سکوت

The Ethical Nature of Karl Popper’s Solution to the Problem of Rationality

STEFANO 

Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy

Mariano Artigas, The Ethical Nature of Karl Popper’s Theory of Knowl- edge: Including Popper’s Unpublished Comments on Bartley and Critical Rationalism, edited by Ivan Slade. Peter Lang AG, Berne, Germany, 1999. Pp. 153. 23.50 euros; $26.95. ISBN: 0-8204-4606-8.

Geoffrey Stokes, Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method. Pol- ity, Cambridge, MA, 1998. Pp. xiv + 197. £50; $57.95 (hardback),

£14.99; $24.95 (paperback). ISBN: 0-7456-0321-1 (hardback), 0- 7456-0322-X (paperback).

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resis- tance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance—meeting no resis- tance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so set his under- standing in motion.

—Immanuel Kant

As Sextus Empiricus reports,

The Skeptics were in hopes of gaining quietude by means of a deci- sion..., and being unable to effect this they suspended judgement; and they found that quietude, as if by chance, followed upon their sus- pense. . . . We do not, however, suppose that the Skeptic is wholly untroubled.     1

Life is “skeptical”—in the etymological meaning of sképsis, the Greek term for research—as Xenophanes taught, since “the gods did not reveal, from the beginning, / All things to the mortals; but in the course of time, / Through seeking they may get to know things better.”2 With his view of life as a never-ending process of problem solving, Karl Popper recalled and gave new meaning to the idea of a philosopher who lived two and a half thousand years ago, according to which “all is but a woven web of guesses.”3 Rationality is opinion and action in accordance to reason. However, what this amounts to remains disputed by philosophers, and the theory of rationality grows from such disagreement.

OVERVIEW

The two books here under review are quite different in aim, style, and content. However, even from different perspectives and with dif- ferent purposes, both take the problem of rationality to be the core of Popper’s philosophy and seek to probe the nature and consequences of Popper’s solution.

Geoffrey Stokes’s book is solid, well written and construed. It endeavors to convey a comprehensive view and critical analysis of the interweaving of political commitments, epistemology, and scien- tific method in the whole range of Popper’s writings, trying to touch on all but the most technical aspects of his philosophical production (namely, quantum theory and the propensity interpretation of proba- bility): methodological falsification and its critics, the politics of criti- cal rationalism, philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, metaphysics and freedom, evolutionary epistemology, and critical rationalism and critical theory (in the last chapter, Popper’s philoso- phy is examined from within problem situations set by the members of the Frankfurt school of critical theory). Convinced that “Research into epistemology and methodology is part of a larger philosophical project which aims to provide an account of rationality in the sense of rules for rational enquiry and rational action,”4 Stokes aims at pre- senting “Popper’s philosophy as a ‘system of ideas’ whose progres- sive unfolding reveals a more general philosophy of life and cosmol- ogy.”5

Mariano Artigas’s book is made up of two texts on the same topic: the ethical roots of Popper’s critical rationalism. The scope is restricted, though essential for a correct interpretation of Popper’s

whole philosophical edifice. Focusing on a few scattered and rare comments on William Bartley’s proposal for a new theory of rational- ity, which Popper delivered during a seminar in Kyoto, Japan, in 1992, Artigas shows how complex the relation is between Popper’s critical rationalism and Bartley’s pancritical rationalism, and argues that “Popper’s philosophy becomes crystal clear when we view it through ethical glasses.”6 If we fail to interpret his arguments in the light of ethical values, he continues, “we seriously risk misunderstanding him and we can easily substitute the real Popper by a dead skeleton full of unsolved problems.”7 However, Artigas’s detailed (though at times repetitive) reconstruction of the problem situation that led to the Popper-Bartley confrontation, and to Popper’s later comments on it, is lacking in at least one (crucial) respect. The author almost totally omits any references to the large debate grown out of the Popper- Bartley exchange—involving Joseph Agassi, Ian Jarvie, John Post, Thomas Settle, and John Watkins, to mention but a few.8 Although he aims at addressing the ethical character of critical rationalism, which is one of the reasons for Popper’s dislike of that debate, a brief survey would have been welcome and helpful for understanding the multi- faceted problem of rationality—whose very many facets play a not secondary role in the story.

