In conversation with Joseph Agassi

 

Talking with Joseph Agassi is an uncoordinated affair. He speaks, he stops, and he interrupts at the most improbable and surprising of places. In unnatural lurches, he jokes while being serious, is kind when talking over you, and elaborates with single word answers. The bewilderment and confusion you feel hits your mind like a panic: this is not so much a casual walk in the philosophical park, as a knee-hugging collapse in a muddy trench; the bombs resonating a little closer each time.

Getting him on the phone is both easy and hard. Agassi always responds to emails with the speed of a plugged-in, tech-savvy teenager, but still in the blunt, busy tones of his natural voice. Dates are made, calendars marked, and he isn’t there. New dates, new times, and still no luck. Eventually I ring him at home without prior announcement. The phone is half way through its first yawn when a confident voice cuts-in: “Agassi here!” Despite our letters, he seems unsure of who I am, but as soon as I say “I was hoping to talk to you about philosophy and about Karl Popper” something shifts. The loud Hebrew music from the next room is turned off, guests are politely ushered out the door, and the man whom Rafe Champion once anointed as an “Intellectual Irritant” is ready, leaning into his microphone and poking for combat.

But he starts with a lament: “I have a constant sense of failure due to my inability to sustain reasonably good relations with the person to whom I am most indebted, both intellectually and personally.” Popper understood as much as anyone that criticism is always a sign of respect, but there is something about Agassi that seemed to hit a nerve. And although they spend long hours together at Popper’s home, their relationship – and Agassi’s criticism – is always a little too close to the bloodstream. From his closing front door (long past midnight), Popper is muttering to himself as to whether his student is more trouble than he's worth. With Agassi – walking down the cobbled path to the gate – lost in self-reflective thoughts about why he is putting himself through the late hours and the abuse; already planning his escape.

Jerusalem. Years earlier and somewhere in the corridors of Hebrew University. Agassi is young and balancing an education between his mandatory stint in the Israeli military. An undergraduate degree in physics, a master’s degree in physics, and then a change that is more profound than it might appear. What need does science have for the philosophy of science? For outsiders who never will – nor want to – step into a laboratory, but who nonetheless find a calling in telling those insiders what their lives are all about, why they behave the way they do, what they are trying to achieve each and every day… and why they fail to do it. Or to phrase the question as Agassi did to himself: is it a role of necessity or simply nuisance?

London. The award of an overseas scholarship gives Agassi the corrective space he needs. It also forces him to go looking for a teacher, someone with the old rabbinical school fire that Agassi is used to, but someone also “underestimated” enough to be open to new, unknown, door-stopping students. In 1950’s Britain, there is only one name that meets this criteria, and although he is well known within the pages of academia and literature, the general public still walk past him – and glance over his books – with lazy, anonymous eyes. Karl Popper is not Bertrand Russell, and for this he feels “amazingly underestimated”.

When that scholarship elapses, Agassi is stuck in a strange and appealing orbit. The thought of leaving is not a thought at all. He bullies his way into a research position, and when that too runs its course, he twists into a Ph.D. despite Popper advising against it. The whole point is to not leave… at least not until the intellectual partnership is completely exhausted, and the personal relationship completely broken. He takes the nuisance part of the philosophy of science to heart and pesters his teacher-supervisor-employer-friend with the happiest/nastiest criticism and argument he can find. And Agassi is grateful for everything it gives him: “Such intellectual success as I have enjoyed is almost entirely thanks to my work under Popper’s tutelage”.

When the falling-out comes, it is easy to forget the closeness of the two men. With enough clout and job security to avoid his campus obligations, Popper spends most of his time locked-up in his house in Kent. The few students that visit him are those who have been personally invited. A rich jealousy grows over the Popperian School, everyone fighting for even the slightest of chats over the daintiest cups of tea. What they all remember of their few stopovers is this: when they arrive Agassi is already there, comfortable and fed as if it were his own home; when they leave, they leave alone, with Agassi and Popper waving goodbye in unison, preparing for their evening debate.

