The Spell of Wittgenstein (Part I)
Winch v. Popper: Rationality in the Social Sciences
Or
How to parry a poker
By John Saudino
5 August 2020
1. General Introduction
One of the most important aspects of Karl Popper’s philosophy is his attitude toward rationality. As he makes clear in multiple works, he views the principles of objectivity and rationality to be vital cornerstones of scientific and moral progress.[1] In The Open Society and its Enemies Popper explicitly links this orientation to the rational, humanitarian and egalitarian tradition of “the Great Generation” of democratic philosophers who lived at or around the time of Socrates.[2] This article explores Karl Popper’s advocacy of the rationality and unity of science and hence of the adequacy of natural science methods in the social sciences. Being that the social sciences are concerned with providing us with knowledge about the functioning of human society writ large, it is clear that our approach to them will have profound ramifications for the usefulness of this knowledge for social policy and its effect on the larger political order. One of the issues I will touch on only briefly in this regard will be Popper’s notion of “piecemeal social engineering”, a subject that I will devote more attention to in future.
The focus of this article will be more geared toward fundamental methodological questions. I start out with a point counterpoint between Karl Popper and one of his critics, but proceed quickly from this debate to a discussion of the implications of the two divergent approaches. I will argue that the key methodological issue here is the problem of essentialism and my focus will be on elucidating Popper’s critique of essentialism in The Open Society and Its Enemies and other works. Using the conflict between Winch and Popper as a backdrop, I will explore Popper’s contention that the use of essentialist methods can lead to irrationality and to highly destructive philosophical error. I will then show what the consequences of this error are in the real world.
Popper’s adversary in this debate is British philosopher Peter Guy Winch (1926-1997). The debate is carried out in the pages of the second Popper volume in Schilpp’s Library of Living Philosophers. [3] The particularly interesting feature of this collection is the fact that there are papers commenting on and or criticizing the work of the given philosopher by other imminent philosophers and then a section in the back where the philosopher, in this case Popper, responds to these criticisms. In the two Popper volumes in the collection there are contributions by such luminaries in the philosophy of science as Quine, Putnam, Lakatos, and Kuhn. However, because of its greater relevance for the social sciences as opposed to pure philosophy of science, I will focus on Winch’s piece which is entitled “Popper and Scientific Method in the Social Sciences”.
Some of the altercations in these volumes are more fruitful than others. The one between Kuhn and Popper, for instance, is characterized by a surprising level of agreement and mutual admiration given the oft cited opposition between these two. The one between Winch and Popper, however, is very different. Popper’s answer to Winch’s criticism is characterized by hardly concealed annoyance.
I will argue here that this is a result of the conflict between the profoundly different philosophical orientations of the two philosophers and that this conflict is based on the divergent methodologies of Winch’s essentialism, attributable to his Wittgensteinian orientation, on the one hand and Popper’s methodological nominalism, which Popper insists is the basis of genuine scientific method, on the other. I will show how this methodological dichotomy has important ramifications for the rationality of science, both social and natural and for human progress.
I intend to proceed as follows: I will first render a brief presentation of Winch’s somewhat obtuse paper, highlighting his main points of criticism. Then using both Popper’s response and key passages from the work of both philosophers, I will examine both the stated and unstated points of distinction between them on the basis of the above mentioned philosophical problems and explain their significance.
I will end with a conclusion where I will explain why I think that Popper’s political philosophy and approach to social science are of such crucial importance today.
2. Peter Winch: “Popper and Scientific Method in the Social Sciences”[4]
2.1 A brief biographical note on Peter Winch:
Peter Guy Winch (1926-1997) was an English philosopher trained at Oxford who taught Philosophy at Kings College in London and later at the University of Illinois. He was an enthusiastic proponent of Wittgenstein and translated one of his later works into English and even became one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors in 1989 when he took over the honor from fellow Wittgensteinian Rush Rees (1905-1989) who was Winch’s colleague and major influence while Winch was at Swansea University in Wales. Winch is known for taking Wittgenstein into the areas of ethics and religion on which Winch wrote much. His most famous book is entitled The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958) and is a rejection of scientific positivism[5] in the social sciences.[6]
Given this rejection of positivism and Winch’s writing style, characterized by a Wittgensteinian preoccupation with words and their meaning, it is not surprising that Popper, as a proponent of the unity science and as a longtime adversary of Wittgenstein’s, wrote such a hostile response.
