Tag: Karl Popper

David Stove and the Plato cult

David Stove’s book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies is a remarkable collection of essays. As a staunch positivist ,the author is not impressed with most of what constitutes “philosophy” (or the quality of our thinking in general). As Stove laments in the preface, “there is something fearfully wrong with typical philosophical theories.” But unlike the early 20th century logical positivists, Stove has little hope for formulating a criterion that shows why the opinions of most philosophers are nonsense and completely devoid of common sense. As a consequence, Stove is forced to look for alternative  strategies to explain the “exceedingly strange” views of prominent philosophers.  Most of the essays in Stove’s book are informed by a perspective that investigates non-rational causes that could throw some light on the matter.

For example, the thoughts of Karl Popper, who Stove holds responsible for facilitating an era of irrationalism in the philosophy of science, are explained by the spirit of the “Jazz Age” (anything goes) that is expressed in Popper’s philosophy.   Stove’s case is not  all that persuasive. The most obvious line of criticism is that it is highly implausible to attribute the spirit of the Jazz Age to a grumpy, intolerant person like Karl Popper. If anything, in light of Popper’s personality traits, the anti-authoritarian aspirations  in his writings are actually quite remarkable.  Stove missed the most obvious personal explanation available to him; Popper’s obsession to refute the logical positivists. One would look in vain in Popper’s writings for a celebration of the Jazz Age but it is not hard to detect Popper’s compulsive need to establish his place in the history of thought.  Obviously, this cannot be done through incremental refinements of the theories of previous philosophers; it requires a new way of looking at things (falsificationism).  If Stove would have argued that lifting concepts from the political realm and using them in epistemology is the road to confusion and leads inevitably to the epistemological anarchism of Paul Feyerabend and the vacuous “pancritical rationalism” of William Bartley, he might have been on firmer ground.  Instead, Stove argues that the main emotional impulse of Popper was ultimately what he calls “horror victorianorum,” the  irrational distaste for, or condemnation of, Victorian culture, art and design. As a self-proclaimed conservative, one would expect Stove to launch a strong defense of the politics and culture of late Victorian England but, oddly enough, Stove seems to have considerable sympathy for horror victorianorum and it is only the rational side in him that forces him to admit that this emotional response has little intellectual merit.

The other essays in The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies are similar cases studies of philosophers with crazy ideas including a scathing review of Nozick’s attempt to engage in “non-coercive” philosophy. Of most interest is the final chapter called “What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo.” It is in this essay where the strict positivist outlook of Stove finds its most forceful expression. Stove cites a number of passages of the works of Plotinus, Hegel and Foucault and cannot explain how (supposedly) intelligent people can express such madness. What characteristics do all these ideas have in common? Stove has considerable sympathy for the logical positivist project to find criteria to eliminate metaphysics and nonsense from philosophy but does not believe that finding such criteria will be comprehensive enough. He refers to Tolstoy who said that all happy families are the same while every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way.  There are endless ways in which human thinking can go wrong. In the end Stove is pessimistic about the prospect for rational thought: “genetic engineering aside, given a large aggregation of human beings, and a long time, you cannot reasonably expect rational thought to win.”

Stove may be correct about the ultimate fate of the human race, but he may be too pessimistic about developing criteria that discipline thinking. The mistake of some of the early logical positivist may not have been so much in looking for such criteria but insufficient recognition of the fact that such criteria need a context to be useful. Instead of saying that the statements of, let’s say, Hegel or Heidegger, or not meaningful (period) it would be better to say that such statements are not meaningful in the context of action or prediction. As Hans Reichenbach writes in his logical empiricist masterpiece “Experience and Prediction:”

It seems to me that the psychological motives which led positivists to their theory of meaning are to be sought in the connection between meaning and action and that it was the postulate of utilizability which always stood behind the positivistic theory of meaning, as well as behind the pragmatic theory, where indeed it was explicitly stated.

From this perspective, critiques concerning the self-applicability of the logical positivist criterion of meaningfulness can be avoided by linking cognitive significance to action (including such endeavors as experimental science) in a way that itself can be subjected to logical or empirical investigation. In essence, this “pragmatic” element would introduce a more thoroughgoing empiricism. Logical positivists like Carnap were not hostile to this idea as evidenced by his ongoing efforts to refine his criteria so as not to exclude the achievements of modern science.  Broadly speaking, we look at successful scientific efforts (which basically comprise all sciences that can be reduced to physics and mathematics) and “reverse-engineer” our criteria around this.  Such efforts may produce new roadblocks but there is a good chance that the resulting criteria will eliminate of lot of the madness that Stove finds in most philosophers, intellectuals, and public policy makers.

