In conversation with Paul Levinson
"Bill, people say that I am a difficult man. Am I a difficult man?"
"Karl, only a difficult man would ask a question like that!"
Bill Bartley had first heard about Karl Popper at the same time that he heard about his difficultness. Rumours of the old philosopher’s dark and grinding tones had made their way across the Atlantic, and in casual goodbyes with his former professors at Harvard College, Bartley told them of his plans to study with Popper regardless. To a man and woman, they “strongly discouraged me”, each taking their brief last moments to issue a “warning”: “I would regret it.” There was care and there was worry in their voices. It was only years later, “when they learned that I did not regret it”, that “they became very angry with me.”
A month or so later, Bartley was being interviewed by the Registrar at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She was cheerful, professional, and to the point, telling Bartley that based on his interests and background she had already chosen an adviser for him (“let us call him ‘X’”) and after a few years of study and writing of “a very good book” he would have his Ph.D. “I told her that I would be happy to write the book, but that I had come across the ocean to study with Popper, and that if he were not to be my adviser I would return to America on the morrow. She scolded me and told me that I was being difficult.”
The next morning he met his new advisor, Karl Popper, and unlike the previous day, there was “nothing routine about this interview.” Without an obvious sense of kindness or personal interest, Popper stared hard and “discomfitingly” at his new student – “His eyes were trained directly on me” – and launched into a near-accusatory lecture about why all of Bartley’s old philosophy professors at Harvard were “utterly” wrong! He then started a whole new lecture, this time about some papers of Bartley’s that Popper had got his hands on. The gist was this: the well-credentialed student-journalist, and editor of the famous Harvard Crimson, that now stood before him couldn’t write. Or at a minimum, “wrote very badly.”
To work with Popper, Bartley would have to be less “pretentious” and much, much more “clear” with his language. Just as heavily obscurant prose should have no place in the world of philosophy, neither should a flowery, stylised prose, whose primary interest is in being “eye-catching” rather than “accurate”. Philosophy was – and is – about “reaching toward the truth”, and nothing should ever be allowed to get in the way of this. Looking back at Popper in silence, as the criticism continued to rain down – wet and cold – upon his first day on campus, Bartley knew two things: “I felt immediately-and ever after-that I had his whole attention” and “from that moment I loved him and knew that I could learn from him: that it would be worth any difficulty that might arise.”
A week later, Bartley attended his first seminar, and from experience he understood the normal procedure of things. But this wasn’t normal! Things ordinarily would begin with a student presenting a paper of theirs, followed by questions and comments and some discussion. The professors may join-in, but they tended to stay at a distance and let their younger colleagues get on with it. “Popper's seminars were different”, rather than a cordial back-and-forth, or a few perfunctorily questions that the listening student might have missed, “they were intense confrontations between Popper and the person reading the paper”.
At this particular meeting, the unfortunate student who had been chosen to present his work only managed to “read about two paragraphs” over the course of an hour. With each and “every sentence” Popper interrupted. Every word mattered and was drilled-into for meaning and purpose; “nothing passed unchallenged”. Popper asked the student a question, “the student dodged it.” Popper asked it again: same evasive answer. Popper stood-up and repeated his question once again, and finally the poor student “answered at last”. But the public inquisition wasn’t over. “Were you then wrong in what you said first?” Popper asked. The student began to mumble away in a different direction, so Popper inquired again; “Yes. But were you then wrong in what you said first?” The bullied student nodded. Popper continued: “Do you apologize?” The student nodded silently again. “Good”, Popper replied. “Then we can be friends.”
Other people weren’t so lucky. On at least one occasion Bartley witnessed Popper physically grab a student by the collar – mid-presentation – and literally throw him out of the seminar. None of this was kind, but there was an attempt at kindness behind it all. There is “nothing easier” Popper once said, than “to nod sagely at a student and say that what the student wrote or said was ‘interesting.’ But that is not teaching, and does not involve learning.” The ordinary rituals and pastimes of academia did nothing for the students on the other end of them; but if a professor were to ever take these interactions seriously, and show some actual care for the intellectual future of the people learning from them, then Popper was sure that they would behave more like him.
Since his early days in Vienna, Popper had dreamt of a new kind of school. A place without all those traditional hang-ups of university culture, with a group of people who refused “boredom” and instead chased-down new problems, discussed those problems loudly, clearly, and without ego or attachment, and a place where no-one – ever – wasted even a moment cramming for gate-keeping examinations. The school found its home at the LSE, and it was built in Popper’s image, but of course many students were “not ready for such a school” and after a few grim encounters “soon dropped out.”
