Joseph Agassi

On September 17, 1994, Karl Popper died at the age of 92.He was described as the official opposition of the “ Vienna Circle”, the philosophical club which in the inter-war period was glamorous and which espoused the then popular doctrine of logical positivism, so-called. His relations with that club were friendly-hostile, to use the term with which he liked to characterize the relations between scientific researchers. He is the last of that generation (unless it is Carl G. Hempel, who, however, sees himself as too young to belong there). The public aspect of Popper’s friendly-hostile relations with his Viennese peers was unfortunately more hostile than friendly. Somehow, philosophers have managed to keep the accounts open for too long. The end of the era is the time to close accounts so as to be able to go on with the job at hand, since the intermingling of personal affairs with objective knowledge is unhealthy. Yet most of the leading heirs of the “ Vienna Circle” still coast around the issues raised by Popper, and so they can neither overlook him nor quote him correctly. If past evidence is reliable here, then this will alter just about now. Is it?

An intuitive idea concerning degrees of precision is widely accepted, and it is that we increase precision of theories by paying attention to ever decreasing orders of magnitude of measurements which we incorporate in these theories. We increase precision of measuring or of predicting measurement of length, for instance, if we pay attention not only to centimeters but also to millimeters, microns, angstroms, and so on. And our theories are precise to centimeters, then to millimeters, and so on respectively. The idea is that increased precision is the process of capturing a point within nested intervals, and that this is reflected both in experimental and in theoretical progress. An intuitive analogy may be drawn with series of photos made by a camera which approaches the moon's surface. A corollary from this intuitive idea which has been stated by a number of writers is that observation reports and theories are not overthrown even when superseded by more accurate observation because within the limits of their own precision-range they are still valid. When a law in physics is stated, it is stated usually without such qualifications; but this is a mere matter of convenience, we are told. The idea is that a tacit proviso is understood and the law should be understood to be not the statement “such and such is the case” but the statement “within this and that limit of accuracy such and such is the case”; in such a formulation, the law, once verified, remains unshaken regardless of further progress in the field.

One of the questions that philosophers discuss is: How can we avoid, or at least reduce, errors when explaining the world? The skeptical answer to this question is: We cannot avoid errors since no statement is certain or even definitely plausible, but we can eliminate some past errors. This book advocates the skeptical position and discusses its practical applications in science, ethics, aesthetics, and politics. It brings philosophy down to earth and comprises an outline of a skeptical guide to the real world.

The central thesis of Karl Popper's philosophy is that intellectual and political progress are best achieved by not deferring to dogmatic authority. His philosophy of science is a plea for the replacement of classic dogmatic methodology with critical debate. His philosophy of politics, similarly, is a plea for replacing Utopian social and political engineering with a more fallibilist, piecemeal variety. Many confuse his anti‐dogmatism with relativism, and his anti‐authoritarianism with Cold War conservatism or even with libertarian politics. Not so: he showed a clear preference for the ideal of truth over relativist complacency, for cosmopolitanism over nationalism, and for democratic control over unbridled capitalism.

Popper’s popular critics – Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos – replace his older, Wittgenstein-style critics, now defunct. His new critics played with the idea of criticism as beneficial, in vain search of variants of these that could better appeal to the public. Some of their criticism of Popper is valid but marginal for the dispute about rationality. He was Fallibilist; they hedged about it. He viewed learning from experience as learning from error; they were unclear about it. His view resembles Freud’s reality principle; they hedged about this too, as they defended the stupid idea of constructive criticism. He stressed his criticism of the view of science as inductive; they endorsed it. They differed from him significantly regarding their intended readers: he had addressed those who readily admit criticism and his popular critics addressed those who find it hard to admit openly that criticism upsets them somewhat. Current popular criticism of Popper’s ideas shows yet again the logical relation between the critical attitude and liberalism: liberalism without critically mindedness is permissible, scarcely the other way around. Hence, we better read the objection that Popper’s popular critics have launched against him not as criticism proper, but as somewhat reasonable protest against his use of the highest standards in his relentless advocacy of liberalism and of criticism in his valuation of science and of democracy as joint.

The erroneous hostility to metaphysics is justified by the clashes between science and metaphysics plus the inability to allow clashes within science. The defenders of metaphysics as world-views offering intellectual frameworks for science have overlooked this fact. Einstein and Popper have legitimized the inclusion of clashes well within the domain of science. This resolves the difficulty of the allegiance to both. Science offers testable explanations and metaphysics comprehension; both are insufficient and conflict — yet thereby improve. Popper's early rejection of metaphysics is rooted in his demand for maximal testability that he better withdraw.

ABSTRACT Concern with global responsibility for survival as such invites the creation of a specific international organization. The new body should adjudicate as to which disputes are open (such as, for example, concerning the advisability of building nuclear plants) and which are not (for example, white supremacy); most significantly, the new body should carefully guard its credibility by sticking to veracity, by avoiding deceit even in extreme situations. In particular it behoves us all to confess that we have no solution to our most urgent problems.