The jealousy and the ego comes also from Popper. And he has a strange rule that seems both personal and out of place. While it is ok and appropriate to criticize other scientists and philosophers as loudly and publicly as possible, the Popperian School is different – a place where all intellectual exchanges must remain private. Why Popper chooses this, is up in the clouds of psychologism, but it doesn’t make much sense for his philosophy. Break the rule and Popper breaks it too, a public feud from a public, good-faith expression of critical rationalism. And a feud it is, with the quality of “expressions'' and “disagreement” becoming “brief, ad hominem, and worthless at best.”

Six years is all Agassi can take (this is more than most people). He gets out with his doctorate and his sanity and a richer mind. Then someone hands him a copy of Popper’s latest book, Objective Knowledge, and asks him to write a review. Unfortunately for both men “the book was very poor”, an empty philosophical statement “buried under a thicket of misconceptions.” The worst – and most shameful –tendency of Popper is there, smeared across the pages, sparking hard memories for Agassi and tragic emotions for the reader: Popper is constructing his own myth, writing his own biography, planning for historical applause.

The pen portrait. A philosopher who cares more, and thinks in higher tones, than his contemporaries. He argues deep into nights, mornings, and broken relationships because the truth matters, it reaches beyond itself, changes the world and the people it touches, and so the fight is a question of duty and honour. He is straightforward when others are not. He is interesting when others are not. And his veins run with an unnatural amount of common-sense. This explains the bitterness and the jealousy that stalks the slow moving, fast thinking, semi-recluse. It is the burden of high rationality and of bravery… and it is the narrative of Popper’s life that has won the day!

The camera portrait. A bullying old man, angry and bitter about the recognition he feels is being denied to him. Arguing with his adversaries and his friends and with his students, Popper tries to prove this tragic neglect true by proving everyone else wrong. If he can always come out on top, always batter his opponents into submission, then it stands that he must be a philosopher of extraordinary quality. And if those victories are public to the point of gossip, everyone else will begin to see that quality, along with the mistreatment. On the wrong end of grandiosity and myth-building, students like Agassi are stuck with the “bullying”, the “dogmatic”, the “cruel”, the “domineering”, the “capricious”, the “complaining”, the “disrespect”…

It starts with an unpleasant little sentence where Popper says: “I have always been interested in Goldschmidt’s theories, and I drew Goldschmidt’s ‘hopeful monsters’ to the attention of I. Lakatos, who referred to them in his ‘Proofs and Refutations’. Agassi reads this and gets a “jolt” – he has seen this before, felt the same odd taste of trafficked recognition over recent years. Perhaps it is true that “the arrow which has left the hunter’s bow belongs to the hunter no longer”, but it certainly doesn’t then belong to the person who simply saw it fly. Having done nothing to deserve it, Popper is trying to claim responsibility from Lakatos for his use of Goldschmidt, and responsibility from Goldschmidt for Lakatos’ continuation of his theory.

Just who told Popper about Goldschmidt in the first place we will never know – Popper has left that link of the chain unreferenced. But Popper has an Agassi-shaped problem here, who quickly senses something wrong with the dates and with the philosophical claims. Popper says he wrote his original paper – Evolution and the Tree of Knowledge – in 1961, but being “no expert” on the topic, decided against publishing. In 1963 Lakatos publishes his own work, with its hard influences from Goldschmidt’s book. And in 1973 Popper circles back around to his old paper, now seeing it as worthy of publication. It is a timeline that begs its own doubts and questions: was it Popper who introduced Lakatos to Goldschmidt, or the other way around?

There is a degree of historical nit-picking to this, but Agassi is just sharpening his blade. He is a Popperian of course, an admirer of the man as well as his philosophy, and this new book – Objective Knowledge – doesn’t live up to either. Speaking in over-the-top deference to offset what is to come – calling Popper “Sir Karl” – Agassi restates Popper’s own methodology: 1. Start with a problem. 2. Pay your predecessors, and past solutions, their dues. 3. Show the error of these solutions. 4. Present your own, improved, solution (something that explains more). 5. Make sure your solution is immune to the previous level’s criticism. 6. And finally, acknowledge other valid, unfalsified, solutions. Agassi finishes by saying that Objective Knowledge fails each and every step.

