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1 Metaphysics
The idea of freedom is the core of Popper’s philosophy and he is determined to make it the ideal background of his very worldview.1 Beginning with the 1950s, Popper thinks it appropriate to insert his epistemological—as well as political—reflections within a wider “metaphysical” framework.2 Popper’s considerations on realism, indeterminism, World 3, and the self came to constitute a specific and distinct phase in the development of his thought, within which his epistemological and political ideas move back, so to say, to take a secondary place. The central problem became that of cosmology, that is, as Popper declares in the 1959 preface to the revised English edition of Logik der Forschung:
the problem of understanding the world—including ourselves, and our knowledge, as part of the world. All science is cosmology, I believe, and for me the interest of philosophy, no less than of science, lies solely in the contributions which it has made to it.3
Popper’s point of departure is that “in almost every phase of the development of science we are under the sway of metaphysical—that is, untestable—ideas; ideas which do not only determine what problems of explanation we shall choose to attack, but also what kinds of answers we shall consider as fitting or satisfactory or acceptable, and as improve- ments of, or advances on, earlier answers.”4 They are, indeed, metaphysi- cal research programmes, which remain mostly unconscious in the minds of scientists but shape their judgements and attitudes, thus influencing their assessments and orienting their choices. Popper calls them “meta- physical,” “because they result from general views of the structure of the world and, at the same time, from general views of the problem situa- tion in physical cosmology”;5 and he calls them “research programmes,” “because they incorporate, together with a view of what the most press- ing problems are, a general idea of what a satisfactory solution of these problems would look like.”6
Despite their being general views (or pictures) of the world, and not empiri- cally testable theories about it, they turn out to be necessary for science, since
“they largely determine its problem situations.”7 And they do so not as mere tools, required in order to do research, but as guides for it: they help scientists to decide whether to take a hypothesis seriously or not, whether it is a poten- tial new discovery, and how its acceptance might influence the problem situa- tion. It is perhaps possible, Popper claims, to find “a criterion of demarcation within metaphysics, between rationally worthless metaphysical systems, and metaphysical systems that are worth discussing, and worth thinking about.”8 Although we cannot come to a conclusion, whether positive or negative, it is possible to argue for or against a given metaphysical stance, and compare the arguments thus provided. The fact that one of these pictures is worth considering would depend “upon its capacity to provoke rational criticism, and to inspire attempts to supersede it by something better.”9
