Rationalism and the Open Society (Part II)
A brief outline of Popperian rationality
By John Saudino
7 February 2021
This is the second article in a three part series. See Part I here.
2. Non-justificationism: the basic principle of Popperian rationality
2.1 The basics of non-justificationism
The solution to this broadly defined problem situation, the impending destruction of the open society, is, of course, rationalism, in the way Popper understood it. According to Popper this rationality is the basis for objectivity in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and of general humanitarianism and hence of morality. His idea of rationality, as we shall see, is based in large part on the principle of non-justificationism, a profoundly anti-authoritarian approach to knowledge that is intricately linked to the particulars of his philosophy of science and is applicable to the social sciences by means of the unity of science and applicable to public policy by means of “piecemeal social engineering”.
To employ critical rationalist David Miller’s diction here, non-justificationism is based on the fact that “rationality is concerned with reason, with argument, but not with reasons”,[1] that is to say not with justifications, i.e. good reasons to believe something. Miller’s three theses are: “good reasons do not exist”, good reasons “would serve no purpose” even if they did exist, and “good reasons are also not necessary”.[2] The first thesis is true because of infinite regress. Just as is the case with definitions, justifications, the providing of good reasons to believe something is true, will always lead to an infinite regress. This is because every reason/conclusion would have to have another reason/premise justifying it, which would in turn require another and another, etc. until eternity. The second thesis, that reasons serve no purpose, is largely based on the logical principle of petitio principii; the only premises that will yield a logically valid inference are the ones in which the conclusion is already contained, so there is no new information to be had with the inference. The third thesis, that good reasons are not necessary, has to do with the Critical Rationalist approach to truth. By rejecting certainty and embracing truth as a regulatory factor, critical rationalism maintains that “human knowledge is always unjustified and unjustifiable” but that “nonetheless it can develop and improve”, and relativism as well as “skepticism can be kept at bay”.[3]
Critical rationalists reject inductivism. They view all knowledge as conjectural and insist its growth is based on criticism rather than justification. This reason without reasons is based on the idea that “criticism is the life blood of reason.”[4] The inherent asymmetry between verification/justification and falsification means that we cannot prove theories right; we can only prove them wrong.[5] The Popperian view of science and of reason is one of “inter-subjectivity”.[6] In Popper’s view there simply is no substitute for rational discussion. “Reason like language, can be said to be a product of social life.”[7] This is what he calls “the social aspect of scientific method”:[8] “the fact that science and scientific objectivity does not (and cannot) result from the attempts of an individual scientist to be ‘objective’, but from the friendly-hostile co-operation of many scientists”.[9] This fact also functions as a foil to all those who base their relativism on the “sociology of knowledge” because their spurious assumptions of biases on the part of single scientists cannot hold when there is the kind of open critical discussion Popper describes as part and parcel of scientific method (see section 7.1 in the next article).
This is why Popper’s passion for defending the open society is so strong, because it alone can reliably maintain “the various social institutions which have been designed to further scientific objectivity and criticism.”[10] It is the responsibility of every rationalist to defend this culture of open discussion and criticism, and, in great contrast to the obscurantist disciples of Hegel and Wittgenstein, to maintain an ethical respect for the clarity of expression. In such discussions it is always important to stress “that the argument counts, rather than the person arguing”.[11]