Stokes is especially interested in the relationship between Popper’s views on scientific method and politics. Although epistemology and methodology are key components in Popper’s system of ideas, Stokes takes their character to be determined by their role and relevance within a political philosophy: they actually reflect political values and commitments, embodying (and not only instrumentally contributing to) certain political values such as the ethics of criticism, self-criticism, and toleration.9 Malachi Hacohen, in his recent historical and intellec- tual reconstruction of Popper’s early development, seems to buttress Stokes’s opinion: historically, Hacohen argues, Popper’s philosophy is anchored in a world of moral and political values; his scientific and political reflections are underlined by a set of ethical values and beliefs that seem to be a response to the ethnopolitical situation of assimilated Central European Jewry.

No doubt, the immediate post–World War I period proved crucial to Popper’s life: “The revolutionary upheaval settled nothing, but it set him on his political and philosophical trajectories.”10 However, though Popper was clearly concerned with political problems and had strong ethical commitments, he was interested in scientific and epistemological problems as well. It is not possible to establish that

political concerns are prior to an epistemological position, or vice versa, and it may be easier to see how he came to derive freedom from fallibilism than the other way round. Indeed, on Popper’s own account, fallibility plays a crucial role in his intellectual development, and he did not have a developed political philosophy when he first formulated falsifiability.11

In any case, Stokes says that Popper’s earliest and most enduring concerns were moral and political, and sets himself “to indicate the key intellectual components and priorities in his thought, to show how they form a complex whole, and how they lead to certain prob- lems and inconsistencies.”12 Epistemology, with its open, critical debate, presupposes the existence of liberal democratic political insti- tutions that guarantee freedom of thought and expression (as in Ath- ens during the golden age of Pericles)—though, of course, political institutions cannot guarantee freedom of thought and expression, and especially not if we do not value freedom.13 That is why the idea of an open society (which does not identify with democracy), though not always explicitly expressed, permeates the whole evolution of Popper’s thought, whose shifts and changes of direction—as Stokes emphasizes—resulted from conscious and unconscious awareness of key ethical and political concerns. The values Popper writes about are not solely methodological or epistemic: “freedom from dogmatism” is an explicitly political and ethical value, as both Artigas and Kiesewetter show.

JUSTIFICATION AND CRITICISM

“The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.”14 Not retiring means acknowledging the historical dimension of knowledge and stressing the role of individual researchers, who are regarded as responsible people charged with decisions. This does not hold only for the theory of knowledge and science. It holds for social sciences with equal force. That is why Popper grounded his “theory of democratic control” upon “the decision, or upon the adoption of the proposal, to avoid and to resist tyranny.”15 Once again, decision is the key word. We need methodological decisions both in democracy and in the scientific enterprise. We could actually replace some words in the  passage  quoted  above  and  read  it  as  follows:  “The  game of

[democracy] is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that [rulers and their acts] do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally [approved], retires from the game.” That is, he retires from democracy. We must come to grips with our fallible nature, both in the natural and the social sciences. And in both fields we have to face the problem of the limits either of our criticism ability or of sovereignty. We have to avoid immunizing strategies and prac- tice democratic vigilance. In this sense, Popper’s philosophy effected a structural transformation in philosophy as a whole.

“How do we know? How do we justify our beliefs?” As Popper taught us, all questions of this kind beg authoritarian answers, such as “the Bible,” “the leader,” “the intellect,” “sense experience,” and the like. Notwithstanding the efforts to free these allegedly indisputable authorities from various difficulties along the Western philosophical tradition, they all proved to be not only inadequate justifications but also fallible and questionable in themselves. In the same line, “Who should rule?” is the wrong way of posing the problem. Again, such a question begs an authoritarian answer, such as “the best,” “the wis- est,” “the people,” “the proletariat,” “the chosen ones,” or “the master race.” Therefore, Popper reformulated the problem in the following way: “How can we best arrange our political institutions so as to get rid of bad rulers, or at least restrict the amount of harm they can do?”16 It is a radical modification of perspective that changes the whole thing, thus dissolving the authoritarian structure of political philoso- phy and, more generally, of the Western philosophical tradition.17 In fact, such a new formulation contains the recognition that there is no best kind of supreme political authority for all situations, and it reopens the door to a rational approach in political philosophy: it enables one to be a political rationalist and a kind of democrat without committing oneself to the belief that any majority is right.