The ones that stayed, showed the battle scars and the intellectual development you might expect. Names like Agassi, Jarvie, Lakatos, Watkins, Feyerabend, Gellner, Gombrich and Sabra, who tore the face off modern epistemology and reshaped the field with new rigour. And then there was Bartley! Perhaps the only student of Popper’s who chose to study under him not in spite of his “difficult” personal reputation, but because of it! So when he first met his supervisor, he knew the early conversations would be hard going. And they were! “For he would often interrupt what one was saying and begin a long and flowing discourse; and there was no hope of interrupting once that had started.”
The complaint of not being able to get a “word in edgewise”, is as fair of a thing that could ever be said about Popper. But Bartley wasn’t buying the standard reason: Popper’s ego! Quickly he surmised that the older man might be “quite deaf”, and that all that talking he did was a coping mechanism of a kind, with Popper picking up the few words and cues that he could, guessing at what was being said, and speaking so widely in response as to hopefully cover what was being asked. Bartley was correct, Popper was deaf, and this obstacle – as well as the relationship between the two men – was quickly overcome by a clever strategy. Before their scheduled meetings, Bartley would write Popper detailed letters “setting out the issues that I wanted to discuss”, allowing Popper to clearly understand both what the topic was, and what Bartley’s views were on it.
“Modest in those areas where he had a right to be vain, and vain in those where he had a right to be modest”, Popper refused to admit his deafness to himself, let alone anyone else. Eventually it was public embarrassment while delivering the famous Sherman Lectures at University College London that forced the issue. He couldn’t hear the questions from the audience, which led at least one visiting professor to complain that Popper had “deliberately pretended to mishear” so that he could “dodge my question.” The very next day, he went out and purchased a hearing aid!
Deaf or not, what Bartley found in Popper was rare and liberating. As a young journalist at Harvard, Bartley had shiny ideas of purpose and community. The other half of his university life largely involved attending lecture halls, with each passing year he could feel new boundaries and less freedom. All the vitality that he found at The Crimson, and which flowed through the air as a new undergraduate arrival at Harvard, was being slowly pushed aside; making room for traditions and conventions of a “professional community”. Working with Popper reversed this for Bartley, and wound the dial of academic vanity back to zero; every day, and for every topic, he had the “irrevocable permission and freedom to throw myself into the world of ideas”.
The university Registrar was prescient enough. After a few years Bartley did finish his Ph.D. And he did so with “a very good book” in tow (The Retreat to Commitment), even if he does say so himself. And for seven world-shaping years, Bartley learnt from, studied under, worked with, and argued against Popper. Those years were unusually “idyllic” for anyone in Popper’s company, in fact there were so few – even minor – quarrels that Bartley’s colleagues and fellow students teased him about the closeness of the teacher and pupil. Then in 1965, they did eventually fall out, and in such brilliant fashion that “we did not speak for twelve years”. That dispute runs to the heart of everything that matters about the philosophy of science.
Before Popper and before Bartley, there was a long – and rich – rationalist tradition. We might call the beginning of this classical rationalism, just for a bit of time keeping and neatness. This is the world of the ancient Greeks, and here the question first steps through our door with the noticing of other cultures, and the awareness of difference: different myths, different practices, and different intellectual ideas. At this early stage, the problem of rationality is the problem of what culture should I embrace? Here there were no claims to rationality being universal in any way, but – in the words of Joseph Agassi – by searching for the best possible “replacement” it was “aspiring to be universalist”.
Enter comprehensive rationalism, and a new breed of philosophers led by people like Immanuel Kant. Instead of scurrying into the refuge culture, now the search was on for a harder, more permanent, less human, foundation. And the possibilities were out there, so to speak: intellectual intuition or sensorial experience or transcendent logic… These all seemed like good options, and they all failed by their own accounts. It was never made clear what the rules of such rationalist theories were, how these were supposed to achieve the things they claimed. As soon as rationalism itself was turned around upon these foundations, and the question asked how does it all work? The theories collapsed, and rationalism was again adrift.