2.2 The anti-authoritarian nature of non-justificationism: genuine rationalism vs. pseudo-rationalism.
It should be clear from the above that non-justificationism is an inherently anti-authoritarian approach to knowledge. This is because instead of breaking the infinite regress of reasons and premises with a dogmatic invocation of authority, the non-justificationist will always be ready to put forth rational arguments for or against a theory or proposal and to listen to the honest criticism of others. “Reason, like science, grows by way of mutual criticism; the only possible way of ‘planning’ its growth is to develop those institutions that safeguard the freedom of this criticism, that is to say, the freedom of thought”.[12] The often quoted motto in this direction is his famous saying: “’I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth’”.[13]
Popper associates this “true rationalism” expressed in this attitude with the intellectual modesty of Socrates, and attributes “pseudo-rationalism”[14] to Plato. Pseudo-rationalism “is the immodest belief in one’s superior intellectual gifts, the claim to be initiated, to know with certainty and authority.” This “authoritarian intellectualism” is anathema to what Popper means by rationalism.[15]
True rationalism is also an aspect of humanitarianism, because it assumes that other people, regardless of their intellectual gifts or education, will have something worth listening to. A true rationalist will “reject all claims to authority”. He or she will see the value of learning by mistakes, one’s own and those of others. “One can learn in this sense only if one takes others and their arguments seriously”.[16] Faith in reason is also faith in the reason of others, thus Popper maintains “rationalism is closely connected with the belief in the unity of mankind”.[17]
Here Popper’s rationalism connects again to the humanitarianism and egalitarianism that he so admires in the Greek tradition of the “Great Generation” during the age of Pericles and Socrates.[18]
3.0 Critical Rationalism vs. Uncritical Rationalism
Popper’s most illuminating and comprehensive writing on what he means by rationalism is to be found in two chapters towards the end of The Open Society, especially chapter 24. Chapter 23 is a critique of the “Sociology of Knowledge”, which has great bearing on the practice of the social sciences, and, in light of more contemporary developments, this critique is of surprising current importance.[19] I will explore it later when I discuss the social sciences. Chapter 24, on the other hand, is focused directly on the issue of rationality, which is the central theme of Popper’s two-volume magnum opus, and arguably, of his entire oeuvre.
I have explained Popper’s distinction between rationalism and pseudo-rationalism in the last section. Another important distinction that is often missed by rationalists is the distinction between “comprehensive” or “uncritical” rationalism, an indefensible form of rationalism, on the one hand and what Popper adopts as his philosophy, critical rationalism, on the other.
Comprehensive or uncritical rationalism is the logically untenable doctrine that rationalism can stand without any assumptions, i.e. it is based on the statement “I am not prepared to accept anything that cannot be defended by means of argument or experience”. This position undermines itself in the face of an irrationalist attack because it is of the same form of the paradox of the liar. That is to say it is “a statement that asserts its own falsity”, because this statement itself cannot be defended by “argument or experience”.[20] The irrationalist hairsplitter will have a field day demolishing such a position because he or she can simply refuse to accept a rational attitude at all and will come out on top because, as Popper puts it, “Irrationalism is logically superior to uncritical rationalism.”[21] That is to say that the irrationalist can, while maintaining logical consistency, simply reject the validity of rational thinking and objectivity altogether and view it merely as a “social construct”, or posit some other form of epistemic relativism. Such irrational rationalism, or better said mysticism, is typical of behavioristic leftwing totalitarian doctrines like those of Stalin, Mao and the proponents of “the sociology of knowledge.”
Popper argues that because “rationalism is necessarily far from comprehensive and self-contained” it must be based on something like “an irrational faith in reason”.[22] Critical rationalism sidesteps the trap of the irrationalists by admitting that there is an at least tentative decision to be made that is not based on fact and argument, a decision to adopt a rational attitude, and this decision, Popper insists “is not simply an intellectual affair, or a matter of taste. It is a moral decision.”[23]
4.0 Demarcation: science vs. Pseudo-science and Critical rationalism[24] vs. Logical Positivism[25]
Falsificationism is the cornerstone of Popper’s demarcation between science and non-science. It is the principle that says that any scientist must search for severe tests of his or her “provisionally true” theory. This is very unlike the approach of the logical positivists of the Wiener Kreis who endeavored to verify theories and ended up choking on Hume’s fork, that is to say on the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, the bifurcation of scientific knowledge into rigid empiricist categories of either pure sensory input or pure logic. They later fell under the influence of Wittgensteinian essentialism,[26] the obsession with the meaning or meaninglessness of words. The result was a trend toward verbalism and obscurantism.[27] Popper says we must falsify theories, not verify them. That means constructing bold theories that are logically formulated to be falsifiable and will be exposed to severe tests.[28]
This is also in great contrast to the doctrines of Popper’s time that he regarded as “pseudo-sciences”. Primary among these doctrines were Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism. Here we are dealing with the problem of demarcation, that is to say, along Popperian lines, the classifying of theories into either science, or non-/pseudo-science. This distinction hinges on falsifiability.[29] This stands in stark contrast to the demarcation of the logical positivists who, like Carnap, distinguished between science and metaphysics,[30] or under the influence of Wittgenstein, distinguished between meaningful statements and meaningless “pseudo-statements”.
