Karl Popper makes me feel like a lapsed alcoholic – someone clinging, slipping, painfully from sobriety. Always uncomfortable and always angry at myself. Critical rationalism – or Popper’s method of conjecture and refutation – bends back and circles inward, it loudly demands on being attacked. The tougher and more rigorous the beating, the more bloodied and broken, the better! Behind the theory is a smiling, smug kind of masochism. It doesn’t just concede that it might be wrong, but insists upon it! And welcomes the fight.
As far as philosophy goes, as far as philosophy can be popular, Popper isn’t (perhaps only Friedrich Nietzsche can still claim such a thing)! But a large number of people do pay a misconnected lip service to his work; as if they know they should utter his name in certain moments, and nod along knowingly when they hear it back at them. Most people with even the slightest finger on the pulse of philosophy and science fall into this category: they understand that Popper has done something important, but are often at a complete loss to explain what that is!
Everyone else (a much smaller group) seems to have wonderful stories of personal enlightenment – stories of how they discovered Popper’s philosophy in a haze of opening light; something profound, life changing and positive. It was not this way for me. I found him frozen in time, still deep in the trenches – a veteran, scarred and embittered and fighting a war that by all accounts should have been over long ago:
I have solved a major philosophical problem: the problem of induction. (I must have reached the solution in 1927 or thereabouts.) This solution has been extremely fruitful, and it has enabled me to solve a good number of other philosophical problems. However, few philosophers would support the thesis that I have solved the problem of induction. Few philosophers have taken the trouble to study-or even to criticize-my views on this problem, or have taken notice of the fact that I have done some work on it. Many books have been published quite recently on the subject which do not refer to any of my work, although most of them show signs of having been influenced by some very indirect echoes of my ideas; and those works which take notice of my ideas usually ascribe views to me which I have never held, or criticize me on the basis of straightforward misunderstandings or misreadings, or with invalid arguments.
This unconcealed grievance is not the tone that you would ordinarily expect from a philosophical book – in fact it is the type of tone that causes professors around the world to routinely reject undergraduate essays at a glance, or hush-away the arguments of students around tutorial tables. It reveals a painful amount of personal investment and emotion, and seems to say a lot more about the person than the problem.
Objective Knowledge was first published in English in 1972, and it was certainly not Popper’s best book. But many years later these were the first words of his that I would read, and so I saw the man and his frustration before I saw, or understood, his work. But I also knew of the “major philosophical problem” that he claimed to have solved in such simple, matter of fact, language. Deep in the pages of Jean-Paul Sartre at the time, the consolation that I found from this clear, unphilosophical tone, cannot be understated. Moving a little higher in my chair, I read on…
The problem of induction (or David Hume’s problem) sat at the pointy end of the most important – and most troublesome – question in the history of philosophy and reason: how is it that we can know anything to be true? The implications of such an answer were – and still are – obvious. The sheer size of intellectual energy that was thrown at finding a solution is hard to comprehend – almost as much as the combined impact, and despair, caused by the constant failure to do so.
So here was Popper, living and breathing within the academic circles that prized this epistemological answer so highly, and yet 45 years after delivering it he was again putting pen to paper in the desperate hope that someone, anyone, would listen. He continued: “This chapter is an attempt to explain my views afresh, and in a way which contains a full answer to my critics.” And so that anger and impatience begins to make a little more sense.
The unusual fizz about Karl Popper sits somewhere between what he did and how he was treated. Popper clearly expected more of a celebration, or at the bare minimum a type of noisy recognition – after all the most important question in all of philosophy now had an answer. That he couldn’t see how badly his solution would be received is a little hard to understand. It was as if Popper were a doctor treating a young and excited woman. She walks into his clinic, affectionately rubbing her swollen belly, and tells him that she is five months pregnant and would like to know the sex of her unborn baby. Popper runs a few tests and tells her that she is not pregnant at all, just fat! She storms out, and Popper is left bemused, thinking that she would have been happy to learn the truth.
Before Karl Popper came along the world of philosophy had a monstrous hole in it, after Popper the world of philosophy was left wishing it still had the hole. People weren’t just expecting an answer, they were expecting a certain kind of answer. Something a little more beautiful.
And it is here where things become uncomfortable for me. Unlike most Popperians I can see and sympathise with this – I was also very slow to recognise my mistake and to grasp the richer beauty within Popper’s theory. It is a mistake that I continue to make… and one that I don’t always catch. I hinge on other people and their good sense to kick me back into shape. As much as this troubles me, I feel that I am in good company: Karl Popper himself was, it seems, a bad Popperian.
