon Popper can be seen as twofold; firstly, by providing the problem situations associated with Popper’s understanding of the theory of knowledge; secondly, and not wholly distinct from the first, providing a practical basis for moral faith. This section explores how Popper provided a further revision of Fries by turning away from the latter’s psychological approach to the                                                            

11 T. E. Willey, Back to Kant: the revival of Kantianism in German social and historical thought, 1860-1914. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), pp. 102-103. 12 W. Berkson and J. Wettersten. Learning From Error: Karl Popper’s Psychology of Learning, (La Salle: Open Court Publishing, 1984).

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logic of discovery towards an objective, realist and ontological approach to the logic of discovery (Geltungslogik). The importance of Popper’s fixation on the epistemological problems of Jakob Friedrich Fries has been pointed out by Malachi Hacohen in Karl Popper – The Formative Years. 13 For Fries, according to Popper, if we are to avoid interpreting statements of science dogmatically, we must justify them. However, as Fries accepted that statements can only be justified by other statements then the demand that all statements be logically justified would lead to an “infinite regress”.14 To avoid the dangers of dogmatism and of infinite regress, Fries opted for a third position, that of “psychologism”. Fries’s psychologism was the understanding that in relation to senseexperience we have what he called “immediate knowledge” from which we may justify our “mediate knowledge”, which for Fries was the knowledge expressed in some symbolism of language, which includes our scientific knowledge.15 The understanding of the human capacity for “immediate knowledge” of the world as it is in itself would later be supported by the work of Konrad Lorenz on the formal abilities of our sensory organs to provide knowledge of the world-initself.16 It was through the rediscovery of Fries by Leonard Nelson that Popper developed his neo-Friesian epistemology. David Miller describes this as being done through an extension and correction of the philosophies of Kant, Fries and Nelson which gave rise to Popper’s views on demarcation and induction. 17 According to Hacohen, Fries thought that the synthetic a priori propositions left too much of the world closed to the human mind which ensured subjectivism. Fries’s solution was to develop a methodological

                                                           

13

M. Hacohen. Karl Popper, op. cit., pp. 182-183. Kant had already outlined the choice for those who wished to persue the scientific method to be between the dogmatism associated with Wolff and a skepticism associated with Hume. See: I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. (Vasilis Plitis Eds. London: Everyman’s Library, 1993 [1787]) §Transcendental Doctrine of Method, Ch. 3, p. 544. 15 K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., p. 75. 16 P. Munz, Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker: New Light on Popper and Wittgenstein (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 2-4. 17 D. Miller, Out of Error, op. cit., p. 6. 14

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procedure for grounding knowledge in a universal human psychology, thereby eliminating much of Kant’s agnosticism and “subjectivism”.18 Many of the philosophical positions central to Popper’s thought are already evident in Fries. This is most notably the case in Mathematische Naturphilosophie in which Fries included a criterion of falsification among a list of rules for the experimental natural scientist.19 Further, Popper’s view that one cannot prove a statement by appeal to a perceptual experience is central to Fries’s distinction between “mediate” and “immediate” knowledge. Fries’s search for the kind of certainty characteristic of mathematics as a basis for our knowledge made a great impression on Popper. As Popper put it, “the problem of the basis of experience has troubled few thinkers so deeply as Fries”.20 Fries’s concern with the certainty of the foundations of knowledge resulted from the interaction between his admiration for the certainty and clarity of mathematics on the one hand, and the influence of the Moravian pietistic community known as “the Unity of the Brethren” or Herrnhut “under the Lord’s care” on the other. According to Frederick Gregory, two fundamental lessons that Fries learned from the Herrnhut were: that important things in life were sure truths not arbitrary sentiments, and the source of this truth is transcendent and not of our making. Fries’s quest for the attainment of geometric-like objective validity and certainty drove his criticism of Kant for not sufficiently investigating the psychological basis on which our whole capacity for knowledge rests. Fries conceived of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason as being branches of empirical psychology in which the objects of investigation were the contents of the human mind. He was adamant that both of Kant’s critiques lacked the necessary psychological foundations. 21 Ernst Henke argued that Fries sought to make important technical corrections to Kant’s system by seeing the critique of reason as

                                                           

18

M. Hacohen. Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 122. F. Gregory, “Extending Kant: The Origins and Nature of Jakob Friedrich Fries’s Philosophy of Science”, in Eds. The Kantian legacy in Nineteenth – Century Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 98. fn. 8. 20 Ibid., p. 87. Also see: Popper, K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., p. 93. 21 F. Gregory, Extending Kant, op. cit., pp. 84-85. 19

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belonging to psychology and requiring foundations that he would develop as an “anthropological critique of reason”.22 It is from this pietistic feeling-for-truth (Wahrheitsgefühl) that Fries argued for the impossibility of dogmatic, general and universal metaphysical systems, reflecting similar concerns that would come up in Popper’s writings. The feeling-for-truth is evident firstly in instances of particular application before general principles. Nelson showed that Fries’s argument for metaphysical dogmatism fails as it attempts to start directly by establishing a general principle from which to erect a system, even though our mind approaches these principles last.23 As we must start with what is immediately given, that is, instances where the feeling-for-truth is evident, we arrive at “the problem of the empirical basis”. For Popper however, there is no clarity of empirical experience and we do not start with what is immediately given, but with a problem.24 He took over the problemsituation from Fries-Nelson but gave a radically different response. For many epistemologists following Fries, accepting psychologism appeared to be the most objective and practical solution to the problem of foundational knowledge claims. The two other alternatives to Fries’s attempt to ground Kant’s transcendental proof included dogmatism, that is, the acceptance of basic propositions without justification and an infinite regress. For Fries a transcendental proof had to be psychologically grounded, or it would be caught in a circular argument leading to an infinite regress. According to Hacohen, this acceptance of psychologism remained unsatisfactory for Popper as this psychological revision of Kant merely deferred lawfulness from Kant’s consciousness (Verstandesgesetzlichkeit) to psychology, thus accomplishing nothing. Like the rest of science for Popper, epistemology required some means of its acceptance over competing theories even if we cannot ultimately justify such theories. As with the natural sciences a truth statement would not be grounded but merely accepted in accordance with a methodological rule.25                                                             22

H. Henke, Jakob Friedrich Fries. Aus seinem handschriftlichen Nachlasse dargestellt (Berlin: Verlag Öffentliches Leben, [1937] 1867), pp. 44-45. 23 L. Nelson, Progress and Regress in Philosophy: From Hume and Kant to Hegel and Fries (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), p. 179. 24 K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. (London: Routledge. [1989],1963a), pp, 28, 55, 67, 74. 25 M. Hacohen. Karl Popper, op. cit., pp. 229-230.

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This point is best seen in the debates concerning Popper’s epistemological and methodological non-foundationalism. Here it is clear that Popper’s philosophy as a whole arises out of a Wahrheitsgefühl related to an on-going process of self-cultivation. This has been a controversial assertion in Popperian circles as a result of the Bartley debate in which William Bartley aimed to expose the embedded justificationism and foundationalism of critical rationalism and proposed an alternative rational basis which avoids this. For Bartley, Popper’s moral decision to place an “irrational faith in reason” as the attitude of rational argument cannot itself be a rational argument and was a remnant of a fideistic attitude which was a legacy of his early positivism. By accepting a moral decision or justification for his critical rationalism Bartley understood Popper to have contradicted his opposition to justificationism which he was trying to eliminate. Bartley proposed to eliminate such moral presuppositions as a basic justification by holding the critical rationalist attitude open to criticism. According to Gattei, Bartley’s criticism, drawn entirely from logic, disregarded the profound ethical nature of Popper’s choice. For Popper, rationalism requires a complementary notion of reasonableness, that is, “an attitude of readiness to listen to critical arguments and learn from experience”.26 Popper responded by saying that: …rationalism is not self-contained, but rests on an irrational faith in the attitude of reasonableness: I do not see that we can go beyond this. One could say, perhaps, that my irrational faith in equal and reciprocal rights to convince others and be convinced by them is faith in human 27 reason; or simply, that I believe in man.

However, Popper did not believe this to be a dogmatic justification, rather a decision, one that he cannot be certain of, yet is emotively sustained as a personal belief in the best way of preventing violence and harm and ensuring the possibility for self-cultivation and social advancement in accordance with the idea of Bildung. Popper’s use of the word faith as a “subjective belief” or Glauben is grounded                                                            

26

S. Gattei, “The Ethical Nature of Karl Popper’s Solution to the Problem of Rationality”, in Philosophy of the Social Sciences. 32 (Sage, 2002), pp. 245246.Gattei, S. (2002), p. 247. 27 K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit., p. 357.

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differently from the mode of cognition associated with conjectural knowledge was also fundamental to Popper.28 Faith finds its origins in an intuitional feeling. Popper regarded Bartley’s views as “selfdefeating” and “utopian rationalism”.29 As Hacohen points out “it was Popper’s irrational commitment to rationalism that gave rise to his philosophy. Bartley wisely disposed of the justificationist ladder once he had seen the world aright.”30 Popper’s “faith in reason” reveals the transcendental logic that facilitates the dialectical positive commitment to anti-foundationalism within an epistemological fallibilism. Further, from this debate with Bartley we can see that existentialism may have played a larger role in Popper’s thought than is generally acknowledged. According to Hacohen, Bartley claimed that Popper’s declaration of the “irrational” basis for his commitment to rationality was a continuation of the existentialist credo that there is no way to knowledge but through a leap of faith which he adopted for a few months after reading Kierkegaard in his youth. 31 Popper regarded Bartley’s criticism as a ‘self-defeating’ and “utopian rationalism’.32 As Hacohen points out “it was Popper’s irrational commitment to rationalism that gave rise to his philosophy. Bartley wisely disposed of the justificationist ladder once he had seen the world aright.”33 This foundational basis, whilst theoretically fallible and hypothetical in character, was later developed in the form of “ethical principles” which Popper was prepared to give up if he was wrong. However given the conviction with which he held these it is hard to imagine the kind of argumentative evidence that could replace moral arguments grounded in a belief that humans are not only problem-solving animals, but also fallible harm-creating beings. Although Popper opposed Hume’s induction, his acknowledgement of the irrational basis of belief is distinctly Humean. Gattei was partly correct in his criticism of Bartley, however the problem was not so much that his criticism should have been based upon ethical arguments rather than logical ones; rather, the clash was                                                             28

K. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 111. 29 Ibid., pp. 355-363. 30 M. Hacohen. Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 519, n. 259. 31 Ibid., p. 84. 32 K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit., p. 360. 33 M. Hacohen. Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 519, n. 259.

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one of cultures. Bartley coming from an analytical tradition which differed greatly from the central European tradition that Popper and Wittgenstein are representative of. What the Bartley debate ignored was the praxiological component which is central to the way we read Popper. Aristotle’s notion of phronesis and Aquinas’ prudentia are crucial here as they force us to ask whether there are basic problems to Popper’s thought whose solutions depend on the personal development of those approaching Popper’s writings. Thus, we need to appreciate the import of the non-rational support for Popper’s arguments that were driven by an unknown cognition gleaned in a way that Popper could not objectify and thus, make subjectable to logical and literary criticism. An appreciation of this is dependent upon the kinds of cognitive transformations that the reader of Popper has undergone. This is suggested by the way his writings lend themselves to multiple and esoteric readings depending upon the personal development of the reader. Popper’s insistence upon his common-sense use of language and that his work does not need interpretation is deceptive. I am not calling for a non-literal hermeneutics, rather, that what is literally given in Popper’s writing lend themselves to differentiated appropriations. This is the result of the subtleness of his argumentation which will become clearer as this book progresses. We cannot assume that a discussion in the philosophy of science is actually about a problem in the natural sciences. Also, it is unsafe to assume that the critical interlocuters that he is engaging with are all mentioned in his discussions. The result is invariably dissatisfying to those wanting a demonstrable logical rationalisation. The Bartley debate is an example of Popper attempting to avoid being forced to posit subjectively-dependent postulates as if they were objectively independent of Popper’s own cognitional and moral development. Where the Marxists would be willing to sacrifice their own youth in the street battle on the Hörlgasse in what he regarded in Kierkergaardian terms as a suspension of the ethical, Popper later called on us to let theories die through debate instead of people.  His opposition to totalitarian ways of thinking, whether in Marxism or religious tribalism was also influenced by Kierkergaard’s thought on the theological suspension of the ethical. Popper’s view that groups within society, whose ideology or religion preach intolerance, forfeit any legitimate claim to be protected by the same tolerance they

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themselves do not adhere to can also be explained in Kierkegaardian terms. People who hold ideologically or religiously based intolerance have suspended the ethical as a result of their theological or quasitheological views.  This foundational basis was later developed in the form of “ethical principles” which, when Popper wrote of them, are seen to reflect epistemological concerns underpinning his idealised moral standpoints. Such moral standpoints are expressed in epistemological terms. From such moral standpoints we can see that the “intuitional understanding” that Popper wrote of in Objective Knowledge played a role in his thought on science by influencing the types of theories that he believed a scientist is inclined to pursue. 34 The result had an implication upon the kinds of topics that Popper was prepared to write, or even talk about. This intellectual self-constrain resulted in a respectful silence in relation to a transcendental subject, an ontology that was teleologically “open,” as well as a Voltairian epistemological repudiation of theology, of the doctrines of positive religion, and of religious authority which was understood as a kind of theodicy. This philosophical indeterminism is best exemplified in Popper’s translation of the B34 poem by Xenophanes in The World of Parmenides: But as for certain truth, no man has known it, Nor will he know it; neither of the gods Nor yet of all the things of which I speak. And even if by chance he were to utter The perfect truth, he would himself not know it; 35 For all is but a woven web of guesses.

Even earlier in Die beiden Grundprobleme he referred to another verse of Xenophanes’: The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, All things to us; but in the course of time, 36 Through seeking we may learn, and know things better…

                                                           

34

K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 183. K. Popper, The World of Parmenides, op. cit., p. 46. Also see: K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., p. 110. 35

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3.4 Axioms, Definitions and Postulates of Geometry Popper’s epistemological objectivism owes much to his appropriation of Bühler’s work in his 1928 doctoral dissertation, Zur Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie (The Problem of Method in Cognitive Psychology). Firstly, Bühler contributed a technical evolutionary theory of communication. 37 Secondly, he contributed a pluralist methodology in which aspects of experience, behaviour and ideas in the objective sense (Gebilde des objektiven Geistes) are equally treated. This was fundamental to Popper’s later approaches to the mind-body problem and his cognitive psychology (Denkpsychologie). It may be the case that the real breakthrough came in 1929 with Axiome, Definitionen und Postulate der Geometrie where Popper realised that logic rather than psychology, was of fundamental concern for scientific discovery. As Gattei has summarised “it is the problematic relationship between geometrical-mathematical constructions and physical reality which triggers Popper’s philosophical revolution”.38 According to Ter Hark this was the first time Popper spoke of Wissenschaftstheorie and it is here that Hacohen argued that Popper’s philosophical ‘breakthrough’ occurred. 39 This early development from psychological to biological to logical concerns in Popper’s approach to methodological problems is an important feature of his early thought. The importance of geometry for Popper’s philosophy including his social philosophy has also not received the scholarly attention that it deserves. According to Stefano Gattei, it was here that Popper first discussed the cognitive status of geometry without referring to psycho-pedagogical aspects, in effect turning from his early focus on the experience of learning to logic and the methodology of science. 40 Hansen states that in Axiome, Definitionen und Postulate der Geometrie (1929) he shifts the focus of                                                                                                                                

36

K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., p 110. Xenophanes B18. 37 Like Wittgenstein, in this light Popper’s Kantianism can also be seen as having taken a linguistic turn. However Popper’s was a very different kind of linguistic turn more akin to the later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations. 38 S. Gattei, The Ethical Nature of Karl Popper’s Solution to the Problem of Rationality, op. cit., pp. 455, 460. 39 M. ter Hark, The Psychology of Thinking, Animal Psychology, and the Young Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 145. 40 S. Gattei. Karl Popper’s Philosophical Breakthrough, op. cit., p. 448.

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his work from the psychology of knowledge to the theory of knowledge. For Hansen “he is no longer interested in the “experience of laws” (Gesetzerlebnis), but in the logical status of natural laws”.41 The significant break with his former work on the psychology of knowledge Axiome, Definitionen und Postulate may be due to the practical reason that Popper at this time started a new job as a teacher of mathematics and physics and was no longer apprenticed to Bühler. Gattei states that: …this thesis first formulates the problem of scientific rationality, enabling Popper’s future philosophical progress. It reflects Popper’s turn from cognitive psychology to the logic and methodology of science…thus applied geometry sets the context for Popper’s 42 discussion of scientific rationality.

However, this does not mean that Popper lost his interest in human cognition, rather it provided new avenues for thinking about cognition including extensionally and objectively. In Axiome, Definitionen und Postulate der Geometrie (1929) Popper stated: The question of the meaning and validity of the axioms, definitions, and postulates of geometry is necessarily connected with philosophical (scientific and epistemological) questions of the general 43 problem situation.

We can see in this statement the legacy of Popper’s late night debates with his friend Julius Kraft over Kant’s Kritik and its antinomies. Perhaps through studying the validity of the axioms of geometry Popper believed he could come closer to addressing the concerns in Kant that would later spark his ‘revision’ of Kant in Die beiden Grundprobleme. This is a dissertation very much in keeping with the interests of the Vienna Circle:                                                            

41 T. Hansen, “Which Came First, the Problem of Induction or the Problem of Demarcation?”, in Ian Jarvie, David Miller, and Karl Milford (eds.), Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment (London: Ashgate 2004). 42 S. Gattei, Karl Popper’s Philosophical Breakthrough, op. cit., pp. 457, 458 – 459. 43 K. Popper, Frühe Schriften, op. cit., p. 265. “Die Frage nach der Bedeutung und Geltung der Axiome, Definitionen und Postulate der Geometrie ist notwendigerweise mit philosophischen (wissenschafts- und erkenntnistheoretischen) Fragen des allgemeinen Raumproblems verbunden.”

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I would like to say that my views are largely influenced by Schlick. Of great importance to me was V. Kraft’s book Die Grundformen der wissenschaftlichen Methoden, as well as the writings of Carnap and Reichenbach. However, I have at some instances deviated from the 44 views of these researchers.

Popper believed that a better understanding of the logical features of geometry could have some bearing upon philosophy, at least negatively by distinguishing between the inconsistency of truth claims about relativity and the problems of human language in describing the world accurately with the precise axioms of Euclidean geometry. For Popper: Since the terminology of philosophical disciplines is unfortunately very volatile, I was forced to produce details that in a purely mathematical work was not quite out of place. The terms of the philosophical language of art are almost always loaded with different, conflicting meanings which are understood in different philosophical way. So much so, that linguistically identical sentences may have significantly different meaning when they are pronounced by 45 philosophers from different dispositions.

Perhaps this passage reveals an early gleaning of his later pragmatism where the phronetic development of the philosopher plays a role in filling-in the facticity. A point that I believe was lost in the Bartley debate. However at this early stage it was understood in a way revealing the early influence of Vienna Circle’s logical positivism. Popper hoped that an understanding of the axioms of geometry would lead to a “recognised philosophical signlanguage” at least at the                                                            

44

Ibid., p. 266. “Ich möchte feststellen, dass meine Ansichten weitgehend von Schlick beeinflusst sind. Von großer Wichtigkeit war für mich auch V. Krafts Buch Die Grundformen der wissenschaftlichen Methoden, ferner die Schriften von Carnap und Reichenbach. Dennoch bin ich an einigen Stellen von den Ansichten dieser Forscher abgewichen.” 45 Ibid., p. 265 “Da nun die Terminologie der philosophischen Disziplinen leider eine überaus schwankende ist, war ich (besonders im ‚Einleitungsteil’) zu einer Ausführlichkeit gezwungen, die bei einer rein mathematischen Arbeit durchaus nicht am Platze wäre. Die Termini der philosophischen Kunstsprache sind eben fast durchwegs mit verschiedenen, einander widersprechenden Bedeutungen belastet, die ihnen von gegensätzlichen philosophischen Richtungen beigelegt werden. Das geht so weit, dass sprachlich identische Sätze stark abweichende Bedeutung haben können, wenn sie von Philosophen verschiedener Richtungen ausgesprochen werden.”

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level of logic: “It is hoped that not too far from now will emerge a certain, generally accepted philosophical signlanguage at least for logic.” 46 This is the optimistic, forceful and decidedly positivistic language of a young scholar on the fringes of the Vienna Circle. It is all the more poignant given that at this time his personal mentality was characterised by the ‘darkest of pessimisms’. What Popper was really after was the replacing of the existing philosophical “Kunstsprache” or art-language with a hoped for logical “Zeichensprache” or signlanguage. In this work we already see the beginning of Popper’s attempt to remove the psychological aspects from a theory of knowledge in order to arrive at an objective theory of human cognition (Erkenntnis), that is, a Wissenschaftstheorie by distinguishing it from confusion with the psychology of cognition. Popper’s Wissenschaftstheorie was developed from the examples of Euclid’s work on providing the axiomatic formations to geometry. It was the comparison between formal and applied geometries that was of concern. Non-Euclidean geometries were purely conceptual. They were not grounded in experience or perception, and thus epistemology was irrelevant to them. For the first time theoretical physics faced the choice of a choosing between applying rival geometries to reality. According to Gattei, it was applied geometry which set the context for Popper’s discussion of scientific rationality.47 However, against Hacohen and Gattai, ter Hark argues that claiming a breakthrough at this stage is still premature. For ter Hark, the 1929 thesis shows that Popper was still in the grip of the Kantian notion of a priori valid knowledge and the unbridgeable gap this creates with a posteriori knowledge. 48 While, the 1929 thesis demonstrates a turn from cognitive psychology to the logic and methodology of science as Hacohen states, ter Hark suggests that the                                                            

46 Ibid., p. 265 “Es ist zu hoffen, dass sich in nicht allzu langer Zeit eine bestimmte, allgemein anerkannte philosophischen Zeichensprache wenigstens für die Logik (Logistik) herauskristallisieren wird. Denn es kann niemandem, der sich nicht speziell mit Logik oder Logistik beschäftigt, zugemutet werden, bei jedem neuen logistischen Werk eine neue Zeichensprache mit in Kauf zu nehmen. Ich habe daher den ‚logischen Kalkül’ selbstverständlich vermieden, obwohl seine Anwendung durch den Gegenstand nahegelegt war.” 47 S. Gattei, Karl Popper’s Philosophical Breakthrough, op. cit., pp. 458-459. 48 M. ter Hark, Popper, Otto Selz, and the rise of evolutionary epistemology, op. cit., p. 145.

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cognitive psychology of Selz continues to inform his Wissenschaftstheorie in Die beiden Grundprobleme even if little by way of overt acknowledgement of Selz is found here.49 According to ter Hark it was only later that we find references to Selzian theories associated with a deductivist psychology of knowledge such as the “searchlight theory” and the rejection of the “bucket theory”. Elsewhere ter Hark has shown that in letters of correspondence between Popper and de Groot, that in 1929 Popper first became aware of Selz who had essentially ‘solved’ the problem of psychology that he had been working on. It was in Die beiden Grundprobleme that Popper would finally integrate a Selzian theory of cognition with a deductive Wissenschaftstheorie.50 We can see from Popper’s early dissertations a concern with how theories are applied to reality whether competing theories in psychology (such as those of Adler and Freud) as well as competing geometries for theoretical physics. Eventually Popper would move beyond particular concerns of applying theories in psychology and geometry to concerns with how language itself (as all words are theory impregnated) is applied to reality, thus enabling his later move from discussions of scientific rationality to a general theory of rationality, and indeed would enable his later ‘metaphysical research projects’. 3.5 Methods used in revising Kant This section provides a close textual analysis of key passages in Die beiden Grundprobleme as well as an explanation of the implications of his thinking here for the development of his later thought. I by no means claim that I provide an exhaustive exegesis in the remainder of this chapter. Rather, I aim to sketch certain key features of his reasoning which foreshadow recurrent themes in his mature writings. It is important to mention that Logik der Forschung only appeared in English in 1959 and Die beiden Grundprobleme did not appear in                                                            

49

For Hacohen’s discussion of the 1929 thesis see: M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 173. 50 M. ter Hark, “Popper’s Theory of the Searchlight: A Historical Assessment of Its Significance”, in Z. Parusniková and R. S. Cohen (eds). Rethinking Popper (Springer Science 2009), pp.150, 176, 181.

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English during Popper’s lifetime. It is likely to have been the case that much of the misunderstanding of Popper as a positivist resulted from a lack of contextual understanding of the specific problem situation Popper was addressing. Popper understood Kant’s theory of knowledge, on which he based his own to have been: “the first critical attempt at a critical synthesis of the classical opposition between rationalism and empiricism.” It was Kant’s “transcendental analytic” that Popper observed was dedicated to Hume’s problem of induction, whilst the “transcendental dialectic” was devoted to what Popper called the problem of demarcation. This is the setting from which Popper’s revision of Kant developed. The decisive question for Kant was: “Are there synthetic a priori judgements?” Popper rephrased this question as “Is there any ground of validity for non-logical statements other than experience?”51 If this were the case, then in addition to the method of empirical testing and the logical method, the latter being ruled out (as the negation of a synthetic judgement is also logically possible), there would be another method grounding the validity of synthetic judgements. The rationalists answered the question of the validity of synthetic apriori judgements in the affirmative. Nevertheless, empiricists contend that even highly plausible synthetic judgements can turn out to be false. For Popper, Kant’s solution to the problem of induction in the “transcendental analytic” was “not satisfactory”: The synthesis between rationalism and empiricism attempted by Kant restricts the epistemological claims of classical empiricism by making concessions to rationalism. These concessions, however, 52 seem to me excessive...

In Die beiden Grundprobleme, the forerunner to the Logik, Popper set out to demonstrate that what he called “Hume’s problem”, the problem of induction, and “Kant’s problem”, the problem of demarcation, could rightly be called the two fundamental problems for the theory of knowledge. This was of central importance to Popper because the theory of knowledge, as opposed to the psychology of                                                            

51

K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., p. 15. 52 Ibid., pp.15, 19.

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knowledge, had a specific method. 53 Popper called the method associated with the theory of knowledge the “methodological method” or the “transcendental method”. There have been many criticisms of Popper’s scientific method, however when viewed in relation to his broader epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie) we can see a meta-level methodological theorising, elements of which are applied in an exploratory fashion to problems over a diverse range of disciplines. Popper’s understanding of epistemology can be best seen in his forcefully stated opposition to the logical-positivists and phenomenologists: The theory of knowledge is a science of science. It relates to the individual empirical sciences in the same way as the latter relates to empirical reality; the transcendental method is an analogue of the empirical method. The theory of knowledge would, accordingly, be a theoretical science. It also contains free stipulations (such as definitions); yet it consists not only of arbitrary conventions but also of statements that are refutable by comparison with the actual and successful methods of the individual empirical sciences. All other epistemological methods (psychological, language-critical, etc.) are 54 altogether rejected by transcendentalism…

Popper here sets himself up as a Kantian imbued in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. It would be many years however, before Popper would call himself a critical rationalist and enlarge the scope of his methodological thought to include the social sciences. For Popper, the theory of knowledge could be divided into two epistemological camps: inductivism or deductivism. Emphatically, Popper asserted a view which he called “radical deductivism”, which held that “all scientific methods of justification are, without exception, based on strictly logical deduction, and that there is no induction of any sort qua scientific method.” In Chapter Three of Die beiden Grundprobleme Popper follows this assertion with a systematic critique of the major inductivist positions following Hume’s argument against the admissibility of induction due to the problem of infinite regress.55 Popper also included a critique of the inductivist positions of Reichenbach, Schlick and Wittgenstein. It is important to keep in                                                             53

Ibid., pp. 4, 20-22. Ibid., p. 7. 55 Ibid., pp. 8, 42. 54

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mind at this stage that Popper was not arguing from a broad philosophical perspective, but rather he was concerning himself with the limited methodological problems for a theory of knowledge associated with the scientific method. However, ter Hark has shown that already at this stage Popper’s methodological arguments were based upon an understanding of human cognition. Ter Hark has shown that in Die beiden Grundprobleme Popper finally integrates his Selzian stance in psychology into his deductive theory of knowledge. Selz’s attack on associationist psychology and defence of a theory of schematic anticipations according to ter Hark, reflected a view of the “animal or human organism as an active cognitive subject constantly putting forward tentative proposals or hypotheses rather than as a passive recipient, patiently waiting for the accumulation of information to be inductively safe”. 56 For Popper, repetition (Wiederholung) plays no role in discovering new knowledge that is, the process of learning, it only operates in forgetting. In a letter to Julius Kraft dated 26th May 1933 in relation to the manuscript of Die beiden Grundprobleme, Popper stated that what he provided was one possible solution to the problem of synthetic a priori judgements. Despite the self-assured and purposeful language of Die beiden Grundprobleme, privately he admitted to his friend Julius Kraft that he was not prepared to claim “hier ist die Lösung!”57 In Chapter Five of Die beiden Grundprobleme Popper appears unusually unclear and unconvincing in his discussion of truth. The rest of this book exhibits a firm, assertive voice of a young man looking to make his mark. However, this discussion of truth appears in a chapter that Popper called a “digression” from the analysis of the problem of induction in Book One. 58 In this “digression” Popper used unusual rhetorical techniques to forward his argument. The “digression” developed into a peculiar Socratic-like dialogue between an idealised Sceptic and an epistemological optimist. This was stylistically at odds with the rest of the book and radically different from the conventional way in which the scientifically minded Kantians and positivists at that                                                            

56

M. ter Hark, Popper’s Theory of the Searchlight, op. cit., p. 181. And, M. ter Hark, Popper, Otto Selz, and the rise of evolutionary epistemology, op. cit., pp. 148-152 57 See letter of correspondence from Popper to Julius Kraft, 26th May 1933. KarlPopper-Sammlung. Box 312-23. 58 K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., p. 87.