The Darwinian theory of knowledge – or evolutionary epistemology – goes like this: think about knowledge for just a moment or two, and you are likely to get quickly tied-up in all sorts of bad ideas. And this has a lot to do with the type of questions we ask and answer: how do we know something is true? How can we be certain of things? How do our senses produce truth? Bad questions lead to bad answers, as they did for all the predecessor theories to Darwinian evolution. Asking questions such as why do birds have wings? they were setting themselves up for error: birds have wings so that they can fly! And just like that, from a bad question, you will likely produce theories of godly design, rather than evolution by natural selection.

What allowed Darwin to make the breakthrough that he did, was a new question which opened the space for better answers. Ask instead what kind of process would lead to a bird having wings? and suddenly the true theory becomes easier to find. And so it is also the case with knowledge creation. If instead of asking questions along the lines of how it is that we can know things, we asked how does knowledge grow? a lot of the confusion and mistakes could have been avoided. It would also have opened our eyes to some wonderful similarities between biology and epistemological processes.

Biology. In any population of any species, there are genetic variations, meaning that despite living in the same environment and evolving together, we/they are all different in some way. Many of those variations will be irrelevant, not helping or hurting the host organism; these will die out slowly over time. Some will be harmful, and will die out much more quickly as their hosts die too. And some will be improvements, giving their hosts a competitive advantage within their ecological niche. These are the survivors, the ones who hang around a little longer, who are better adapted to the dangers of their world, who are more likely to reproduce and pass those genetic improvements on to their offspring.

This explains both the wide variety of life that we see in nature, the dramatic success of certain genetic changes, as well as the higher heritability of success, rather than failure. The process is a process, and it continues. Environments change, making past genetic improvements less helpful than they once were, or simply making a radically new ecology to which the species is poorly adapted. The other species change too. They evolve, and some of that evolution will be targeted at hunting this example species to extinction; or to expelling it from its territory. What is successful today won’t be tomorrow. Nothing lasts. And with every successful improvement comes a host of unforeseen problems. The good news is that there is always another possible variation that could fix the new problem…if only it materializes quickly enough. The species that don’t adapt, die!

Epistemology. Or how does knowledge grow? Just as there is constant variation in genes, knowledge too is always changing and multiplying and dying and succeeding. Most new ideas are fairly neutral, some are harmful, and only very few will ever be successful. But those select few have something on their side. They are improvements on what came before them, they explain the world in more complete, more accurate, or more vibrant terms. They give their hosts a competitive advantage. This is noticed by other people (it is only people who are capable of explanatory knowledge) and copied, spreading the new knowledge and spreading the competitive advantage. The people and societies that don’t copy these successful ideas pay a high price, stagnating, suffering, falling-behind, and dying.

But knowledge comes from problems, problems with existing theories or problems with our understanding of the world (these are theories as well, but a helpful distinction for where we are heading). Just as with biological organisms, knowledge too lives within an ecological niche of a kind. It doesn’t build up from nothing, but answers a need or a selection pressure. An asteroid heading to earth makes the knowledge about how to deflect such objects vital, or the discovery of a new pandemic-causing virus makes knowledge of potential vaccines and mitigation policies suddenly important. The best theories – the ones we consider as true – are simply the best surviving ones… and by extension, the ones that help us to survive and hopefully thrive.

The real selection pressure, however, is always criticism. Criticism from us, about our best existing theories. It might be an asteroid or a virus that causes knowledge to change, grow and become relevant, but more often than not it is nothing more than one human being disagreeing with another human being: a theory that another theory is false. There is always some way to criticize even our best, and surest-footed theories, and when those ways are exhausted, new ones can always be thought up. Here we have an endless landscape of variation, analogous with that of gene mutation and gene coupling. And with each new criticism comes the possibility of improvement, that the new theory is better than the incumbent, and so – through selection pressure and adaptation – takes over, survives, and reproduces, while the old one slowly dies out.

To quote myself from an earlier paragraph: “What is successful today, won’t be tomorrow. Nothing lasts. And with every successful improvement comes a host of unforeseen problems. The good news is that there is always another possible variation that could fix the new problem…if only it materializes quickly enough.” As true as this is for both biological and epistemological evolution, there is a difference. Natural selection in living species is a nasty, painful, wasteful, and unbearably long process. Millions of deleterious variations are likely to happen before a single positive one occurs, it then takes thousands of years, generations upon generations, of handing those genes down to offspring for the variation to become stable within the genepool and reasonably widespread.