The solution was a bad one. Pick a starting point, something from which we get things going – from which the rationalist wheels can begin to spin – and just admit that the choice is made from beyond the boundaries of proof and evidence and explanation: an irrational commitment that allows rationality the small foothold it needs. It runs like this: choose induction (for example) and don’t worry yourself about the failure to explain how induction works, it is enough that it does work. Now get on with discovering all the knowledge of the universe through the inductive method, without ever having to be bogged-down looking backward and questioning the principle itself. That it works, is proof enough that it is true.
The rationalist community had what it thought it needed, and got busy working on human progress. And quietly, behind the loud scenes of public celebrations, the irrationalist community were also cheering! The comprehensive rationalists were staking their houses on something that sounded very reasonable, and which was a definite improvement on what had come before. Here is Popper given them some temporary dues before he then tries to cut them down: they have the “attitude of the person who says: ‘I am not prepared to accept anything that cannot be defended by means of argument or experience.’” Very reasonable!
Things get unreasonable with the large space it opens up behind it. If you are allowed to simply declare your own starting point, and remove that starting point from the ordinary rational process, then what is stopping the church next door doing the same thing, saying something like ‘we start from a first principle of god existing and his commands for us being written in a certain holy book, and then we reason outwards and let rationality take its course’. If it isn’t obvious yet, these foundations really do matter, and where you end up will be heavily influenced by where you start. By defining rationalism in this way, the comprehensive rationalists were inadvertently letting any crank who also wanted the title, to claim it.
So lowering the standards of what was rational in order to let rationality win the day, just was not going to cut it for long; the bend of its own logical inconsistencies would eventually become a self-crippling problem. Karl Popper, and critical rationalism, to the rescue! Rather than beginning with an irrational faith of some variety (even if that is an “irrational faith in reason”), this was a much braver step into the void of human experience, and much more humble expression of what is possible. Here is Popper again: “[this is] a critical form of rationalism, one that frankly admits its limitations, and its basis in an irrational decision, and in so far, a certain priority of irrationalism”.
Critical rationalism was different to its predecessors in one very important way: it sought to minimise its irrationalism, not to merely accept it in full. If we must kick things off in an unreasonable place, let us then commit to making it as small of a place as possible. For any given decision, it is always we that make it; it is never forced upon us as a next logical step, the consequences of the decision don’t predetermine that we make it, these are moral judgements after all, and “in the case of moral theory, we can only confront its consequences with our conscience.” We are fallible, and so all of the decisions we make are also fallible. There can never be a thing with certainty in our lives, nor in rationality. Everything we do, say, think, act up, or choose, might be wrong, and likely is in some way; that these mistakes – big and small – often seem entirely rational at the time, makes no difference to them still being mistakes.
The small shard of irrationalism that Popper was begrudgingly letting into his theory, is the commitment to the rationalism itself and the favourable attitude to criticism (which are one-and-the-same thing for Popper). That these commitments or attitudes are themselves not rationally justified, is for Popper missing the point of rationalism itself. If rationalism moves forward through criticism, and it is moral to want to continue moving forward in that way, then criticism is necessary; even if this means accepting it as a presupposition. Popper thinks that the problem here is less of a problem than two poorly phrased questions: 1. Asking for a justification for rationality, in a world where justification is not possible. 2. Doubting the central place for rationality and rational decision-making, without thinking about the impossible alternative – people living in constant irrationality and deliberately turning towards irrational decisions. Without first presupposing the value of rationality, questions of rationality make no sense.
But the irrationalists were still cheering, and staring down their rationalist foes, saying proudly: See! You are just like us! At some point our arguments become circles too, our regress becomes infinite, and then, just like you, we sidestep that by making a one-time, irrational, leap of faith. Talking about his old friend, Agassi sets-out the coming dispute like this: “This argument is not serious. William Bartley said, nevertheless, we rationalists have to answer it properly”.
It comes down to a pair of crises. In the raw, psychological sense, the first of these usually manifests in early adulthood, when we are finding a sense of who we are as people, and then building-up that self-image; something that we then project out upon the world. This is called the “crisis of identity”. The “crises of integrity” tends to occur later in life, when we are out there trying to live-out those chosen identities, and struggling to do so. Here Bartley is a therapist for his fellow philosophical patients: “My thesis is that the perpetual crisis of integrity into which rationalists are continually falling or being forced is due to a neglected crisis of identity in the rationalist tradition”.