Thomas Ligotti, Karl Popper and antinatalism

In his recently published non-fiction work The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror the contemporary horror writer Thomas Ligotti takes Karl Popper’s “negative utilitarianism” to its ultimate conclusion:

One who did not balk entirely was the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper, who in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) did have a thing or two to say about human suffering. Briefly, he revamped the Utilitarianism of the nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, who wrote: “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to promote the reverse of happiness.” Popper remolded this summation of a positive utilitarianism into a negative utilitarianism whose position he handily stated as follows: “It adds to clarity in the fields of ethics, if we formulate our demands negatively, i.e. if we demand the elimination of suffering rather than the promotion of happiness.” Taken to its logical and most humanitarian conclusion, Popper’s demand can have as its only end the elimination of those who now suffer as well as “counterfactual” beings who will suffer if they are born. What else could the “elimination of suffering” mean if not is total abolition, and ours? Naturally, Popper held his horses well before suggesting that to eliminate suffering would demand that we as a species be eliminated. But as R.N. Smart famously argued (Mind, 1958), this is the only conclusion to be drawn from Negative Utilitarianism. (p.73)

It is not likely that Popper would have agreed with such an antinatalist interpretation of his work but we should not be surprised about it. Such unintended consequences are basically implied in ethical views that seek to maximize a value or state of affairs for humanity as a whole. It inevitably leads to a teleological concept of society and tortuous attempts to construct some kind of optimal social welfare function where the suffering of one person is weighed against the suffering of another person. Not surprisingly, Popper followed his ethical views with his idea of “piecemeal social engineering” to generate a “social technology” to improve the world.

An alternative to Popper’s “negative utilitarianism” and “piecemeal social engineering” would be to think about ethics  and politics “from the ground up” as Thomas Hobbes attempted:

Hobbes’s contemporaries understood politics as something descended from the ages or the heavens, but Hobbes built politics from the ground up. Self-interested individuals, craving protection for their lives, contracted to create sovereign states.

In this view morality is not the imposition of a set of values that a particular person happens to like but a mechanism to coordinate activity between humans. Contemporary Hobbesian philosophers like David Gauthier and Jan Narveson do not seem to agree with Hobbes about the necessity of Big Government (or in the case of Narveson, the need for Government at all) but Hobbes’ secular conception of morality as mutual advantage remains intact.

Thomas Hobbes was considered an atheist and reductionist by his enemies:

Hobbes’s snide irreligion, once the main complaint against him, may now commend him to those who perpetually fear the supposed return of theocracy. His tendency to portray humans as appetitive beasts flatters our present eagerness to explain every aspect of human conduct in biological terms. Hobbes was also acutely suspicious of democracy. He considered it a breeder of faction

In light of Ligotti’s book it should also be noted that Thomas Hobbes was  a determinist (albeit not a “hard determinist”). As such, the Hobbesian enterprise can also be conceived as a project to explain how social norms emerge and change.

As for suffering, most people do not think that a life that includes suffering is not worth continuing, or creating, but look at  other interests and the quality of life as a whole as well. As antinatalists like David Benatar have argued, quality of life is not just a simple matter of subtracting (expected) negative things in life from (expected) positive things in life. But such an argument can be developed in both a pessimist and an optimist direction – two possibilities that do not receive equal treatment in Benatar’s work.

Carl Menger and the exact science of economics

In Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) Terence W. Hutchison presents a logical-empiricist perspective on economic methodology and takes specific issue with Austrian economists who believe that economic theories cannot and should not be falsified through empirical testing. In the chapter “The Application of Pure Theory” Hutchison criticizes Carl Menger’s view of what constitutes an “exact” science:

Menger contributed a further precision to this concept of economic laws, emphasizing what he and subsequent writers called their exactness, exceptions to them being inconceivable, and that “it involved a misconception of the foundations and postulates of the exact method” to test them empirically…To-day one can hardly help concurring with Schmoller that any worker in a chemical laboratory who proclaimed Menger’s conception of exactness would be ejected forthwith.

He also quotes John Elliott Cairnes on the methodology of economics as saying, “The economist starts with a knowledge of ultimate causes. He is already, at the outset of his enterprise, in the position the physicist only attains after ages of laborious research…”

Hutchison responds to his claim as follows:

It is possibly very encouraging for the economist to hear that compared with the natural scientist the psychological method saves him “ages of laborious research”, but it is curious and a pity that this huge start has not enabled him to formulate any considerable body of reliable prognoses such as the natural sciences have managed to achieve.