Worse, for a genetic change to make a significant difference in the survival of a species, there has to be a problem on the ground for it to solve, or improve upon. Which means for those thousands, perhaps millions, of years waiting around for a successful genetic mutation, the species in question is suffering… a lot. For the evolution of camouflage to make a difference to a lizard, it can only be because it was being hunted to near extinction – without any protection – beforehand. An evolved increase in strength or size implies that the smaller, weaker species was easy prey. An increase in speed comes from a need to outrun predators more effectively. And improvements in dexterity, or other hunting abilities, points to constant starvation and food insecurity in one's ancestors.

Any biological sensations of pain or unease or discomfort or anxiety or worry or fear or panic or misery that you feel today, can only be because the human body evolved to feel it. And that it evolved to feel it, can only be because the members of your distant family tree who didn’t have those feelings suffered horribly and died as a result. Every small change in our biology is thanks to an unfathomable amount of carnage and mortality; and the reason why Susan Blackmore calls biological evolution “design by death”.

Epistemology on the other hand evolves with more efficiency and less bloodshed. For a start, it’s not blind. Rather than waiting patiently for random variation after random variation, hoping that one of these might become helpful to the species before it’s too late, explanatory knowledge evolves within a mind after the discovery of a specific problem that needs solving. Though they might still fail, all these variations/solutions that are thought-up have an advantage – they are targeted at solving the problem at hand; there is no randomness to the process, and less waste. And whereas biological evolution is restricted to small, incremental, physical changes, epistemology is driven not only by a knowing purpose, but also by human creativity; removing all physical limits on what is possible, as well as allowing for larger jumps forward in evolution (without the need for all the smaller, intermediate steps).

It gets better still. Epistemological evolution – explanatory knowledge – is also faster than its biological competitor… much faster. All those thousands and millions and billions of years of change, can happen at the speed of a neuron firing between two synapses of a human brain. That’s all it takes for the world – and life on it – to change forever, in the most dramatic of ways. Rather than waiting for a problem to manifest itself, and then desperately scratching for a solution, epistemological evolution can reach beyond our current safety, imagine future problems before they manifest, and then go searching for pre-emptive solutions. A process in which no one needs to suffer at all for improvements to be found.

This is the largest – and most significant – difference between biological and evolutionary epistemology: the cost of progress. An animal with a bad evolutionary code – an error of some kind which needs replacing by Darwinian natural selection – is doomed. It is something that can only be solved by future mutations in future offspring, and so the host will always die before seeing a positive change. And if the genetic error comes in the form of a competitive disadvantage to other members of the species, then the host will die out without even that faint possibility of having offspring, and without the fainter possibility of genetic improvements in the next generation. Either way, errors kill their hosts. In epistemology however, we can discover our errors and eliminate them without anyone having to die. All we have to do is change our minds, and they are gone, no longer harmful and no longer a problem. We can let our false theories die in our place!

Spinoffs. No sooner had evolutionary epistemology found light, than philosophers were hard at work making it incomprehensible. The instructionist school was born, then the selectionist: should we be judging the growth of knowledge by the behaviour of the people who hold it, or by the underlying truth-claims? How do we get the knowledge – replicating itself across hosts – through the cloud of psychological nonsense we all have in our minds? What is the appropriate unit of study: the success of an idea in spreading, or the competitive advantage of the people who adopt it? Are the ideas stored within individuals or within an inexplicit culture? What is the replicator: what is the one-to-one analogy for the gene, the cell, the phenotype etc? Are our theories of epistemological evolution contingent upon our theories of knowledge (empiricist, inductivists etc)? Then we are off in the wilderness talking about hypothetical realism, epistemological dualism, adaptationism, perspectivism, embodied theories, disembodied organisms… And none of it can save Karl Popper.

Back to Joseph Agassi. He reads Popper’s new work, rechecks Popper’s own method for inquiry, and goes to war. Instead of starting with a problem – as he should – Popper only has a distinction, a delicate turning of slight details. What his theory solves, is already solved by Goldschmidt’s; and what his theory explains, is already explained. So on points one and two of his methodology (1. Start with a problem. 2. Pay your predecessors, and past solutions, their dues) Popper has failed. Popper’s great new twist was to look at both biological and epistemological evolution as not just similar in appearance and outcome, but also as doing the same thing: problem solving.