It runs something like this: despite all the great improvements of Popper’s theory, particularly his exorcism of the search for justifications, an impossibility – as well as a monster – remained within the minds of most rationalists. The impossibility was a matter of theory selection, with the average rationalist holding-on through whitening knuckles to unattainable notions of what rationalism can, and ought, to be. And then having their spirit crushed by a crisis of integrity, when they cannot live-up to their own standards. The simple, though easily deceptive, mistake they are making, is equating their theories of rationalism with the very possibility of rationalism.
There is a story that both Popper and Bartley like to tell, and it is a helpful example for this crisis of rational integrity: the philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege spent a significant part of his career theorising about the logical structure of mathematics itself. What he wrote and said, seemed true, and was widely accepted as such. Then Bertrand Russell discovered a series of paradoxes within Frege’s (as well as Russell’s) theories. When he heard about this, Frege exclaimed to an audience “Arithmetic has been set spinning!” But of course it hadn’t. The only thing which was spinning was Frege’s theory of arithmetic.
For Bartley the “miserable state” of rationalism was – in part – due to the same type of error: the best theories of rationalism that existed were either self-refuting, or permissive of leaps of faith (no matter how small), which opened-wide the irrationalist backdoor. And because of this, many philosophers were suffering from a crisis of identity about the whole rationalist project. That was the impossibility. The monster was something that Popper thought he had slain, but which remained heavy in the shadows of modern philosophical tradition: an “authoritarian” oppression, squeezing dogma, rigidity, and indeed irrationalism, into everything it touched.
That infinite regress which causes all the problems here, comes from questions like “How do you know?”, “How do you guarantee that?”, and “How do you justify that?” These can be asked again and again, running further and further back down the deductive chain, until there has to be a stopping point where the rationalist says No more! Enough! And becomes an irrationalist himself. Not seeing the monster behind them, many philosophers, including Popper, accepted some form of this. Bartley refused!
All those regressive questions didn’t sit well with Bartley, who noticed that they all “demand authoritarian answers”, of one kind or another. It’s not that they reasonably lead towards an unavoidable stopping point of some kind, but rather that they already have stopping points baked-in to the questions themselves. The only reasonable sounding answers to such questions – which keep the appearance of rationality intact – are unpleasant things like “the Bible, the leader, the social class, the nation, the fortune teller, the Word of God, the intellectual intuition, or sense experience.”
“How do you know?” is nothing more than a kindly phrased demand for justification, a demand for something that cannot be answered… unless of course the answer is something authoritarian, unquestionable, beyond justification itself, and guaranteeing a correct outcome. An impossible question producing an impossible answer. Since Popper and critical rationalism, the role of the philosopher was to seek and eliminate error, not to guarantee truth. And yet when the inquiry was of rationalism itself, many Popperians – including Popper – seemed to lose touch with their own theory.
When a philosopher is asked “How do you know?” the only accurate could – and should – be: “I do not know; I have no guarantees.” When he is pressed further, and asked to elaborate, he would have to say something like: “Some of the theories I hold may in fact be true; but since there are no criteria of truth, I can never know for sure whether what I believe to be true is in fact so.” When the unsatisfied irrationalist continues to push the interrogation, seeking the authoritarian answer he desires, the philosopher ought to turn things around with a better question: “How can our intellectual life and institutions be arranged so as to expose our beliefs, conjectures, policies, sources of ideas, traditional practices, and the like— whether justifiable or not—to maximum criticism, in order to counteract and eliminate as much intellectual error as possible?”
One way of explaining the mix-up and strange blindness of Popperians to their own theory, is that ground-breaking, and genuine, innovations in thought and philosophy – running against centuries of accepted wisdom and decades of personal education – are difficult things to properly internalise. A better explanation would be that such blindness was, in fact, a feature of critical rationalism; a painful outgrowth from an internal error: the “fusion of justification and criticism”, a “hidden philosophical dogma”.
The best example of this lingering justificationism runs to the heart of laboratory level rationality. Here it is accepted that an argument of some kind is rational if, and only if, the conclusion follows from the premise “through the relationship of logical deducibility.”
1. All roses are flowers.
2. All flowers are beautiful.
3. Therefore all roses are beautiful.
Or,
1. All whales are mammals.
2. All mammals have kidneys
3. Therefore all whales have kidneys
The problem here should be obvious if you have managed to pick-up where Bartley’s theory is heading: from the beginning of our all too human talk about rationality, even at the most foundational, and logically grounded level, is an existing standard. Something that pre-defines what is intellectually respectable and what is not. And this – or these – standards exist whether you are a comprehensive rationalist looking to make an evaluation, or a critical rationalist looking to make criticism.