The symposium on Francesco Guala’s Understanding Institutions was thought provoking. Five critical papers took issue with Guala’s reconciliation of the game-theoretical view of institutions and the rule-governed view. We offer some critical commentary that adopts a different perspective. We agree that institutions are central to social life and, thus, also to the social sciences; they are also prior to and more fundamental than individuals. We add some historical points on the ways previous philosophers thought about institutions, and we come at this from a philosophical viewpoint that is not that of analytic philosophy but rather that of Popper’s critical rationalism. In that framework, we espouse an idea of the relation between philosophy and the philosophy of science that is different from that of Guala and his commentators, and we recommend a reformist philosophy of institutions that is neither radical nor traditionalist and that makes better sense of the institution of the scholarly symposium than do...

The system of higher education always has a significant place in national political affairs. Politically indifferent academics may legitimately ignore this. Those concerned with the welfare of the system of higher education, however, cannot afford this luxury. Further, intellectuals, including academics, are a significant political factor even when passive. Even were all of them to ignore all politics, including the ever-present political importance of the educational system for national politics, they would still play a particularly significant role in national politics as what Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld call the opinion leadership. This way the maintenance of responsible government, and the maintenance of democracy, much depends on what intellectuals demand of the system. Any regime may be endangered by the negative attitudes that opinion leaders may have towards public affairs -- even if it is merely passively negative

Both a Popper biography and an autobiography, Agassi's "A Philosopher's Apprentice" tells the riveting story of his intellectual formation in 1950s London, a young brilliant philosopher struggling with an intellectual giant - father, mentor, and rival, all at the same time. His subsequent rebellion and declaration of independence leads to a painful break, never to be completely healed. No other writer has Agassi's psychological insight into Popper, and no other book captures like this one the intellectual excitement around the Popper circle in the 1950s and the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s - personal, academic, political, all important philosophically. Agassi's Popper - whether one agrees with it or not - is an enormous contribution to scholarship. This second revised edition includes also Popper's and Agassi's last correspondence and, in a postscript it shows Agassi leafing through Popper's archives, reaching a sort of reconciliation, an appropriate ending to the drama. A must read. Malachi Hacohen, Duke University.

Karl Popper's methodology can be seen as the situational logic of research. Popper called his method "Epistemology without a Knowing Subject." It was dismissed as metaphysical by those who refuse to give up an ideal knowing subject (a perfect human inductive processor). This article surveys the failure of modem discussions of this ideal, from the earliest (the writings of Sir Francis Bacon) to the latest (Kripke). The knowing subject exits at last, but leaves behind interesting results. The ideal knowing subject embodied ideal rationality, outside culture and history. Giving up this ideal invites us to integrate science with its background, to grade rationality (from magic to science), and to integrate different degrees of rationality under one rule.

Wolfgang Stegmüller, the leading German philosopher of science, considers the status of scientific revolutions the central issue in the field ever since "the famous Popper-Lakatos-Kuhn discussion" of a decade and a half ago, comments on "almost all contributions to this problem", and offers his alternative solutions in a series of papers culminating with, and summarized in, his recent "A Combined Approach to Dynamics of Theories. How To Improve Historical Interpretations of Theory Change By Applying Set Theoretical Structures", published in Gerard Radnitzky and Gunnar Andersson, editors, The Structure and Development of Science, issued in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science series, volume 59, 1979, pp. 151-86. Popper views scientific revolutions as rational and due to empirical refutations, but there are no refutations in science. Lakatos agrees and assumes that research programs are refutable and their replacements to be revolutions, but the same arguments he launches against Popper apply to him; moreover, applying his philosophy to itself makes it collapse anyway . Kuhn's view was interpreted to be one of scientific revolutions as quite irrational and as arbitrary as mob action. Stegmüller presents revolution in another interpretation of Kuhn - as non-rational, as based on hopes and value judgment but not on facts. He thinks there are big and small revolutions. And he uses his own modifications of J. D. Sneed's famous formal analysis of scientific theory to make his point. After presenting a summary of Stegmüller's ideas in our own way, which seems to us a clarification of presentation with no change of content, especially due to our stressing all differences of opinion, we apply Stegmüller's idea to itself, the way Stegmüller has done with the view of Lakatos, and with similar results

Why are the efforts at coordination so feeble? Unless we face this question, we may never see progress. The answer is not hard to find. Decisions on matters of life and death are awesome; decisions on some awesome questions are guided by accepted laws, rules or customs; other awesome questions are open. Obviously, having to decide on an open, awesome question is a hardship in every possible manner: intellectually and practically, legally and morally, socially and psychologically. People are reluctant to explore predicaments if all available alternative remedies to them implicate decisions on open, awesome questions.