This is fairly uncontroversial when it comes to explanatory, human-created, knowledge. But biological evolution is also knowledge creation, of a sort. The ability and awareness of how to run faster, how to avoid predators, and how to find food, how to reproduce most effectively, are encoded within the genes of animals (as well as human beings). It is rigid, confined, slow-moving, but it is unmistakably still knowledge. And it evolved to solve problems – problems with being hunted by other animals, problems with starvation and hunger, problems with passing on our genes within a competitive environment. Genetic knowledge is just the slower, dimmer cousin of explanatory knowledge; different in ability, but not in kind. 

Agassi gives Popper his dues here – he has added something to the existing theory (“it connects the amoeba and Einstein as problem-solvers”), but not much. On the third methodological step (3. Show the error of these [previous] solutions) Popper finds a slight foothold. But it is less of an error in Goldschmidt’s theory that he is pointing out, than an incompleteness or a lack of emphasis. When it comes to four (4. Present your own, improved, solution (something that explains more)) Agassi is unimpressed: “here comes Popper’s claim that he has an explanatory theory. He has none that I can see.” By this same failure, point five (5. Make sure your solution is immune to the previous level’s criticism) fails too.

The worst sin that Agassi sees in the pages of Objective Knowledge, is with six (6. And finally, acknowledge other valid, unfalsified, solutions), and how it relates to two (2. Pay your predecessors and past solutions their dues). Having already stolen the credit for Lakatos’ theory by referencing Goldschmidt, and saying that he (Popper) deserves recognition for dubiously connecting the two men, Popper then goes on to diminish Goldschmidt to a single, decade-old afterthought, in a single footnote. Agassi writes: “I mean, how does Goldschmidt come into Objective Knowledge: through the back door in a 1972 Addendum to a 1961 paper”.

Having cut his way through Objective Knowledge, as well as some favourites from Popper’s back catalogue – corroboration, scientific credibility, what constitutes an explanation – Agassi turns around to stamp the final vestiges of life from the book: “looking again at Popper’s excursions into biology, I am amazed to find how much pointless though valid criticism it includes… I am amazed to see that they [his papers] start with attacks. No problems, no discussion of strength of valid solutions to be attacked.”

When Popper reads Agassi’s words, he does the unthinkable for someone who believes that “all criticism is constructive” – he ignores it! And for Agassi, this is “painful”, after all “any criticism is better than a dismissal or an oversight”. When messages begin leaking through to him from mutual friends and colleagues, the gossip and the second-hand professionalism is too much for Agassi to tolerate. He phones Popper to talk about his review – “I was used to him shouting at me” Agassi writes, but this time all he did was “scoff at me”.

All these moments in Popperian history can ring as distantly as stories of Socrates plodding around the agora. And so it is hard to imagine that Agassi was there, beginning to end, and at 95 years old he is joyfully still here. His memory is strong and unshaken by age, his stories rich, long and wonderfully personal: the whims of Paul Feyerabend, the plagiarism of Imre Lakatos, the soldier’s honesty of John Watkins, the persistent fraud of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the regrettable weakness of Thomas Kuhn, and the intense anger of Karl Popper.

Perhaps Agassi has earnt that label of Intellectual Irritant, and that is the place he will hold in this history when people inevitably write his story. But what lingers from speaking with him is only admiration. I admire that he doesn’t back down, doesn’t retreat at any cost, and fights to blood and bone. I also admire that he drips with emotion and regret when thinking about the toll it all took, and the harm it may have produced… whether the fault is his or theirs: “No amount of justification of an action may allow us to ignore the pain it causes”. And what lingers too, despite the unpleasantness, is the gratitude he still feels for a single, chance event, which changed his life for the better:

I do not know how much I am indebted to Sir Karl Popper, except that but for my having been his student and research associate I would not be what I now am. I consider that fact my greatest fortune.

 

*** Shortly after writing this article (publication delayed) Joseph Agassi died at his home in Tel-Aviv (1927-2023).

 

*** The Popperian Podcast #18 – Joseph Agassi – ‘Karl Popper’s Hopeful Monsters’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #18 – Joseph Agassi – ‘Karl Popper’s Hopeful Monsters’ (libsyn.com)