Hutchison does not completely dismiss the role of  a-priori reasoning in economics but objects to the idea that such reasoning exhausts the subject of economics. He quotes Ernst Mach on “laws” being “a limitation of what is possible.” If a law does not exclude or forbid any conceivable type of empirical occurrence than it  is not telling us anything about the world and, therefore,  such a science should be considered a pseudo-science. A similar complaint has been raised by Karl Popper about the all-accommodating nature of Marxism. The logical positivist writer Otto Neurath was of the opinion that, historically, metaphysical and anti-positivist thinking go hand in hand with the justification of oppression.

Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether the methods of the natural sciences are suitable for the study of economics. But even after 70 years since the publication of  Hutchison’s classic, economists who  have completely rejected empirical testing have contributed little of substance to the science of economics.

Rudolf Carnap politicized

“I like to keep my philosophical work separated from my political aims.” (Rudolf Carnap)

It is a welcome development that there is an increasing interest in the history and substance of logical positivism (or logical empiricism). Most of this literature, however, is produced by professional philosophers and social scientists, and, therefore, should be approached with caution.

Despite the refinements that have been made to the basic tenets of the early Vienna Circle, logical positivism remains identified with physicalism, the unity of science, a rejection of metaphysics, and non-cognitivism; an overall outlook, at least in its implicit moderate form, that has become dominant among most practicing (natural) scientists.

As a general rule, the more obscurantist and multi-interpretable a philosopher, the higher the probability (s)he will be admitted to the ranks of “important thinkers.” Therefore, as one browses the philosophy section in a book store one should expect to find numerous books on Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno, and little, or nothing, on systematic and disciplined writers like Rudolf Carnap or Hans Reichenbach.

In the case of Carnap this situation is changing. For a long while, Carnap was being perceived as an outdated thinker whose contributions had been “refuted” by Karl Popper and other critics of logical positivism.  In the case of Karl Popper this opinion has been further reinforced by Popper the person, reflecting his desire to establish himself as an important philosopher by distancing himself from the philosophers of the Vienna Circle.  In his essay on Popper, Martin Gardner writes that  “it seems that every time Carnap expressed an opinion, Popper felt compelled to come forth with an opposing view, although it usually turned out to be the same as Carnap’s but in different language.”

In hindsight, Popper’s vanity has been unfortunate because both philosophers would most likely have been appalled with the state of contemporary philosophy. The differences between Popper and Carnap  are a lot smaller than the differences between them and what constitutes “critical thinking” today. What could have been a potential refinement of logical positivism became “critical rationalism.”

Since Rudolf Carnap has the reputation of being a bone dry and technical philosopher who did not allow hyperbole, moralism, and politics in his published philosophical writings (presumably because he recognized the challenge, if not  impossibility, of linking his technical writings and political views in a logical manner), one would think it would be impossible to use Carnap’s technical writings as a starting point for social philosophy. Enter A. W. Carus’s Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment, who takes on this task.

The author of this book must have realized himself that  his proposal has a strong subjective component, as evidenced by the following self-conscious passages from the Preface and Introduction:

“The purpose of this book is to describe that proposal , to make it more explicit than Carnap did…”

“In the particular case of the Vienna Circle, certain assumptions about the broader cultural and ethical context of their philosophical project were so obvious to them they were never made explicit in their writings.”

“But although he remained politically aware during his American years, and involved in radical politics, he made no effort whatever to connect these activities with the philosophical work he was publishing.”

Towards the end of the introduction, Carus informs us that he will not engage with  most of Carnap’s specific technical writings but proposes to work out a “general programme of explication”, “something toward which Carnap approached, in his later years, but which never quite crystallized, probably not even in his own mind.”

It cannot be denied that Carnap had political interests that preceded or continued during his academic work. As a number of quotations from Carnap’s autobiography make clear, Carnap certainly had an interest in political matters and was even engaged in political organization throughout his life (for example, Carus mentions Carnap’s apparent sympathy for the socialist anarchism of Gustav Landauer). But some writers cannot resist to treat these personal political and cultural ambitions as necessary linked to (or a prerequisite for) their technical work, an exercise that seems to me just as futile as envisioning the idea of a “socialist chemistry” or a “feminist physics.”

Moreover, to the extent that there are indications of ideological bias in someone’s scientific work (Otto Neurath’s writings may be a good example) the proper approach is to highlight those and separate them from the meaningful (sic) work. Carus’s approach, on the other hand, seems to embrace such tendencies and further amplifies them, an attitude that seems to be highly at odds with the logical positivist tradition and presents a formidable obstacle to clear and disciplined thinking.