From those lucky enough to have met Popper, there are no shortage of stories that start something like this: I confronted Popper about…, I challenged Popper on…, I criticised Popper for… And invariably such stories end with: not only did he ignore my ideas, but he did so in the petulant tone of a parent annoyed with their child for speaking out of turn.
Central to critical rationalism is a happy embrace of error correction – a desire to be proven wrong and to then change one’s mind. This, and only this, is how progress happens and how we can edge closer to truth. Popper of course was riddled with the failures that his theory lacked – he was human, and he didn’t seem to like criticism very much. Strangely perhaps, this makes me happy – I prefer him flawed and fallible, down in the mud with the rest of us, and with knowledge itself. It also depersonalises the man from the theory, which can’t be a bad thing.
There are a few ways for a philosopher to become immortal, to live on after their death. They could have historical importance like Plato or Aristotle, they could shake imaginations through bombast and excitement like Friedrich Nietzsche or Karl Marx, or they could be right! And what they said could be true!
The mathematician and astronomer, Sir Hermann Bondi, once proudly looked upon the place that all his effort, toil, creativity, success and reputation had come from and described it like this: “There is no more to science than its method, and there is no more to its method than Popper has said”. Here all that discomfort rushes back at me again. The philosophy of Karl Popper has reach… real-world reach. From critical rationalism and the answer to how knowledge is created, we naturally shift into a theory of science; then it is on to art, to morality, to economics, to society, to policy and politics (bad science and bad systems of government have exactly the same thing in common).
Popper will survive because what he said works, and it works in every realm of life where truth matters. And yet anything this big, with such a nerve-rackingly large scope onto the world, and with such success, also, quite unavoidably, has the ring of a fraud to it. Trained through experience the mind unpleasantly jumps to the back-woods footprints and late night crop circles of conspiracy theory.
The line that matters here is between science and pseudo-science; with Popper’s anger now steeled onto Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Sigmund Freud. The demarcation that Popper cut between these two types of knowledge-seeking is most easily understood in terms of behaviour: how do theories deal with the prospect of being proven wrong. Everything that has ever come from Popper not only opens itself to criticism and dissolution, but also in new, hearty, and enterprising ways that were made possible only by Popper himself. Popper may not have been very good at dealing with criticism, but his theory is!
To learn that you are wrong should be a very liberating experience, because to learn that you are wrong is to also learn how and where you can improve. It stops you from continuing in error. It also means that objective truth – whether or not we can ever get to it – must exist, because if it is possible to be wrong then it is also possible to be right. And the bigger our mistakes, the bigger the possible leap forward.
By turning around the science of Francis Bacon in this way, and forcing people to abandon their long-trained instincts (criticism is often a deeply unpleasant and resented experience for most people, regardless of how mild it is) Popper was never likely to win many quick friends. He would have to wait, much too long perhaps, for people to slowly recognise the wealth of his philosophy within their individual lives.
Most troubling for many though, is likely the problem of what happens next. No matter how much effort and criticism and destruction of false theories we move through, there can never be a point of revelation and light where finally the words: this I know is certainly true, can ever be said. Every truth about the world that we hold dear, and seems unshakably solid, is always just delicately balanced on the precipice of refutation and collapse. It means that no matter where we step-to after discovering and correcting a mistake, that new place, that new strong-hold, not only might be a blunder of some kind as well, but almost definitely is. The only hope we have, is that this new mistake turns out to be also a slightly better mistake than the last one; and that we discover this new error as quickly as possible, so that we can move on to the next one after that.
Popper demands something painful from us – he demands that we become careful and well-suffering adults. Here is where things become most uncomfortable for me. I don’t match-up well to this standard. I am persuaded, the ideas sink-in and capture me, but each day and with most of my language, I fail! The automatic vocabulary of our societies and our everyday instincts fall well short of Popper, and it drags me back-under and into error. Words like certainty, authority, validity and surety have no place when it comes to objective truth, and yet I use them all the time!
All this despite the fact that Popper writes so clearly and with such straightforward prose.
It is hard to think of truth as something out there to be found, something that we can get closer to, and yet also something that we can never actually grasp (even if it were discovered, we would have no way of recognising it as such). Especially while also accepting that the quest for truth – through Popperian conjecture and refutation – isn’t wasted, in fact it is the complete opposite. This endless struggle is how we improve things, how we make progress, how we survive and make life increasingly rich.
This is a lived-in philosophy, a philosophy of big questions and real world problems; it is a rejection of Ludwig Wittgenstein and a return to what matters. But philosophy, science, reason, truth, are only possible as a social activity – it cannot be done well by oneself. You need to be imposed upon by new directions and perspectives, to be poked at and punched with all the things that you hadn’t thought of by yourself. It all needs to be adversarial.
You need the voices of other people.
Here they are…