Popper, Objectification and the Problem of the Public Sphere

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The Australian National University Popper, Objectification and the Problem of the Public Sphere Jeremy Shearmur1 1. Introduction: World 3 Popper’s approach to philosophy was anti-psychologistic, at least since he wrote The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge (cf. Popper 2009 [1979; 1930-3]). In his work, anti-psychologism meant not an opposition to the recognition of psychological activity and its significance (in correspondence with Hayek in the 1950s he identified himself as a dualist interactionist), but, rather, an opposition to the reduction of knowledge to psychology. He stressed – in ways that are familiar from Frege and the early Husserl – the non-psychologistic status of logic. And in The Open Society (Popper 1945), with reference to Marx, he stressed his opposition to attempts to offer psychologistic explanations in the social sciences. His own interpretation of ‘methodological individualism’ viewed human action as taking place in social situations. His short papers on the mind-body problem in the 1950s (included in Popper 1963) developed an argument that the descriptive and argumentative functions of language posed a problem for reductionistic accounts of the mind-body relation. While in his ‘Of Clouds and Clocks’ (in Popper 1972), issues concerning what he was subsequently to call ‘world 3’ played an important role in his more systematic treatment of the mind-body problem. As David Miller suggested, Popper called world 3 in to redress the balance of world 1 and world 2 (see Popper 1976b, note 302). 2 At the same time, I recall the somewhat shocked reaction, at his seminar in 1968, when Popper spoke about ‘world 3’. His colleagues – who agreed with his anti-psychologism – did not seem to know quite what to make of world 3. And others, too, who were broadly sympathetic to his work, also seemed somewhat puzzled. Quinton argued that the idea seemed to sit somewhat uneasily between Hegel and Plato (Quinton 1973). Others raised the question of whether, once a contradiction was admitted, this did not mean that the entire content of world 3 had been brought into existence at a stroke, just because anything could be understood as following validly from a contradiction (Cohen 1985, p. 4). It seemed to me clear from discussions with Popper, when he was writing his contributions to The Self and Its Brain (Popper and Eccles, 1977), that he was not offering, or interested in trying to develop, a formal ontology. He readily admitted that one could consider the way in which some world 3 objects could be looked at as intentional objects – which had the consequence that aspects of our psychology came to have characteristics like world 3 objects. In addition, he was agnostic as to whether, eventually, there might be some possibility of reductive explanations of world 3. One might say that, for Popper, what mattered about ‘world 3’ was the light that the idea threw on various other issues. A key notion was that – relative to the adoption of particular rules of inference – our ideas had a content which went beyond what we were, or could be, aware of at any one 3 time, and within which we could make discoveries. In addition, world 3 had a historical aspect to it: certain things had, at particular points, been discovered – by people generally, and by us as individuals. Popper also stressed the way in which we were shaped through our interactions with these world 3 objects. All this is of great importance, and attempts to offer quick reductions of world 3 to other things – including the social – seem to me not only unsuccessful, but also liable to make us to lose sight of some of the key themes to which Popper has drawn our attention. However, there is another side to Popper’s work, the significance of which in my view needs to be reaffirmed, and the consequences of which need, in our present context, to be explored. 2. Methodological Rules Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper 1959) stressed the significance of the objectivity of theories, and of our taking a non-psychologistic approach to them. However, in that work a key role was also played by ‘methodological rules’. Popper’s epistemology is often discussed as if a major problem is posed for it by the ‘Duhem- Quine problem’. But, in fact, not only was Popper well aware of the issue (the topic was discussed in the Vienna Circle, and Popper also engaged with conventionalism in relation to the work of Hugo Dingler), but a central feature of his epistemology is constituted by his response to it. Popper’s view is that it is perfectly possible to take a conventionalist view towards any element of our knowledge, holding it true by methodological decision, 4 and diverting responsibility for putative falsifications elsewhere. He argued, however, that taking such an approach – as opposed to the kind of view that he favoured – would hold our key ideas as immutable by convention, as opposed to their being open to the kind of growth that Popper favoured, and which was, for him, exemplified by the replacement of Newton’s work by Einstein’s. Popper, when he wrote The Logic of Scientific Discovery, downplayed his ideas about metaphysics; but one might, with hindsight, say that Popper’s response to this problem was chosen because of his concern with the ideal of a fallibilist and realist view of the aims of science. Popper clearly accepted the idea that we should see our knowledge as a system of ideas, and that our response to problems should be in terms of making modifications of our ideas that increase the content of what is being asserted. Perhaps the best brief formulation of this is given in his ‘Truth, Rationality and the Growth of Knowledge’ (in Popper 1963). A particularly illuminating interpretation of Popper’s philosophy of science that stresses the role played by methodological rules is Ian Jarvie’s The Republic of Science (2001). Some years ago, I suggested that this aspect of Popper’s work had some interesting consequences. The first is that institutions, customs and habits might sometimes play the role of methodological rules in Popper’s sense. Second, we might not be aware of this fact, and of its consequences. The result could be (it would be a matter for investigation how significant it was) that there is a discrepancy between the way in which we are understanding an idea – i.e. as a straightforward claim that something is true – and what the idea amounts to as a consequence of how it is being so handled. That is to say, there could be a contrast between the prima facie character of a theory, and the character that it 5 actually has as a result of the rules and procedures that those people who entertain it adopt towards it. A theory might be being held as true, when those who favoured it simply thought that it was true, because of the ways in which the people’s institutions and institutional procedures operated. That is to say, they might not understand that their behaviour had these consequences (compare Shearmur 1980 and 1985). To appreciate what is going on, we may need to understand this discrepancy and its consequences. This would suggest an important reason why we should avoid any approach – such as that of David Bloor (1974) – in which world 3 is treated as simply a mystification of the social. For if we took such a view, we would lose out on the key interplay between how an idea is understood by those who entertain it, and what its social treatment makes it amount to. If my suggestion here is accepted, we would be in a situation, familiar to critical rationalists, where the investigation of such things would be a matter for piecemeal learning and (if we are concerned by what we discover about our own ideas) continual improvement. Such an approach could be put to many possible uses. It could form the basis of a theory of ideology (in the sense of offering explanations as to how people are able to hold, in good faith, certain views which are known in the wider community to be problematic). It might also suggest ways in which we might improve our existing institutions in areas which relate to the production and growth of knowledge, where we would take our best current ideas about the philosophy and (normative) sociology of science as a basis on which our other practices could be tentatively appraised. (It would for example suggest the basis for a critique of current governmental schemes to evaluate 6 research, which tends to treat all research as if it amounted to a Kuhnian ‘normal science’, in which no fundamental changes ever took place.) Should the approach be accepted, it would suggest that Popper’s own attitude towards sociological issues relating to the production of knowledge stands in need of modification. For example, in his ‘The Logic of The Social Sciences’ (1976a), Popper was critical of an anthropologist who was a participant in a scientific discussion because he was more interested in issues relating to the dynamics of group behaviour than in the substantive content of the discussion. Popper’s particular criticism may have been fine. But if I am correct in my argument, there is a genuine intellectual issue here from which we may learn a lot. Popper’s own (1945) criticism of the sociology of knowledge was important. But at the same time, there seems to me every reason to suppose that how we currently conduct our arguments, seminars and so on is not necessarily the best way in which we might do so.

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