Most important, in Bartley’s view, what holds true for political phi- losophy applies perhaps even more significantly to philosophy in general. All proposed sources of knowledge are fallible and epistemologically insufficient—but all are welcome, given that they can be criticized.

The authoritarian structuring of philosophy’s fundamental epistemological question can be remedied by making a shift compara- ble to the one suggested for political philosophy. We may not only reject (as did the critical rationalists) the demand for rational proofs of our rational standards. We may go further, and also abandon the demand that everything except the standards be proved or justified by appealing

to the authority of the standards, or by some other means.... Nothing gets justified; everything gets criticized. Instead of positing infallible intel- lectual authorities to justify and guarantee positions, one may build a philosophical program for counteracting intellectual error. One may create an ecological niche for rationality.18

Once again, we could rephrase our problem, switching a few words and putting it into another context:

How can our intellectual life and institutions be arranged so as to expose our beliefs, conjectures, policies, positions, sources of ideas, tra- ditions, and the like—whether or not they are justifiable—to maximum criticism, in order to counteract and eliminate as much intellectual error as possible?19

By sharply separating the concepts of justification and criticism, and by explicitly eliminating the notion of justification from that of criticism, Bartley intends to escape the dilemma of ultimate commit- ment to an authority, thus eliminating what he thought were the last remnants of a fideistic attitude and of positivism (that is, justificationism) in Popper’s philosophy.20 His comprehensively criti- cal rationalism, later renamed pancritical rationalism, proposes itself as a new philosophical program, a nonjustificational philosophy of criti- cism comprising a new conception of rationality. Within such a frame- work, being rational means being willing to entertain any position and hold anything in it (including the most fundamental standards, goals, and decisions) as open to criticism, without resorting to any authority, faith, or irrational commitment. Any position may be held rationally, provided that it remains open to criticism and survives severe tests. There is no theoretical limit to criticizability, that is, to rationality.21

IRRATIONAL FAITH IN REASON

According to Popper, the attitude of rational argument cannot be grounded on rational argument. Critical rationalism ultimately relies on an “irrational faith in reason,” a consequence of a moral decision in favor of rationalism: “whoever adopts the rationalist attitude does so because he has adopted, consciously or unconsciously, some pro- posal, or decision, or belief, or behaviour; an adoption which may be

called ‘irrational’ . . . we may describe it as an irrational faith in reason.”22

Bartley regarded it as a too generous concession to irrationalism, a dangerous chink in the armor of critical rationalists (the tu quoque argument, as he called it: the most effective argument in the armory of irrationalism—something we owe to ourselves to answer). He did not want to share any leap of faith, although in reason, and therefore rejected it—and, with it, the moral decision that Popper placed at the root of his philosophy.

Bartley’s attempt to free Popper’s critical rationalism from what he considered the last remnants of a fideistic attitude (namely, his ulti- mate grounding it upon a “faith in reason”) was contested by Popper from the very beginning. They had long discussions that led to the publication, in 1962, both of Bartley’s The Retreat to Commitment,23 and of Popper’s fourth edition of The Open Society and Its Enemies. A lengthy new addendum was added to this new edition, in which Pop- per acknowledged Bartley’s “incisive criticism which not only helped me to improve chapter 24 of this book (especially page 231) but also induced me to make important changes in the present addendum.”24 However, their relationship deteriorated during the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, held in London in 1965. There Bartley presented a paper on the problem of demarcation between science and metaphysics, pointing out that Popper’s contri- bution caused a shift from the general problem of method or rational- ity to that of demarcation.25 He attacked Popper on one of the issues to which he was most sensitive, since it had contributed most to the mis- representation of Popper’s philosophy (the so-called “Popper- legend”): the alleged positivist traces in his early philosophy. He argued that Popper’s proposed criterion of demarcation corresponds to a problem that has little relevance compared with the real central problem, that of demarcating critical and noncritical theories: even though Popper was not a positivist, he was closer to the positivists than he thought, and left little room for metaphysics.26

In Bartley’s eyes, Popper’s assertion about faith in reason goes to justify critical rationalism, whilst he said he needed no justification at all. In other words, when Popper identifies a positive basis for his rationalist attitude by means of a moral decision, he actually falls back on the justificationist attitude he tried to eliminate. Bartley does not want to have anything to do with basic decisions or moral presuppo- sitions and therefore proposes to eliminate any kind of justificationism by holding the attitude itself open to criticism.