The result is a book that cannot seem to decide what it wants to be (see Alan Richardson’s review on this point).  The introduction and the final chapter of the book attempt to link Carnap to a specific cultural, if not political, philosophy and produces a rather artificial and arbitrary brew as a result. The remaining bulk of the text is a well researched and interesting review of the evolution of Carnap’s (early) thinking. No doubt the author could claim that these two elements are not mutually exclusive, perhaps even complementary to each other, but the parts in which the author allows more space for Carnap’s broader ambitions convey as much information about the author as about Carnap.

Even if an attempt along the lines of this book is made it does not strike me as obvious to place the relevance of Carnap’s thought in debates such as those between John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas.  The tradition of logical positivism, and its associated meta-ethical theory of non-cognitivism, seems to be more compatible  with an outlook that is influenced by evolutionary or game-theoretical approaches to social phenomena.

Although Carnap has admitted in his autobiographical writings to have remained sympathetic to a planned economy and world government, the general worldview that was implicit in the logical-empiricist movement permits secular views ranging from analytical marxism to “right wing” counter-modernism. This tolerance to various interpretations of the Enlightenment is very clear in its 1929 “manifesto” “The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle”, which mentions Adam Smith as well as Karl Marx as predecessors of a scientific and anti-metaphysical attitude.

In my opinion, if there is an urgent matter in which the perspective of logical positivism can be of important value it is the explicit  post-war taboo on the use of evolutionary biology in the shaping and evaluation of public policy. Although a logical-empiricist approach may not be be able to shed light on the formation and persistence of this taboo (although public choice might), it can critically analyze the arguments that have been offered to justify the “modern denial of human nature.” I do not think that it would be proper to offer this proposal in a book about Carnap though. And this brings us back to the topic at hand. The renewed interest in Carnap is wonderful and deserved, but I’d rather see works on Carnap that are more modest and which do not propose “a framework of discourse in which a utopian partnership for reason and Enlightenment can co-exist with a pluralism more radical and fundamental than that envisaged by liberal political philosophers such as Rawls.”

One of the real strengths of the logical positivists was how their views were shaped by modern developments in the physical sciences and mathematics. Carnap’s work can benefit from placing it in a broader perspective but I think that it will be more  illuminating to review his relevance in light of recent developments in science instead of contrasting his thinking with other (political) philosophers. There is a lot of contemporary work in science that is close to the spirit of Carnap’s thinking, and logical empiricism in general, but it is rarely identified as such because many of these scientists (physicists, biologists, neuroscientists, etc.) are not aware of the empiricist and anti-metaphysical premises in their work. 


Karl Popper’s authoritarian social technologies

Karl Popper is known for his influential contributions to the philosophy of science and critical rationalism.  Unfortunately, his attempt to apply critical rationalism to political philosophy produced writings of a more impatient and dubious nature. For example, in 1960 Popper wrote:

..the empiricist’s questions ‘How do you know? What is the source of your assertion?’ are wrongly put. They are not formulated in an inexact or slovenly manner, but they are entirely misconceived; they are questions that beg for an authoritarian answer…They can be compared with that traditional question of political authority, ‘Who should rule’, which begs for an authoritarian answer such as ‘the best’, ‘or ‘the wisest’, or ‘the people’, or ‘the majority’…This political question is wrongly put and the answers which it elicits are paradoxical. It should be replaced by a completely different question such as ‘How can we organize our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers…cannot do too much damage?’ I believe that only by changing our question in this way can we hope to proceed towards a reasonable theory of political institutions.

Popper’s reformulated question simply takes for granted that we need a mechanism of collective choice  to revolve conflicts between people and produce public goods.  Not only that, as a social democrat he did not just restrict government to such a role but expected it to fight “evil” and “suffering:”

We must construct social institutions, enforced by the power of the state, for the protection of the economically weak from the economically strong. The state must see to it that nobody need enter into an inequitable arrangement… (in: The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1962)

As a hardline political consequentialist, Popper proposed his idea of  “piecemeal social engineering”  to generate a “social technology” to improve the world we live in. As such, he places himself in a long tradition of activist philosophers who take a look at society, conclude that it can be “improved”, and advocate collective choice mechanisms to discover and implement such changes. Fortunately, Popper’s political views have been subjected to a rigorous critical dissection by the social philosopher Anthony de Jasay in his article The Twistable is not Testable: Reflections on the Political Thought of Karl Popper (reprinted in Against Politics).

Popper’s question about “organizing our political institutions” should be replaced with questions that do not assume that the issue of government has been settled. Such questions  may include ‘Can conflicts about scarce resources be resolved without resorting to non-unanimous decision making’ or ‘Can public goods be provided without coercion?’ One attempt to reconcile Popper’s anti-justificatory critical rationalism and anarchism is Jan Lester’s book Escape From Leviathan: Liberty, Welfare, and Anarchy Reconciled.