2.2 Winch’s arguments in brief (all quotes unless otherwise indicated are from Winch’s essay):
Winch’s contribution is quite confusing; the following summary is written in a way that gives Winch’s arguments a great deal more coherence and clarity than does the original.
Winch begins by saying that there is a relationship between Popper’s account of scientific method and his understanding of social life. He makes a connection between Popper’s falisificationism and his advocacy of piecemeal social engineering over “holistic” or utopian engineering. Winch argues that “the first real difficulties begin to accumulate when we inquire into Popper’s account of the point of view from which these piecemeal changes will be initiated”. He believes it is important to make a distinction that, according to him, Popper neglects, namely the distinction between “A. the conception of improving the institutions in question” and “B. the conception of improving our understanding of the institution.” According to Winch, Popper advocates a trial and error process of improving institutions both as an act of reform and as a learning process, a position that Winch rejects, because he seems to feel that an understanding of institutions is quite inaccessible to those outside of them.
Winch then in the next section turns to Popper’s ethics, in particular to Popper’s very central notion of “critical dualism”[8] , the “dualism of facts vs. decisions”[9] which is the basis for Popper’s moral position which could be called ethical individualism. According to this doctrine, genuine moral decisions are made voluntarily by individuals independent from any appeal to external authority.[10] In opposition to this dualism Winch’s position seems to be a version of what Popper calls “naïve monism” “characteristic of the ‘closed society’”. For Winch there is a link between facts and decisions, “we find that the concepts of saying that something is so and of making a decision are related to each other in a way which Popper’s account does not bring out and which is very relevant to his whole account of social engineering.”[11] He holds that it is a “mistaken view that an individual’s values can intelligibly be ascribed to him quite apart from the forms of social life in the context of which he lives his life”.
Over the next six pages Winch develops a rather complicated argument in which he questions this dualism further. He presents complexities that, according to Winch, Popper unduly ignores. In particular he describes the difference between the “intrinsic”, “institutional aims” as against the “extrinsic” individual aims of the social engineer. In the spirit of his critical dualism Popper views the aims of the reformer as the result of moral decisions not provable by invoking external authority. However, since Popper’s principle of rationality requires open discussion and criticism of these aims, the engineer will need to discuss these aims with others for this criticism to take place. “Hence there is a premium—deriving from the nature of rationality—on having social aims which are likely to be widely shared.” Popper’s way of dealing with this is to not focus social engineering on a utopian appeal to some ultimate good but rather on addressing “urgent evils”; this focus “’makes a direct moral appeal’”. This follows Popper’s principle, as Winch phrases it, that “the question of how any institutions is to be improved is always a question of how it may best be made to further humanitarian aims.”
This, however, does not work according to Winch because Popper’s dualism of facts and (moral) decisions places such decisions outside the realm of the institutional context, something Winch views as impossible and because according to Winch “it is an illusion to suppose that there is such a general humanitarian aim at all.” This is because “what constitutes human suffering” “what is counted as suffering” “cannot be understood apart from the institutional context in which it is being asserted to exist.” As an example of differing standards of suffering Winch mentions the example of a religious minority not being allowed to practice their religion according the demands of their religious institution; what is suffering for them would not be suffering for those in other institutions. Winch even goes so far as to say that it is only within the institutional context that one finds “the circumstances in which […] freedom and responsibility can intelligibly be spoken of at all”.