Like the pseudo-science of astrology, as opposed to the science of astronomy, a pseudo-science is a theory that explains too much, not one that explains too little. By explaining too much a pseudo-science allows its practitioners to be surrounded by an endless playground of verifications. Indeed, with the explanatory vagueness of psychoanalysis in one’s toolbox it is hard to imagine any human behavior at all that could not be “explained” by its “deep psychology” of mysterious subconscious desires. Analogously it is hard to imagine any daily newspaper whatsoever that would not provide the vulgar Marxist with a plethora of confirmations of his pet theories.[31]
The Frankfurter Schule of Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas, which was very influential in the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, was in large part a fusion of the two pseudo-sciences of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis and thus “’irrationalist’ and ‘intelligence destroying’”[32] in Popper’s view.
Thus pseudo-sciences, like the Marxism and psychoanalysis of Popper’s day, are unscientific and irrational because they rest on verification and resist falsification. Paradoxically much the same could be said of many of the predominant “free market” schools of economics in so far as they rely on verificationist and conventionalist[33] methods.[34]
In contrast to the logical positivists Popper showed that genuine science is about falsifying and eliminating theories and choosing between those remaining, all of which are only provisionally true. Science is not about verification, like the logical positivists would have it. Their demarcation fails on both counts because metaphysics and even pseudo-science, while not falsifiable, are not “nonsense”. A rational discussion of either one could yield theories that contain falsifiable statements.[35] What is important in science according to Popper is not theory formation but theory testability.
Falsification is essential because of the inherent asymmetry between it and verification. This is the same asymmetry that makes criticism “the life blood of rational thought”. By giving up certainty in exchange for truth, Popper preserved the objectivity of the sciences, without which they are of no use to humanity.
Here and elsewhere we see that the problem of demarcation between science and pseudo-science and hence between rationality and irrationality is essential. Without it we have no way of achieving anything like objectivity, and since, as I will show later, the methods of the natural sciences are applicable to the social sciences, the question of demarcation bears on these sciences as well and by extension on the rationality of policy decisions. That is why I believe that an attempt to abandon this demarcation between science and non-science in favor of something like merely “good” or “bad” practice, as Bartley advocates,[36] is fundamentally flawed. Similarly the attempt by Karl-Dieter Opp to banish the principle of rationality from the social sciences by means of a mere linguistic analysis of how some scientists happen to use the term “rational”,[37] seems like nothing more than a Wittgensteinian essentialist obsession with the meaning of words, an elaborate mystery tour of the “language games”[38] played by sociologists, and hence quite useless.
If there is one thing that should become clear, it is that rationality in the Popperian sense cannot be reduced to the observed usage of the term by even the totality of all scientists. Popper fully admits that the term rationality as well as the other terms used to elucidate it are vague,[39] which is why in order to explain what he means by rationality Popper needs chapters 23 and 24, which are themselves predicated on the entirety of the magnum opus that precedes them. Indeed, as I have indicated above, it is a complex and vital principle that in one way or another pervades the entirety of his work.
