I put ‘we’ because institutions like legal systems are fundamentally collaborative, unless enacted by a total dictator.
Popper’s grandparents were Jewish and he wrote one of his major works which explores these topics, The Open Society and Its Enemies, as an urgent response to the totalitarian ideologies and atrocities of WWII. Totalitarian ideologies do not permit open, critical pursuit of the truth, and so they cannot create knowledge to solve problems in an unbounded way. Free, open societies can, where ideas can be freely exchanged and people have the freedom to criticise institutions without fear of violence. The values of an open society are the values needed for knowledge growth. And the reason we want more knowledge is to solve our problems.
I am wondering if it would have been better if I had written ‘solving problems is on balance a good thing’? Or do you think solving problems is on balance bad, or perhaps neutral?
Sorry, just saw this. The Open Society and its Enemies is the big winner for Popper imo.
Short answer: it’s impossible.
Medium answer: the attempt itself is counterproductive and misunderstands how we use language.
Long answer: aside from being impossible, the impulse is related to Platonic essentialism, which is the philosophical spawning ground of authoritarianism and has stifled honest inquiry for circa 2k years.
With the risk of being unpopular I have to admit I have found what I've read of Popper to be seriously overrated. So far I have gone through The Open Society... and the better part of The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Open Society to me read mostly like a critique of the political philosophy of Plato, Hegel and Marx, with brief mentions of what the open society is actually supposed to be (I recall some mentions of social engineering and other such things). At best it felt like a grounding for the currently dominant neo-liberal social order.
The Logic... on the other hand does seem to bring novel content, but I feel the core of his endeavor is hopeless. Science definitely doesn't and can't work in a perfectly coherent algorithmic way. Science is a human social process that can't be subjected to a strict methodology. On this front I think Lakatos or even Kuhn are much closer to how things can/do work.
This is the thesis of Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies." He argues, correctly I think, that you can find intellectual strands going back to Heraclitus and Plato which revolve around the idea of some "central force" or "law of history" that enables a thinker to predict the future. He says that the alternative and preferable society is a skeptical one that views history as a series of experiments and tries to infer what amount to rules of thumb rather than grand "world historical" theories or forces.
> Popper argued that Plato had produced a vision of one such closed society. He pointed to the stratification of the social order in Plato’s ideal city, the strict division of labor between the intellectual and productive classes, the absence of social mobility, state censorship of most culture, and, above all, the promulgation of an openly fraudulent myth, the so-called Noble Lie, to legitimize the status quo.
The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and woolliness, is scholasticism, … which is treating what is vague as if it were precise… F. P. RAMSEY.
I’ve read the Wikipedia page. I also own the copy of the book where it is mentioned, which I’ve also read. People are paying it way more attention than Popper himself did (it’s not even mentioned in the original text proper) and further treating it as some sort of immutable law, when that completely ignores the purposes for which the argument was created and that it was never a formal observation of how society actually operated.
I'd suggest Popper's Paraphrase needs some deeper thought, as today it has been reduced to people trying to end arguments by yelling "KARL POPPER!" at people who step out of line.
I think this is the paradox's greatest weakness: whataboutism :-)
Karl Popper is not talking about today's progressives, because he died in 1994. The closest extension we can reasonably draw does not include them either, because Popper exclusively identified totalitarian ideologies with reactionary beliefs[1].
It's very easy to use the PoT as a blunt weapon, and there are some embarrassing applications of it on the political left. But none are quite as embarrassing as suggesting that Popper might seriously entertain "free debate" with a Nazi.
Go back and read The Open Society and Its Enemies or Objective Knowledge. and you'll find this statement constitutes a fundamental misreading of Popper.
Never mind the fact that Popper was basically wrong and the notion of 'falsifiability' is a non-starter when it comes to practical application of political theory, Soros notwithstanding.
I can almost guarantee that Karl Popper (the person who wrote a book on the reductive tendencies of proto-totalitarian societies) would fundamentally disagree with this summary of his 750 page work. He might point to the next five decades of his life as evidence for a repudiation.
Thank you for this. I’m seeing the argument and that particular misinterpretation raised frequently in online discussions lately. I suspect that few of its proponents have actually read Popper, and have based their interpretation on that terrible comic that’s often reposted on Reddit.
Can you elaborate on why you believe this is the case? Your comment as-is lacks substance, and it would be helpful to describe what of Popper's ideas you agree with, and how and why they apply to GP's comment.
> Kuhn covered it in full. Nothing more to be said on this subject.
The book was a classic when it came out, but there have been some fairly strong critiques in the past fifty years or so.
In fact, the most recent edition of the book includes a 'Postscript' written in 1969, in which Kuhne tries to answer some of the most pertinent criticisms of his theory.
There are also alternative theories to all this, or at least different perspectives one can take. Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations is a good example.
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