In the third section of his essay Winch turns to the question of understanding as opposed to improving institutions. He says that Popper applies his methodology of science based on hypotheses and falsifications to institutions and references a lecture that is very important for the application of Popper’s view of science to institutions entitled “Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition”[12]. Winch explains how in this work Popper finds a close analogy between scientific theories on the one hand and social institutions or traditions on the other. Popper’s point is that 1) both create situations that make phenomena rationally predictable; theories do so in the natural realm and institutions/traditions do so in the social realm, and that 2) both can be criticized rationally and changed.
Winch rejects this analogy and insists that theories and institutions are fundamentally different:
When the physicist formulates a theory, this may indeed make certain phenomena more ‘rationally predictable’, but it does not do so by affecting the behavior of the phenomena: rather, it affects the physicist’s intellectual grasp of the phenomena. In social life, however, if people’s behavior in a certain area of their lives comes to be governed by traditional standards where none existed before, then it is the behavior itself that is changed, not an observer’s grasp of it.[13]
Citing his colleague and fellow Wittgensteinian Rush Rhess, Winch maintains that this “confusion” leads Popper to “conflate practical social phenomena with theoretical problems” because “unlike scientific theories, the tradition exists whether any observer detects it or not.” Similarly, this also leads Popper in The Poverty of Historicism to compare social institutions to theoretical models, mistakenly in Winch’s view.
Winch acknowledges that in the above-mentioned lecture Popper underscores the relationship between rationality and the existence of traditions that form regularities in people’s behavior, but insists that Popper does not go far enough. In spite of the fact that Popper singles out the rational tradition of Ancient Greece as the tradition or institution of most significance for his conception of rationality, Popper’s analysis, according to Winch at least, implies that “for Popper, rationality has to be understood in relation to the existence of some tradition or other, the qualitative content of the tradition being more or less irrelevant”. This is because traditions go deeper than Popper thinks and involve “habits of thinking” that allow for a description of what people do and why they do it that makes it possible to talk about regularities at all. Hence, according to Winch “there is a dimension to our understanding of the social life of human beings, which Popper’s formal schema of hypothesis and falsification fails to illuminate”. In sum Winch insists that in any process of social engineering involving trial and error like this “people will tend to disagree on what constitutes success” and even on what “counts as a problem” in the first place. Where disagreement takes place, “it does not necessarily follow that there has been any failure in communication; the disagreement may express different values, springing from diverse social movements, interests and institutions”. An understanding of the peculiar character of institutions and people’s participation in them is needed in order to make any sense of “trial and error” in this context and Winch believes “it is a kind of understanding quite different from anything that Popper gives an account of”.
[1] Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, K.R. Popper, (hereafter cited as “C&R”), Basic Books, Publishers New York, London, 1962 pp. 120-135 on rationality, see also Ibid pp. 215-222 on verisimilitude
[2] The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. I, K.R. Popper, Fifth Edition, (hereafter cited as “O.S. Vol I”) Princeton University Press, 1966, Ch. 5, pp. 95-96
[3] The Library of Living Philosophers, The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Volume XIV Book II, Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Open Court Publishing Co., La Salle, Illinois, 1974
[4] Ibid, pp. 889-904
[5] “positivism” does not here refer to the narrow epistemological use of the term within the Vienna Circle, but more broadly to the view that science is capable of bringing progress and that this also holds for its application to other fields.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Winch
[8] O.S. Vol I, Ch. 5, p. 61
[9] Later in an Addendum Popper clarifies this notion significantly: “it would have been clearer if I had spoken of a dualism of facts and policies, or of a dualism of facts and standards” O.S. Vol ll p.383
[10] O.S Vol l, p. 73 critical dualism: the doctrine “that the responsibility for our ethical decisions is entirely ours and cannot be shifted to anybody else; neither to God, nor to nature, nor to society, nor to history”.
[11] Notice the use of obscurantist verbiage “the concepts of saying that something is so” and “making a decision” are somehow “related”.
[12] C&R pp. 120-135
[13] L.O.L.P. p. 893