5.0 Hume’s Irrational Solution to the problem of Induction vs. Popper’s rational solution thereof.
In Objective Knowledge (1972) Karl Popper restates his solution to the problem of induction as a rejection of Hume’s solution thereof. As Popper explains, Hume, a rationalist, was driven to skepticism and irrationalism by his faulty solution to this problem. Hume addresses two problems of induction: the logical problem of induction and the psychological problem of induction. Both Hume and Popper agree that it is impossible on logical grounds to assume future events will be the same as past events (logical induction is impossible), or in Popper’s more objective wording, the answer to the question “Can the claim that an explanatory universal theory is true be justified by ‘empirical reasons’?” is “No”.[40] However, Hume’s answer to the psychological, or we could say practical, problem of induction leads to irrationalism. In spite of the logical impossibility of induction Hume maintains that we nonetheless believe the future will be like the past for psychological reasons, that is to say because of “custom or habit” and hence we must accept an unprovable, illogical, irrational approach to knowledge, an “irrationalist epistemology”.[41]
Popper avoids Hume’s irrationalism by introducing a second logical problem of induction as follows: “Can the claim that an explanatory universal theory is true or false be justified by ‘empirical reasons’”?[42] The answer here is “Yes”, because although empirical observation cannot prove a theory true it can prove it false, that is to say it can falsify the theory.[43] Here Popper establishes again the important asymmetry between verification and falsification referred to above, which establishes the principle of deciding rationally between theories in a way that avoids Hume’s irrationalism, the same irrationalism that had led so many of the philosophers of the 19th century astray.[44] By means of what Popper calls a “principle of transference” the dichotomy between epistemology and ontology can be bridged.[45]
6.0 Anti-psychologism and the Autonomy of Sociology
Popper insists that psychologism, the doctrine that “society being the product of interacting minds, social laws must ultimately be reducible to psychological laws”,[46] is mistaken. It leads, among other things, to the pervasive “methodological myth”[47] of the phychologistic version of the “social contract”, the vague and unfounded pronouncements about “human nature” at the root of so many irrational social theories.
He develops his critique of psychologism from Marx’s famous epigram from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): “It is not the consciousness of man that determines his existence—rather, it is his social existence that determines his consciousness.” In other words, social phenomena like the prohibitions against incest are the effect of education and not the result of any innate aversion in human nature. This aversion is the effect rather than the cause of the institutions that enforce the prohibition.[48]
This does not, as it might seem, conflict with Popper’s rejection of collectivism. He in fact agrees with Mill’s psychologism in its rejection of methodological collectivism in favor of methodological individualism, which sees institutions as the result of the unintended results of intentional human action. However, he insists that “the belief that the choice of such an individualistic method implies the choice of a psychological method is mistaken”.[49] This is because, according to Popper, human behavior can be adequately explained according to situational logic and does not require any assumptions regarding human nature, psychology or even rationality.[50]
His main reason for rejecting psychologism is because it is intrinsically historicist. If there were a fixed “human nature” and social phenomena were reducible to it, then they would be determined by it, hence predictable, so the position leads to historicism. Popper favors an institutional approach rather than a psychological one, and institutions are by and large the results of unintended action and can therefore not be reduced to psychology. This is why the all-too-common psychologistic social contract theories based on notions of human nature are so mistaken. “Psychologism is thus forced, whether it likes it or not, to operate with the idea of a beginning of society, and with the idea of a human nature and a human psychology as they existed prior to society.”[51]
This phantasy scenario of an original state, of “man in a state of nature” is at the root of all the famous and irrational social contract theories like those of Hobbes and Rousseau. They are clearly mistaken because ever since Darwin it has become clear that “we have every reason to believe that man or rather his ancestor was social prior to being human…social institutions, and with them, typical social regularities or social laws, must have existed prior to what some people are pleased to call ‘human nature’”.[52]
Thus whether it is a question of the misanthropic anthropologies of Biblical “original sin” and Hobbes’ “homo homini lupus” on the one hand, or Rousseau’s romanticized utopian “noble savage” on the other, any a priori notion of an intrinsic, constant and hence deterministic human nature can never form the basis for a theory of society.
The upshot of this as Popper points out is that “owing to our slowly increasing knowledge of society, i.e. owing to the study of the unintended repercussions of our plans and actions…men may even become the conscious creators of an open society, and thereby of a greater part of their own fate”.[53]
The implications of this for the social sciences will become clear in my final article.