Also smuggled into that mistake, is a second assumption about the transmissibility of rationality. Whereas falsity is retransmitted from conclusion to premises, it is imagined that truth runs in the other direction, top-down. This isn’t so controversial, but that “intellectual respectability” runs top-down also, from premises to conclusion, with complete faithfulness and accuracy, is. The assumption can be summarised like this: “the logical derivatives of a theory inherit its quality and degree of intellectual respectability.”
This is a historical hangover of a kind, something that remains with us because our earliest attempts at building a theory of rationality involved searching for a criteria of truth. Such a criteria was an impossibility, as well as a step into authoritarianism, but the allusion remains nonetheless with the “demarcation between the respectable and the disreputable” still neatly coinciding with “the demarcation between the true and the false.”
As it turns out – though it is still taken for granted – the transmissibility requirement doesn’t work. When you go searching for basic statements to kick the rational ball into motion, you only ever find a description of the empirical character of something. Which is a report of sensory experience, and then the logical derivatives from that statement. However, it turns out that the empirical character of the statement is not transmissible in any way. “From every basic empirical statement both nonempirical metaphysical statements and all tautologies follow logically”, writes Bartley “Adding to the difficulty, universal scientific hypotheses cannot be reduced to truth functions of a finite class of basic empirical observation statements—which denies empirical character to scientific hypotheses themselves. Such unwanted results hound empiricists with the well-known ‘paradoxes’ of induction and confirmation in any case”.
A scientific theory cannot be probably true, nor probably false. With an infinitely many possible theories and explanations and observations out there for any single phenomenon, a theory can only be either true or false, a 1 or a 0. And yet in this traditional shift between premises to conclusion, probability is being smuggled into the picture. In the mind of the person working through the rudimentary rational theory, an error of transmissible probability is being made, followed by another error of linking that probability to respectability; something like: because I think A is true, and because I think B is derived from A, B must be just as true.
A Popperian might interject here and say ‘But as you acknowledge, criticism or testability runs in the other direction, being retransmissible from conclusion to premises, and critical rationalism is all about testability’. And here Bartley would smile, and respond that this would mean that “testability would be transmissible from premises to conclusion”, and that “any logical consequence of a hypothesis would have to be as highly testable as the original hypothesis”. But this just isn’t the case, because all hypotheses are testable or falsifiable by the testing or falsification of their consequences; meaning that a hypothesis can have a higher “degree of testability as any of its consequences.” An example might be helpful, here is Bartley’s:
1. All who dwell in London are English.
2. All who dwell in Hampstead are English.
3. All who dwell in Bloomsbury are English.
Let’s examine the testability of these three hypotheses, and their relationship. If we correctly assume that both Hampstead and Bloomsbury are in London, and that the second and third hypotheses are derivatives of the first, what would happen if we could falsify the second and show that not all the people in Hampstead are English? By the Popperian rule of retransmission, the first hypothesis that all the people in London are English must also be wrong, because Hampstead is in London.
But what would happen if the second hypothesis were not falsified, and the third hypothesis – as another derivative of the first – has never been tested. Well in that case the first hypothesis would be falsified by the third hypothesis being tested and falsified in the future, but the second would not. It would remain unfalsified because they are logically unrelated: showing that some people in Bloomsbury are not English, doesn’t mean that the same is true for the people in Hampstead. They are unconnected. So the first hypothesis is more testable than its derivatives, since any falsification of the second and third would falsify the first, but would mean nothing to the remaining derivative hypothesis.
So it is possible for a hypothesis to have a higher degree of testability than its consequences. Meaning the consequences do not inherit their testable quality directly from the hypothesis. Nothing can be deduced in this way, there is no logical relationship. Nothing is bequeathed from higher level theories to lower ones, and nothing is returned, and the traditional account of logic and justification can be put to bed, and left to die, with a scribbled note saying Do Not Resuscitate! In the next bed, in the same ward, critical rationalism dies too, just a few painful breaths later; from the same infectious disease.
Pancritical rationalism is different. For a start, it’s healthy! It opens no doors to no monsters, of any kind. It asks nothing from justificationism. Nothing from irrationalism. Requires no leaps of faith. And solves all of those logical inconsistencies that Bartley discovered, and which you – the reader – no doubt found so painstakingly boring over the previous paragraphs. Pancritical rationalism reconciles Popper’s critical rationalism with those lost hopes of a comprehensive rationalism. Those infinite regresses, those necessary stopping points, all disappear, and what is left is something that cures rationalism of its crisis of integrity.