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time in Vienna wrote. It is not a dialogue sensu stricto, but one voice seems to posit a sceptical philosophy only for another rather Wittgensteinian voice to refute this position without a firm resolution to the problem of truth and objectivity within an anti-essentialist Kantian framework.59 One could speculate that there is something of the ghost of Popper’s late night debates with Julius Kraft in the content of this chapter that perhaps unconsciously appears in the form of a stalemate in regards to the problem of scepticism.60 The central problematic aspect of Popper’s revision of Kant began with Popper’s distinguishing between the theory of knowledge from the psychological experience of cognition. Popper then begins to treat Kant’s conclusion to the transcendental deduction which states: “The possibility of experience in general is therefore at the same time the universal law of nature, and the principles of experience are the very laws of nature”. Popper stated that Kant required further explanation of the agreement of knowledge with its object. The possible choices of explanation as stated by Popper were: First possibility: our knowledge is determined by its object. Second possibility: the object is determined by our knowledge. A middle course: we have knowledge as an (inborn) disposition that 61 is preformed such that it agrees with its object.

For Popper, the only option that Kant believed was open was the second possibility resulting in the thesis of transcendental idealism. Popper then reformulates Kant’s “completely unacceptable” epistemological question into the “psychological” or “genetic                                                           

59

“I gladly admit [he might continue] that our knowledge is merely “semantic”; but the inevitable anthropomorphism consists precisely in this, since it reveals the dependence of knowledge on our assignment of symbol.” This Sceptical straw man dialogue is associated with Wittgenstein’s position which Popper then argues against this by stating it is possible to have objective knowledge of the external world despite the anthropological framework of the Kantian “forms of our understanding”. “The objectivity of knowledge cannot therefore be sought in any knowledge that grasps its object “in itself”; rather, it consists in scientifically determining the object according to the universally valid (intersubjective) methodological principles (for the use of our understanding). For an example of this dialogue see: Ibid., pp. 98-100. 60 Hacohen suggested to me in correspondence that this is part of chapter 5, which may well have been written in the fall of 1933. 61 K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 89, 90..

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biological” question: “How can the agreement of the (subjective) conditions of our cognitive apparatus – of the laws governing the functioning of our mind – with the (objective) conditions of our environment be explained?” 62 At this point Popper introduces his knowledge in the field of cognitive psychology from his time at the Psychological Institute. One can sense the presence of Külpe, Bühler and Selz even though they are not mentioned by name. By relocating Kant’s question from the theory of knowledge to the psychology of knowledge Popper was able to avoid the separate and incompatible analytical choices that Kant faced and that led him to a position of idealism. By this Popper believed that he had answered the question concerning the “strange agreement” between our intellect and the properties of the environment by reducing it to a more general biological question of adaptation. Thus the a priori in the field of epistemology is “analogously” understood in the psychology of knowledge as the “preconditions of all adaptation”. In this way Popper could provide an explanation based upon biological adaptation to the three alternatives mentioned above given by Kant which implies a decision in favour of the “middle course”, yet not “unbridgeable” with the other two positions. In summary, Popper treated Kant’s problem of the possibility of the agreement of knowledge with its object by separating the theory of knowledge from the psychology of knowledge. He then treated the problem according to theoretical knowledge in the field of cognitive psychology and thereby came up with an alternative explanation that was analogous to Kant’s. Finally, Popper returned to Kant’s epistemological setting demonstrating that a different choice of explanation could be gained. However, there remains a greater problem here, by separating the fields of knowledge between epistemology and biology or psychology, and by bringing knowledge from the latter to analogously argue for a preferred realist position in the former. Popper was in fact using a transcendental argument according to his description of the transcendental method. He was aware of this problem at the time and questioned whether one can “really derive epistemological conclusions from this biological hypothesis.”63                                                            

62 63

Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., pp. 95, 97.

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It is at this point that Popper’s discussion breaks down. There is an abrupt end to Popper’s discussion of truth, which is followed by a digression on the a priori that ends on a note that may well be catastrophic for Popper’s claim to have revised or updated Kant. This potentially catastrophic argument is as follows: If the idea of anthropomorphism (which, of course, was originally a biological idea) is at all applicable to the field of methodology and epistemology, then it can be applied only with the aid of the concept of approximation and that of the incompletability of our empirical knowledge. The former only derives its full import from the discovery of the latter, as well as positively complementing the discovery 64 itself.

This use of a biological thesis which can only be applied to the field of methodology or epistemology in an approximate way is reflective of Popper’s use of the transcendental method. Much later in a letter to Victor Kraft dated 9th June 1967, Popper would state that this “approximation” is indicative of his understanding of the epistemological limitations of such an argument which mirrors his statements on the undecidable immanent and transcendental critiques.65 From this “approximation” statement and the Victor Kraft letter alongside his admission that he provided only one possible solution rather than the solution we can see that Popper was aware of the ‘metaphysical’ nature of his argument. Thus, Popper’s biological explanation necessary to overcome Kant’s ‘unsatisfactory’ concessions to rationalism by providing an alternative position on the validity of synthetic a priori judgements is grounded upon a problematic transcendental criticism rather than secure analytical or empirical proof. Whether the ground for validation of Popper’s revision of Kant being located in the non-testable depths of transcendental support is really catastrophic depends upon one’s attitude towards epistemological foundations. What is important is that the belief in his revision of Kant, as a notable yet underappreciated moment in the history of ideas was enough to drive his later philosophical achievements. We can see that already at this stage Popper was struggling with the analytic problematic that he                                                             64

Ibid., p. 109. Letter of Correspondence. Popper to Victor Kraft. 9 June 1967. Karl-PopperSammlung, Box 3.16, 24 Victor Kraft 1945-74. 65

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would have to publically answer for later in his debate with Bartley. By the time of the Bartley debate Popper had been thinking about the issues that Bartley raised for many years. His responses although simple, were hardly naïve and were the product of prolonged intellectual activity and formation that went beyond the concerns of analytic validity in relation to the problems of foundationalism that Bartley’s critique was focused upon. After the above “approximation” quotation which attempted to justify his use of biological arguments in his revision of Kant, written according to Hacohen sometime during the fall of 1932 in Die beiden Grundprobleme, the discussion once again breaks down into a kind of poetic resignation. 66 The discussion turns towards fragments of Xenophanes that reinforces an epistemologically pessimistic tone as well as a philosophical scepticism regarding our knowledge of natural laws. 67 Following this, the discussion once again unsystematically breaks off and is redirected towards a discussion of Fries. The incoherence of Popper’s argumentative structure (rare for Popper) in the later part of Chapter Five on Kant and Fries of Die beiden Grundprobleme is symptomatic of the highly speculative and exploratory nature of the philosophical problem that he set himself in this work. Popper was charting new intellectual territory and did not yet have the tools needed to navigate this terrain. Chapter Five remains a source of contention and speculation today amongst Popper scholars such as Hacohen, Wettersten, and Hansen who have made strides in reconstructing this crucial, yet still obscure moment in the development of Popper’s thought. This close reading of a section of Chapter Five of Grundprobleme, particularly Popper’s dialogue with Julius Kraft may suggest that Hacohen may have exaggerated the role of Neurath’s position in Popper’s rewriting of Chapter Five in the fall of 1932.68 The discussion of the problem of truth in Chapter Five of Die beiden Grundprobleme led to the “limited scepticism” which avoids the contradictory nature of the strict “sceptical” position that he                                                            

66

M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 220. K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 109-115. 68 This was generously pointed out to me by Hacohen himself after reading a draf manuscript of this book. 67

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associated with Wittgenstein. 69 Viewing Wittgenstein’s position in this light is clearly demonstrable of his misconstruing him as a positivist in the same way the Vienna Circle did. Julius Kraft also argued that it implied that we should give up the idea of objective truth, which Popper could not respond to until he came across Tarski’s “clarification of the correspondence theory of truth”.70 The discussions that follow this as well as Popper’s correspondence with Kraft mentioned above seem to indicate that however innovative and important Popper was as a philosopher, there were fundamental problems in his positions and for his critical philosophy as a whole. For one thing there was a big hole where “truth” should be, which made the prospect of ‘justifying’ his other arguments in a coherent way difficult. Would Popper’s revision of Kant have to be content with being a fuzzy “approximation”?71 By reframing Kant’s problem as he believed we now know it should have been, a new trajectory in philosophical research was made possible. This new trajectory would be carried forward throughout his life, and eventually applied to social, aesthetic and even cosmological and ontological concerns. It is commonly acknowledged that Popper’s stance on the role of metaphysics within a falsificationist philosophy was only accepted during the early 1950s. However even much earlier in Die beiden Grundprobleme a conscious awareness of use of metaphysical argumentation can be discerned in Popper’s writings as he was tackling the fundamental problems of epistemology as he saw them, which preceded his falsificationism. Popper understood Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to have resulted from a problem setting of the apparent discovery of scientific laws by Newton. In a similar way, Popper’s Neo-Kantian research questions were phrased in relation to contemporary debates concerning the foundations of geometry in the work of Max Born and Albert Einstein. Popper understood Kant’s problem to have been: “How is pure natural science possible?” However, he argued that given contemporary knowledge, the question ought to be phrased as:                                                             69

K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., (2009), p. 100. Also see: L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge. [1918], 1922), Proposition 6.51. 70 K. Popper, After The Open Society, op. cit., p. 18. 71 K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., p. 109.

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“How are successful hypotheses possible?”72 It was in this way that Popper would arrive in The Logic with the framing of the problem of demarcation as, “by what criterion do we decide which hypothesis is scientific?” and the problem of induction of “how do we learn from experience?”73 However, Kant’s “transcendental dialectic” reached a position closer to what Popper believed actually reflected the status of scientific theories qua a Selzian understanding of how human cognition actually operates. Kant’s transcendental dialectic is “transcendental” inasmuch as it sets out the limits to reason through delineating the structure within which reason must operate, whilst also grounding the possible employment of reason. In this way the transcendental project is a form of immanent critique. Much in the same way Popper’s falsificationism would act to limit the epistemic value or correctness of his employment of social scientific arguments. Thus, following the transcendental dialectic, Popper supported: “Kant’s formulation of the problem and his method, and also very significant parts of his solutions” [Popper’s italics]. 74 Popper however, differed from Kant by way of his synthesizing of classical rationalist and classical empiricist positions on the validity of synthetic a priori judgements. He achieved this by separating classical rationalism, which holds that there are a priori synthetic judgements, from the idea of deductivism and empiricism.75 This enabled Popper to synthesize the empiricist standpoint with deductivism. The result is not greatly removed from Kant’s position in the “transcendental dialectic” and was made possible in Popper’s mind through the recent developments in physics and geometry. The conclusion that Popper arrived at after his revision of Kant’s attempt at answering the problem of the validity of synthetic apriori judgements resulted in the statement that “There are, indeed, synthetic a priori judgements, but a posteriori they are often false” [Popper’s italics].76                                                            

72

K. Popper, “The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science”, in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 3:10 (1952), p. 155. 73 S. Gattei,The Ethical Nature of Karl Popper’s Solution to the Problem of Rationality, op. cit., p. 448. 74 K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., p. 20. 75 Ibid., p. 16. Here Popper gave the example of a similar recombination produced by Wittgenstein’s synthesis of inductivism with rationalism. 76 Ibid., p. 34.

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3.6 Theorising on the methods of criticism By saving synthetic apriori judgements Popper also ensured the existence of another method, besides the logical and empirical, for grounding the validity of synthetic judgements. 77 For Popper, like Kant, this was the transcendental method or the “presentation of apriorism.” Popper starts with the proposition: “All scientific criticism consists in identifying contradictions.” The first example of a contradiction that Popper gave was the “purely logical” one, that is, an “internal contradiction” which is associated with the “logical method”. The second method that Popper stated was the “empirical method of criticism” which consists of demonstrating a contradiction with the facts. These two methods of criticism constituted for Popper “immanent criticism”, as they do not go beyond the realm of what is asserted by the thesis criticised.78 Popper contrasts this with what he called “transcendental criticism.” In Die beiden Grundprobleme Popper stated that transcendental criticism: …as a method of criticism and argumentation should never be allowed to play a part in the epistemological debate, consists in confronting one thesis, one position, with another; more precisely, in using a contradiction between one position assumed to be true and another that is being criticised, as evidence against the latter. Such criticism, combating one position by means of presuppositions extraneous to it (which is why such criticism is said to be transcendent), and the setting out to assess one theoretical construct in terms of an entirely different one, can in principle always be directed with equal justification against either position; hence, it is completely irrelevant for our discussion (however persuasive it may sound). One must therefore insist that all epistemological criticism be 79 immanent criticism.

This position on the emphatic disallowance of the transcendental method is entirely justified in Popper’s view because such transcendental criticisms have no grounds of validity (Geltungsgrund). As I have argued above, in his revision of Kant Popper did actually use these techniques in his argumentation. Thus, it                                                             77

Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 53. 79 Ibid., p. 58. 78

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is important to distinguish between his methodological theorising and the actual methods he used in building arguments concerning these theories. Later, Popper would come to hold a very different view. The discussion would later be argued in terms of the status of metaphysics versus science, including the 1950s transformation whereby Popper would come to endorse the possibility of criticism in metaphysics.80 Although he initially argued in Die beiden Grundprobleme that such criticisms may have no grounds of validity, he later added a note amending his position to the first publication of this book in 1979, which added that such criticisms nonetheless “may be exceedingly illuminating” even if never “sufficient for a clear refutation.”81 This was the result of a 1950s transformation in his thought in which he openly endorsed the possibility of criticism in metaphysics. Agassi gives an account of this gradual acceptance of a broader scope for metaphysic within rational thought. Firstly, Agassi relates the antimetaphysical style of his earliest work reflecting “the style of the day”. 82 For Agassi “This demand expressed an austere attitude towards the endorsement of opinions. It conflicts with his respect for religion”. Secondly, Agassi observes that: …he changed his opinion and declared criticism a broader category than tests, thus admitting the possibility of criticizing moral (and historical) judgments. He could then declare metaphysics criticisable though not empirically refutable, especially since already in 1935 he had recognized the possibility that a metaphysical theory becomes scientific through an increase of its contents...he adopted the view that metaphysical theories are points of view and so can be pitched 83 against their contraries.

Popper’s change of stance on the issue of the transcendental criticism is further supported by his later admission of his early                                                            

80 According to Hacohen, it was while working on probability and quantum theory during the mid-1950s that Popper “found a metaphysics for falsificationist science”. M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 260. Popper’s theory of “propensities”, would later be developed in an increasingly systematic, yet metaphysical direction. 81 Popper, K. The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., p. 57. 82 Agassi refers to these works as “now utterly forgotten”, however, recent scholarship by Hacohen, ter Hark, Petersen, Hansen and the present author amongst others has done much to redress this. See: J. Agassi, A Philosopher’s Apprentice, op. cit., p. 61. 83 Ibid., pp. 61-62.

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incorrect identification of the limits of science with those of arguability. In Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972), Popper wrote that he had later changed his mind and argued that “non-testable (irrefutable) metaphysical theories may be rationally arguable.”84 From Popper’s amendment of his stance on the value of the transcendental criticism, it can be seen that after years of dealing with problems in the social sciences he came to appreciate the unavoidability of transcendental criticisms. If we compare this position in Die beiden Grundprobleme which forbids transcendental criticism with a later letter he wrote to Victor Kraft, we can see a radical change in his position. Popper stated in a letter to Victor Kraft in 1967 that the majority of his work on Kritisierbarkeit was either as yet unpublished or unfinished.85 Thus, years later we can see him revising his earlier stance on the admissibility of transcendental criticism that he prohibited in Die beiden Grundprobleme. It is through glimpses into such letters, as well as through his posthumously published or as yet unpublished works, that we can piece together the methodological and epistemological implication of the notion of Kritisierbarkeit for his thought as a whole. The central Kantian distinction for Popper’s work was that between “immanenter und transzendenter Kritik.” Unfortunately, this distinction, important as it is to the methodology of Popper’s writing, is not theoretically dealt with in his major texts, however, it can be pieced together from his letters. This Kantian foundation is expressed most succinctly in a letter to Victor Kraft as follows: “Aber wenn wir nichtentscheidende immanente und transzendente Kritiken zulassen, dann kann man jede transzendente Kritik in eine (nichtentscheidende) immanente Kritik logisch überführen.” In other words, Popper argued that if we have undecidable immanent and transcendental critiques, then every transcendental critique can be logically turned into an undecidable immanent theory. For Popper, all criticism whether immanent or transcendental is fallible (fehlbar), the only infallible (unfehlbar) mode of knowledge,                                                            

84 J. Shearmur, ‘Critical Rationalism and Ethics’, in R. Cohen and Z. Parusniková (eds.) Rethinking Popper (Springer Verlag, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2009), p. 345. Also see: K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 40. 85 Letter of Correspondence. Popper to Victor Kraft. 9 June 1967. Karl-PopperSammlung, Box 3.16, 24 Victor Kraft 1945-74.

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which can be said to be decisive (entscheidend) are the formal disciplines such as mathematics and logic.86 This unfehlbar mode of knowledge is infallible only in regards to the truth function that a given proposition holds, which is tautologically presupposed in its initial conditions or axioms. The logical process by which a movement from a transcendental critique to an undecidable immanent theory entails, is described by what has been referred to as the Überbrückungsproblem or the problem of finding bridge principles. According to Hans Albert, Max Weber’s conception of rationality made it possible for a cognitive criticism to be brought to bear upon value convictions. 87 According to Albert, this is done via a “bridge principle” which is “a maxim to bridge the gap between ethics and science – that has the function of rendering scientific criticism to normative statements possible.” 88 This process reveals a central feature of critical rationalism that was shared by both Albert and Popper. A bridge principle describes the process by which Popper was able to take a theory from one field that may well have been proved in the case of mathematics or shown to be a sound principle in the case of other scientific disciplines, and applied it either in the form of a criticism or hypotheses for a non-scientific or moral argument. In this case the theory directed towards criticising a non-scientific or moral argument, does not constitute a proof or a sound inference, but is a necessary and unavoidable part of moral arguments. Popper’s later moral arguments in which he drew support for his criticisms from an array of scientific inferences – sound or otherwise – is owing to changes in his understanding of arguability and criticisability. In this way we can see that differences in cognitional theory concerning the applicability of falsifiability for refutable and irrefutable hypotheses were eventually resolved in Popper’s thought. Later in life Popper’s increasingly neoPlatonic writings as well as theoretical social scientific modelling which often could not be tested highlighted the need to revise his cognitive theory of rational argumentation in a way that includes certain species of non-testable or irrefutable hypotheses. Popper’s own                                                            

86

Letter of Correspondence. Popper to Victor Kraft. 9 June 1967. Karl-PopperSammlung, Box 3.16, 24 Victor Kraft 1945-74. 87 H. Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 98. 88 Ibid., p. 98.

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cognition was not what his earlier theory of rational argumentation deemed reasonable. Popper wrote the above mentioned letter in 1967, years after Die beiden Grundprobleme, which reveals his changed position. In Die beiden Grundprobleme, he was of the opinion that although this type of transcendental criticism occurred, it should never be allowed to play a part in an epistemological debate due to its (nichtentscheidend) character. 89 However, this letter reveals that although Popper maintained the same epistemological stance on the ability of such criticisms to increase our knowledge, he nonetheless came to a greater appreciation of the value and need for such criticism, as we very often have no other alternatives. It is likely that a reason for the legitimation of metaphysics in the 1950s and his later Platonism resulted in his changed attitude towards such transcendental methods. However, along with Kant, he maintained a concern for the risk of perverting reason, which explains the epistemological cautions that he prefaced his arguments in the humanities with, as relying on this understanding of the transcendental method. It suffices here to say that Popper’s change of opinion concerning the logical possibility of turning transcendental critiques into ‘undecidable’ or irrefutable immanent critiques, and the practical benefits of such a method of argumentation, was pivotal for the development of his thought. In this respect we can see that along with what may be regarded as Popper’s early “revision” of Kant in Die beiden Grundprobleme, that he later revised his own arguments through a process of distinguishing and exploring the relationship between the limits of rational arguability and the limits of science.90 This was possibly the result of a reflection upon the actual methods he was using. Years later in Universals, Dispositions, and Natural or Physical Necessity which appeared as “Appendix *X”, to The Logic of Scientific Discovery he argued that not only do the more abstract explanatory theories transcend experience, but even the most ordinary singular statements transcend experience. This is upheld as even ordinary singular statements are always “interpretations of ‘the facts’ in the light of theories.” which is a position Popper may have held as early as 1934. Furthermore, this argument holds for “the facts”                                                             89

K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., p. 57. 90 J. Shearmur, Critical Rationalism and Ethics, op. cit., p. 345.

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themselves as they contain universals, and universals for Popper always entail “law-like” behaviour. As every law is understood to transcend experience, meaning that it is not verifiable, so too must every predicate expressing law-like behaviour also transcend experience.91 As these universals transcend experience they are for us undefinable. 92 Thus for Popper: “There is no pure observation. All observation is theory laden, because all language, including observational speech is theory laden”.93 Popper went on to explain that the theory that language is “imprägniert”, is not testable and therefore metaphysical. For Popper there are metaphysical elements in all languages including scientific languages that reflect the way scientific propositions as well as linguistic communication in general use universals which imply the existence of natural laws. From such a standpoint, Popper is in opposition with Rudolf Carnap, due to the latter’s belief that it is possible to “constitute” any true universal term in purely experiential or observational terms. From this we can gather the Kantian importance for two of the most important, yet often unappreciated features that have influenced the entirety of Popper’s thought, that is, his understanding of theories and the importance of discovering universals in all modes of human inquiry. For Popper, even the cells of an organism are considered to be embodied theories as the evolutionary success of a cell or organism is likened to a conjecture that has so far withstood successfully the severe attempts by the environment to refute it. This is the conclusion that Popper drew as a result of his continuation of Kant’s refutation of Lockean empiricism. We have no choice, Popper argued, in accepting transcendent universal laws as there is no such thing as “pure experience”, but only experience interpreted in the light of expectations or theories which are themselves “transcendent”. Popper concludes in The Logic that it is because of this transcendence that scientific laws or theories are non                                                            91

K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., p. 444. These undefined partly transcendental universals can be defined through the use of other non-experiential universals. Popper gave the example of the universal ‘water’ which can be defined as ‘a compound of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen’. Ibid., p. 424. 93 “Es gibt keine reine Beobachtung. Alle Bobachtung ist von Theorien “imprägniert”, weil alle Sprachen, einschliesslich Beobachtungssprachen, von Theorien imprägniert sind”. Letter of Correspondence. Popper to Victor Kraft. 9 June 1967. Karl-PopperSammlung, Box: 3.16, 24 Victor Kraft 1945-74. 92

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verifiable, and that testability or refutability is the only thing that distinguishes them, in general, from metaphysical theories.94 We can see that in Popper’s epistemology our conjectural knowledge grows according to the method of conjecture and refutation, which is maintained by the Vienna Circle’s Kantian observational-theoretical distinction. The complete array of intellectual activity that constitutes this science of climate change exemplifies the epistemological issues that Popper’s thought was devoted towards.

                                                           

94

K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., pp. 444-445.

Chapter Four Logic and language: Wittgenstein and Tarski

4.1 Introduction The philosophical implications of Popper’s use of Tarski’s work on the correspondence theory of truth have not fully been appreciated. We cannot treat Popper’s work on logic and the problem of truth in isolation as if they exist outside his theories of cognitional metaphysical reasoning. Even his most technical works of logic are means of propelling arguments about the world belonging to a species of reasoning we call metaphysical. This chapter argues that Popper showed us that the correspondence and consensus theories of truth are not mutually exclusive, but that consensus plays an important part in a correspondence theory within Popper’s broader understanding of cognition and linguistics. Popper’s attitude towards the conceptions of truth contest this distinction between ‘consensus’ and ‘correspondence’. This chapter argues that we cannot dismiss Geoffrey Stokes’ thesis in The Critical Thought of Karl Popper (1984) that Popper understood truth as consensus. This chapter argues that an ‘intersubjective’ or consensus understanding of the way objectively valid empirical knowledge or ‘truth’ as construed in everyday language is consistent with Popper’s anthropology of humans as problem-solution-seeking rational animals. It will be argued that Popper himself used Tarski in a broad philosophical sense which needs to be seen in relation to his fallibilist anthropology expressed in his various theories of human cognition, evolutionary linguistic as well as social theory.

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4.2 Tarski’s theory of truth and its implications .