To Popper, rationalism requires a complementary notion of reason- ableness, that is, “an attitude of readiness to listen to critical argu- ments and to learn from experience.”27 It is the moral core of Popper’s fallibilism: having realized how little we know, we must not only be fully prepared to correct our mistakes, but we are also required to have doubts about our knowledge. The process of doubting must be a conscious attitude of openness to criticism, which has an individual and a social aspect. On one hand, each participant in the game of criti- cal discussion is required to be prepared to listen to criticism, to be able to accept criticism, to practice self-criticism, and to engage in mutual criticism with others. On the other, once a subjective attitude or moral stance has been adopted by the individuals, reasoning must be conceived as a social process of intersubjective confrontation.

Reasoning is engaging in communication with others; it requires nonepistemic values of social conduct. Central among these is the moral imperative to take others and their arguments seriously, that is, to respect them, to be ready not only to allow differences to exist but to try to learn from them. Popper chooses reason primarily because of its beneficial consequences: rationalism comprises a set of principles that are both epistemological and ethical and, set the social and political rules for the human cooperation necessary for the acquisition of knowledge. Popper felt it as a very concrete issue and understood it as a personal choice:

I felt that where moral problems come in, one  must  not  be abstract. . . . This was for me, not for my students, but this was for me a kind of faith, or decision, or something like that; for me only. I even did- n’t advocate it.28

On the contrary, Bartley’s critique seems entirely drawn from logic, thus disregarding the profound ethical nature of Popper’s choice.29 And even if we take pancritical rationalism to emphasize an attitude, possessing itself an ethical dimension (in fact, Bartley arrived at it while trying to solve existential problems relating to religion and ulti- mate commitment), we cannot help but see how pancriticism seems to be centered more on overcoming the opponent than on aiming at avoiding violence.

Popper understands his own moral decision as a choice, as a kind of categorical imperative valued for its own sake, not as a premise to an argument. It is not a commitment to a theory, nor to anything that could be accepted or rejected as true or false. His critical rationalism is

“fundamentally, an attitude,”30 not a theory—that is, a disposition, a readiness to listen to each other’s critical arguments, to search for one’s own mistakes, and to learn from them, following the best argu- ment in a critical debate.

Therefore, it can not be replaced by a theory of rationality. A theory of rationality is a proposed solution to the problem of rationality. Like any theory, it can be true or false. On the other hand, an attitude is nei- ther true nor false. But again, even if we read Bartley’s pancritical rationalism as an attitude—namely, the attitude that requires that everything should remain open to criticism, including this very atti- tude itself—we have to notice that they are two different attitudes, confronting two different problems. On one hand, we have the growth of knowledge and the improvement of society and its institu- tions; on the other, the will to demolish the argument of those relativ- ists, skeptics, and fideists  who  reproach  the  rationalist  with the tu quoque argument.

De facto, when we argue in favor or against something, we have already adopted or accepted a rational attitude, no matter how tenta- tively. Rationality is just a word to describe the correct way of finding out what is going on by using unlimited criticism. It has nothing to do with discovering thoughts or assuming stances; it does not allow us to follow a procedure that would be “right” and would lead us to the desired results. Reason is the negative faculty of relentless criticism. Do we wish to become more rational or less rational? Once we accept it this way, we are already rational to some degree. After asking, we can go one way or the other, but the very ability to ask it tells us we are.

Critical rationalism’s defence of criticism is caught—Stokes con- cludes—between two mutually unacceptable options. Either the defence is based on decision and, because it cannot supply satisfactory reasons, it is therefore dogmatic, or it is circular in that it is self applicable or paradoxical because it uses criticism to defend criticism.31

We can now understand that this is a misinterpretation of Popper’s intentions. Indeed, Popper explains,

My rationalism is not dogmatic. I fully admit that I cannot rationally prove it. I frankly confess that I choose rationalism because I hate vio- lence, and I do not deceive myself into believing that this hatred has any rational grounds. Or, to put it another way, my rationalism is not self- contained, but rests on an irrational faith in the attitude of reasonable- ness: I do not see that we can go beyond this. One could say, perhaps, that my irrational faith in equal and reciprocal rights to convince others