Bartley’s new creation protects nothing from criticism, even rationalism and criticism itself. It is a philosophy which never has to cut off an argument, and which welcomes all questions, especially of itself. And importantly for Popperians, it is a philosophy that takes critical rationalism more seriously than Popper ever did. Pancritical rationalism accepts that “rationality lies in criticism”, and so our whole purpose – and the way we develop new knowledge – is to apply criticism as widely, and forcefully, as possible… including to the important role of criticism in the rational way of life; and including to whether the rational way of life is even possible.
A good Popperian would agree that it is reasonable to believe that something is true, and acceptable as a theory, only if it is “held open to criticism and survives severe testing.” So why should the same not apply to rationalism itself? As much as this might sound like the opposite, the people and the ideas that Bartley is targeting here are the irrationalists. As a younger man, Bartley had a firm foot in the door of religion – and for a while even considered training to become a protestant minister – and was very aware of people out there, beyond the halls of academic philosophy, who were seeing the leap of faith being made by rationalists, and saying if it is acceptable for you, then it must also be acceptable for me.
If rationality is logically limited, then every irrationalist and his dog has a rational pretext for being irrational. But “If my argument is sound”, writes Bartley “irrationalists lose the most formidable weapon in their intellectual armory, their rational excuse for irrational commitment.” Anyone willing to call themselves a rationalist, ought to be someone willing to acknowledge – and welcome – that it is something that he could be argued out of.
This step might seem small, or insignificant, but it was one that Popper refused to make. Friend to both men, Ian Jarvie, said of Bartley’s pancritical rationalism that it fundamentally changed the way in which Popper’s work should be seen and understood, and that it “transformed the problem-situation in philosophy”. The demarcation criterion needed changing, from being between science and non-science, to that of between rational and irrational; and importantly criticism was now off the chain, allowing for a larger space of competitive theories, as well as cross-field criticism from the worlds of law and art and morality etc.
What Bartley had solved was a deep issue inside epistemology, something from which “Almost all other philosophical problems are directly related yet subordinate”: the problem of reunifying knowledge with rationality.
So is a critical rationalist an irrationalist? Bartley thought so, Popper didn’t. Bartley thought that we should be open minded about being open minded, Popper didn’t. Strangely the one concession that Popper did make, was to say that his logic checked-out, but that this amounted to nothing more than a rephrasing – though be it an improved rephrasing – of what Popper had already said; he hadn’t made a mistake, as Bartley said he did, but “had intended to advocate all along” for the logic behind pancritical rationalism; but still not pancritical rationalism itself. Here Bartley called Popper an authoritarian for not seeing the momentous change that he had formulated, and a fideist (“the epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason”) for holding onto his irrational commitments. And so that “twelve years” of silence settled over the two men.
The final words here belong not to Popper, nor to Bartley, but to Joseph Agassi, who lived through the animosity as a constant friend and intermediary between the warring parties. He also has the retrospective lens of someone who walked the line between both philosophies, though admittedly remaining a critical rationalist, and never a pancritical rationalist.
An immediate problem for Bartley is a paradox. If pancritical rationalism insists upon its own questioning and fallibility – opening itself up to criticism – what happens in practice when we actually begin to play that game? The logic runs like this: If we accept that (A) everything is open to criticism, and (B) this means that A is also open to criticism, what happens if we instead criticise and refute B. And if B turns out to be false, that means A is also false, and pancritical rationalism is refuted by its allowing boundless refutations. On this Agassi agrees with Bartley that B is simply a statement about A, not a position itself. And being a statement – in a different domain to A – it doesn’t have to be independently criticisable.
On a more worldly level, is it really the case that pancritical rationalists are open to rationalism itself being falsified? How would this play out? Rationalism moves forward through criticism – without which there would never be any change and never any new knowledge – and so what would happen if a pancritical rationalist were to be one day argued-out of his commitment to criticism? He would have to either take his theory seriously and give-up on all future criticism, or take that criticism of criticism only tentatively and go on looking for why he might again be mistaken (continuing to use criticism). Either way, the best Bartley seems to be able to say here is that pancritical rationalism is criticisable, but only tentatively so. Which reopens that irrationalist door, allowing any fideist to also say that you are welcome to criticise his commitment to god, but he will only ever take your criticism tentatively.