From the philosophical standpoint, Popper keenly observed that Tarski’s work on truth had implications that went well beyond the field of semantics or science at large and could be used, with a measure of care, to shape arguments in political and social philosophy as well, such as those of The Open Society. The arguments used to support Popper’s views on truth are recurrent and operate over and over again in different forms throughout his works including his broader moral and political oppositions to epistemologically pessimistic grounds for scepticism, moral relativism as well as dogmatic modes of thinking. The interplay between arguments for liberalism and those for truth and show Popper’s technical proficiency in his ability to differentiate argumentative operations so that their conjunctions can appear in ever fresh combinations. Popper wrote that “it was clear that we could learn from Tarski’s analysis how to use, with a little care, the notion of truth in ordinary discourse, and to use it, moreover, in its ordinary sense – as correspondence to the fact”.1 How exactly Popper understood that a notion of truth could be used in ‘ordinary discourse’ needs to be contextualised within his broader understanding of human cognition and the role this plays in social or species problem solving. In Objective Knowledge (1972) Popper identified that Tarski provided a devastating blow to Wittgenstein’s ‘positivism’ which held that a concept is vacuous if there is no criterion as Tarski’s definition of truth proved that there can be no criterion of truth, that is no criterion of correspondence.2 Whether a proposition is true is not decidable for the language which we may form the concept of truth. Rather, truth plays the role of a regulative ideal as a guide for helping us in search for truth. Popper states that even though we know there is something like truth or correspondence occurring, the concept of truth does not give us a means (criterion) of finding truth or even being sure that we have found it when we know something to be true. This Chapter makes the more radical argument that Popper’s showed that Tarski’s theory of truth is not a theory of truth at all as Truth is a kind of God word, rather it redirects us towards an anthropology of the of the searcher.                                                             1 2

K. Popper, Unended Quest, op. cit., p. 99. K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 317-318.

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Popper became acquainted with Tarski as a result of attending the Vienna Circle’s Vorkonferenz in Prague in 1934. On a following occasion in 1935 in Vienna, Tarski explained his “semantic conception of truth” to Popper. 3 Although Popper’s familiarisation with the work of Tarski was too late to make an impact upon his Logik (1934) it would play a significant role in his later arguments. There are some important biographical similarities between Popper and Tarski that also might account for their mutual admiration. Both were non-Jewish Jews living and working in increasingly Anti-Semitic countries. Both did as much as possible to play down their Jewish ancestry and to integrate socially and culturally into the intellectual strata of the predominantly Christian society. Alfred Tarski was originally Alfred Teitelbaum (from the old rabbinic dynastic family). Ultimately both were forced into exile. In the article Popper and Tarski (1999) David Miller made the observation that it was Popper’s political work The Open Society that dealt most with the work of Tarski. Miller referred to Tarski’s shock at being quoted in the index almost as often as Marx.4 It was Miller who early on noticed the importance of an understanding of Tarski’s work for an appreciation of Popper’s social thought. However, I would make the caution that it is crucial to emphasise the distinction between Popper’s use of Tarski from the arguments and problems Tarski himself worked on. Although there are few direct references to Tarski in the body of The Open Society, the remarkable extent to which Tarski was referred to in the endnotes reveals how much Popper was able to read into Tarski’s work to support his own political arguments.5 For Die beiden Grundprobleme we can see that his alternative position to the ‘sceptical’ arguments that he associated with the early Wittgenstein’s attempt to overcome an Aristotelian essentialist epistemology is directly related to his support for Tarski’s work on                                                             3

D. Miller, Out of Error, op. cit., p. 9. For other accounts of the meetings in 1935 between Popper and Tarski see: A. Burdman-Feferman and S. Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic, op. cit., pp. 93-94. 4 D. Miller, Out of Error, op. cit., p. 56. 5 Miller has identified how the positions in Chapter 8 of The Open Society “The Philosopher King” reflect a philosophical application of Tarski’s theory of truth. D. Miller, “Popper and Tarski”, in I. Jarvie and S. Pralong. Popper's Open Society After Fifty Years: The Continuing Relevance of Karl Popper (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 56-70.

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truth as correspondence. Popper generalised the early Wittgenstein’s arguments as exemplifying this philosophical pessimism which posits itself as an alternative to essentialism. For Popper, a Wittgensteinian sceptic “would also have admitted that we have knowledge (of course, “only” semantic knowledge); and what he now attacks is our (semantic) concept of knowledge, and our concept of truth, which is closely connected with it.” An analysis of the text in Die beiden Grundprobleme outlining this argument shows how Popper used a dialogue with a Sceptical straw-man which is meant to represent Wittgenstein’s position which Popper then argues against by stating it is possible to have objective knowledge of the external world despite the anthropological framework of the Kantian “forms of our understanding”: The objectivity of knowledge cannot therefore be sought in any knowledge that grasps its object “in itself”; rather, it consists in scientifically determining the object according to the universally valid (intersubjective) methodological principles (for the use of our 6 understanding).

Popper was wrong about Wittgenstein on this account, rather than leading to a philosophical pessimism Wittgenstein’s contribution to symbolic logic in the Tractatus only enriches the praxiological aspect of lived-philosophy. This is achieved through phronesis, as the limits of the propositionally knowable or true are restricted. The meaningful and existential can then be seen to require other alternative modes of engagement and expression. Things of true value cannot be gesagt only gezeigt. Popper believed that he could rehabilitate objective knowledge through a “limited scepticism” avoiding the “contradictions of a general form of scepticism”.7 For this to happen, “objective” would need to be decoupled from “absolute” in relation to knowledge, as if object were comprehended “in itself” “detached from all relations to the knowing subject”, it would be subjective if its determination of the object were only “relative”. For Popper, this situation results in a coupling of the “absolute” which can only be grasped subjectively                                                            

6

K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 98-100. 7 Ibid., p. 108.

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(believed) and “objective” “universally valid, intersubjectively testable scientific knowledge” that is “relative”. Popper saw in Kant’s Transcendental Doctrine of Method as well as his practical philosophy, a way to overcome this linking of the notions of objectivity and relativity through a non-positivist empiricism. While he believed that within the tradition of Kant’s practical philosophy that he could avoid this problematic nexus of objectivity-relativism in relation to the empirical extrinsic reality, the problem of an objective, yet non-absolute truth that was objectively secured through intersubjective cognition was still not at hand. Popper sought a way to be able to speak of truth in an objective sense without it becoming a divine God-like word. However, the price on truth may have been too high. What Popper was left with was a truth that was neither ‘certain’, let along Absolute, more a semantic truth for searching for a conceptual Truth; in other words something like the truth – verisimilitudinous. For Tarski, the object of his investigation into the problem of the definition of truth required a definition which is “a materially adequate and formally correct definition of the term ‘true sentence’”.8 Tarski stated that when this definition is applied to colloquial language, the results are entirely “unproductive”. For Tarski, with respect to colloquial or ordinary language, not only does the definition of truth seem to be impossible, but even the consistent use of this concept in conformity with the laws of logic also seem to be untenable.9 As Tarski’s notion of truth was developed for the use of formal language in logic, it cannot be unproblematically applied to a study of natural languages in general. According to Jan Wolenski, Tarski himself was sceptical of the possibility of a formal semantics of natural language including the application of the semantic theory of truth to natural languages.10 Brian Ellis supports this claim reiterating Tarski’s concerns that “a Tarskian truth theory does not exist for any                                                             8

A. Tarski, “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 4: ([2001] 1944), pp. 341-376. 9 A. Tarski, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers From 1923 to 1938 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 152-153, 165. Where Tarski concludes statement §1 with: the very possibility of a consistent use of the expression ‘true sentence’ which is in harmony with the laws of logic and the spirit of everyday language seems to be very questionable , and consequently the same doubt attaches to the possibility of constructing a correct definition of this expression. (p. 165) 10 J. Wolenski, Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov-Warsaw School, op. cit., p. 180.

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natural language, and there is reason to think that no such theory could be provided for such a language”.11 From a strictly logical perspective Ellis’s assertion is correct, Popper’s use of Tarski was not logical, it was philosophical and highly contentious. In an obscurely presented argument, Popper stated that: “despite Tarski’s restrictions it was clear that from Tarski’s analysis we could apply this to ordinary language and that the application of this was made clear by Tarski himself”.12 This claim by Popper at first notice appears to take great liberties with Tarski’s insistence in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics (1956), in which he argued that such an application to an ordinary language was not possible. However, it was the implications for ordinary language that Popper gleaned to have a significant import for a common-sense philosophical realism. It was Popper’s understanding of the evolved characteristics of cognition itself that could best explain why such a jump from an empirical scientific function to an ordinary language usage could be made, and it hinged upon the notion of experience and facticity in the hypotheticodeductivist understanding of an undifferentiated cognitional activity uniting mundane reasoning and refined science. In Conjectures and Refutations, experience in science was spoken of as no more than an extension of ordinary everyday experience, what applies to science by and large can be applied to everyday experience also.13

4.3 Consensus as correspondence If it is the case that we indeed cannot extend a correspondence theory from a formalised language to the way ordinary language relates to                                                             11

B. Ellis, Truth and Objectivity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 117. K. Popper, Unended Quest op. cit., p. 99. Where Popper states that: “…all these precise methods were confined to formalized languages, and could not, as Tarski had shown, be applied to ordinary language (with its “universalistic” character). Nevertheless it was clear that we could learn from Tarski’s analysis how to use, with a little care, the notion of truth in ordinary discourse, and to use it, moreover, in its ordinary sense – as correspondence to the facts. I decided in the end that what Tarski had done was to show that once we had understood the distinction between an object language and a (semantic) meta-language – a language in which we can speak about statements and about facts – there was no great difficulty left in understanding how a statement could correspond to a fact”. 13 K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit., p. 184. 12

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reality then how can we hold a notion of truth in relation to commonsense reason (Vernunft)? Kołakowski may be used to explain Popper’s need to speak of truth or “how things really are”. According to Leszek Kołakowski “we can see that the idea of truth as correspondence with reality seems to fit well with our ordinary, non-philosophical intuition, which is indifferent to the squabbles of logicians, and with the ordinary, non-philosophical meaning of the words ‘true’ and ‘truth’. For Kołakowski, as we are rational animals, we will never stop wanting to know the Truth and we will never desist from asking such questions as the roots of the correspondence theory are cultural, not epistemological.14 This cultural aspect of the correspondence theory as it played out in Popper’s thought was best explored by Geoffrey Stokes. Stokes argues that the correspondence theory evolved or became a consensus theory. Stokes’ argument is that: According to Popper, Tarski’s theory ‘dispels all doubt about the meaningfulness of talking about the correspondence of a statement to some fact or facts.’ It does not, however...provide any rigorous epistemological guidance; it merely reinforces our intuitive common sense notion of truth...Tarski’s theory...does not provide a criterion of truth and according to Popper we must not ask for such a criterion for 15 it is simply unavailable.

We are, as a consequence for Popper, able to “speak, without fear of talking nonsense, of theories which are better or worse approximations to truth.” 16 However, Stokes acknowledges that Popper and others have failed to ‘provide a formal definition of verisimilitude’. It was Stokes who made the novel claim that in practice, Popper advocates a consensus theory of truth whose characteristics again find parallels in Habermas’s work. It is to this point that I would like to draw the reader’s attention. For Stokes, in both empirical science and hermeneutics, Habermas, like Popper, considers that “the truth of propositions is not corroborated by                                                            

14 L. Kołakowski, “Is there a future for truth?” in Is God Happy? Selected Essays, Penguin: London, 2012), pp. 289- 296. 15 G. Stokes, The Critical Thought of Karl Popper, (1984 Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. School of Social Sciences, Flinders University: Adelaide), p. 669. 16 Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 335.

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processes happening in the world but by a consensus achieved through argumentative reasoning”.17 Stokes in Chapter 8 of Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method (1998) attempted a reconciliation of critical rationalism with critical theory. Gattei has stated that Stokes described Adorno’s and Habermas’s subjectivist theories of truth and then ‘wrongly’ assigns to Popper a similar view. Gattei sites Stokes’ argument that “Habermas’s consensus theory of truth has affinities with Popper’s arguments on the subject...the Popperian concept of objectivity as an intersubjectivity leading to consensus denotes a theory of truth that is proceduralist and that shares a great deal with Habermas’s theory.”18 Gattei responds by saying that: Stokes confuses the concept of truth with that of corroboration, that misplacing him alongside Habermas: intersubjectivity (that is, Kant’s surrogate for objectivity) leads to improvement; and the corroboration of a theory...does not imply that it is true: even the most well-corroborated and explanatory powerful theories (such as 19 Newton’s, for example) can be false – and actually proved to be so.

Gattei gives Newton’s theory as an example of a refutation of Stokes’s proposition. Gattei claims that Stokes is confusing corroboration with a consensus theory. This is unfortunate as Stokes is speaking of truth as it actually functions in relation to everyday social problem solving need. This functionality requires consensus between minds which Popper argued in The Self and Its Brain needs to be understood within a materially transcending interactionist framework. Gattei further compares Stokes’s error with Kuhn’s. However, Stokes was not in this section referring to the relationship between scientific models and reality but the correspondence of moral, historical and political theories with reality. Gattei presents a very narrow reading of Popper’s work on truth which excludes both Popper’s later theories of cognition and what he regarded as Tarski’s “over simplistic”                                                            

17

G. Stokes, The Critical Thought of Karl Popper, op. cit., pp. 671, 673. S. Gattei, The Ethical Nature of Karl Popper’s Solution to the Problem of Rationality, op. cit., p. 249. Also see: G. Stokes, Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 155-58. 19 S. Gattei, The Ethical Nature of Karl Popper’s Solution to the Problem of Rationality, op. cit., p. 250. 18

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example. 20 If we are to acknowledge the role that consensus plays upon any act of judgement on the correspondence of facts with the reality they describe we must also allow for an appreciation of the role of phronesis as indispensable for the act of agreement. Stokes was correct in identifying a consensus aspect. However, perhaps went too far in replacing correspondence with consensus outright. I argue that Popper never cast off the correspondence theory but rather used the correspondence theory to frame the way consensus on truth is achieved. Moreover, Popper contests the category of a “correspondence theory” by arguing that Tarski’s example oversimplified the matter as even the most basic descriptive sentence such as “The snow is white” is partly theoretical and can even be highly abstract for someone who has never seen snow. 21 Thus, a consensus upon the basic meaning of the ‘facts’ is required before we can see whether it corresponds to reality. The ‘universals’ embedded in our words are windows into the logical operators of some prelinguistic cognitive structure responsible for language. It is only at this level of an unknowable cognition that from a philosophical perspective, room for Logos can be made, even if Popper himself would not venture this far. 4.4 Evolutionary cognition It is prudent to observe that Popper’s Tarski and the real Tarski were far from similar. Popper’s understanding of Tarski was shaped by the interaction with a series of problem situations in which the impact of Bühler’s theories was also important. It is clear that at least in the 1970s, much of Popper’s linguistics was taken directly from Bühler. Thus, it is not only necessary to speak of Popper and Tarski in relation to the problem of truth but also of Bühler’s influence upon Popper as well. If truth is a notion for Popper that functions in linguistic problem solving, it cannot be seen in isolation from an evolutionary understanding of communication that he gained from Bühler and Selz. It is necessary to view this notion as Popper would have, that is, in relation to his understanding of semiotics, or more correctly the                                                             20

A. Schlipp, Ed. The Philosophy of Karl Popper (La Salle, Illinois: The Open Court, 1974), p. 1094. 21 Ibid., p. 1094.

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extension he made to Karl Bühler’s theory of language function. 22 Hence, the way that Popper received Tarski’s work on a correspondence theory of truth would become for Popper the needed common-sense notion of truth which could also be integrated into Bühler’s theory of language function. 23 Popper also showed that in relation to this phylogenetic sequence of language functions the notion of truth or falsity only pertain to the “Descriptive function” of language not to the highest “Argumentative function” which holds validity and invalidity as its values. 24 By outlining the function of truth within what I call the Bühler-Popper Phylogenetic Theory of Language, we can begin to better understand how the notion of truth Popper developed from Tarski pertains to Popper’s understanding of language and communication. However, if we go back earlier it was Kant as early as 1933 for Popper in Die beiden Grundprobleme in which the link between intersubjective communication and our capacity to gain objectively valid knowledge of external reality was argued to be possible. This was argued to be the case by Kant despite our “anthropomorphic framework”. Against both the sceptic’s ‘semantic view of knowledge’ Popper follows Kant in asserting an alternative anti-essentialist view capable of asserting objectivity in relation to empirical reality. The objectivity of knowledge cannot therefore be sought in any knowledge that grasps its object “in itself”; rather, it consists in scientifically determining the object according to the universally valid (intersubjective) methodological principles (for the use of our understanding).25 It was with this solution to the problem of holding extrinsic empirical objective knowledge within the transcendental idealism                                                             22

For Popper’s elucidation of, what I call the Popper-Bühler Linguistic Schema, see: K. Popper, Knowledge and The Mind-Body Problem: In Defence of Interaction (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 84. 23 For the importance of the work of the Würzburg School, in particular the thought of Karl Bühler upon Popper’s thought see: J. Alt, Die Frühschriften Poppers, (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1982). 24 For further discussion of this point see: A. F. Petersen, “On Emergent PreLanguage and Language Evolution and Transcendent Feedback From Language Production on Cognition and Emotion in Early Man”, in J. Wind et al., (eds). Language Origin: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), p. 145. 25 K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., p. 100.

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associated with a Kantian anthropology that Popper would come to use the work of Büher, Selz and later Lorenz to develop his alternative philosophy linking an anthropology centred upon problem-solving with notions of objectivity and truth understood intersubjectivity. Later in life Popper continued Bühler’s work by integrating it into what would become Popper’s late World 3 ontology. From a late paper, The Place of Mind in Nature (1982) we can see how Popper understood Tarski’s criterion for truth as somehow relating to Bühler’s understanding of truth in communicative language. This can be seen through the way he integrates theories and references to Tarski and Bühler in this discussion.26 Following Bühler’s empractic theory of language Popper came to see the act of communication on a practical common-sense problem-solving level. We speak of truth as a value we hold at a certain functional level of communication and it is the evolutionary and survival significance of communication that gives meaning to the truth or falsity of our assertions. The link between language and evolutionary necessitated problem-solving, developed to the point that Popper saw a unity of method that drives the search for truth “from the amoeba to Einstein”.27 In this lecture Tarski’s work on truth and Bühler’s broader linguistic theories are brought together to form a broader evolutionary theory of mind.28 Popper’s epistemology was heavily indebted to the theories and discoveries of Karl Bühler of the Würzburg School his early supervisor. His epistemology categorizes linguistic functioning in accordance to Bühler’s categories. These categories function as a means of limiting the operations of truth in human communication. Popper limits the operationalization of truth to the ‘descriptive function’ leaving ‘validity’ and ‘agreeability’ as the values for the                                                             26

See: K. Popper, “The Place of Mind in Nature”, 1981 October 6 . Speech (not delivered in person due to illness), Nobel Conference XVII, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota, published in Mind in Nature, Elvee, Richard Q., ed. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 32-33, 47. 27 It is not a method in the strictest sense of a logical method, which he states in The Logic (p. 8) is impossible, but I refer to method in the broad sense of the process of problem solving that is the defining feature of all life forms. For Popper’s comparison of error elimination of the amoeba and Einstein see: K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 70. Where Popper stated that “The difference between the amoeba and Einstein is that although both make use of the method of trial and error elimination, the amoeba dislikes to err while Einstein is intrigued by it: he consciously searches for his errors in the hope of learning by discovery and elimination”. 28 See: K. Popper, The Place of Mind in Nature, op. cit., pp. 32-33, 47.

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“argumentative or critical function” of language. He summarized his understanding of Bühler’s linguistic function in Conjectures and Refutations as follows: Bühler’s anthropology divided the main function of human communication into three functions: (1) the expressive function – i.e. the communication serves to express the emotions or thoughts of the speaker; (2) the signalling or stimulative or release function – i.e. the communication serves to stimulate or to release certain reactions in the hearer (for example, linguistic responses); and (3) the descriptive function – i.e. the communication describes a certain state of affairs. These three functions are separable in so far as each is accompanied as a rule by its preceding one but need not be accompanied by its succeeding one. The first two apply also to animal languages, while the third appears to be characteristically human. Popper went further to add a fourth function to Bühler’s linguistic functions which he called the ‘argumentative or explanatory function which described the presentation and comparison of arguments or explanations in connection with certain definite questions or problems.29 In one of his later works Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem (1994), it is stated that Bühler’s descriptive or informative function along with Popper’s argumentative or critical functions are essential for an understanding of knowledge in the objective sense.30 Bühler’s theory of language function is central to Popper’s epistemology and the development of his late ontology. The Popper-Bühler Linguistic Schema which plays such a central role in Popper’s philosophy is outlined below:

                                                            29 30

K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit., pp.134-135. K. Popper, Knowledge and The Mind-Body Problem, op. cit., pp. 84-85. 

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Table 2: Popper-Bühler Linguistic Schema.31 Functions Values Popper’s Higher Linguistic Function Validity / Invalidity Argumentative or Critical Function (agreeability/ disagreeability) Bühler’s Higher Linguistic Function Descriptive or Informative Function Bühler’s Functions

Lower

Falsity / Truth

Linguistic

Communicative Function Expressive Function

Efficiency/Inefficiency Revealing/ Not revealing

This table reveals a synthesis in Popper’s thought between the positivistic influences (Geltungslogik) of demarcating between ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ with the linguistic thought of Bühler. By adding the higher linguistic functions we can see that Popper did not passively receive Bühler’s linguistics but revised it emphasizing the power of reason and criticism. Further, this table exemplifies one of the ways in which Popper returned in his later evolutionary epistemological writings to the earlier cognitive psychological and anthropological insights of the Würzburg School which he was imbued with during his time at the Pedagogic Institute. It also clearly refers to ‘truth’ indicating that solely neo-Fregean concerns of the syntactic structure of true sentences are not enough from an anthropological perspective. A broader naturalistic understanding of the way the concept of truth becomes operationalized within human languages as they evolve tools for collective problem solving is needed. This is indicative of Popper’s attempt to break out of the rationalism of the German tradition of Geltungslogik by attempting to integrate the objective logical features of human language and the world into naturalistic scientific knowledge, thus incorporating both forms of knowledge (rational, natural scientific) into a broader explanatory model. This                                                             31

Ibid., pp. 31-59.

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broader explanatory model was expressed in both ‘open’ anthropological in The Self and its Brain and in cosmological terms in Objective Knowledge, A World of Propensities as well as Open Universe. According to what may be seen as a Popper-Bühler linguistic schema, at the “critical” or “argumentative” level of language function, a theory of truth would secure objectivity through intersubjective consensus in an effort to eliminate error and to reduce harm. More importantly it is at this level that the necessary ‘axioms’ needed to establish the possibility of truthful correspondence are conventionally agreed to. At the descriptive level of language function, a proposition may be objectively true as in corresponding to the facts, however, at the “critical” or “argumentative” function of language a proposition requires at this level an inter-subjective component, or role for phronesis to secure its objectivity. In a response to Jacob Bronowski in the Schlipp volume Popper argues for an overlap between what we regard as consensus and correspondence theories of truth. Popper argued that there really isn’t a difference between complex scientific theories which explain facts and simple descriptions of facts themselves. Take Tarski’s example of: “The statement “Snow is white” corresponds to the facts if and only if snow is white.” which Bronowski argued differed from theories such as Newton’s. Popper however, responded that: All the most simple and apparently “factual” statements like “Snow is white” are, in fact, deeply impregnated by theory. That there is such a thing as snow is not only a fact, it is also a theory. For South Sea islanders who have never seen it, it is even a fairly abstract theory...For this reason I do not believe in the existence of a line which separates two kinds of statements: simple statements of fact, and sophisticated explanatory theories. I believe that apparent statements of fact are theory-impregnated, and that whether or not a theory is explanatory depends entirely upon the question whether it is being used to explain, that is, to solve an intellectual problem, a problem of understanding… I therefore think that Tarski’s theory of truth is applicable to explanatory theories, and that the success of science is best accounted for by the metaphysical belief that the 32 growth of knowledge consists in progress towards the truth.

                                                           

32

A. Schlipp, Ed. The Philosophy of Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 1094.

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From this we can see a kind of revision upon Bühler, in which even the lower level of the descriptive function of language operates in the same relation to reality as the most complex theoretical argument; both are “theory-laden”. The aspect of consensus comes in where we have an agreement upon the meaning of the theory-laden facts or theories that we apply to collective problem solving. The majority of problems that humans face, as well as the very progress of science, are collective societal or civilizational efforts. A “naïve attitude towards facts” belies the complexity of cognitive processes that underpin the role of language and logic in problem solving. Before a relationship between the facts and the world can be established, an agreement or consensus upon the theory-impregnated facts themselves is needed. We can draw from this that the correspondence and consensus theories of truth are not mutually exclusive, but that even within modern presentations such as Tarski’s, the consensus theory can be seen to cohere with a correspondence theory as the basic ‘facts’ that are put to reality require consensus concerning their meaning. Within a social problem solving setting the basic facts can be construed in a variety of way depending on various cultural factors, agreement, or consensus is fundamental for the establishment of facticity. Popper shared with Bronowski very similar views on science, rationality and enlightenment principles, including the relationship between tolerance in scientific enterprise and the possibility for tolerance in our day to day engagement with others. Despite what is presented below, Bronowski and Popper were very similar thinkers from very similar backgrounds. Bronowski criticised the applicability of the correspondence theory of truth that Popper used as “Snow is white” can correspond to the facts as it is about facts. However, a theory such as Newton’s or Einstein’s are not descriptions of facts, rather they are explanations of facts. Thus, their relation to the facts is different from what Popper calls “the simple descriptions” which the correspondence theory and Tarski had in mind. Popper believed that Bronowski was misled by the word “correspondence” and Tarski’s “over simple” example: “The statement “Snow is white” corresponds to the facts if and only if snow is white”. Popper further related Bronowski’s argument as one in which “scientific theories are not like this: they do not describe simple facts. They are our own inventions, and they are good or bad according to whether they explain the facts

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(facts like the whiteness of snow) well, or less well”. 33 Indeed, for Bronowski every scientific theory is an analogy. Popper also understood and accepted the analogical relationship between our theories and reality. Scientific theories are analogies, however, they are not only that. Popper responds to Bronowski’s criticism in a way that reveals much more about his thought-system than just linguistic or logical positions. He stated that he believed that such theories are our inventions, however this “Kantian idealism” was limited by the “anti-Kantian” qualification that we cannot simple impose our inventions upon the world. For Popper: Kant thought that our mind not only produces Newtonian theory, but forces it upon experience, thereby forming Nature. I think very differently. There is a world, and we try to understand it, by talking about it, and inventing explanatory theories; but although we are often unable to think otherwise than in the terms of these theories, there is a reality on which we cannot arbitrarily impose our theories. This reality, this world, was there before man, and our attempts to impose our theories on it turn out, in the majority of cases, to be vast failures: thus Kant’s idealism is wrong, and realism is right...I conjecture that such strange regularities of nature do exist. But even if they do not –even if there should be exceptions to all scientific laws –this does not mean that the correspondence theory of truth is inapplicable to scientific theories; it would only mean that all scientific theories are false. It would mean that there are no exceptionless regularities in nature. Although I do not believe this, I admit that my belief that there exist some exceptionless intrinsic regularities of nature is a metaphysical belief. It is a metaphysical belief which is perfectly compatible with the belief that these exceptionless intrinsic regularities of nature for which we are groping in science are too deep for us, that we shall never discover them. However, the applicability of the correspondence theory of truth, as I (following Tarski) understand it, would not be threatened – not even if all our explanatory laws are false. It only would mean that the world is much more complicated than it seems to most of us; and that our attempts to understand it are for ever illusory; that the enterprise 34 of science (though not the world) is a dream, an illusion.

                                                           

33 34

Ibid., p. 1093. Ibid., pp. 1093-94.

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I have quoted Popper at length here as I believe that this is one of the most crucial summarisations of his world-view and in particular, the way his philosophical, linguistic, logical, cosmological, metaphysical and even ethical arguments are interconnected as part of his broader attempt at a ‘secondary science’. Popper’s response shows that he perceived the correspondence theory of truth in a broader sense than the “oversimplified example” that Tarski gave in his seminal paper, 35 as the best way to methodological evaluation of the relationship between our language and reality in accordance with his realist emergent theory of cognition. Thus, Popper’s use of Tarski is not to be construed solely as the concern of a logician working in the discipline of logic, rather it includes a philosophical critique of Kantian idealism grounded in a naturalistic and emergent theory of cognition of which human language and the scientific theories we develop must conform to. Further, the very possibility for ‘correspondence’ we applied to scientific theories has ontological consequences for the kind of universe we construct. That this whole admits the existence of “exceptionless intrinsic regularities in nature” remains for Popper a deterministic “metaphysical belief”, but one fundamental to the possibility of ever holding a theory to be true within a correspondence theory. Even if such “exceptionless intrinsic regularities of nature” are too deep and beyond the ability of our scientific theories to discover, as a realist our theories nonetheless are seen to move in approximation to the truth of such regularities (even if our limitations means that it will always be dubitable that we are moving nearer or further from certain knowledge of an exceptionless intrinsic regularity). If the realism fails, the correspondence theory can still hold for theories, however as there are exceptions to all scientific laws, all our scientific theories must be false. To use Popper’s analogy, there is something cloud-like to all clock-like activity. 4.5 Demolishing Wittgenstein In Objective Knowledge Popper argued that Tarski’s theorem in his theory of truth that “for sufficiently rich languages, there can be no general criterion of truth’ undermines the thesis behind Wittgenstein’s                                                            

35

Ibid., p. 1093.

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positivism that “a concept is vacuous if there is no criterion for its application”.36 The undefinable or nominally definable words used in the metalanguage are used to speak about definitions, problems, theories in the object-language. According to Popper: We must speak, if we wish to define. It is impossible to speak properly in our language of ordinary use without using conjunction, the conditional, and indeed all its formative signs…we do not attempt to define the words we are using, but we use words in order to define 37 very general concepts referring to other languages.