[1] David Miller, ‘A Critique of Good Reasons’, in: David Miller, Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defense, Open Court, Chicago and LaSalle, Illinois 1994, chap. 3 p. 51
[2] Ibid, p. 55
[3] Ibid, p. 54
[4] Ibid, p. 67
[5] C&R, 210-237
[6] OS, Vol. II p.217
[7] Ibid, p. 225
[8] Except where noted, all italics are in the original text.
[9] Ibid, p. 217 (the italics is Popper’s own)
[10] Ibid, p. 218
[11] Ibid, p. 225
[12] Ibid, p. 227
[13] Ibid p. 225
[14] This distinction seems similar to that advocated by Neurath in his “Lost Wanderers of Descartes”, although he elsewhere accuses Popper of pseudo-rationalism.
[15] O.S, Vol II, p. 227
[16] Ibid, p. 238
[17] Ibid, p. 232
[18] OS, Vol I, pp. 185-189
[19] See, for example, the “Strong Program” of David Bloor in the field of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
[20] OS, Vol. II p. 230
[21] Ibid p. 231
[22] Ibid
[23] Ibid, p. 232.
[24] Critical Rationalism: the philosophy of Karl Popper
[25] Logical Positivism: aka logical empiricism, the philosophy of the “Vienna Circle“
[26] By Wittgensteinian essentialism I do not mean the essentialism of Aristotle’s epistemology based on a taxonomy of true definitions, but rather something of its opposite, the irrational skepticism based on the taxonomy’s impossibility, what Popper calls the “obsession with the meaning of words”, i.e. with their supposed meaninglessness. It is closely related to, though diametrically opposed to, methodological essentialism. It is a kind of methodological nihilism.
[27] OS, Vol. II, p. 9
[28] Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, (from here on C&R)K.R. Popper, Basic Books, Publishers New York, London, 1962 Ch. 1
[29] Falsifiability—the logical or practical possbility of a statement or hypothesis to be refuted by experience. Example of logical falsifiability: the statement that „There are no such things as unicorns“ can be refuted by the observation of one, whereas the statement „There are such creatures as unicorns“ cannot be falsified by any observation.
[30] Logical Positivism, edited by A.J. Ayer, The Free Press, 1959, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language”, by Rudolf Carnap, (originally published in German in Erkenntnis, 1932) pp. 60-81
[31] C&R, Ch. 1
[32] The Myth of the Framework: in defense of scientific rationality, (from here on M.O.T.F) Karl Popper, edited by M.A. Notturno, Routledge London and New York, 1994
[33] Conventionalism: the doctrine that theories are only pragmatic tools for sucessful prediction and that they are not concerned with ascertaining any truth about the world
[34] The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper, Routledge, 1995, originally Logik der Forschung, 1935 p. 59
[35] Popper, Bryan Magee, Fontana Press, 1973, pp. 45-46
[36] The Retreat to Commitment, “Logical Strength and Demarcation”, William Warren Bartley III, Open Court Publishing, 1984 pp. 185-209
[37] The Mystery of Rationality: minds, beliefs and the social sciences, Edited by Geral Bronner and Francesco di Irorio, Springer, 2018, “Do the Social Sciences Need the Concept of ‘Rationality’? Notes on the Obsession with a Concept” by Karl-Dieter Opp, pp. 219-238
[38] See Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations, 1953
[39] OS Voll II, p. 224
[40] Objective Knowledge, Karl Popper, Oxford at the Carendon Press, 1972, p. 7
[41] Ibid, p.4
[42] My italics
[43] See falsifiability, note 74 above
[44] Ibid, p.5
[45] Ibid, p. 6 “what is true in logic is true in psychology”
[46] OS, Vol. II p. 90
[47] Ibid, p. 93
[48] Ibid, p. 89-90
[49] Ibid, p. 91
[50] Ibid, p. 97 (later Popper does come to accept a position closer to what economists call “the rationality principle”) see The Myth of the Framework, pp 177-178.
[51] Ibid p. 93
[52] Ibid
[53] Ibid, p. 94