Bartley thought it was important that we remain open to the possibility regardless – that the whole rationalist project might be mistaken, and should be brought to an end, if only to maintain logical integrity. And here Agassi begins to dig in his heels, asking what is so terrible about the “charge that we are dogmatic rationalists. What is this dogma?” It’s a good question. If it is indeed a dogma, then it doesn’t seem such an unpleasant type of stain to have on one’s character. Being dogmatically attached to critical debate, to thinking that all types of criticism are constructive, and to inviting as much criticism as possible, itself seems like a paradox.
A challenge then. Agassi asks Bartley to run his theory into a social framework, and see how reasonable – or unreasonable – it seems with this rephrasing. The point of a theory of rationality can only be that it connects with the real world somewhere down the line. So instead of rationality questioning its own possibility, how about members of democracy trying to overthrow that democracy; a political party running for election saying that once elected they will do away with all future voting, it will be the last election ever. Would it be reasonable to call this party democratic? And if they won, would it be reasonable to call the changes they make democratic?
Popper takes rationality for granted – or in this is social rephrasing, takes democracy for granted – but good and effective criticism should always be a poke towards finding alternatives. We don’t dump an existing theory once some effective criticism comes its way, but only after something better is offered; when a viable alternative is found that passes the tests which the previous theory did not. “What this means for Popper is clear enough”, says Agassi, “both democracy and science are open to reform. What this means for Bartley above and beyond what it means for Popper I cannot see.”
Bartley thought there was a very important difference. What pancritical rationalism meant was more criticism, new types of criticism, new manners of it, and new research protocols. It also meant less openings for irrational belief systems, which might otherwise piggyback their legitimacy on the concessions of rationalism. If you want to criticise a particular thing in a particular way, we – if worthy of the name rationalists – should be welcoming and “willing to test it.”
So let’s start again, with Agassi mediating things. Instead of attaching ourselves to rationalism as some kind of faith, or basis for thought, let’s take it as a “working hypothesis.” Nothing more than an assumption that allows for “rational deliberation” and progress. Here Agassi thinks that “Popper and Bartley would have allowed it.” Readers might sense a tone of conventionalism to this though, but even if not, this manoeuvre pushes the dispute down the road, but no closer together. Popper and Bartley would simply be moved-on to arguing about what specifically is a rational deliberation.
Agassi is undeterred. What is really lost in all of this by allowing rationalism to rest on an “initial basic axiom, namely, the claim that rationality is possible and desirable”? If this must be done, is Bartley correct that this really offers support for the fideists and the irrationalists? Are the arguments of these people really strengthened in some way by them being able to say “tu-quoque” (you too). It seems a stretch to claim that a single – standalone – axiom, one that is accepted only to facilitate a violent explosion of rationalism beyond itself, turns that rationalism into irrationalism.
Still the logic remains a problem. If you simply decide to choose a basic axiom, then that choice is not rationalism. It is a leap of faith. And for Popper, Popperians, and critical rationalists, the problem is more troubling. According to their own theory something is rational based on its “openness to criticism”, and so what does this say about their choice of an initial axiom, if that choice is uncriticisable? Popper was aware of the fideist line he was walking here, when he talks about “the myth of the framework” or that “the most criticizable theory should be examined first”. On this, Agassi sees Popper as “unclear if not inconsistent.”
There is an old philosophical chestnut here, something that slips back into language and thought like a virus seeking a host. And it is here where Agassi thinks the discussion is going astray. It is true that classical rationalism and comprehensive rationalism collapsed, because of their comprehensive designs. Fideism is different though: it collapses specifically because it is not comprehensive. But as rationalists we must reject them both, and this “amounts to rejecting what they share: the idea that rationality is proof.” Critical rationalism and pancritical rationalism are not these things, specifically because of their openness to criticism. Above all, the Popper-Bartley dispute matters specifically because it is “painful” and unfinished. In his final thoughts, Agassi writes “I know Popper and Bartley agreed that they disagreed; I do not know on what.” And if someone like Agassi can’t figure this out, what luck is there for the rest of us?
*** The Popperian Podcast #23 – Paul Levinson – ‘W.W. Bartley and Pancritical Rationalism’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #23 – Paul Levinson – ‘W.W. Bartley and Pancritical Rationalism’ (libsyn.com)