This statement exemplifies the influence of Tarski’s conception of object-language and meta-language in relation to the role of definitions within argumentation. The phrase “we must speak” alludes to Popper’s opposition to Wittgenstein’s call for silence in the Tractatus.38 Popper identified that Tarski provided devastating blow to Wittgenstein’s ‘positivism’ which held that a concept is vacuous if there is no criterion as Tarski’s definition of truth proved that there can be no criterion of truth, that is no criterion of correspondence.39 Whether a proposition is true is not decidable for the language which we may form the concept of truth. Rather truth plays the role of a regulative ideal as a guide for helping us in the search for truth. Popper states that even though we know there is something like truth or correspondence occurring the concept of truth does not give us a means (criterion) of finding truth or even being sure that we have found it when we know something to be true. If we accept that for Popper a pre-linguistic cognitive structure played a major part in his understanding of rational criticism and arguability, then his opposition to essentialist definitions can be seen as part of his broader understanding of the logic (as a theory of refutation) of deductive inferences.40 Popper stated that:                                                            

36

K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 317. K. Popper, “New Foundations for Logic”, in Mind. (1947) LVI (223), p. 234. 38 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, op. cit., p. 89, Proposition 7: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”. 39 K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 317-318. 40 Nimrod Bar-Am reminds us that Popper presented logic as the theory of refutation. See: N. Bar-Am, “Proof versus Sound Inference”, in Rethinking Popper, R. Cohen 37

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There are two obvious reasons for studying logic. One is curiosity, theoretical interest in languages and into their rules of use…The other is practical. Our naturally grown languages have not been designed for the use to which we put them in scientific and mathematical investigations. They definitely do not always stand up too well to the strain of modern civilisation: paradoxes arise, spurious theories; the conclusiveness of some of our subtle arguments becomes doubtful. Such practical needs lead us to study the rules of language in order to 41 design an instrument fit for use in science.

The lack of direct reference that Popper makes to the importance of Tarski’s research for a refutation of Wittgenstein’s understanding of language has also enabled this Wittgenstein-Tarski nexus to go largely unnoticed. The way both Popper and Wittgenstein have been misunderstood, and misunderstood each other as various kinds of positivists has not helped the situation. Rojszczak has argued that Tarski and Wittgenstein each reflected the two opposing trajectories of analytical philosophy of the early twentieth century, that being, the “positivistic” orientation of Cambridge and Vienna, and the “analytic” work of the Lvov-Warsaw School strongly indebted to the inheritance of Brentano. 42 However, the interaction, if not direct, between Popper, Tarski and Wittgenstein, with Popper as the nexus and conduit suggests that Wittgenstein never really left Vienna. For Alan Musgrave, the importance of Tarski’s theory of truth for a rebuttal of Wittgenstein lies in the distinction between a correspondence theory of truth and a semantic theory of truth. According to Musgrave the contention lies in whether Tarski’s semantic conception of truth can correctly be regarded as a version of the classical objective or correspondence theory of truth, a position which Tarski himself affirmed. The reasons why Popper was so keen to accept Tarski’s work were precisely those that led others to disagree that it was, in fact, a correspondence theory. According to Musgrave, correspondence theorists traditionally tried to give an account of the correspondence relation and of the ‘facts’ which are the                                                                                                                                 and Z. Parusniková (eds) (Springer Verlag. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2009), p. 64. 41 K. Popper, New Foundations for Logic, op. cit., p. 233. 42 A. Rojszczak, Philosophical Background and Philosophical content of the Semantic Definition of Truth, op. cit., p. 35.

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second term of that relation.43 From such an account we could arrive at the ‘essence’ that lies behind what all truths have in common. It would, according to Musgrave, tell us how thought or language matches up with reality or the facts. It is clear that such a traditional essentialist correspondence theory would not be acceptable to Popper. Such an attempt had to give a general account of correspondence between a linguistic item and something non-linguistic. Popper was concerned with the relationship between language and reality as mediated through ‘facts’ which are understood to be in part theoretical, that is, metaphysical. It was linguistic convention or consensus that determined the thing-ness of an object. Snow is “white” because there is collective agreement that this word “white” describes a particular quality of a state of affairs, in this case “snow”. Popper may have formed this attitude from his 1929 work Axiome, Definitionen und Postulate der Geometrie on problems surrounding the way geometries are methodologically applied to reality. I suggest however that the real purchase of Tarski for Popper rebuttal of Wittgenstein and indeed for contemporary philosophy does not hang upon the distinction between a correspondence theory of truth and a semantic theory of truth as this is not reflected in idiom and he freely refers to Tarski’s theory as a correspondence theory. I will make the more radical argument that Popper showed that Tarski’s theory of truth is not a theory of truth at all as Truth is a kind of God word, rather it redirects us towards an anthropology of the searcher. We search via criticism rather than ‘proof’ as Popper argued in Objective Knowledge that from Tarski we can see that truth transition is a logical consequence of a conjecture. Thus logic is made realistic and directed in the form of criticism (the operationalization of the set of logical consequences of a conjecture) to actual human affairs. Thus logic is seen as a dispositional feature of human cognition: “I look upon criticism…as the main instrument in promoting the growth of our knowledge about the world of facts”.44 Peter Munz in Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker (2004) has suggested that Popper’s notion of verisimilitude tacitly went over to the idea that semblance of truthfulness “consists in the coherence of theories which in toto explain more than other theories; that is, he                                                            

43

A. Musgrave, Commonsense, Science and Scepticism: A Historical Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 260. 44 K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 318.

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approved of the concept of coherence as a criterion of verisimilitude, if not of truth as it is in itself.”45 However this cannot be the case, truth for Popper is a regulative idea that cannot have a positive criterion yet still manages to do the job in both our science and in our day to day lives. Rather it is safer to argue that verisimilitude describes a relation between a cognitive act that is signified by the use of the word ‘true’ as guided by an abstract and regulative idea. What Popper was trying to get at may be gleaned through his translation of Parmenides’ proem which refers to Selen’s gaze that turns back towards the rays of radiant Helios. We can imagine that Popper’s exegesis of this proem is a kind of symbolic word magic for a hermetic union between the way of conjecture and the way of truth.46 I return to a description of Popper’s exegesis of this proem at the end of Chapter 6. To summarise, an understanding of Popper’s intellectual response to Tarski’s ideas from 1935 onwards provides salient clues for re-interpreting the argumentative oddities in his later thought. Such oddities are based upon his critical rationalist view of the nominalist use of definitions to oppose the intellectual intuition of the essence of a definition. This understanding of truth as part of a broader nominalist attitude towards definitions is fundamental to Popper’s opposition to claims to truth in any intellectual field or debate relying upon expressionism, emotivism and the intuition of “deep” truths. However, the mature work of Popper and Wittgenstein starts to reveal their similarities. For Janik and Toulmin, in the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein had: …abandoned any absolute or hard and fast contrast between literal, descriptive utterances (language as Bild) and ritual or performative speech (language as Handlung); and, by taking this final step, he had dismantled also the very criterion by appeal to which he had drawn his original absolute distinction between “sayable” facts, which language can encompass, and “transcendental” values, which must in 47 the nature of things remain forever inexpressible.

                                                           

45

P. Munz, Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker, op. cit., p. 127. K. Popper, The World of Parmenides, op. cit., p. 77.  47 A. Janik and S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, op. cit., p.234. 46

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The turn in the Philosophical Investigations to a view of language as Handlung within a broader anthropology of symbol-using and rule-conforming activities “language games”, is similar to Popper return to Bühler’s theory of linguistic functions. Popper, however, later in life would experiment with expressions of transcendental values in the very building of his cosmos; and its gleanings from the various modes of ‘transcendence’ associated with our linguistic knowledge and exploration of the material universe on non-human scales which require theorisation which is increasingly undifferentiated from the imaginary real associated by our myths and poetry. Indeed, the arguments in works by Popper intersperse. Initially, in the 1930s Popper talked of refutation and refutability, however with the development of his ideas of the broader role of rationality beyond scientific testing this is replaced by criticisability in the 1950s. The notion of criticisability for Popper is central to the way we systematically want to know more about something. This, along with the idea of an “intellectual love” (Einfühlung), or the love of truth driving the unknowable logic of discovery, provided the constants in Popper’s philosophy.48 The idea of an “irrational element” driving the creative process is not systematically treated in Popper’s works (however it is stated in The Logic and in The Open Society).49

                                                           

48

K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., p. 9. For the notion of intellectual or creative intuitions in Popper’s writing see; K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 15. Also see: K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., p. 8. 49

Chapter Five Definitions, essences and meaning

5.1 Introduction Popper had various criticisms of various functionally related theories covering functionally different fields which he associated with the doctrine of essentialism. In one sense this opposition to essentialism can be viewed as an anti-authoritarian, almost iconoclastic attitude which seeks to criticise Socrates and his concern with seeking universal definitions. This chapter reviews Popper’s critique of Aristotle’s view of definitions as foundational proofs by replacing them with “ad-hoc distinctions” more in keeping with his anthropology centred upon cognitive problem solving and the role intersubjective communication plays in this. While Popper thought the turn to language as a solution to the problem of essences as disastrous, this chapter makes the argument that Popper and the late Wittgenstein actually held a similar view of the function of language and definitions. Popper came to this view by using Bühler’s evolutionary epistemology (and view of language) to modify and uphold Kant. It is argued that the late Wittgenstein reached a similar Popperian understanding of the function of definition which suggests that a reappraisal of our view of the Popper-Wittgenstein relationship is required. Throughout this chapter and the following one, I will be proposing radically new ways of looking at Popper which are not restricted to a conventional reading of his classical works. This view suggests a much closer proximity to both Wittgenstein and Hegel. A consequence of this will be the redrawing the map of post-war philosophy, and Popper’s place in it.

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5.2 The problem of essentialism It is difficult to arrive at a clear understanding of what Popper meant by ‘essentialism’ as his arguments concerning the problem of essences constantly evolved in accordance to the thought domain he was engaging with at any particular time. It was not that Popper believed in the strong thesis of the non-existence of essences, as fallibilism assures him of the possibility that he may be wrong in this regard as well. Rather, anti-essentialism was limited by Popper to an understanding of fixed or unchanging essences, as well as our ability to have certain knowledge of essences. Popper understood the notion of the existence of essence from an Aristotelian perspective, albeit within this fallibilist epistemology. This was despite his criticism of Aristotle in The Open Society. This Aristotelian essentialism has been described by Nimrod Bar-Am as the claim that “only concrete objects really exist, and yet abstract objects are out there too: in some subtle sense, they too exist. They are either general characteristics of particulars or their very essences (or both).”1 Popper’s opposition to essentialism is based on the understanding that we cannot know if objects have de re essences as contemporary physics has shown even the task of pinning down particular objects is often beyond us. Later in life, as exemplified by A World of Propensities (1990) Popper would increasingly talk about processes, systems and situations rather than objects revealing a concept of reality grounded in open world process based on emergent probability. For Popper, the world is one in which we can understand matter as process, as construing matter in terms of substances or essences is unproductive and as a result of modern physics need to be given up.2 Popper understood there to be an evolutionary lag between the linguistic conceptual tools that we have evolved and the increasingly complex problems that we set for ourselves.3 Insofar as we can speak of essences in regard to Popper’s philosophy it is in the Lockean sense

                                                            1

N. Bar Am, Extensionalism: The revolution in logic (Springer, 2008), p. 59. J. Eccles and K. Popper, The Self and Its Brain, op. cit., p. 7. 3 For the links between Popper’s methodology and late evolutionary thought see: K. Popper, “The Place of Mind in Nature”, Nobel Conference XVII: Mind in Nature. Richard Elvee Ed. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982). 2

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of nominal essences.4 However, Popper seemed to prefer not to speak of essences at all. He could not hold a de re necessity and the only necessity associated with definitions is linguistic or verbal necessity. The empirical component to Popper’s deductivist philosophy is in keeping with the broad twentieth century analytic tradition, which endorses the classical empiricist critique of essences and holds that necessity is merely linguistic. Even though Popper did not like to speak of essences, he did not consider himself a nominalist. In relation to the problem of essences, however, his fallibilism would force a nominalist stance. Popper’s tendency towards such a fallibilist approach to the problem of essences can be seen already in the language of Die beiden Grundprobleme. For an epistemologist schooled in the Neo-Kantian tradition such as Popper, such an understanding of our knowledge of experience is highly problematic. For Popper, Erlebnisse did not constitute demonstrable scientific knowledge and as far as his early work was concerned, could not be argued for at all. Any empirical science reducible to Erlebnisse confuses psychology as the basis of statements rather than logic. 5 Thus, in the original version of Die beiden Grundprobleme the term for “experience” is always Erfahrung.6 A linguistic lens coloured Popper’s theorising on essentialism. When Popper argued against essentialism he was referring to a linguistic notion of essentialism associated with his critique of the semantic view of knowledge, including sceptical versions such as Wittgenstein’s. 7 A linguistic essentialism of the kind Popper was concerned about was one that assumes the essence or necessary property of an object is found in the word used to signify that object. The effect of this linguistic essentialism that concerned Popper the most was that once the essence of an object can be seen to be captured by human knowledge in a word, then further words and propositions can provide no more of an explanation of the object in question. Popper perceived this problem in light of the Friesian aspects of his                                                             4

For Popper’s discussion of the nominalist rather than the essentialist use of definitions in science see: K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 14. 5 K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., p. 75. 6 K. Popper, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, op. cit., Exposé. 7 K. Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, op. cit., p. 99.

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epistemology in which a dogmatic foundation for the truth is established within the conventional linguistic modes of explanation. In Conjectures and Refutations Popper described his notion of the essentialist doctrine as follows: The essentialist doctrine that I am contesting is solely the doctrine that science aims at ultimate explanation; that is to say, an explanation which (essentially, or, by its very nature) cannot be further explained, and which is in no need of any further explanation. Thus my criticism of essentialism does not aim at establishing the non-existence of essences; it merely aims at showing the obscurantist character of the role played by the idea of essences in the Galilean 8 philosophy of science.

Popper agrees in The Open Society with the thesis he associates with Aristotle and Plato that “we possess a faculty, intellectual intuition, by which we can visualize essences and find out which definition is the correct one”. However, following Kant, Popper modifies this with a scepticism of this kind of knowledge. The result is that Popper admits that we possess something which may be described as “intellectual intuition”. According to Popper “this [intellectual intuition] can never serve to establish the truth of any idea or theory, however strongly somebody may feel intuitively that it must be true, or that it is ‘self-evident’”.9 Popper, following Aristotle, saw the need to define things not words, which gave rise to his disputes with the neo-positivist linguistic philosophers in Cambridge and Vienna. However, Popper did not follow Aristotle in linking the notion of essence (to ti ên einai) with the notion of definition (horismos) as is evident from Aristotle’s Topics: “a definition is an account (logos) that signifies an essence”.10                                                            

8

K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit., p. 105. K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 15-16. 10 Nimrod Bar-Am notes that horos means an edge, limit or end. See: N. Bar Am, Extensionalism: The revolution in logic, op. cit., p. 39. Also see: Aristotle, Topics. 102a3. Also see M. Krąpiec, Understanding Philosophy. (Hugh McDonald, Creative Commons License, 2007), p. 27. Professor Krąpiec of the Catholic University of Lublin stated that Aristotle’s understanding of concrete substance (το τι ήν είναι) as a substance that is definable was the point in which Aristotle’s thought met Plato’s. Krąpiec stated that as Plato looked on the world of things from above, Aristotle went by way of the senses and came to practically the same conclusion. For Krąpiec “…the reality of the world is more accessible to us, both in breadth and depth, than is 9

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Popper breaks from Aristotle by separating the notion of essences from that of definition. In Popper’s view philosophy cannot, as the early Wittgenstein claims, purge our language of linguistic puzzles through the clarification of meaning, so that science can get on with the business of investigating facts.11 For Popper, horismos would be subjected to diaeresis in relation to the scientific task of searching for invariants. Such a search for invariants Popper initially credits to Parmenides. 12 In The Open Society, Popper argued that Aristotle’s linking of the notion of definition with that of essence not only leads to “a good deal of hairsplitting”, but also encouraged verbalism, disillusionment with argument and with it a revolt against reason. This is due to Aristotle’s insistence that “demonstration or proof, and definition, are the two fundamental methods of obtaining knowledge”, which Popper stated “led to countless attempts to prove more than can be proved”. Popper viewed scholasticism as an example of this approach of which he was critical. For Popper, it was Kant’s criticism of all attempts to prove the existence of God which provided a momentary break in the essentialist tendency in the history of Western philosophy. In Popper’s view this momentary break exemplified by Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft was shortly followed again by the romantics and what Schopenhauer described as the “age of dishonesty”.13 However, despite Popper’s criticism of Aristotle in The Open Society which he later felt was too strong, Popper’s views owe much to this tradition. Nimrod Bar-Am relates how in Plato’s Phaedrus (265d) Socrates explains how the splitting of a term according to diaeresis must correspond to real platonic forms, only in this way is the validity of diaeresis ensured. For Bar-Am, “Aristotle’s theory of the syllogism is simply a literal expression of his incredible assumption that we have gained knowledge of the proper matrix of concepts (and corresponding matrix of terms).” The result is that these syllogisms are not empty deductions, rather “God’s very own matrix of being is spelled out by them…the cosmos in its entirety, is                                                                                                                                 allowed by abstractive apprehension of the content of the thing given to us in eidetic intuition, even of the Aristotelian type (genetic empiricism)”. Popper’s later references to his materialism that ‘transcends itself’ may be similarly viewed in this Aristotelian light. It may be that in this way Popper arrived at his late World 3 theory. 11 K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 20. 12 K. Popper, The World of Parmenides, op.cit., pp. 146-164. 13 K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 21.

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explained by the mere assumption that we have obtained the matrix of legitimate concepts.” 14 From this we can see that Popper’s ‘invariants’ in this case can be likened to Plato’s forms from a logical perspective as Popper attributes the same method for extraction. However following Aristotle, ‘invariants’ are real eidetic features of the cosmos that we can come to know, even if this knowledge is imperfect. Hence while Popper was critical of Aristotle, much of his thinking remained indebted to what Barry Smith referred to as an Austrian tradition of Arisotelianism. Popper’s repeated referring to the need to “search for invariants” in the universe is a modern rendering of this tradition.15 In a letter to Hayek, Popper described himself as “a conscious and determined enemy of definitions”. Popper turned from definition to the notion he called diaeresis, and he claimed to have appropriated it from Plato’s Laws (932e). Diaeresis means a ‘division’. However, it is difficult to state the relationship between Popper’s use and the classical origins he attributes to it. Explaining the advantage of diaeresis over the definition of a word in that knowledge derived from definitions is impossible as “definitions are attempts to lay down some ‘absolute’ meaning of a term in advance”. Diaeresis, however, holds that the meaning of a concept is always ad hoc and pertains to the current problem under discussion.16 Thus, the distinctions developed and terms used can only be understood in regard to their functionality within the argument into which they are situated. Wilhelm Büttemeyer highlighted Popper’s distinction between nominalist and essentialist understanding of definitions that appear in The Open Society. Büttemeyer notes how Popper saw scientific practice as concerning itself with the nominalist rather than essentialist definitions. 17                                                            

14

N. Bar Am, Extensionalism: The revolution in logic, op. cit., pp. 44-45, 68. For a discussion on Austrian Aristotelianism see: B. Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano, op. cit. 16 Letter from Popper to Hayek, 20th October, 1964, p 1. Karl-Popper-Sammlung, Box 3005.13 Letters. Hayek 1940-47. 17 See: W. Büttemeyer, “Popper on Definitions,” in Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 36. 1. (Netherlands: Springer, 2005), p. 17. In light of Popper’s admittedly rather sparse theoretical work on the notion of diarrhesis. Büttemeyer’s criticisms of Popper’s understanding of the problem of definitions on page 17 would need to be revised if it is to remain relevant. Not only is this another example of the importance of Popper’s letters of correspondence and latter posthumously published works for an understanding of Popper’s philosophy, it shows that the linguistic characteristics of Popper’s philosophy as a whole needed to be taken into account when viewing any individual text of his. 15

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However, we can gain a more accurate understanding of what Popper understood by the term definition when we compare these two distinctions in The Open Society with Popper’s remarks in a letter to Hayek. Through the introduction of the notion of diaeresis, we can then appreciate that when Popper talked about definitions he talked about the essentialist notion of definition, not the nominalist (the latter of which he later preferred not to call a theory of definitions at all). Instead, Popper found a new concept, or rather, revived one from antiquity to describe the ‘good’ nominalist procedures in the form of diaeresis as distinguished from the ‘bad’ prophetic intuition and naming of essences that Western philosophy has derived from the tradition of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. Popper stated that he opposed the Aristotelian “theory of definition”, which was built upon Aristotle’s “theory of induction” (epagōgē). Definitions are seen by Popper as being for Aristotle “foundational proofs”. According to Aristotle then, from this knowledge (epistēmē) arrived at from inductive “proofs” (the apodixis), we are enabled to hold “essential definitions”.18 Thus we have a positive solution to the problem of certain and secure knowledge. Instead, Popper follows Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique rejecting the older rationalism’s method of beginning with definitions or axioms and then reasoning from them. Popper’s attitude concerning definitions is fundamental to the problem centred rather than concept centred approach to philosophy.19 The notion of diaeresis is central to Popper’s theorising on “concrete” versus “abstract” in relation to groups and societies in The Open Society. This can be seen in a letter written to Hayek in 1964, in which the very notion of diaeresis is taken from Plato, then used by Popper against Plato to combat his “revolt against freedom” in The Open Society. 20 This is a particularly important letter for our understanding of how Popper developed his arguments and the rationale behind them. Firstly, Popper sets out in this letter to outline                                                            

18 K. Popper, The World of Parmenides, op.cit., pp. 244, 265, 275-277. Popper understood Aristotle to have taken this argument for essential definitions from Plato but to have attributed it to Socrates. 19 Popper shared this opposition to rationalism’s geometric method of beginning from axioms or definitions with Hegel. See: F. Beiser, Hegel (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 91. 20 Letter to F. A. von Hayek. October 20th 1964. Karl-Popper-Sammlung. Box 3005.13. Also see: K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, op. cit., vol 2, p. 21.

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his distinction in social philosophy between abstract society and concrete groups. Popper initially drew the analogy between his social use of the distinction between “abstract” and “concrete”, and the way mathematical logicians understand these concepts. Even though Popper too gained inspiration from the mathematical logicians in developing this distinction, he admitted that this similarity was more verbal than structural. This is indicative of Popper’s awareness of the difficulties of taking formal knowledge from logic and applying it to the field of social analysis as this process would lose its analytic grounds for validity or Geltungsgrund. Popper then introduced the notion of diaeresis in order to emphasise the ad hocness of the distinction between abstract societies and concrete groups. I argued in Chapter Four that Popper used Tarski’s work on truth to support his argument of the possibility of nominally defining truth. Popper’s use of the concept of diarrhesis can thus be seen as an extension of this line of reasoning by overcoming any logical and technical objection that can be raised by transferring a theory from the field of logic to a completely different field of knowledge. For Popper, ad hoc meant: “for this particular discussion of this particular problem, and thus “relative” to that problem”. Popper states that “distinctions” (diaeresis) “may be always refined, that is, carried one step further; but one should only do so if the needs of the discussion require it”. 21 Ideally, through diaeresis insoluble distinctions can be shown to develop for a particular problem situation and remain as hypothetical conjectures. However, for Popper the Aristotelian origins of the problem of definitions occurs in Aristotle’s understanding of induction not as being a “method of inferring natural laws from particular individual instances” which he associated with the inductivism of the Vienna Circle, “but a method by which we are guided to the point whence we can intuit or perceive the essence or the true nature of a thing”. In this way Popper saw Aristotle’s inductivism as being in accordance with Socrates’ maieutic which aims to help lead to anamnēsis which is the power of seeing the true nature or essence of a thing. However, this anamnēsis would eventuate in the modern inductivism of Bacon and Cartesian                                                             21

Letter of Correspondence: Popper to Hayek, 20th October, 1964, p. 2. This stopping point of the minimum needs of a problem situation, reflects Popper’s position of restricting his ontology to “three worlds” rather than allowing for an ontology of worlds 4, 5, etc. See: K. Popper, Knowledge and The Mind-Body Problem, op. cit.

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intellectualism and the problems of definitions. Popper explained this by suggesting that Baconian and Aristotelian induction is fundamentally the same as the Socratic maieutic, 22 through its preparation of the mind by cleansing it of prejudices in order to recognise the manifest truth of the “open book of Nature”. In the same way, Descartes’ method of systematic doubt destroys all false prejudices of the mind and aims to arrive at the “unshakable basis of self-evident truth”.23 Popper’s contextualisation of an ancient tradition of diaeresis should be seen within the broader context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates in mathematics. Following Hilbert’s publication of Foundations of Geometry (1899), a debate arose out of a series of letters of correspondence between Hilbert and Frege concerning the nature of definitions. Frege’s view was that: …all [a definition] does in fact is to effect an alteration of expression…it is not possible to prove something new from a definition alone that would be unprovable without it…In fact considered from a logical point of view it stands out as something 24 wholly inessential and dispensable.

Shearmur describes how Popper thought it to be poor practice for the theorist to place too much emphasis upon concepts.25 We may focus on concepts in an ad hoc way as required, however the development of concepts extraneous to the immediate need of providing a better alternative theory to a previous one is seen as counter-productive. Popper’s attitude towards the non-essential nature of definitions is in keeping with Frege’s thought on the matter. However, Frege added to this that even though definitions are without                                                            

22 According to Popper, Meno’s slave is helped by Socrates’ questioning to recapture the forgotten knowledge that his soul possessed in a pre-natal state of omniscience. The method employed towards this end was called the art of midwifery or maieutic in the Theaetetus. It is this optimistic epistemology of Plato’s that Popper saw as containing the germs of Descartes’ intellectualism and Aristotle’s and Bacon’s theory of induction. See: K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit., pp. 12, 16. 23 K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit., p. 15. 24 See: J. Brown, Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introduction to the World of Proofs and Pictures (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 97. Also see: G. Frege, Posthumous Writings, G. Gabriel et al., eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). p. 208. 25 J. Shearmur, The Political Thought of Karl Popper, (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 19.

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logical significance, it does not imply that they are without psychological significance. Indeed for Frege, definitions are very likely essential from a practical, human point of view.26 Popper’s strict negativism, besides reflecting the influence of Kant’s Transcendental Doctrine of Method, 27 adheres to the older scholastic tradition which maintained a strong continuing presence in Austria. For John Scotus Eriugena and Pseudo-Dionysius before him, the attainment of knowledge of the Natura quae creat et non creatur one must proceed dialectically via the negative to the affirmative method.28 The use of a typically scholastic method is interesting given Popper’s often strong criticism of scholasticism. The negative method is fundamental and denied for Scotus a divine essence or substance to things ‘which are’, foreshadowing Popper’s ‘negativism’ and his antiessentialism. Yet he decided however, not to use the term “negativism” as the official label for our (that is, Popper’s and Hayek’s) philosophy due to his perception that only people of a pessimistic character were in favour of it, and he did not want to associate himself with “the skeptics” or those he regarded as relativists.29 For Popper, the negating method is, termed “refutation” rather than “negation”. Proceeding to the affirmative method prevented Eriugena from applying names in their strict sense to God. Rather, such names are seen to be metaphorical or translative. 30 In this respect, Popper found himself following the same dialectic that characterised Eriugena’s theology.                                                            

26

J. Brown, Philosophy of Mathematics, op. cit., p. 7. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., §Transcendental Doctrine of Method, Section 3, p. 500. 28 D. Carabine, John Scottus Eriugena, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 13. According to Carabine, for Eriugena “language is an expression of a metaphysical reality, for the whole of the visible world contains symbols that point to God”. It is useful to see this view of a ubiquitous metaphysics in relation to Popper’s view of the metaphysical transcendence of “universals” in statements. Carabine explains Eriugena’s negative method in the following way: “When Eriugena denies something of God, he is not saying that God is not that thing or is nothing but is saying that God is the no-thingness that, paradoxically, is everything. Every negative sentence is, in a sense, “haunted” by God because negations in relation to God are not simply empty phrases ...On the epistemological level …there will always be a tension between the positive and the negative in relation to the transcendent immanant”. 29 Letter of Correspondence: Popper to Hayek, October 31st 1964. Karl-PopperSammlung, Box 305.13. 30 D. Carabine, John Scottus Eriugena, op. cit., p. 13. 27

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However, in accordance with his Kantianism, Popper’s negativism is the only way in which we can get “nearer and nearer to something very positive indeed: something like a regulative idea (or ideal).”31 5.3 Comparison with Wittgenstein More work needs to be done in contextualising Popper’s thought within its proper central European context. In this section I sketch out a positioning by comparing his arguments to those of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890-1963)  Polish philosopher and logician who was a prominent figure in the Lwów– Warsaw School. In this way Popper’s thought can be seen to be an expression of a plastic clustering of central European problems and approaches. Popper is in agreement with Quine’s argument in Word and Object (1960) that we ought to give up the quest for meaning in an atomistic sense. 32 This also reflects the later thought of Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, in which he turned his attention away from thinking in isolation about “words and their meaning” (exemplified in his earlier Tractatus), and instead focused on their use in specific language games.33 For the later Wittgenstein the end-point for justification does not concern whether our propositions are immediately seen to be true, rather it concerns the acting which lies at the bottom of the language-game”. 34 Wittgenstein’s last work, which he wrote on his death bed, refuted the idea in the Western intellectual tradition going back to Plato that any meaningful human behaviour must somehow be the expression of an implicit theory that we hold. Wittgenstein came to the radical conclusion that we just act, we do not need to appeal to ideas.35 For Wittgenstein, it was not the case that there is an implicit theoretical structure to action. There is a strong contrast between this final position of Wittgenstein and the thesis held by Popper that all our                                                            

31

Letter of Correspondence: Popper to Hayek, October 31st 1964. Karl-PopperSammlung, Box 305.13. 32 W. Quine, Word and Object (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), pp. 206-209. 33 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, [1953], 1968). 34 Ibid., p. 81, Proposition 204. 35 O. Hanfling, Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 164.

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actions are “theory-impregnated”. For Popper, there could be no distinction between an “empirical language” and a “theoretical language” as “we are theorizing all the time” which needs to be understood praxiologically as the way knowledge is known – differentially reflecting the development and transformation of the knower. Popper was unaware of Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatus writings, yet as a result of his exposure to Bühler’s theories on communicative language functions, he arrived at positions very close to those of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Hence, at the time of the infamous “poker incident” at the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club in 1946, they were by then drawing towards similar philosophical positions concerning language, and an understanding that our knowledge does not begin with observations. Yet as knowledge is conceived as growing in relation to individuals engaged in an effort to find progressively better solutions, such knowledge can be true “for us”. We can hold them as true for the purpose of critical discussion as agreed upon conventions, that is, the best possible concept or definition, for the purpose of dealing with the problem pertaining to it at a certain time. We can also hold a concept to be true in the sense of functioning as regulative ideals towards which our knowledge develops.36 For Popper, “The very idea of error – and of fallibility – involves the idea of an objective truth as the standard of which we may fall short. (It is in this sense that the idea of truth is a regulative idea.)”. 37 The content of the name that we use to denote a concept however, remains unknowable. Popper could not accept Wittgenstein’s view in the Tractatus that statements between language and the world are senseless and that one cannot say what can only be “shown”. This position, that questions about meaning can be answered through the syntactic relations of statements without involving an extra-linguistic reality was most elaborately developed in Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache (1934). As I have discussed in the previous chapter, this                                                             36

K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit., p. 229. This philosophical indeterminism is best exemplified in Popper’s translation of the B34 poem by Xenophanes in The World of Parmenides: But as for certain truth, no man has known it, nor will he know it; neither of the gods. Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.And even if by chance he were to utter the perfect truth, he would himself not know it; For all is but a woven web of guesses.37

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syntactical and logical-positivist orientation for analytical philosophy was unacceptable to Popper and he proposed an alternative cognitive model which understood the functionality of truth in our cognitional activities in a radically different way. Popper’s stance on the problem of meaning was similar to Ajdukiewicz’s who also followed Frege’s steps in distinguishing between sense and reference. Frege thought of meanings not as objects, but as a property of expressions determined by the existence of rules governing their employment.38 The way that both Ajdukiewicz and Popper, similarly yet independently, chose to proceed to view meaning was not to secure a fixed definition for a word which was then agreed upon and accepted conventionally, but to accept the spontaneous and evolving reality of meaning formation.39 Ajdukiewicz in Problems and Theories of Philosophy pointed out, as Popper did, that by defining a primitive term we face a problem of infinite regress as we attempt to secure a meaning for the definition. Instead of trying to give meaning to a definition of a word, both Ajdukiewicz and Popper accepted an evolutionary approach to meaning whereby it is understood that each of us, by learning a language in early childhood, have been introduced by our parents and teachers to a definitive way of understanding the words of the language. For Ajdukiewicz, “by listening to adults’ utterances produced in different situations, we have acquired an ability to use these expressions in the same way and thereby we have learned how to understand these utterances as adults understand them”.40 As Popper received a naturalistic theory of language acquisition from his supervisor Karl Bühler, it is not surprising that he supported the semantic approach to the problems of truth and meaning akin to Ajdukiewicz’s. This semantic orientation was open to the possibility of incorporating theoretical work from the natural sciences such as behavioural and cognitive psychology and evolutionism. In this way, meaning is seen as a product of a function of human language and with it objectivity occurs organically in an inter-subjective problemsolving context. Thus Popper concludes time and again with the assertion that, we ought not to get bogged down in questions of words and their meaning. It is only in direct relation to the process of a                                                            

38

K. Ajdukiewicz, Problems and Theories of Philosophy, op. cit., p. xv. For Popper’s arguments against conventionalism see: K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., pp. 57-61. 40 K. Ajdukiewicz, Problems and Theories of Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 33-34. 39

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problem situation in which we attempt to reduce error that we form meaning and accept the meaning on the basis of a correct or successful outcome.41 This understanding of what constitutes meaning for Ajdukiewicz and Popper is remarkably similar to that developed by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations (1953). As I have shown earlier, Popper arrived at this understanding of meaning in relation to his philosophy of language as a result of directly appropriating much of the thought of Bühler’s Die Krise der Psychologie (1927) in which an attempt to reform psychology was made by providing foundational axioms for linguistics. 42 The understanding of the concept of meaning that Popper, Ajdukiewicz and the late Wittgenstein were attempting to develop, as Bühler had before them, was one that required an understanding of objectivity that was inter-subjectively grounded in an understanding of linguistic communication as action. By following Frege, this notion of objectivity would be secured without recourse to subjective, intentional, or psychologistic sources. This idea is expressed in Popper’s stricture, “knowledge without the knowing subject”.43 The later Wittgenstein also moved towards a similar understanding of securing the truth for meaning when he articulated the thesis of the impossibility of what he called private languages. For Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations (1953), we are all bound by the social rules of our language games or Sprachspiele, even reading cannot escape the public rule obeying requirements of language, thus it cannot be a “private” activity. 44 However, the differences between the Popper-Bühler position on language and that of Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations are more procedural and methodological rather than philosophical. According                                                            

41 The connection between error and harm in Popper’s ethical thought is dealt with in greater depth in the following section. 42 K. Popper, “Zur Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie”, in Frühe Schriften, op. cit., p. 190. Also see: Bühler, K. Die Krise der Psychologie (Frankfurt: Ullstein, [1978], 1927), p. 29. 43 K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 106. 44 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., Proposition 5:7. Also see: Proposition 202; for the impossibility of meaning for private languages as resulting from a practical understanding of meaning formation: “And hence also ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it”.

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to Wittgensteinian introspective thought experiments we could not speak a private language, that is, we could not point inward to some private experience and name that experience.45 However, the justification for Wittgenstein’s opposition to a private language very closely reflects some of Popper’s arguments concerning “knowledge in the objective sense” and Ajdukiewicz’s arguments concerning “rational inter-subjective distance from the object”.46 For Wittgenstein, unless we can appeal to some larger social gathering there is no difference between my thinking that I am actually using the word correctly and my actually using the word correctly.47 Wittgenstein postulated that the social character of rules determine the rejection of the idea of private languages. For Wittgenstein, the sum total of the use of words in their various language games determines a word’s meaning. For the late Wittgenstein language is a form, whereas Popper took a more extreme emergent ontological position by positing that language can be said to have independent existence separate from an individual knowing subject. Despite these similarities between the philosophy that Popper slowly developed throughout his life and the positions of Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, there remained in the end one major theoretical distinction between the two philosophers. According to Oswald Hanfling, Wittgenstein reversed the traditional priority of knowledge over action.48 In Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1969) the end-point for justification does not concern whether our propositions are immediately seen to be true, rather it concerns the acting which lies at the bottom of the language-game”.49 Wittgenstein’s last work, which he wrote on his death bed, refuted the idea in the Western intellectual tradition going back to Plato that any meaningful human behaviour must somehow be the expression of an implicit theory that we hold. Wittgenstein came to the radical conclusion that we just act, we do not need to appeal to ideas.50 For Wittgenstein, it was not the case that there is an implicit theoretical structure to action. There is a                                                             45

S. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 56. 46 K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 106. 47 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., p. 81. Proposition 202. 48 O. Hanfling, Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy, op. cit., p. 164. 49 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., p. 81, Proposition 204. 50 O. Hanfling, Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy, op. cit., p. 164.

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stark contrast between this final position of Wittgenstein and the thesis held by Popper that all our action is theory-laden and that every statement that we make transcends experience.51 Bernard Lonergan is also of interest in the debate on meaning in relation to philosophical propositions, as he argued that asking whether a proposition is meaningful or not is to ask the wrong kind of question. Lonergan in Method in Theology (1971) used the example of the smile to show the global meaningfulness of this fact as distinguished from propositions being the bearers of meaning.52 This indicates that Popper may have overstated the role of language within our cognitive apparatus, that other kinds of recursive structuring are providing the content for the universals. The meaningfulness of the smile is a fact, but it is not ‘theory laden’ as Popper argues all facts are as the smile has something irreducible, spontaneous and elemental. Meaning may play an important role in cognitive activity however, not of a propositional kind. This may indicate where a philosophy of the face may be warranted and asks questions as to the role such a philosophy would play within a critical or open rationalism. Popper and Wittgenstein were both concerned with knowing the cognitive structures for the insights they give into personal or social improvement. Their approaches to philosophy was similar than the famed dispute at the Moral Sciences Club suggests, and from all accounts there wasn’t much opportunity on this occasion to warrant the event even being called a dispute. What this did highlight was the personal animosities between two Viennese intellectuals who were not giving away the whole picture to the folk at Cambridge. What this suggests is that the two books written on the Popper-Wittgenstein case Wittgenstein’s Poker and Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker may have approached this subject with an inappropriate assessment of both thinkers. Despite the amount written on this topic, a de-Anglicised account needs to be written.

                                                            51

K. Popper, “Appendix*X. Universals, Dispositions, and Natural or Physical Necessity”, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., p. 423. For Popper: “even the most ordinary singular statements are always interpretations of ‘the facts’ in light of theories”. 52 B. Lonergan, Method in Theology, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd., 1971), pp. 59-61.

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5.4 Popper’s aesthetics Popper’s attitude towards essentialism and definitions permeated all of his intellectual thought including his aesthetics. This can be seen in his support for the approach to aesthetic theory by his lifelong friend Ernst Gombrich. The position outlined in another lecture by Popper Schöpferische Selbstkritik in Wissenschaft und Kunst (1979) is that the success of great works of art or music are subjected to the same method of trial and error. The uniqueness of particularly great works is understood by Popper to exemplify his indeterminism and fallibilism associated with an unknown logic of discovery.53 A continuation of his understanding of evolutionism as consisting of purposeful problem-solving according to a Selzian theory of mind can be seen in his understanding of the process of artistic creation.54 Art, science and literature all result from a “superabundance of purpose”, that is, purposeful survival behaviour through trial and error problem solving. The importance of the process of objectification of the contents of artistic and intellectual creation, or for that matter any thought as it moves from World 2 to World 3 gaining external form, is emphasised by its autonomous nature becoming something fundamentally independent from the subjective processes that gave rise to it. It is unreasonable to assume that the object of art has total independence from its subjective origin within the artist, writer, composer or those experiencing an artistic work. Interactionism implies some sort of structural continuity. The indeterminism and openness that is entailed within this process of creation, externalisation and objectification reveals something of the unknowable of human creativity and flourishing that Popper was so concerned with in the Logik. He saw this existing at the highest levels of the Western cultural tradition, particularly in democracy and science:

                                                            53

See: “Schöpferische Selbstkritik in Wissenschaft und Kunst,” 1979 July 26. Opening address, Salzburg Festival, Salzburg, Austria. Typescript and English text. Karl-Popper-Sammlung, Box: 223.6-7. Even if this can be seen as a rather unusual view of artistic endeavour, it is a good illustration of how his Kantian problemsolving philosophy developed. 54 “Schöpferische Selbstkritik in Wissenschaft und Kunst,” 1979, Typescript and English text. Karl-Popper-Sammlung, Box: 223.6-7.

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Returning to Karl Popper In reality the great artist is a keen learner who keeps an open mind so that he can learn not only from the work of others but also from his own labours, including his failings. Almost all great artists have been highly self-critical, and they looked at their work as something objective. Haydn, on hearing the first performance of his Creation in the Aula of the old University of Vienna, broke into tears saying “It is 55 not I who wrote this”.

Popper expresses the same unknowable logic of discovery as operating behind all instances of knowledge creation in the objective sense. Haydn’s expression here is similarly seen in science by Newton’s inability to accept his conclusion of action at a distance as the property of the mechanics of nature. Popper supported this claim with the argument that Newton and later Einstein felt a mystery in this conclusion and were unable to accept it, instead attributing such movement to God. 56 We can glean in the logical and explanatory capacity of a theory aesthetic values that are esoterically discernible. Popper argued that we could discern the logical and dialectical unfurling of hypotheses even in paintings; brushstrokes as conjectures and refutations. From this we can see how his cognitive theory was a metaphysics that explained this poetic interplay between art and science as participating in the same unknown logic of discovery via the dialectic of conjecture and refutation. As Bernard Lonergan observed “functional specialities are functionally interdependent”.57 The method by which we progress to our regulative and ideal goal, Popper argued, is identical in science and in artistic creation. In art the method of trial and error elimination is conducted in regard to criteria such as formal correctness and expression. As the scientist can conduct tests through experimentation, the artist conducts tests every time his or her brush strokes the canvas, which is itself a conjecture. Only in the field of a theoretical human or social sciences that we have no means of refuting our errors in a systematic way, and can only

                                                           

55

K. Popper, Unintended Consequences: The Origin of the European Book. KarlPopper-Sammlung, Petersen Sammlung Box 5.17, p. 12. 56 K. Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science. (New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield. 1983 [1956], 1956), p. 149. 57 B. Lonergan, Method in Theology, op. cit., p. 126.

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at best validate our social claims according to a vague principle of agreeableness.58 We can contend that Popper’s writings on science can be included in his aesthetics. This accounts for the sparseness in his disquisitions on aesthetics and artistic culture. In Realism and the Aim of Science, Popper argued that: Science is not only, like art and literature, an adventure of the human spirit, but it is among the creative arts perhaps the most human: full of human failings and shortsightedness, it shows those flashes of insight which open our eyes to the wonders of the world and of the human spirit. Science is the direct result of that most human of all 59 human endeavours – to liberate ourselves.

For Popper, the most beautiful work of art in the twentieth century was science. The products of the human mind associated with science are not only interesting; they are beautiful. There is a mystical tone to the way Popper not only revered problems but almost worshiped their existence which is further suggested in Realism and the Aim of Science. Strikingly, the erotic engagement with problems leads to a noetic nuptial ascent: I think that there is only one way to science – or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it, and to live with it happily, till death do ye part – unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem, or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting though perhaps difficult problem children for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days.60

Further, engaging with problems and theories provide an opportunity for transcendental experiences through which transformative selfimprovement can be made. Contemplating beautiful solutions or indeed even beautiful problems is cognitively akin to contemplation                                                            

58 Popper understood social science as being theoretical in the same sense as theoretical physics. 59 K. Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science, op. cit., p. 259. 60  K. Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science, op. cit., p. 8. 

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derived from listening to music or looking at a painting. After all, Pythagoras taught us that the world of sound, and indeed colour, is governed by exact numbers, from which arrangements by the human mind manipulate into aesthetically judgeable products. Science is a transformative activity through which we participate in a diacosmic Weltharmonik. The notion of the scientist is not restricted to a Baconian specialist or expert, rather the true user of science is “the amateur, the lover of wisdom, the ordinary, responsible citizen who has a wish to know.”61 There is a sense in which to engage in science is to engage in spiritual excercises. Anyone who can fall in love with problems is to some extent a Popperian scientist.

                                                           

61

Ibid., p. 260.

Chapter Six Popper’s metaphysics

6.1 Introduction This chapter suggests ways of viewing Popper in relation to the traditions of Brentano, Frege and Lotze. It is this context that provides the conceptual apparatus enabling Popper to develop a “non-ontology” out of his earlier Bühlerian understanding of linguistic communication. It is possible that Popper received his Platonic interest in ideas as objectively real and having an independent existence from the subjective thinker from Bühler’s “Gebilde des objektiven Geistes”. Popper followed Bühler’s naturalistic approach to cognition by developing it into a kind of philosophical anthropology capable of relating the evolutionary nature of humans to the cosmological reality of emergence. This was formulated by Popper in the post-war period, demonstrating a later return to his formative influences. However, Hacohen identified Popper’s university teacher Heinrich Gomperz (1873-1942) as crucial in this respect. Hacohen also states that Gomperz’s naturalisation of knowledge problematized the autonomy of science, epistemology and logic. According to Hacohen: Gomperz separated radically between thought (Gedachte), and thinking (Denken), objective and subjective ideas (Gedanken), logical relationships among statements and cognitive psychological 1 processes (experiences of consciousness).

This procedure reflective of a broader tradition in Central European philosophy associated with Franz Brentano and his school as well as the Austro-Polish philosophers, particularly Kazimierz                                                             1

M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 152.

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Twardowski who is known for his work on the reality of non-physical, non-existent objects. Thus, Popper’s “non-ontology” can be seen to accord with Twardowski’s notion of reality as treatable independent of existence. This ontology needs to be viewed in association with Popper’s understanding of metaphysics and the particular role that it plays within human language. Ontology is used by Popper as a heuristic for guiding the reasonableness or otherwise of irrefutable philosophical assertions. 2 Thus, Stokes’ argument that Popper’s thought constitutes a kind of system, or more specifically an “evolving ‘system of ideas’” is further substantiated by this chapter.3 6.2 Propensities and the metaphysical ‘turn’ The various schools and influences that Popper drew upon were interconnected and part of a broader Central European republic of letters. All roads in this republic led back to Franz Brentano, and from there further back into antiquity. Although Brentano’s appointment to the University of Vienna was vetoed by the Emperor it did not stop him from leaving a lasting intellectual legacy in Central Europe. Of Brentano’s heirs two, Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932) and Kazimierz Twardowski (1866-1938), would leave a legacy that played an important role in the Viennese academic world that directly informed Popper’s thought. Christian von Ehrenfels was professor in Prague for more than 30 years and responsible for the Gestalt revolution in psychology. Karl Bühler played a role in bringing Gestalt philosophy to Vienna and formed a group which promulgated a naturalistic philosophy of Gestalten to which the young Popper belonged. It was this developmental psychology informed by comparative evolutionary biology which included a linguistics that would shape Popper’s thought. Modern Gestalt theory was a reformation of Aristotle’s theory of Form. According to Hacohen, “Bühler criticized Gestalt                                                            

2

However, Feyerabend argued that “an ontological description frequently just adds verbiage to the formal analysis; it is nothing but an exercise in ‘sensitivity’ and ‘cuteness’”. See: P. Feyerabend, Against Method, op. cit., p. 236. 3 G. Stokes, Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. xii, 2.

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psychology for physicalism, the translation of psychological structures into physiological ones. Popper defended Bühler’s methodological pluralism against Schlick’s (and the Gestaltists’) “physicalism” and showed that Schlick’s reduction of psychology to physics was no alternative to semasiology.” 4 Bühler neither accepted the historical Aristotle nor the modern Gestalt-theoretical solution to the problem of form. In Das Gestaltprinzip im Leben des Menchen und der Tiere (1960) Bühler returned to the problem of form or Gestalt and argued that a specific performance of higher animals was to be able to grasp Gestalten. For Bühler Gestalten grow in the body and function in communication resulting in the creation of Gestalt in the external world. This process is found similarly in humans and animals. Hacohen identified that Bühler’s methodology opened psychology to biological perspectives which as a promising beginning for Popper’s attempt at creating a meta-science linking logic, psychology and biology.5 Popper later in The Self and Its Brain would argue that there is a tremendous amount of knowledge that we inherit and which is built into our sense organs and our nervous system; such as knowledge concerning how to react, how to develop and how to mature.6 Thus, Popper’s interactionism insures that within the circuit, knowledge is not only to be found objectively in World 3, or subjectively in World 2, but also inbuilt in World 1. Similarly, Popper learnt from Selz that Gestalten (wholes) are task orientate as the mind was a problem solver. According to Hacohen “For the passive mind learning through association, the Würzburg School substituted an active mind forming knowledge.” 7 This naturalistic view of the symbiotic relationship between Gestalten and the external ecology would be recast in Popper late World 3 Thesis. Rather than referring to Gestalten Popper would talk of World 3 non-physical yet real (wirklich) objects, which include things such as problems or theories which arise in relation to World 1 ecological pressures and underwrite the possibility for linguistic communication. For Popper the Forms are problems the entelechy is the problemsearching (Suche) mind. In conversation with Konrad Lorenz in 1983, Popper spoke of this ecological approach to Gestalten in reference to                                                            

4

M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 158 Ibid., p. 158. 6 K. Popper and J. Eccles, J. The Self and Its Brain, op. cit., p. 102.  7 M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 141. 5

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problems of language, learning and theory formation: Leben ist Lernen.8 This was not the only tradition traceable to Brentano that was to play a major role in Popper’s Vienna. Twardowski in Lvov based his work on logic and psychology upon Brentano and was responsible for bringing a tradition of exact philosophy to Poland which included all of the important figures in Polish philosophy for most of the twentieth century. According to Barry Smith, members of Twardowski’s circle after moving to Warsaw where Stanisław Leśniewski was dominant formed contacts with the Vienna Circle.9 These contacts were initiated by Alfred Tarski’s visit to Vienna in the spring of 1930 and Carnap reciprocated by visiting Warsaw in November of that year. Carnap lectured at the Warsaw Philosophical Society and had discussions with Leśniewski, Kotarbiński and Tarski around the time when Tarski was developing his semantic conception of truth that would be so influential to Popper. In this way Popper’s positive disposition towards Tarski’s work is understandable given the Brentanist inheritance that he received from Bühler. Thus, via a conference in Prague in 1935, two branches of scholarship inspired by Brentano, logic and cognitive psychology form a backdrop to the philosophical work of Popper. In the 1950s Popper changed his opinion and declared criticism to be a broader category than tests which enabled the possibility to criticise moral and historical judgements. For Agassi “He could then declare metaphysics criticisable though not empirically refutable, especially since already in 1935, he had recognized the possibility that a metaphysical theory becomes scientific through an increase of its contents…he adopted the view [in The Open Society, Chapter 25 ] that metaphysical theories are points of view and so can be pitched against their contraries”.10 For Popper metaphysics did not have a single meaning. In a broad sense, Popper referred to metaphysics as any non-falsifiable theory reflecting the lingering influence of the Vienna Circle’s positivism.11 Further, metaphysics could be used by Popper to refer to                                                             8

K. Popper, Alle Menschen sind Philosophen, (Munich: Piper Verlag 2006), pp. 2356.  9 B. Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano, op. cit., p. 21. 10 J. Agassi, A Philosopher’s Apprentice, op. cit., p. 61. 11 K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., pp. 11-13.

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the innocuous Platonic “universals” ever present in our basic statements. Popper argued for the importance of metaphysics as it exists within human language and knowledge. However, the term ‘metaphysics’ could also refer to harmful metaphysical theories associated with Freud and psychoanalysis as well as grand philosophical system building and theodicy. In this objection, Popper followed Kant’s claim in the Critique of Pure Reason that metaphysics as an attempt to gain knowledge of the unconditioned (i.e. God, freedom, immortality) through pure reason is impossible. Popper’s metaphysics, at least certain features thereof, can be seen as a rational development of the situational modelling of the Poverty in order to account for the evolution of human communication and emergence of a realm of conventions, or institutions. This understanding of modelling is derived from his early work on how we decide upon geometric models to describe extensional reality that he developed in his early dissertation on geometry in Axiome, Definitionen und Postulate der Geometrie (1929). This would provide the basis for his later thought on social science models.12 His so-called metaphysical turn during the early 1950s coloured his later writing such as the essay on metaphysics in Chapter Eight of Conjectures and Refutations (1963), and are further exemplified by Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972). These works show greater attention to ontological concerns raised by methodological arguments. His ontology aimed to explain how transcendental or metaphysical entities are an integral part of our linguistic communication and what such entities imply for our understanding of the mind-body problem. For Popper, there was an insidious relationship between metaphysics and language. We may eliminate forms of metaphysical speculation, but we cannot eliminate the universals that are inherent in the structure of our language. Even metaphysical speculation, as this chapter will show, has its praxiological value, so long as we understand the epistemological limitation for such speculation. Hence, Popper’s so-called ontology was a framework for explanations at the point where the cognitive capacity (Erkennen) ends, and our questions demand that we move beyond our current horizon. In this sense, Popper like Heidegger, was

                                                           

12

K. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, op. cit., p. 37.

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concerned with avoiding both a crash into materialism and a false ascension of subjective idealism.13 It is important to note that Popper’s ontology was not an “ontology” in the true sense of the word.14 This becomes clearer when we observe the way that Popper’s ontology is mutually supportive of his broader methodological arguments, which in turn underpin many of his social arguments. Ian Jarvie argued that Popper chose to “gloss” his later theories of World 3 and objective knowledge in metaphysical rather than sociological terms. Jarvie explains this as resulting from Popper not having fully developed or thought through an implicit sociology of science that was crucial to his epistemology.15 Jarvie is incorrect here; rather this demonstrates a return to his earlier Gegenstandstheorie and increasing concern with the  eidetic or formal as well as dispositional or in-built aspects of knowledge. The formal and dispositional are not seen as separate as Popper argued in the appendix to the Logic of Scientific Discovery in an essay titled Universals, Dispositions and Natural or Physical Necessity that “all universals are dispositional”. With the publication of Objective Knowledge, ontological concerns played an increasing part in Popper’s thought. However, the basis for this ontological interest can be seen much earlier stemming from his concern with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.16 It was the ‘subjectivism’ of the nonlocality described by the Copenhagen interpretation that Popper found greatly disturbing. Popper’s proposed an objectivist understanding of probability or propensities that are akin to Fregean non-physical objects. Probabilities, or what Popper referred to as “numerical propensities”, could be found objectively in the world.17 In 1955 Popper published his measure-theoretical formalism of conditional probability which holds that “the measure-theoretical probability statements are singular probability statements…from the point of view of physics, a singular                                                            

13

R. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Trans. Ewald Osers. (First Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 39. 14 K. Popper and J. Eccles, J. The Self and Its Brain, op. cit., p. 4. 15 I. Jarvie, “Popper’s Continuing Relevance”, in Z. Parusniková and R. Cohen (eds). Rethinking Popper. (Springer Science, 2009), p. 219. 16 K. Popper, In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years (London and New York: Routledge, [1996], 1984), p. 11. 17 K. Popper, A World of Propensities, (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990), pp. 20-21.

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probability…can best be interpreted as a physical propensity.” 18 Numerical propensities have an actuality and reality in the universe. However, objects such as propensities and Frege’s equator, can only be apprehended by us through thought. Frege’s ontological understanding of the objective and independent reality of numbers reappears in Popper’s objectivist solution to the problem of probability, thus saving the falsificationist methodology at least for science. In A World of Propensities (1990) Popper stated the aim of our theories and our hypotheses or what he called our “adventurous trials”: What we aim to know, to understand, is the world, the cosmos. All science is cosmology. It is an attempt to learn more about the world. About atoms, about molecules. About living organisms and about the riddles of the origin of life on earth. About the origin of thinking, of the human mind; and about the way in which our minds work.

Popper’s cosmological theorising was directed towards the problem of causality and change in relation to events and processes. He did not embark on his cosmological thinking with the aim of developing an organised system of ideas or an objective scientific theory of the whole of human experience. His theorising on the problem of probability also took a cosmological detour later in life. Probabilities are not the result of our lack of knowledge, but a structural property of the universe which governed the nature of change. It does not refer to the nature of changing objects but of changing propensities, processes and states of being. Thus, Popper’s theorising on the problem of determinism was largely conducted without a language of objects and matter; rather it was treated mathematically. Hence for Popper, the central point of his theory was that there was inherent in every possibility a tendency or propensity to realise a certain event. According to Popper, it was only due to the growth of his theorising on propensities that he came to realise its cosmological significance. By this Popper means:                                                            

18 H. Keuth, The Philosophy of Karl Popper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 185. Also see: K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., Appendix *IV.

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Returning to Karl Popper …the fact that we live in a world of propensities, and that this fact makes our world both more interesting and more homely than the 19 world as seen by earlier states of the sciences.

Thus, in the notion of a world of propensities we can see his numerical or eidetic rendering of the possibility for change and emergence in the universe: The tendency of statistical averages to remain stable if the conditions remain stable is one of the most remarkable characteristics of our universe. It can be explained, I hold, only by the propensity theory; by the theory that there exist weighted possibilities which are more than mere possibilities, but tendencies or propensities to become real: tendencies or propensities to realize themselves which are inherent in all possibilities in various degrees and which are something like 20 forces that keep the statistics stable.

For Popper, “propensities are not mere possibilities but are physical realities”. Therefore, he called this an “objective interpretation of the theory of probability”. For Popper such propensities are not “inherent in an object” but “inherent in a situation”, of which the object is only part. Propensities are nonphysical causal powers which “in physics are properties of the whole physical situation”. The “whole physical situation”, refers to the totality of events and processes. This gives rise to our apprehension of common-sense objects of the physical world. Propensities are real in the sense that they are possible as well as “actual” in that “they can act”.21 We can know of their existence through their products; that is, the events which are the realisation of moments and situations that we experience as the physical world and with which our minds must interact.22 Popper summarises the continual process of actualisation of “invisible” Newtonian-like “attractive forces” upon the common-sense                                                            

19

K. Popper, A World of Propensities, op. cit., pp. 7, 9, 11. Ibid., p. 12. 21 Ibid., pp. 14, 18. 22 Popper’s theory of propensities ought to be related to what he called “Compton’s problem” which is the problem of “how abstract entities such as rules and decisions, theories and melodies, are able to bring about changes in the physical world”. See: D. Miller, Out of Error, op. cit., p. 34. 20

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interactive experiences with which the human mind must confront the physical world: The future is open: objectively open. Only the past is fixed; it has been actualized and so it has gone. The present can be described as the continuing process of the actualization of propensities; or, more metaphorically, of the freezing or the crystallization of propensities. While the propensities actualize or realize themselves, they are continuing processes. When they have realized themselves, then they are no longer real processes. They freeze and so become past – and 23 unreal.

For Popper, even before the possibilities or propensities have actualised themselves as objective situations they remain real. They have what Popper called a “kind of reality”. As Pythagoras understood the world of sound to be governed by exact numbers, Popper continued Pythagoras’ extrapolation of this view to include an understanding all events and situations as having objective mathematical correlates in an imagined geometric realm of inherent probabilities. These mathematical or numerical propensities, as Popper called them, that correspond to the possibility of one or another situation arising in the common-sense world have “a measure of this status” that is of having reality. “A measure” qualifies them for being an ontologically “not yet fully realized reality”. The notion of “reality” in A World of Propensities is an extremely complex one. Not only is this notion of the real both virtual, as numerical propensities attest, and actual as the possibility becomes the moment, but the virtual is actual as it is “actively” present at every moment.24 There are degrees and variations of the real that exists in every moment. The real for Popper can have existence or not; it can be likely to have existence in the future, or have little (if not zero) chance of coming into existence. This position is in keeping with other Central European philosophers such as the early Franz Brentano, Anton Marty and Kazimierz Twardowski who also held the distinction between reality and existence. For Twardowski:                                                             23 24

K. Popper, A World of Propensities, op. cit., p. 18. Ibid., p. 20.

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Returning to Karl Popper An object is said to be something real or not real, regardless of whether or not it exists, just as one can talk about the simplicity or complexity of an object, without asking whether or not it exists. That in which the reality of an object consists cannot be expressed in words; but most philosophers seem to agree nowadays that objects like piercing tone, tree, grief, motion, are something real, while objects like a lack, absence, possibility, etc. are to count as not real. Now, just as a real object may at one time exist and at another time 25 not exist, so, too, can something non-real now exist, now not exist.

As can be seen from Twardowski, Popper’s attitude towards reality was by no means unique in Central Europe. This distinction between existence and reality opened up the possibility of the ‘imaginary real’, something Popper had been long familiar with as a result of his early studies on scientific models, which he later in life attempt to explain analogically via Presocratic poems and creation myths. This understanding of reality is owing to Kant who subscribed to the traditional scholastic-rationalistic ontology which holds that different degrees or amounts of reality can be ascribed to things. This possibility was stipulated by Kant’s categories of quality (reality, negation, and limitation). A World of Propensities cannot be fully appreciated without an awareness of the kinds of debates associated with truth and reality that were characteristic of Mitteleuropa. For Popper, the universe is an “open system” characterised by emergence. It is through evolution that new combinations of different sets of basic kinds come together to form new organisms. The successful actions that an organism makes throughout its lifetime does, in Lamarckian fashion, influence the basic sets constituting an organism, and thus its dispositions to act or react to external forces or influences. In regard to natural laws, Popper supported Hume’s “contingency thesis” which holds the position that natural laws could have been other than what they are and that in different possible worlds would give rise to different natural laws.26 It was through the notion of numerical propensities that he aimed to describe the causal interaction of dispositions in a way that explained events and processes of the physical world. It was a determining demand that arose out of an object’s disposition that is                                                             25

B. Smith, Austrian Philosophy, op. cit., p. 160. B. Ellis, The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism (Chesham: Acumen, 2002), p. 78. 26

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the result of a dispositional process that caused events to happen. These events are the actions and interactions of dispositional objects being enticed or attracted to certain outcomes which are numerically most likely. Popper aimed at explaining the problem of causality and the process of interacting dispositions in A World of Propensities: What may happen in the future – say, tomorrow at noon – is, to some extent, open. There are many possibilities trying to realize themselves, but few of them have a very high propensity, given the existing conditions. When tomorrow noon approaches, under constantly changing conditions, many of these propensities will have become zero and others very small; and some of the propensities that remain will have increased. At noon, those propensities that realize themselves will be equal to 1 in the presence of the then existing conditions. Some will have moved to 1 continuously; others will have moved to 1 in a discontinuous jump. (One can therefore still distinguish between prima facie causal and acausal cases.) And although we may regard the ultimate state of the conditions at noon as the cause of the ultimate realization of the propensities…27 6.3 Materialism transcends itself Popper’s contribution in the co-authored The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (1977) with John Eccles was primarily concerned with the theses of his World 3 pluralism. Popper’s early psychology sought to integrate the kind of knowledge we can possess through an integration of a Selzian active problem-solving mind with Bühler’s evolutionary theory of language function. However, when Popper returned to his earlier Würzburgian influences later in life, he related it to the disciplinary needs of the field of neuroscience. This required extensional models of anatomical explanations of brain function to be integrated into his intentional model of the mind which was facilitated thought an evolutionary theory of cognition. The result is a peculiar example of Popper’s metaphysical realism at work in which his World 3 interactionism is extended to account for neurobiological functioning.28 The effect of this is perplexing from a traditional empirical and anti-metaphysical natural scientific                                                            

27 28

K. Popper, A World of Propensities, op. cit., p. 22. See diagram labelled Fig. E7 – 5, in Eccles J., and K. Popper, (1977), p. 375.

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standpoint. Within the materialist standpoint of modern physics Popper believed there was no self-identical entity persisting during all changes in time and that there is an essence which is the persisting carrier or possessor of the properties or qualities of a thing. Popper saw contemporary physics as a materialist endeavour which had great explanatory power despite the lack of a notion of substance or essence.29 In this way we can see that he not only disagreed with the weaker notion of metaphysical determinism, but also disagreed with the stronger scientific notion. There can be no fixity or symmetry between past and future events. Characteristically, Popper used an analogy, in this case a description of a cinematic film to illustrate his point. For Popper, there is no cinematic film of which a part has already passed through the projector and part of which is still to come. 30 By this analogy Popper was attempting to express the indeterminist argument that the future is open. He supported the materialist project in physics because of the practical benefits he saw in its research but this does not mean that he was a physicalist. Physicalism for Popper was the view that the physical world (or World 1) is closed. Materialism however, needed to be a self-transcending notion in order to deal with the problem of minds and bodies. He started with the notion of a material universe in which problem solving is an inherent feature of organisms. With the higher organism, problem solving is actively pursued eventually leading to the critical events that caused the emergence of the human mind. According to Popper’s revised understanding of scientific materialism in The Self and Its Brain the mind is almost seen as an epiphenomenon in relation to the material universe. There is a rather mystical tone with Popper’s description of this process of material transcendence: “We can only wonder that matter can thus transcend itself, by producing mind, purpose, and a world of the products of the human mind”.31

                                                           

29

K. Popper and J. Eccles, J. The Self and Its Brain, op. cit., p. 7, fn 4. J. Watkins, “The Unity of Popper’s Thought”, in Schlipp, A. (eds). The Philosophy of Karl Popper, (La Salle, Illinois: The Open Court,1974), p. 373. 31 K. Popper and J. Eccles, J. The Self and Its Brain, op. cit., p. 11. 30

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6.4 The World 3 thesis Referring to a speculative ‘cosmology’ in relation to Popper, a critical rationalist who emphasised the limited human cognitive capacity for known knowledge, is fraught with dangers. In 1965, Hayek wrote to Popper and inquired about the nature of Popper’s usage of the term cosmology. Popper responded in one of his last lectures “The Unknown Xenophanes” which was pieced together posthumously from his Nachlass and published in The World of Parmenides. In his response he argued that cosmology is: …a way of looking at science from the point of view of trying to understand what happens in the world – as opposed to any narrow view directed to either some technique or some practical problem, or 32 some specialisation pursued without that wider outlook.

Before we can examine the features and characteristics of Popper’s cosmology we must examine his attitude towards the role of cosmology and cosmogony in relation to human knowledge. For Popper, in The World of Parmenides the greatest of all philosophical problems is that of the problem of the universe: It is my belief that philosophy must return to cosmology and to a simple theory of knowledge. There is at least one philosophical problem in which all thinking men are interested: the problem of understanding the world in which we live; and thus ourselves (who are part of that world) and our knowledge of it. All science is 33 cosmology.

It was in relation to the nexus that Popper forged between epistemology and cosmology that he gestured “Back to Presocratics” in The World of Parmenides. 34 Popper saw importance of cosmology for the Presocratics who understood                                                            

his the the the

32 K. Popper, The World of Parmenides, op. cit., p. 45. Arne Petersen related to me in conversation that Popper's ‘Unknown Parmenides’ is the only essay among the ten essays, which make up his ‘World of Parmenides’, that was not finished by him and on which he worked to the end. The text of Addendum 2 to the essay was presented twice - first at the University of Tübingen in 1981 and then in Vienna 1982 - under the title: ‘Toleration and Intellectual Responsibility’. 33 Ibid., p. 7. 34 K. Popper, A World of Propensities, op. cit., p. 7.

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world as “our house”. 35 Popper read into the Presocratics a conjectural, amendable and hypothetical tradition of cosmology and cosmogony which can provide an alternative to theodicies of revelation. The best way to understand the structure of our house was to study how we fit into it. As Popper understood the universe as a continuum of events and processes which led to the formation of new dispositions and hence new laws of nature, our relationship to the universe was best understood from a species evolutionary context. This provided the cosmological viewpoint from which all his social and political theories arose. An important feature of Popper’s naturalism is an evolutionary organicism that is hostile to teleological language. Popper’s cosmos is an open-system. The future is open, and the emergence of mind is seen as opposing Parmenides thesis that there is nothing new under the sun.36 In Popper’s lexicon World 1 is that part of the whole that is comprised of physical objects. World 2 by contrast is used to describe the world of experience (Erlebnisse) and psychological or cognitional processes. It is our ‘apparatus of adjustment’ to our environment.37 Most notably, World 3 is used to describe the reality of thought objects (geistigen Produkte). Popper’s World 3 ontology can be seen to be heavily indebted to Kant, insofar as the language and theories used to describe this third “realm” or “world” follow Kant’s idealism. For a foreshadowing of Popper’s metaphysical thought we can once again turn to Kant’s Transcendental Doctrine of Method, in Section II, where it is stated: I call the world a moral world, in so far as it may be in accordance with all the ethical laws – which, by virtue of the freedom of reasonable beings, it can be, and according to the necessary laws of morality it ought to be. But this world must be conceived only as an 38 intelligible world…

                                                           

35

K. Popper, The World of Parmenides, op. cit., pp. 9-11, 70, 108-110. K. Popper and J. Eccles, J. The Self and Its Brain, op. cit., p. 15. 37 K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 77. Also see: K. Popper, Auf der Suche nach einer besseren Welt, op. cit., p. 16. 38 I. Kant,I. Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., §Transcendental Doctrine of Method, Ch. 2, Section II, p. 519 36

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We can see that Popper’s noetic “third world” or world of objective mind follows Kant’s “moral” or “intelligible” world. Kant continued by arguing that: So far, then, it is a mere idea – though still a practical idea – which may have, and ought to have, an influence on the world of sense, so as to bring it as far as possible into conformity with itself. The idea of a moral world has, therefore, objective reality, not as referring to an object of intelligible intuition – for of such an object we can form no concept whatever – but to the world of sense – conceived, however, as an object of pure reason in its practical use – and to a corpus 39 mysticum of rational beings in it…

Popper’s World 3 ontology shares much with Kant’s concept of the intelligible world. It is in this light that we ought to view Popper’s World 3 and its reality and interaction with the physical world of sense. The confusion and lack of clarity surrounding the object or contents of World 3 in its very ambiguity is reflective of Kant’s corpus mysticum associated with the beings of the intelligible world.40 Popper’s World 3 system is not a grand metaphysical system but a regulative scheme aiming to capture particular features of the universe. This regulative and integrative scheme is guided by NeoKantian epistemological principles however contains within it a logic of synthesis and dialectic that indirectly and implicitly owes much to Hegel’s logic. Popper’s standpoints share much with Hegel’s understanding of mind as a higher degree of organisation for an organism.41 Some idea of how Popper saw the relationship of his neoPlatonic World 3 to Hegel can be seen in Objective Knowledge where he states that: Hegel’s Ideas, like those of Plotinus, were conscious phenomena: thoughts thinking themselves and inhabiting some kind of

                                                            39

Ibid., §Transcendental Doctrine of Method, Ch. 2, Section II, p. 520. Ibid., p. 520. According to Roger Sullivan, this corpus mysticum or “mystical body” was originally borrowed from Saint Paul’s title for the invisible Church. From this we can see the ethical and theological context of this ontological concept which would shed its theological association in its later manifestations in Frege’s and Popper’s thought. See: R. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 216. 41 F. Beiser, Hegel, op. cit., pp. 104–107. 40

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Returning to Karl Popper consciousness, some kind of mind or ‘Spirit’; and together with this ‘Spirit’ they were changing or evolving. The fact that Hegel’s ‘Objective Spirit’ and ‘Absolute Spirit’ are subject to change is the only point in which his Spirits are more similar to my ‘third world’ than is Plato’s world of Ideas (or Bolzano’s world of ‘statements in 42 themselves’).

Popper could see that there was much in common between Hegel’s dialectic and his evolutionary (or Tetradic) schema: P1 TT EE P2. However, he argued that his scheme was fundamentally different as it worked through error-elimination and “on the scientific level through conscious criticism under the regulative idea of the search for truth”. 43 A central different that Popper distinguished between his Tetradic Scheme and Hegel’s dialectic was that he viewed Hegel to be a relativist whereas for Popper’s schema was concerned with the search and elimination of contradictions. For Hegel contradictions are as good as, or better than non-contradictory theoretical systems as they provide the mechanism for propelling Spirit. For Popper, this position was unacceptable as rational criticism and human creativity play no part in Hegel’s automatism. Popper further argues in Objective Knowledge that: While Plato lets his hypostasized Ideas inhabit some divine heaven, Hegel personalizes his Spirit into some divine consciousness: the Ideas inhabit it as human ideas inhabit some human consciousness. His doctrine is, throughout, that the Spirit is not only conscious, but a self. As against this, my third world has no similarity whatever to human consciousness; and though its first inmates are the products of human consciousness, they are totally different from conscious ideas 44 or from thoughts in the subjective sense.

The notion of this realm is also particularly indebted to Gottlob Frege’s theoretical development of the Kantian description of the intelligible world. In a draft of a paper intended for a Kurt Gödel Symposium in 1983, Popper stated that his “World 3” was directly taken from Frege’s unfortunately named “Das Dritte Reich”, or “The                                                            

42

K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 125. Ibid., p. 126.  44 Ibid., p 126. 43

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Third Realm”. 45 This explains why Popper often referred to realms rather than worlds. If we understand the World 3 ontology as being part of a Kantian tradition developed by Bolzano and which was fundamental to the thought of Frege and Tarski, we can have an appreciation of the possibility of non-physical objects that are nonetheless real and exist. 46 Evidence for linking Popper with this tradition can be found in this paper for the Kurt Gödel Symposium, in which Popper wrote that he believed that Gödel can be interpreted as supporting Frege’s and his notion of World 3.47 Through an ontology of physical and non-physical entities Popper believed that he was able to continue his critical-rationalist opposition to subjectivism, expressivism and inductivism. However, it is likely that there was a more direct source for Popper’s objectivist approach to thought-objects. It is highly likely that it was through Bühler’s notion of Gebilde des objektiven Geistes in his Die Krise der Psychologie (1927) that Popper became disposed to the corresponding notions in Frege. Popper, like his teacher Bühler, was part of a broader European intellectual shift from immanentistic (or psychologistic) conceptions of judgement prevalent in the nineteenth century toward ontological (or objectivistic) conception of propositions and states of affairs. Barry Smith states that this shift was effected both by Frege as well as independently in the work of Brentano’s disciples. In regard to Brentano’s disciples, this involved a hard-fought struggle for both ontological and psychological clarification. Barry Smith relates how Bolzano had done much in effecting a clear logical distinction between judgement and presentation, or what Bolzano referred to as “propositions in themselves” and “presentations in themselves”.48 Similarly in Frege’s Begriffsschrift a distinction was made between the objective “judgeable content” and the act of judging which according to Smith                                                            

45 Draft paper for a Kurt Gödel Seminar. 16-6-1983, Klagenfurt. In this paper Popper tells us that he believed that Gödel can be interpreted as supporting Frege’s and his notion of World 3. 46 In Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem Popper stated that Bolzano’s understanding of Sätze an Sich (sentences in themselves) corresponded to the theory of World 3. See: K. Popper, K. Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem. Op. cit., p. 50. 47 Draft paper for a Kurt Gödel Seminar. 16-6-1983. Karl-Popper-Sammlung, Klagenfurt. 48 B. Smith, Austrian Philosophy, op. cit., p. 186.

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since Whitehead and Russell has established itself quite generally among logicians. Popper in Objective Knowledge supportively stated that: “As for Frege, there can be no doubt about his clear distinction between the subjective acts of thinking, or thought in the subjective sense, and objective thought or thought content”.49 However, overall Frege never fully committed to a separate ontological step.50 Hence, it is safer to assert that Popper’s objectivism most likely was established from exposure to the Brentanist tradition, particularly given the links between the influence of Bühler and via Bühler’s circle to the work of Selz as pointed to by Michal ter Hark’s research. According to ter Hark, Selz argued that “knowledge is always of facts or state of affairs, thereby drawing on the theory of objects (Gegenstandstheorie)”, which was developed by a number of philosophers including the Brentanist Meinong, Külpe, Husserl, and Stumpf, who coined the general term state of affairs (Sachverhalt).51 Popper stated in Objective Knowledge that: Bolzano’s statements in themselves and truths in themselves are, clearly, inhabitants of my third world. But he was far from clear about their relationship to the rest of the world…It is, in a way, Bolzano’s central difficulty which I have tried to solve by comparing the status and autonomy of the third world to those of animal products, and by pointing out how it originates in the higher functions 52 of the human language.

This notion of Sachverhalt would reappear in Popper’s ontological and situational logical thought as “the whole physical situation”. It is how the Sache stand in relation to the thinking subject that was crucial to the logico-ontological thought on judgement. Popper’s argument that facts do not stand by themselves, that not only do they require interpretation and have meaning only in relation to a particular theory, but a “fact” as an object, is theory laden. This relational character of facticity was also found in Selz’s Gegenstandstheorie through his coinage of the term Sachverhältnis by combining Sachverhalt and Verhältnis. Ter Hark states this aimed to                                                             49

K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p 127. B. Smith, Austrian Philosophy, op. cit., p. 186. 51 M. ter Hark, Popper, Otto Selz, and the rise of evolutionary epistemology, op. cit., p. 98. 52 K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 127. 50

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bring into prominence the relational character of facts. 53 Ter Hark notes Selz’s reference to Alexius Meinong’s Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie (1904). 54 The idea of Sachverhalt linked many of Popper’s early Würzburg influences from Bühler’s school such as Oswald Külpe and Otto Selz as well as the Polish analytic tradition via Twardowski.55 When we look at Popper’s earliest works we can see the influence of Brentano. For example, in his 1927 Zur Philosophie des Heimatgedankens Popper utilises Brentano’s intentionalism (Intentionalität) in relation to the notion of Heimat which is held as an Objekt. The notion of Heimat is treated as a Relationsbegriff which continues the Selzian emphasis upon the relational character of facts understands the object Heimat according to Meinong’s language of Gegenstand which comprises a complex interaction of things (Dingen), persons (Personen), and intentional objects (geistigen Inhalten).56 Popper’s later World 3 ontology is anticipated in this very formative work. Popper’s World 3 thesis which seemed like a strange deviation for this scientifically minded philosopher in the Anglo analytic world, was little more than a continuation of Popper’s formative very Central European Gegenstandstheorie. Thus, the elements which comprise the category of Gegenstand (Dingen, Personen, and geistigen Inhalten) would be separated and interned in separate ‘worlds’; World 1: the physical world of material objects, World 2: the subjective world of individual people and the subjective process of thinking, and World 3: the world of the objective content of thoughts. The theory of three worlds is a return to his earliest work in a way that aimed to develop it in new naturalistic directions. However, Popper’s understanding of the notion of objectivity and the objective reality of the contents of our mind have parallels in Frege’s understanding that numbers exist objectively in the world and are not just a subjective psychological process. In The Foundations of Arithmetic (1950), Frege makes the distinction between “objective form” from what can be handled or spatial or actual, which                                                            

53

M. ter Hark, Popper, Otto Selz, and the rise of evolutionary epistemology, op. cit., p. 98. 54 Ibid., p. 208. 55 B. Smith, Austrian Philosophy, op. cit., p. 187. 56 K. Popper, “Zur Philosophie des Heimatgedankens”[1927], in Frühe Schriften, op. cit., pp. 18-19.

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foreshadows Popper’s distinction between World 1 and World 3 objects.57 For Popper, the development of this realm or “World 3” had an important explanatory function for how institutions operate according to some Parmenidian invariant or law. World 3 raised important theoretical concerns for Popper’s complex evolutionary materialism, which not only became dualist but pluralist. 58 As has been argued above, an important feature of Popper’s understanding of materialism was its scepticism about any ultimate substances or essences.59 This understanding of a materialism that transcends itself has often led to a confusion concerning what constitutes the basic entities of the physical world as well as to a confusion concerning the entities or “inmates” of “the third world”. The problems and confusions concerning Popper’s World 3 ontology are so great that scholars have been reluctant to deal with it and as a consequence, it has not received the kind of scholarly attention that it deserves. Klemke, for instance, believed that Popper’s notion of “the third world” was a significant and fascinating topic, but that it contained many problems and confusions. Klemke argued that the fundamental problem concerned the “inmates” of this third world. Klemke brings our attention to the fact that the contents of this realm are: “Theories, the state of a discussion or of a critical argument, and the contents of journals, books and libraries”. However, books, libraries and language are also stated by Popper to exist in World 1 as they are also physical. 60 Further, Popper referred to World 3 as a “linguistic third world” and called the third world “a world of language”.61 Klemke made the distinction between the two types of entities that subsist in World 3. Firstly, the “logical contents” of books, libraries or the “objective contents of thought”. 62 Secondly, as a                                                             57 G. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic: A logico-mathematical enquiry into the concept of number J. L. Austin, Trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, [1980], 1950), p. 33. 58 Dualism is the thesis that holds an ontological distinction between minds and bodies, the former not being reducible to physical entities. The pluralist thesis adds a further ontological category to the dualism of minds and bodies in the form of the products of our minds as existing independently of the former two categories. 59 K. Popper and J. Eccles, J. The Self and Its Brain, op. cit., p. 7. 60 E. Klemke, “Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, and the Third World”, in Philosophia, 9(1), (Netherlands: Springer, 1979), pp. 45, 47. 61 K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 118, 120, 148. 62 E. Klemke, Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, and the Third World, op. cit., p. 52. Also see: . Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 74, 106.

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linguistic world it contains theories, theoretical systems, conjectures and arguments. However, Klemke also points out that Popper attributed a third and more problematical entity to the objects of World 3. World 3 for Popper not only contained the logical contents of books and objects, but also the books and libraries themselves.63 Klemke argues that this is implausible as the logical content of a book cannot be identified with or be classified on the same level as a book itself.64 The simultaneous existence of books, like paintings, as objects existing in both the physical world and the third world is an ontologically contentious proposition. David Bloor picks up on the deeper historical and ethical concerns embedded in Popper’s theory of World 3 that are often overshadowed by rational and formal analysis of categorising and relating concepts to one another. Bloor saw Popper’s World 3 as “replaying, in modern dress, an old drama”. For Bloor: His picture of three worlds resonates with the myths and imagery of Judaeo-Christian theology. Man is a creature midway between the material and the spiritual, an admixture of clay and God. For Popper a personal God has been replaced by an impersonal Science, the 65 world of spirit by the world of knowledge.

One has to be careful about how one uses the term “ontology” in relation to Popper’s later works such has his “World 3 ontology”. What he was offering is not an ontology in the strictest sense. The reason why Popper did not believe that he was offering a traditional ontology as such was because he did not ask questions such as “What is mind?” or “What is matter?”66 Rather, World 3 ontology may best be understood praxeology as a heuristic device aiding problem solving and argumentation. It does not encapsulate the totality of knowledge, as epistemology is primarily concerned with the aspects of experience that can result from scientifically demonstrable knowledge.                                                            

63

K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 74, 115-118. E. Klemke, Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, and the Third World, op. cit., p. 53. 65 D. Bloor, “Popper’s Mystification of Objective Knowledge”, in Scientific Studies, 4(1). (Sage Publications, 1974), p. 69. For an interesting discussion on the understanding of objective truth for medieval scholasticism and its modern legacy see: Znaniecki, F. The Social role of the Man of Knowledge, [1940] Oxford: Transaction Books, (1986), Ch. 3. 66 K. Popper and J. Eccles, J. The Self and Its Brain, op. cit., p. 4. 64

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Further, as Popper in The Self and Its Brain argued for an ontic structural realism in which things don’t really matter, rather it is the relations in which those things stand that that matters. Objects are understood via their relational positions, or what they ‘stand against’ (Gegenstand). This view holds that there are relations without relata in a world made of structures, plastic systems and nets of relations. Such as relational or processual approach to a theory of the universe may not be able to produce a clear ontology or basic physical picture. Popper’s later concerns with plastic systems and numerical propensities can also be seen as a consequence of a world-view which prioritizes relations without relata. Popper’s understanding of the objects of our thought differed due to his evolutionism and interactionism from Frege’s. This renders the possibility of the concept of number being created by thought to partake in a psychological process as well as existing independently from the thinking subject. Unfortunately Popper’s appropriation of Frege’s notion of “Das Dritte Reich” and the thought objects that exist within it, when combined with Popper’s evolutionism and interactionism create many concerns. For Popper, entities such as theories are the objective contents of thoughts as Frege understood, not as the subjective act of thinking. The subjective acts of thinking are ontologically separated into a realm or world that is communicatively inaccessible for us according to Popper’s epistemology, and are ‘known’ only intuitively. 67 World 2 may be construed as a realm of processes linking World 1 neurology with World 3 thought products. World 2 may be understood as not being autonomous, but rather as a schematic positioning of mind in relation to physiological underpinnings and our innocuous and creative engagement with World 3 in the process of thinking. We can never completely understand these worlds analytically, as we can never satisfactorily envisage Popper’s scheme as this would involve impossible visualisations. We can only roughly sketch aspects of Popper’s schema in relation to particular problems or functions that we choose to focus on. World 3 is a non-visualisable metaphysical framework aimed at describing visualisable yet invisible recurring processes and functions.                                                            

67

K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 109. Also see: G. Frege. “Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung”, in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik , 100, (1892), p. 32.

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Lotze, along with Frege, and Brentano and his followers also made the distinction between the psychological act of thinking and the content of thought. 68 For Lotze the act of thinking is an inherently determinate and temporal phenomenon; the content of thought however, existing within an alternative mode of being. Lotze saw the physical world and the world of thinking as having the same temporal ontological status whereas the contents of our thoughts exist in another realm. 69 In Popper’s notion of mind the objects of our knowledge are categorically distinct from the problem-solving process of thinking. As such the processes of thinking and the contents of thoughts in themselves interact within a pluralist schema. This interaction reflects a Peircean indeterminist cloud-like system in which the subsystems of the circuit (our subjective cognition and the autonomous and subsisting inmates of World 3) exercise a mutual plastic control insofar as the system is closed; at least in relation to cognitive functioning such as problem solving and learning is concerned.70 Despite Popper’s refinement, Lotze’s theory concerning the attribution of a separate mode of being for the content of thought to the process of thinking is maintained. According to Hacohen, Popper had a tendency towards this mode of metaphysical thinking long before his ontological turn. Hacohen observed that already in Die beiden Grundprobleme Popper described “objective intellectual structures” as logical in character, and drew the comparison with this to his later scientific and World 3 thought.71 The ontology that Popper developed in his later years builds upon Lotze’s premise and accords with the new mathematical logic found in the thought of Frege. When A World of Propensities is compared with the thought of Frege striking similarities can be seen. For Frege there is an objectivity to the truth of propositions of the sort that Popper understood by his use of Tarski’s theory of truth. As Frege stated: “it seems, that a proposition no more ceases to be true when I cease to think of it than the sun ceases to exist when I shut my eyes”. Hence, objectivity of scientific statements holds independently of the                                                             68

D. Williams, Truth, Hope, and Power: The Thought of Karl Popper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. 64. 69 For a discussion of Lotze’s idealism see: G. Santayana, Lotze’s System of Philosophy (London: Indiana University Press, 1971), pp. 155-181. 70 K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 249. 71 M. Hacohen, Karl Popper, op. cit., p. 105.

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thinker, indeed holding a mode of existence even when nobody is actually thinking them. Frege thought that thinking of numbers as either spatial or as subjective was fundamentally wrong, because “numbers are neither spatial nor physical nor yet subjective like ideas, but non-sensible and objective”. Thus, according to Williams, Frege reapplied the notion of numbers from the Kantian category of ‘things’ to that of ‘concepts’.72 Frege, like Lotze, used the term wirklich in the German sense of the word ‘real’ or ‘actual’. The problem of kinds of reality in Popper’s ontology also appeared in an earlier guise in the work of Frege. Frege described physical objects as wirklich. However he denied that numbers and logical objects in general were wirklich. According to Dummett in Frege and Other Philosophers (1991), Frege held that: …thoughts can be regarded as wirklich only in a special sense, and that although they are not altogether unwirklich, their Wirklichkeit is 73 of a quite different kind from that of things.

Thus, the argument has been made by Gregory Currie that Frege’s realism also extended to numbers and logical objects, which must, like thoughts, participate in something that is not unwirklich.74 However, how different the reality of such intentional objects is to physical things is not clear from Popper’s writings. In describing the ontological status of propensities in a way that identifies them with the logical objects of Frege, Popper wrote: Propensities, like Newtonian attractive forces, are invisible and, like them, they can act: they are actual, they are real. We therefore are compelled to attribute a kind of reality to mere possibilities, especially to weighted possibilities, and especially to those that are as yet unrealized and whose fate will only be decided in the course of 75 time, and perhaps only in the distant future.

It is interesting here to note the attribution of reality to unrealised entities whose very existence is their not-yet realised mode                                                            

72

D. Williams, Truth, Hope, and Power, op. cit., p. 64. M. Dummett, Frege and Other Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 98. 74 G. Currie, “Frege on Thoughts”, Mind, 89, (1980), pp. 234-248. 75 K. Popper, A World of Propensities, op. cit., p. 18. 73

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of being. Popper perceives that the world at a non-common-sense level is constituted by such entities. This view of the world as being constituted by events and processes was outlined previously in The Self and Its Brain.76 For Popper, realism was a many sided affair as there are “many sorts of reality which are quite different”. Popper admitted the metaphysical nature of his realism and its inability to be demonstrated or refuted. Nonetheless he argued for realism as “the only sensible hypothesis”.77 At this stage it is important to make the distinction between plural “worlds” and philosophical dualism. Popper rejected monistic world-views such as subjective idealism or physicalism or other variants of materialist reductionism. However, he also denied a strict dualism of the Cartesian occasionalist kind and other forms of parallelism. For Popper, as there is no ultimate substance, hence we cannot posit mind in this way. What we can say is that the emergence of a new entity (mind) reinforces an argument for the need to model a complex hierarchy of entities occupying different realms, levels or “worlds” within a self-organising system or organic whole, and interaction or “downward causation” characterises its mode of activity. With this we begin to sense Popper taking off and letting his metaphysical wings take flight. Popper’s Platonic metaphysics has not received the kind of attention that it deserves as a result of his infamous criticisms of Plato in The Open Society. However, from his lectures and unpublished works we can see that he softened his stance towards Plato later in life. Popper’s hostility in his scandalous book has done much to cloud the debt he believed he owed to the divine Plato. The Open Society may well be seen as a unique reading of Plato for a particularly traumatic period, both in Popper’s life, and in world history; a reading which remains enigmatic to this day. From an early draft to a lecture Public and Private Values Popper made the distinction between Plato’s city in heaven and utopia. The ‘city of heaven’ was read by Popper through a Kantian lens as an argument in support of regulative ideals or dreams that are needed to inspire social reformers. This is distinguished from utopianism which sees such personal dreams of an ideal society as realisable. Whereas the Platonic city in heaven is a postulate of a necessary cognitive function involved in social renewal                                                             76 77

K. Popper and J. Eccles, J. The Self and Its Brain, op. cit., p. 7. D. Miller, Ed. Popper Selections (Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 220, 223.

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and in the redressing of inevitable decline, utopianism represents a flawed cognition. For Popper, while beautiful dreams may inspire the social reformer, “they should be kept in their place”. Popper asserts that “It is far from me to say anything against such dreams, apart from demanding that they should be recognized as what they are – inspirations to action – but bad guides for dealing with serious political problems”. 78 It can be adduced from Popper’s reasoning that we should not deny particular world views but encourage individuals to envisage them as a particular type of cognition ill-suited for politics. What we need is a better understanding of the kind of cognition suited for the public agenda. For Popper, this was a critical rational mode of active problem seeking and eliminative empirical trialling. Despite the negative picture Popper painted of Hegel, Popper’s late World 3 arguments share many important features with Hegel whilst remaining distinct from Hegel’s system within the safety of Neo-Kantian epistemology. Popper’s Doctrine of the Three Worlds rather than being dismissed as the folly of his old age, is rather an interesting twentieth century instance of overcoming dualism’s problem of a strict separation of minds and bodies with the aid of contemporary developments in the natural and formal sciences. His project aimed at renewing the dualist thesis to better accord with our current state of cognitive science in a way that buttressed it against the traditional dangers of the various positions of materialism, vital materialism or solipsism. Despite all the influences mentioned above, it was Plato who discovered the third world and that part of the influence or feed-back of this world impacts upon ourselves; that we try to grasp the ideas of this world and use them as explanations. However, Plato’s world was distinct from Popper’s in that the Sage’s world was divine, unchanging and true, whereas Popper’s world is man-made and changing. It contains both true as well as false theories and especially open problems, conjectures and refutations. Plato saw dialectical argument as leading to the third world, whereas Popper regarded arguments and open problems as the most important inmates of this world. For Popper:

                                                            78

K. Popper, Public and Private Values. (1951 unpublished)

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Plato envisaged the objects of the third world as something like nonmaterial things or, perhaps, like stars or constellations – to be gazed at, and intuited, though not liable to be touched by our minds. This is why the inmates of the third world – the forms or ideas – became concepts of things, or essences or natures of things, rather than 79 theories or arguments or problem.

Popper recognised that contents and objects of thought seem to have played an important part in Stoicism and in Neo-Platonism. While through the Neo-Platonic tradition Plotinus maintained the separation between the empirical world and Plato’s world of Forms and Ideas, however like Aristotle destroyed the transcendence of Plato’s world by placing it into the consciousness of God (the immanent states of consciousness of the divine intellect). Popper performed a similar operation to Plotinus here as our cognitive functions include reasoning as a kind of transformative intellection, however not between the Soul and the Intellectual-Principle, but via the interactions between our cognition and the realm of ideas. The logic holds, and despite the more mundane and naturalistic rendering of Popper’s revision of Plotinus’s cosmology. Speaking in the language of learning from error rather than intellection should not be considered a diminution of the noetic act. 6.5 An esoteric reading This section suggests possible esoteric ways of approaching Popper’s writings which extend beyond analytic and literary criticism. It is possible to read Popper’s thought as containing its own esoteric mysticism. Popper’s thought contains many of the features associated with high mysticism. Mysticism as understood in this context does not refer to any kind of religious or occult practice, rather it refers to truth gleaned when he is often at his most scientific and technical resulting in transcendental insight. Often this occurs at the point where his exploration of the physical universe results in a transcending of its material features. Numerical propensities as ‘physical realities’ are real forces inhere in every situation and constitutes the ‘world process’. We live in a world of propensities which ‘attract us’ and                                                             79

K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p 123.

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‘entice us’ to keep life moving forward and the world unfolding. We have seen by his reference to the Popper-Lynkeus Talmudic passage that in some sense worlds are something that are created and destroyed around us. This mysticism can also be discerned in his cognitive linguistics at the point where we encounter the universals inhere within every word. There is much in his World 3 cosmology concerning the role we structurally play in the creation of this realm that lends itself to mystical interpretation. Popper shared with Wittgenstein a mystical aesthetics that saw in the cosmos a Weltharmonik, Kepler’s  book by the title  being amongst Popper’s most prized works in his antique book collection. The imaginary real of his cosmology needs to be taken seriously. Further, the role of faith in Popper’s thought, particularly a moral faith in being optimistic about the world in the face of unspeakable evils is also characteristic of a mystical discernment. Despite Popper’s fallibilism when it comes to rational knowledge associated with mental cognition (Erkennen) there is what we might call a gnosis underpinning the correctness of the optimistic view of the world and about humanity that no amount of exposure to the brutish aspects of existence can shake. This is related to a belief in personal transformation, improvement in the realm of moral standards. This task of creating a better world by overcoming harm through error elimination as a feature of life. There is a higher occluded register to Popper’s thought. In this way Popper’s optimism was a response to the pessimism he read in Parmenides. To understand this we have to look at his translation of the following poem by Parmenides on Selen’s love for radiant Helios (DK 28 B14-15) and the theological reading of this that Popper was contributing to: Bright in the night with the gift of his light, Round the Earth she is erring, Evermore letting her gaze 80 Turn towards Helios’ rays.

For Karl Reinhardt, the epistemological fall of man can be read in this poem by Parmenides giving the names of two things, light and night, instead of only one. Popper argued that previously scholars                                                            

80

K. Popper, The World of Parmenides, op. cit., p. 77.

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have claimed that Parmenides understood that it was the light of Helios that could be ‘named’ because this was existing and being while night was unreal and should not have been named. For Reinhardt, the forbidden move was to name light, a no-thing where mortals, as intellectual sinners ‘went astray’. This lead them to believe in no-things, which Popper stated includes the void, unreality, empty space and the possibility of motion, change, movement, warmth, youth, love, illusion and desire (for example Helios’ rays in B15). On the other hand night is on the side of darkness, heaviness, body, cold, old age, death, non-movement, matter, the one real being and the permanent, unchanging and timeless truth. For Popper, naming both fuses the Way of Truth with the Way of Conjecture; something that Popper himself attempted by accepting a correspondence theory of truth within a fallibilist conjectural view of human knowledge. The difference being that for Popper, Parmenides’ view was fundamentally pessimistic. “Parmenides sees life in all its warmth and movement and beauty and poetry. But the icy truth is death”.81 Popper’s process philosophy may be related to his desire to avoid Parmenides pessimism. It is in relation to this problem of pessimism rather than methodological debates for the natural sciences that the gravity of Popper’s arguments against a ‘closed’ deterministic universe can be seen. The processual nature of the cosmos is argued for in Popper’s thought through the reality of the imaginary real entities in the universe such as fluctuating propensities, emergent situations and extensional interacting minds. We can read these all as participating in a Neo-Platonic sense in the formation of reality through an intersubjective active intellect that informs objectivity. Objective probability or numerical propensities are Popper’s twentieth century equivalent to Heraclitus’ burning flame. We need not choose the Paramendian reality of an icy night. As for Heraclitus, God as identified by a cosmic principle is revealed as the identity of all opposites. Quoting Heraclitus “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger”.82 Heraclitus saw that a theory of things misunderstood and misinterpreted the appearances of often invisible processes. As Popper himself saw such invisible processes as inherent in the cosmos it may be possible to read his                                                             81 82

Ibid., p. 82.  Ibid., p. 248.

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cosmological thought, particularly his work on objective probability as a kind of unspoken gnosis behind his critical rationalism: But we do not know what the reality of the higher development (Höherentwickelns) of creativity is. I think that the name of God is not only not to mention vain, but not at all to be mentioned. The 83 daimon of Socrates is still the most tactful hint.

Popper’s refusal to refer to God in his cosmological thought should be read not as an opposition to theism, but rather the result of a religious, indeed Jewish, piety concerning the naming of God which colours his mystical reading of Socrates and the Presocratic philosophers.

                                                            83

K. Popper, Alle Menschen sind Philosophen, (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2006), p. 26. “Was aber das Wesentliche des Höherentwickelns, des Kreativen ist, das wissen wir nicht. Ich glaube, dass man den Namen Gottes nicht nur nicht eitel nennen soll, sondern überhaupt nicht nennen soll. Das Daimonion des Sokrates ist noch der taktvollste Hinweis.”

Chapter Seven Towards an Open Rationality

In a lecture given in Alpbach, Erkenntnis und Gestaltung der Wirklichkeit (1982) Popper stated that Erkenntnis is the searching for the truth (Wahrheitssuche); the search for objective knowledge or explanatory theories, not certainty (Gewiẞheit). 1 The distinction between truth and certainty is crucial. A solution can be objectively true without being certain. We can have an objectively true solution to a problem, but we can never by certain about what this means. We are behoved to continually search for a better understanding of what knowledge we have in light of new problems and challenges: Leben ist Abenteuer, Leben ist Risiko.2 Popper’s view of knowledge in the objective sense which is both inter-subjective and lacking a single knowing subject is typical of the moral values of rationalists, that is, anti-irrationalist rather than a priorist to use Ajdukiewicz’s distinction. 3 The value of inter-subjectively secured objectivity is explained by Ajdukiewicz as follows: …first, to protect society from the domination of the meaningless cliché which often has a strong emotional resonance and, because of this, influences individuals and whole social groups; and, secondly, in order to give protection from the uncritical acceptance of views proclaimed by their adherents sometimes with the full force of conviction but which are inaccessible to testing by others and thus might be suspected to be false. The point is to protect society from nonsense and falsehood. This postulate seems as sensible as the requirement of railway administration which allows a passenger to

                                                            1

K. Popper, In Search of a Better World, op. cit., p. 12. K. Popper, Alle Menschen sind Philosophen, op. cit., p.29. 3 K. Ajdukiewicz, Problems and Theories of Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 46-47. Even though Popper made room for “an irrational element” or “Einfühlung” within his scientific method, he cannot be said to be an irrationalist. See: K. Popper, K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit., pp. 8-9. 2

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Returning to Karl Popper travel only when he can produce a valid ticket and not when, although he has paid for the ticket, he does not want to show it. Paying for the journey corresponds in this comparison to the truth of an assertion; readiness to show the ticket corresponds to the possibility that anyone can become assured as to whether the 4 assertion is valid or not.

Popper understood the dangers that the above understanding of irrationalism posed for society. In this way a communicative or linguistic theory outlining the conditions for objectivity becomes central to Popper’s political thought. Being able to show a paid ticket is a metaphor for the role that communicative consensus plays within a correspondence understanding of truth. We have to be willing to show the ticket we paid for in order to provide valid solutions to collective problems. This can be seen in a lecture, The Theory of Totalitarianism (1946), in which Popper stated that: “a tolerant society must, of course, tolerate such irrationalism, as long as it is not an aggressively intolerant brand of irrationalism”. Further, for Popper, such a tolerant society must contain some kind of “minimum philosophy common to, at least, a great majority”. 5 This common philosophy is analogous to the inter-subjective testability necessary to secure objectivity. As a correspondence theory of truth requires a consensus upon what facts are to be accepted, so does Popper’s understanding of Periclean democracy require a kind of correspondence of policy with a “minimum common philosophy”.6 A consensus theory, in the realm of collective human action, is an aspect of correspondence. Popper’s liberalism was based upon his evolutionary understanding of how humans cognitively respond to their ecology in the search for a better, more hospitable (lebensfreundlich) environment. The utopian motivation to search for a better world is perfectly natural and is akin to a fish searching for a better passage to swim. From the beginning of life, organisms searched for a better ecological niche. Hence, when Popper talked of a ‘search for a better                                                             4

K. Ajdukiewicz, Problems and Theories of Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 46-47. K. Popper, After The Open Society, op. cit., p. 137. 6 “Periclean” in this sense refers to Popper’s often repeated quote of Pericles: “Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it”. See: K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 7. Also see: K. Popper, After The Open Society, op. cit., p. 137. 5

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world’, the searcher’s (Sucher) world-view is skepsis of a neverceasing series of trials and error correction initiated by hope-driven work: Das Leben ist skeptisch. 7 Liberalism is a philosophy of hospitality. Pluralism is a state in which the free interaction of different cultures leads to emergent possibilities for creative adaptation to new social ecologies. A pluralist society is one in which every individual is able to search for a better world, a more hospitable environment: Jedes einzelne Lebewesen versucht, eine bessere Welt zu finden. Intercultural dialogue and mundane interaction between individuals in such a hospitable environment constitutes a corrective force for individuals to correct aspects of their own culture and that of others: Das Leben riskiert, es experimentiert. Democracy is the possibility to reduce ecological harm by peacefully throwing out bad rulers or criticise bad policy. As through speech we have evolved the ‘colossal’ capacity to make our theories criticisable. Without speech, culture would not be possible and speech enables the development of culture. Thus, discussion as an evolved capacity is central to the culture of a democracy. In the Bühlerian sense it is an evolved higher linguistic function which has created a more hospitable environment as it enables us to resolve conflict without violence. We kill the Gestalten, the theories, rather than the people. In such a social ecology, the young man from the National Socialist Party that Popper encountered in 1933 in Carinthia would have to resolve his disputes by discussion rather than violence. For Popper, evolution is on the side of free-discussion and whatever political and social forms which best accommodate it. Despite Popper’s opposition to scholasticism, he was engaging with many of its perennial concerns, however rendered in the secularised language of modern scientific thought. The continuing relevance of Popper’s thought partly lies in his Platonism which is everywhere increasingly supported in the sciences. For Popper there are laws of nature, however these are for us, never directly knowable. They are not grounded in any notion of substance, let alone essence. Rather the language of plastic systems and recurring schemes is more appropriate. The describable interactions between such systems which lead to recognisable events and processes at the empirical level are apprehended in neo-Platonic realm of weighted possibilities and numerical propensities which actualise themselves in a completely                                                             7

K. Popper, Alle Menschen sind Philosophen, op. cit., pp. 28-32.

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random, fluctuating and unpredictable way. Popper argued in Realism and the Aim of Science that: If the picture of the world which modern science draws comes anywhere near to the truth – in other words, if we have anything like ‘scientific knowledge’ – then the conditions obtaining almost everywhere in the universe make the discovery of structural laws of the kind we are seeking – and thus the attainment of ‘scientific knowledge’ – almost impossible. For almost all regions of the universe are filled by chaotic radiation, and almost all the rest by matter in a likewise chaotic state. In spite of this, science has been miraculously successful in proceeding towards what I think should be 8 regarded as its aim.

Yet such indeterminism gives rise to law-like plastically controlled systems based upon spontaneous ordering of mathematically describable structural schemes of recurrence. For Popper, all clocks are clouds. It is within such schemes of recurrence that dispositions arise. How they arise is described by a Pythagorean realm of numerical representations which are gleaned in the modelling of the most basic structures in the physical universe at the level, where matter itself no longer can be demonstrated. We rise to the Platonic forms of World 3 (of numerals) after a descent into extended materiality so deep that matter itself becomes lost in the void of Parmenides’ ‘reality of night’. After all, metaphysical research programs have influenced the development of physics since Pythagoras. Anti-intuitive imaginings and the possibility for coherent and commonsensical visualisations are not central to the process of rational understanding. A theory which may lead to a nonsensical or impossible visualisation may nonetheless be rationally understandable in relation to its explanatory power and logical and pragmatic consequences for solving problems.9 World 3 and numerical propensities and properties cannot be read literally, the real of objective probabilities is an imaginary-real used to describe relations of occurrence. We cannot empirically find the objective numerals, just as we cannot find the shells of the Kabbalist or the creation serpents which                                                             8

 K. Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science, op. cit., p. 146. 

9

K. Popper, Unended Quest, op. cit., p. 93.

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live in various waterholes throughout Australia. We can read these theories of Popper as cosmological exercises in picture building or cartography. The World 3 architectural images are an act of imagining that aimed to integrate an array of sources from Bühler’s evolutionary linguistics to the work of the theoretical physicists alongside the perspectives of Plotinus and Parmenides into a picture of the cosmos. The concrete world of the senses is the only world that our words can refer to in order to describe the unconditioned noetic structures such as the logic of discovery. The ‘place’ or station in which this logic subsists is named and given architectures via the transcendental method of analogically applying such terms used in descriptions of sensible reality to intentional and metaphorical states. The success of great works of art or music are subjected to the same method of trial and error and the uniqueness of particularly great works is understood by Popper to attest to the reality (tatsächlich) of an unknown logic of discovery. Popper opposed what he believed was a general tendency within aesthetic theory which emphasised our inability to attain knowledge of universals through intuition as necessarily leading to pessimism. The social consequences of this pessimism was the general belief that without an appreciation of the unknowable from which our great artistic (as is the case with scientific) discoveries are made, culture becomes “a commercialized industry” that is both kitsch and vulgar. 10 Therefore, Popper’s epistemological anti-expressivism and anti-intuitionalism do not lead to a rejection of the depths of illumination and transcendence that can be gained from art. Rather, by appreciating our very intellectual limitations in the face of the creative process and its products, a reverence for great works of art as having an almost religious sanctity is assured. What Popper really believed in was what he called a Third World (also referred to as World 3), “something which is beyond us and which we do interact, in the literal sense of interaction, and through which we can transcend ourselves”. It was music that was the art that meant most to Popper, who stated: “I can lose myself in my music which for me is an objective experience through which I try to improve myself”. 11 Popper’s reluctance to delve further into art,                                                            

10

“Schöpferische Selbstkritik in Wissenschaft und Kunst,” 1979b July 26. Opening address, Salzburg Festival, Salzburg, Austria. Typescript and English text. KarlPopper-Sammlung, Box: 223.6-7. See: English translation, p. 32. 11 K. Popper, After The Open Society, op. cit., p. 49.

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literature and aesthetic matters is not the result of the lack of cultural capital. To the contrary, it is reflective of this deep respect, almost piety which grew from his upbringing in a culturally elite Viennese household in which Kunst (specifically music in the Popper household) was revered as religion. Popper was someone whose formative years were spent in the scientifically and aesthetically vibrant modernist city of Vienna of the fin-de-siècle, and held an unshakable faith in the progress of science, rationality and even moral standards in overcoming many of the hardships of reality. Abandoning the belief that our knowledge grows would mean giving up on the philosophical optimism for improving human societies. What we would be left with is a philosophical pessimism, a return to the “broken timer” mentality. What we are left with would be a return to the “darkest of pessimisms” of Popper’s youth, where harm cannot be reduced or avoided, rather nihilism, resignation and relativism govern our brutish actions in a world without the possibility of a better future. John Maynard Keynes came to hold a similar position later in life by viewing his early opposition of “conventional” religious morality as being ‘disastrously mistaken’. Keynes eventually saw that he had ignored the ‘insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men’, and the dependence of civilization on “rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved”. 12 Where Keynes saw a greater role for conventional religious morality, Popper held steadfast to Enlightenment rationality as providing the only real grounds for optimism as we cannot know that the essence of human nature is human wickedness. The notion of original sin is replaced in Popper’s thought with the more sober understanding of life arising out of error. In an obscure lecture titled On the Conspiracy theory of Religion (1970) Popper argued that it was the “conspiracy” of religion that fostered a fear of life grounded in the view of the wickedness of humans, the existence of suffering, harmful actions and ultimately the event of death which resulted in a pessimism requiring doctrines of salvation. Popper responded later in life by arguing that we should allow this to make us despondent. Despite the particular “ugliness” of human caused suffering we must not look upon life as a “vale of tears”. For Popper “the earth is a miracle, fundamentally something                                                            

12

R. Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master (London: Penguin Books, 2009), pp. 150-151.

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like a paradise…it is wonderful”. We must appreciate the extent of paradise that exists in this world and act to prevent the worst kinds of human vileness, rather than to exaggerate them. To do this we must aspire to the ideal of not hardening our hearts. “If you want to be a lovable person then try not to harden your heart and try to remain really sensitive to suffering”. This is achieved not by dwelling on one’s own suffering, but by acting to reduce the suffering of others.13 Popper emphatically argued that there are no grounds to be pessimistic about humanity. We must constantly envisage a better world, a more hospitable human ecology as this is in accordance with the way our mind operates: we search and we do so adventurously. By better valuing and understanding nature and the culture enveloping us, Popper believed that we could dispel any doubt concerning the meaningfulness of the world, notwithstanding the gravity of the sufferings that humans are inflicted with. Life has improved its environment for millions of years to our advantage (Das Leben verbessert die Umwelt für das Leben).14 If we just do what we have evolved to do, that is actively search out errors – we will have no cause to be pessimistic. Perhaps this was even the grounds for a philosophy of happiness by which Popper lived. The way this happiness grounded in an evolutionary anthropology can be related to a speculative philosophy of personhood may be worth exploring. Popper’s evolutionary inspired optimism is derived from an understanding that we cannot know if there is an ultimate grounded nature for humans. Even if there is such a thing as human nature we cannot assume that by using this term we are referring to an essence that is unchangeable and that is by nature crooked. In this way Popper’s scientific realism can be used to respond to the Dostoyevskian theological pessimism associated with Bishop Rowan Williams’s insistence that we still have “no way of making sense of the most deeply threatening elements in our environment” and the experience of cruelty, harm or suffering at the level of individual persons.15 However, for Williams the humane sensibility provides us with an “awareness that the roots of motivation” and the awareness that such roots may not be exhausted by an impulse to improve our ecological habitat as Popper held. Indeed, life may be understood to                                                             13

K. Popper, “On the Conspiracy Theories of Religion,” (Unpublished lecture, 1970).  K. Popper, Alle Menschen sind Philosophen, op. cit., p. 191.  15 R. Williams, Faith in the public square (Bloomsbury: London, 2012), p. 1. 14

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arise out of error, but this may not be the whole story. Popper’s optimism provides a response to this problem of pessimism associated with the Christian tradition. Popper’s optimism in the face of the ‘vale of tears’ was an insight that he gleaned via the discovery of a world of moral demands, a realm of thought more sublime and beautiful than any artistic expression or scientific discovery. The emergence of the world of moral demands was the light that resplendently shone though in night of the Parmenidean reality discussed in the previous chapter. It was in The Open Society that Popper presents this glorious idea: Man has created new worlds-of language, of music, of poetry, of science; and the most important of these is the world of the moral demands, for equality, for freedom, and for helping the weak.16

I would like to demonstrate one final point about Popper’s aesthetics in relation to a moral argument concerning the nature of life. In order to do so I will, perhaps unexpectedly, turn to one of his arguments in the philosophy of science. As I have earlier argued, his aesthetic thought is best gleaned not from his limited commentaries on paintings or music, rather in his theoretical discussions of modern physics which he regarded as a high point in human creativity and expression. There is also an aestheticism to his own later paintings of a non-visualisable metaphysical cosmology (Weltbild). I will turn to Popper’s agonistic discussions with Schrödinger as an example of his use of the ‘transcendental method’ of applying or extrapolating analogously the arguments from one discipline to a totally unrelated discipline however in a way that aims to maintain its original logical force. In his autobiography, Popper referred to Schrödinger’s ‘beautiful’ book What is life? Here Schrödinger argued that the characteristic feature of life, given that matter is considered to be alive, is that life feeds on negative entropy. Thus, it is “by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic”. From a statistical perspective by feeding on negative entropy an organism delays its “decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)”. Feeding on negative entropy is the ‘device’ by which life maintains itself in a relatively high level of orderliness (or low level of entropy).17 Popper admitted that all organisms do this,                                                            

16 17

 K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 65.  K. Popper, Unended Quest, op. cit., p. 137. 

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however he denied that this was the characteristic of life, as even a steam engine or an oil-fired boiler can do this. Permit me to take this a step further. If we accept Schrödinger’s definition of the characteristics of life there follows certain moral implications for this; implications that Popper so forcefully argued against in The Open Society and The Poverty of Historicism, and no doubt he himself was aware of in his engagements with Schrödinger. If life were definable as such, then conservation of forms via replication becomes a good which challenges the more progressive and liberal views of emergence, freedom construed in the Kantian sense and creativity. A society governed by a view of human societies characterized by Schrödinger’s definition is nothing less than the attempt to realize the totalitarian utopia’s that Popper so infamously attacked. Conserving low levels of entropy by maximizing levels of orderliness, by ‘sucking’ orderliness from its environment is reflective of the principles by which Nazi Germany operated, and indeed the way many colonies were established. No wonder Hitler looked to the genocidal expansion of American settlement across the continent as a model for his quest for Lebensraum. Homogenised modes of living based upon dogmatic thinking directed towards cultural and eugenic preservation informed by infallible laws enforced by strong leaders enables the machination of life understood by the minimal requirement of “feeding of negative entropy”. The totalitarian society is a society which understands people as little more than the steamengine or an oil-fired boiler. Such a materialistic view of life grounded in unreason and intolerance leads to a society in which human ‘decay’ and ‘degeneracy’, and indeed anyone whose existence undermined the uniformed preservation of orderliness, by introducing difference and diversity itself could not be tolerated. The argument for the characteristic of life as maintaining a low level of entropy, is an argument, expressed in  statistical language, for the gas chambers for the gulags as devices for maintaining orderliness as an absolute and realizable ideal. The aesthetics in Popper’s writings are found in the way his arguments from physics, and mathematics, evolutionary biology and linguistics, to social and ethical arguments were deeply connected, the logical force of an argument in one discipline having implications for arguments in other functionally differentiated fields of research. There is a remarkable creativity and indeed beauty in the way Popper was able to show how problems in functionally

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differentiated domains of intellectual inquiry can speak creatively to problems extraneous to those of the domain from which they were conceived. We can see from this discussion that Popper was an intensely ethical thinker. His scientific thought was not limited to forwarding knowledge in the scientific disciplines; it informed the development of a new naturalism for morality.

Archival Material Note on sources: The following is a list of works held at the Karl-PopperSammlung (University of Klagenfurt, Austria) that are used in this study which are also contained at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University. A separate subsection is given to the materials that were later donated to the Karl-Popper-Sammlung, by Arne F. Peterson and are catalogued separately as Sammlung Arne F. Petersen as they are not part of the original material sourced from the Hoover Institute. Speeches and Writings 2.1-24. Unidentified writings, n.d. General Fragments. 12. 1 “Ethical and Methodological Individualism,” n.d. (probably 1960s or early 1970s). Speech given in the United States. Typescript. 12.9 “Freedom and Truth,” n.d. Speech fragment. Holograph. Includes notes on interpretations. 12.12 “Historicism and the Treason of the Intellect,” n.d. Holograph. 37.4 “Utopia and Violence,” 1947 June. Speech, Rencontres Philosophiques de Bruxelles, Institut des Arts, Brussels, Belgium, English published version, 1948. 39.3 “The Study of Nature and Society,” 1950 February 16 April 27. The William James Lectures, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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39.17 “Public and Private Values.” Speech, 1951. Typescript and holograph. 49.20-21 “Zum Thema Freiheit,” 1958 August 25. Speech, The European Forum Alpbach 1958, Alpbach, Austria (subsequently published in Die Philosophie und die Wissenschaften: Simon Moser zum 65. Geburtstag, 1967). German and English versions. 50.16-18 “Woran glaubt der Westen?” 1959. Speech, Zurich, Switzerland (published in Erziehung zur Freiheit, 1959) Typscript, printed copy and English translation (modified version) typescript. 50.26 “Epistemology and Industrialization” (Contd.) Published version (English), 1975-1979. 83. 10 “A Realist View of Logic, Physics and History”. Printed copy. 84, 3 “Education versus Commonsense”. 1966 June 10. Commencement speech, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado. Typescript. 84.13 Contribution to Imre Lakatos memorial volume, 1967. Notes. 105.3 “On the Conspiracy Theories of Religion,” 1970 April 3. Typed notes. 128. 5-13 “Some Notes on Early Greek Cosmology,” 1953 May 8. Henry Dan Broadhead Memorial Lecture, Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand. Holograph and typescript. 129. 21-22 “Historical Prophecy as an Obstacle to Peace.” Sonning Prize Lecture, 25.3.1975, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Typescript.

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164. 4 Contributions to the C. H. Boehringer Sohn Symposium, The Creative Process in Science and Medicine, Kronberg, Taunus, Germany, 1974 May 16-17. Typescript. 164.10 “Wissenschaft and Kritik,” 1974 September 5. Speech, The European Forum Alpbach 1974, Geistige und Wissenschaftliche Entwicklung der Letzten 30 Jahre, Alpbach, Austria. Typescript. 166. 14 “How I See Philosophy,” (contd.) Printed copy. Mitteilungen: Gesellschaft der Freunde der Universität Mannheim, 1978 October. 167. 6 “Gespräch mit Sir Karl Popper”. 1975 June 1. Interview conducted by Conceptus staff (not published) Typescript. 208. 3 "Interaction and The Reality of World 3," 1978 August 25. Paper, The European Forum Alpbach 1978, Knowledge and Power: Problems of Legitimacy in Culture and Society, Alpbach, Austria. (Holograph, in part typescript) 208.5 After August 25. Includes copy for distribution. Miscellaneous pages. 208.7 Joseph Agassi’s question put to Karl Popper. Holograph. 208.12 “Interaction and the Reality of World 3” (contd.) German translation) for publication of the forum’s proceedings). Typescript. 208.13 Letter to the editor, Die Presse, 1978 September 16-17. Holograph, typescript and printed copy. 208, 15-20 “Some Reflections on the Prehistory of our Western Universities and on their Present Crisis”. 1978 October 5. Speech, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Holograph and notes, typescript, German translation.

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208, 22 “The Self and Its Brain.” Paper, American Philosophical Association, Hilton Hotel, Washington, D.C., 1978 December 28. Notes, holograph and typescript. 209.2-3 “Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie,” 1979. Notes, including notes by Jeremy F. G. Shearmur. Typescript (in part holograph). Includes correspondence. 218, 9-12 “On the Part Played by Some Empirical Refutations in the History of Physics.” 1979 February 11 or 12. Popper for a seminar or conference, The Falsifications in the History of Physics. Holograph, typescript. 218.13 “On the Part Played by Some Empirical Refutations in the History of Physics.” (contd.) 1981 August 222.1 “Special Relativity and Moving Clocks.” 1979 May. paper. (Princeton Symposium?).Holograph and typescript. Contributions to the Third C.H. Boehringer Sohn Symposium. Structure in Science and Art, Kronberg, Taunus, Germany,1979 May 2-5. 223.6-7 “Schöpferische Selbstkritik in Wissenschaft und Kunst,” 1979 July 26. Opening address, Salzburg Festival, Salzburg, Austria. Typescript and English text. 223.13 “Über die sogenannten Quellen der menschlichen Erkenntnis,” 1979 July 27. Speech upon receiving an honorary doctorate from the Universität Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria. Printed copy. 224.3 “Über den Zusammenprall von Kulturen,” 1980 May 14. Speech, Austrian Expatriates Society, Vienna, Austria. Typescript. 224.29 Interview for Mondadori, 1981 February or March. Typescript.

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254.7 "Freude an der Arbeit," Speech. 1985 August 31. Holograph. 254.10-11 “Erkenntnistheorie und das Problem des Friedens,” 1985 September 19. Speech. Holograph and typescript. Correspondence 272. 4. Bartly, William Warren, III. 1968. 276.10. Berlin, Isaiah, 1952-1982. 282.24. Carnap, Rudolf, 1932-1967. 294.6 Feigl, Herbert and Maria, 1945-1978. 300. Gombrich, Ernst H. and Leonie (Ilse) 1. Undated 2. 1943 3. 1944 4. 1945 5. 1956-1983 305. Hayek, Friedrich August and Helene von 11. Undated 12.1936-1938 13. 1940-1947 14. 1950-1958 15. 1960-1969 16. 1970-1977 305.32. Heisenberg, Werner, 1934-1935. 313.10 Jewish Year Book, 1969. 316.23. Kraft, Julius, 1945-1960. 316.24. Kraft, Victor, 1923-1974. 321.4. Lorenz, Konrad Z., 1969-1984.

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329.41 Moser, Simon (Österreichisches College), 1950-1982. 354. 8. Tarski, Alfred, 1935-1981. Sammlung Arne F. Petersen Given to the Karl-Popper-Sammlung on 30.5.2006 1.1 Beyond the Search for Invariants. Eröffnungsansprache, International Colloquium on the Philosophy of Science, Bedford College, London, 11.7.1965. 1.2 Rationality and the Search for Invariants. Skizzen und Entwürfe (IIIrd VERSION), hs. John Carew Eccles. Statement über die Wirkung Eccles’ auf KRP. Masch. 1 S. 1.8 Popper on Parmenides. Two letters with an answer. (The content of the ,Yellow Folder’.) Brief KRPs (Brandeis University) an AFP, 12.11.1969. Entwurf : Hs., 17 S. + masch., 5S. (Part of this letter was later incorporated into the Broadhead Lecture.) Siehe : Addendum zu Essay 6 von WoP. Brief (entwurf) KRPs (Brandeis University) an AFP, 24.11.1969. Hs., 2 S. Could you try to get for me H. Gomperz’ Parmenides article from Imago ...Vgl. 1.10. Siehe: Addendum zu Essay 6 von WoP. Brief AFPs, London, an KRP, 3.12.1969. Hs., 2 S. 5.8 Unintended Consequences : The Origin of the European Book. By Karl Popper. A lecture delivered on November 2nd, 1982, in the old Imperial Palace (Hofburg) in Vienna to celebrate the opening of an exhibition of books by the President of the Federal Republic of Austria. Masch. + hs. Korr., 18 S. Bücher und Gedanken : Das Erste Buch Europas. Kopie des gedruckten Festvortrags. In : Popper, Karl R. : Auf der Suche nach einer besseren Welt. München, Zürich : Piper, 1984. S. 117 – 126.

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5.14 Motto of the Paper. Hs., 1 S. 5.17 Books and Thoughts. The Origin of the European Book. By Karl Popper. Datiert : 20.11.1984. Masch. + hs. Korr., S. 1-18 Unintended Consequences : The Origins of the European Book. By Karl Popper. Masch. + hs. Korr. S. 1-18. 6.3 Support and Countersupport. Induction becomes Counterinduction, The Epagogē returns to the Elenchus. Essay 10 von WoP. 3 Expl. Masch. + hs. Korr., 11 S. 8 Korrespondenz.

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Name Index Adler, Alfred. 61 Adler, Max. 15, 17 Adorno, Theodor W. 6, 32fn, 86 Agassi, Joseph. 9, 17fn, 19, 20fn, 26-27, 72, 124 Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz. 34, 36fn, 111, 113-115, 151152 Albert, Hans. 74 Alt, Jürgen A. 88fn Aristotle, 34fn, 36, 55, 102, 104-110, 111fn, 122-123, 147 Bacon, Francis. 42, 108-109, 120 Bar-Am, N. 96fn, 102, 104fn, 105 Bartley, William. 53-55, 59, 68 Beiser, Federick. 107fn, 135fn Berlin, Isaiah. 17, 22 Berkson, William. 49 Bernstein, Eduard. 15 Bloch, Ernst. 26 Bloor, David. 141 Boyer, Alain. vii Bolzano, Bernard. 136-138 Brentano, Franz. 8fn, 97, 121122, 124, 129, 137, 139, 143 Bronowski, Jacob. 92-94 Brown, James R. 109fn, 110fn Buber, Martin. 23

Bühler, Karl. 23, 33, 36-38, 45,57-58, 66, 87-93, 100101, 112-116, 121-124, 131, 137-139, 153, 155. Büttemeyer, Wilhelm. 106 Carabine, Deirdre. 110fn Carnap, Rudolf. 31-34, 38, 59, 76, 112, 124 Cohen, Hermann. 9, 11, 23-24, 33, 49 Currie, Gregory. 144 Descartes, René. 42, 109, Dietrich, Wendell S. 25 Dummett, Michael. 144 Eccles, John C. 19fn, 102fn, 123fn, 126fn, 131, 132fn, 134fn, 140fn, 141fn, 145fn Edmonds, David. 12fn, 13fn Ehrenfels, Christian. 122 Eidinow, John. 12fn Einstein, Albert. 20-21, 69, 89, 93, 118 Ellis, Brian. 83-84, 130fn Engels, Friedrich. 15-16 Euclid. 59-60 Feyerabend, Paul. 30, 35, 122fn Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 39, 42

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Frege, Gottlob. 91, 109-110, 113, 121, 126-127, 135fn, 136-144 Freud, Sigmund. 61,125 Friedman, Michael. 34 Fries, Jakob Friedrich. 29, 45, 47-53, 68, 103 Frisby, David. 32-33 Gattei, Stefano. 45, 53-54, 5758, 60, 62, 70fn, 86-87 Gombrich, Ernst. 15, 117 Gomperz, Heinrich. 25 Gomperz, Theodor. 11, 25 Gödel, Kurt. 136-138. Gregory, Frederick. 51 Habermas, Jürgen. 6, 85-86 Hacohen, Malachi H. viii, 1, 89, 12fn, 13-16, 18fn, 21, 25, 28, 30fn, 45, 47, 58fn, 50, 51fn, 52fn, 54, 60, 61fn, 65fn, 68, 72fn, 121-123, 143 Hanfling, Oswald. 111fn, 115 Hansen, Troels E. 57, 58fn, 68, 72fn, Hayek, Friedrich A. 7, 42, 106-108, 110, 111fn, 133 Hegel, Georg. 42, 47, 52fn, 101, 107fn 135-136, 146 Heidegger, Martin. 8, 48-49, 125, 126fn Henke, Ernst L T. 51, 52fn Hess, Moses. 22 Hilbert, David. 109 Hobbes, Thomas. 42 Hudson, Wayne. viii Hume, David. 1, 42, 50fn, 52fn, 54, 62-63, 130

Husserl, Edmund. 48-49, 138 Janik, Allan. 39-40, 99 Jarvie, Ian. vii, 58fn, 81fn, 126 Kant, Immanuel. 1, 10, 20, 2326, 29-35, 37, 41, 45-52, 61-63, 65-67, 69-71, 75-77, 83, 86, 88, 94-95, 101, 103105,107, 110, 125, 130, 134-137, 144-146, 159 Keuth, Herbert. 127fn Kierkegaard, Søren. 27-28, 37, 54, 56 Klemke, E. D. 140-142 Kołakowski, Leszek. 30, 37, 85 Kotarbiński, Tadeusz. 36, 124 Kraus, Karl. 16 Krąpiec, Mieczysław Albert. 104fn Kraft, Julius. 31, 46-49, 58, 64, 65, 68 Kraft, Victor. 38, 40, 59, 67, 73, 74fn, 76fn Kripke, Saul. 115fn Külpe, Oswald. 66, 138-139 Lassalle, Ferdinand. 15 Leśniewski, Stanisław. 124 Levinas, Emmanuel. 8 Locke, John. 42, 76, 102 Lorenz, Konrad. 50, 89, 123 Lotze, Hermann. 121, 143-144 Łukasiewicz, Jan. 34fn Marcuse, Herbert. 6 Marty, Anton. 129 Marx, Karl. 2, 15, 31, 81 Meinong, Alexius. 138-139

Name Index

Mendelssohn, Moses. 22-23, 25 Mill, J. S. 42 Miller, David. 32fn, 35fn, 43, 46, 50, 81 Munz, Peter. 50fn, 98, 99fn Musgrave, Alan. vii, 97-98 Natorp, Paul. 33, 49 Nelson, Leonard. 29, 47, 4950, 52 Neurath, Otto. 27, 30, 38, 68 Newton, Isaac. 69, 86, 92-94, 118, 128, 144 Nietzsche, Friedrich. 3 O’Hear, Anthony. vii Parmenides. 56, 99, 105, 133134, 148-149 Petersen, Arne F. vii, 24fn, 38, 45, 72fn, 90fn, 118fn, 133fn Plato. 1, 4, 22, 24, 36, 104107, 111, 115, 121, 125, 136, 145-147, 153-154 Plotinus. 135, 147, 155 Popper, Israel. 13, 18fn Popper, Simon. 12-13, 27 Popper-Lynkeus, Joseph. 1819, 148 Pralong, Sandra. 36fn, 81fn Pseudo-Dionysius. 110 Quine, Willard V. O. 111 Rojszczak, Artur. 40, 97 Rosenzweig, Franz. 23 Rousseau. 42 Russell, Bertrand. 30, 39, 138

187

Safranski, Rüdiger. 126fn Salamun, Kurt, viii, 41 Santayana, George. 143fn Selz, Otto. 45, 61, 64, 66, 70, 88-90, 117, 123, 131, 138139 Schelling, Friedrich. W. J. 42 Schiff, Jenny. 13 Schlipp, Arthur. 87fn, 92, 132fn Schlick, Moritz. 59, 63, 123 Shearmur, Jeremy. vii, 45fn, 73fn, 75fn, 109 Smith, Barry. 8, 106, 124, 137 Socrates. 101, 105, 150 Stadler, August. 49 Stadler, Friedrich. 31 Stokes, Geoffrey. 79, 85-86, 122 Stumpf, Carl. 41, 138 Tarski, Alfred. 34, 39, 81-89, 92-99, 108, 124, 137, 143 ter Hark, Michel. vii, 45, 57, 60-61, 64, 139-140 Toulmin, Stephen. 39-40 Trebitsch, Arthur. 16 Twardowski, Kazimierz. 35, 122, 124, 129-130, 139 Voltaire. 42-43 Watkins, John. 132fn Weber, Max. 74 Weininger, Otto. 16 Weinstein, David. 14, 20 Wettersten, John R. 49, 68 Whitehead, Alfred North. 139 Willey, Thomas E. 49 Williams, Douglas E. 143-144

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Williams, Rowan. 157 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1, 6, 8, 12fn, 13fn, 34-35, 39-41, 50fn, 55, 57fn, 63-64, 69, 70fn, 79-82, 95-99, 101, 103, 105, 111-112, 114116, 148 Walter, Bruno. 13 Wolenski, Jan. 35fn, 83fn, 84fn

Xenophanes. 56, 57fn, 68, 133 Zakai. Avihu. 14, 20,

Subject Index Aesthetics 117-120, 150, 158159 Abstract society 108

Dogmatism/anti-dogmatism 39fn, 50, 52-53, 80, 104, 159

Cartesian intellectualism 108109 Causality 127, 131 Certainty 51, 115, 151 Closed society 3, 50 Conjecture and refutation, method of, 20, 77, 118 Conventionalism 113fn Cosmology 133-134, 148, 158 Cosmopolitanism 10-11, 16, 20, 21fn, 26 Critical rationalism 7, 30, 35fn, 39, 43, 47, 53, 73fn, 74, 75fn, 86 Criticisability 74, 100

Empiricism 43, 62, 70, 76, 83, 105fn Enlightenment, Jewish Enlightenment, Kantian, radical, anti-enlightenment, English, Scottish and French Enlightenments 912, 15, 20fn, 22-23, 24fn, 24fn Epistemology 33-34, 43, 45fn, 49-50, 52-54, 56-58, 60, 62-73, 75, 77, 80, 82, 85, 90-91, 101-104, 121, 125126, 133, 135, 141-143, 146, 148, 155 Essentialism 82, 101-104, 110, 117, 130fn Evolution, evolutionary cognition, evolutionary epistemology 88, 91, 101-102, 113, 117, 121-122, 125,130-131, 134, 136, 140, 142, 152-153, 155, 157, 159

Deductivism, deductive logic 4, 39, 42, 48, 61, 63-65, 70, 84, 96, 103, 105 Demarcation, criteria of 47, 50, 58fn, 62, 70 Democracy, and science, and social reform, piecemeal social engineering 145-146 Determinism 127, 132 Dialogue 20, 153 Dispositions 59, 75, 116fn, 126, 130-131, 134, 154

Fallibilism 24, 54, 102-103, 117, 148 Falsifiability 2, 4, 7, 25, 32, 35-36, 51, 69-70, 72fn, 74, 124, 127

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Foundationalism, anti- 34, 5156, 67-69, 73, 101, 104, 107, 114 Freedom, and determinism, and individualism, democratic institutions, metaphysics of 13, 23, 107, 125, 134, 158, 159 Geometry, axioms, postulates and definitions of 45, 5761, 125 Historicism 2, 11, 26, 125fn, 159 Hermeneutics 86 Human nature 5, 156-157 Hypothetico-deductive 4, 43, 54, 84, 108, 134 Idealism, anti- 11fn, 35fn, 47, 65-66, 89, 94-95, 126, 134, 143fn, 145 Ideology 53 Indeterminism, vs determinism, metaphysical 56, 112fn, 117, 154 Individualism 17, 25 Induction/inductivism 4, 37, 45-46, 48, 52, 56fn, 60-62, 68, 107 Inter-subjective, notion of objectivity 35, 92, 113-115, 151-152 Intuition/Intuitionism 47, 54, 56, 85, 100fn, 105fn, 135, 155 Irrational/Irrationalism 27, 34, 43, 53-54, 100, 151-152, 156

Kantianism 49, 57fn, 65, 103, 111, 117fn, 135-137, 144146, 159 Liberalism 7, 10, 14-15, 17, 21, 80, 152-153, 159 Logic of Scientific Discovery 2, 36fn, 50fn, 51fn, 75, 76fn, 77fn, 100fn, 103fn, 113fn, 124fn, 126, 127fn, 151fn, Logical positivism, Vienna Circle 31-35, 38-39, 59 Marxism 55 Methodology 4, 38fn, 102 Mind, mind-body problem and interactionism, dualism, materialist philosophy, and self 50-52, 57, 66, 86, 8889, 93-94, 109, 117, 119120, 123, 125, 127-132, 134-136, 142-157. Moral responsibility 25-26, 32, 38-39, 133 Natural science, difference in method from social science 52, 55, 69, 113, 149 Naturalism 27, 58, 75-76, 8384, 91, 95, 98, 108, 113, 122-123, 126, 130-131, 134, 139, 146-149, 152, 160 Negative utilitarianism 18 Neo-Platonism 3-4, 19, 44, 74, 135, 147, 149, 153 Objects, kinds of, thought objects 51, 102, 113, 122-123,

Subject Index

126-128, 130-131, 134-142, 147 Objective knowledge 7, 65fn, 82, 89, 126, 152 Objectivity; see: intersubjective Ontology 38, 43, 56, 89-90, 108fn, 121-122, 125-126, 130, 135, 137, 139-144 Open rationality 151 Open Society and Its Enemies 2, 10, 26, 100-107 Open system 130 Positivism, also see logical positivism Poverty of Historicism 2, 26, 125fn, 159 Presocratics 24, 28, 130, 133134, 150 Progress 10, 15-16, 20, 24, 26, 39, 55, 92-93, 112, 118, 156 Propensity theory of probability, numerical propensities 72fn, 122, 126-131, 142, 144, 147, 149, 153-154. Prophetic ethos, false prophets 1, 12, 21, 26, 42-43, 107 Quantum computation 4 Quantum mechanics/ theory 72fn, 126 Rationalism, rationality 7, 25, 31, 36-38, 42-43, 47, 53-55, 58, 60, 62, 67, 70, 72-75, 85-86, 91, 93, 96, 100, 107, 115-116, 136, 148, 151153, 154, 156

191

Realism, and common sense, metaphysical, methodological 4-5, 84, 94-95, 12, 118119, 131, 142, 144-145, 154, 157 Reality, kinds of 85, 87-88, 9395, 98, 102, 122, 127, 129130, 134-135, 144-145, 149-150 Reason 2-3, 10, 37, 47, 51-54, 58, 70, 75, 85, 105, 125, 134 Relativism 80, 83, 156 Religion 10, 18, 23, 27, 55, 156 Self-criticism, self-critical attitude 3, 118 She'elot ut'shuvot 22 Situational analysis and situational logic 58, 102, 113114, 125, 128-129, 138, 147, 149 Social democracy 7, 15, 49 Social and political theory, and thought 6, 79 Suffering 156-157 Testability 37, 77, 152 Tolerance, paradox of 17, 5556, 93, 159 Totalitarianism 22, 152 Tradition 23, 25-27, 35, 117, 158 Transcendence 76, 86, 89, 99100, 105fn, 107, 110, 116, 119, 125, 131-132, 134, 140, 147, 155 Truth, common sense notion, consensus theory, corre-

192

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spondence theory, consensus vs. correspondence, coherence theory, as a regulative ideal, also see verisimilitude 2, 35, 41, 46, 48, 51-52, 56, 59, 64, 65, 6769, 74, 79, 83-85, 97, 112, 124, 130, 136, 138, 141fn, 143, 147, 149, 151-152, 154 Universals 38, 75, 76, 87, 110, 116 Utopianism, utopia 54, 145146, 152, 159

Values, social and cultural, epistemic and nonepistemic 82, 88-91, 99100, 118, 125, 145, 151 Verificationism, verifiability 85, 76-77 Verisimilitude 35, 83, 85, 9899 Violence, non-violence 16-17, 53, 153