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11 May 08
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It is thus surprising to discover that Popper himself hardly lived up to this ideal of non contradiction. When one examines Critical Rationalism, for example, one soon notices that it is based on questionable premises; that its internal logic is seriously flawed; that it is inconsistent with other elements of Popper's thought; and that it leads to conflicts with his own publicly stated convictions.
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Popper refused to grant any philosophical value to definitions: "Definitions do not play any very important part in science.... Our 'scientific knowledge'... remains entirely unaffected if we eliminate all definitions" [OSE2 14]. "Definitions never give any factual knowledge about 'nature' or about the 'nature of things'" [C&R 20-21]. "Definitions.... are never really needed, and rarely of any use" [RASC xxxvi].
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Popper built his philosophy on foundations borrowed from Hume and Kant. His first premise was wholehearted acceptance of Hume's attack on induction. The second, to be addressed in the next section, was agreement with Kant's view that it is our ideas which give form to reality, not reality which gives form to our ideas.
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Popper described himself as an "unorthodox Kantian" [UNQ 82]; i.e., he accepted part of Kant's epistemology, but not all of it: "Kant was right that it is our intellect which imposes its laws - its ideas, its rules - upon the inarticulate mass of our 'sensations' and thereby brings order to them. Where he was wrong is that he did not see that we rarely succeed with our imposition" [OKN 68n31; c.f. OKN 328, C&R 48-9].
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Popper's Kantian premise raises enough issues for a book. In this short paper, there is room only for a single objection. Namely, if it is true that our senses are pre-programmed; if it is true that "there is no sense organ in which anticipatory theories are not genetically incorporated" [OKN 72]; then what flows into our minds is determined and what flows out of them is subjective. If our senses are not neutral, if they organise incoming data using pre-set theories built into them by evolution, then they do not provide us with unalloyed information, but only with prescriptions, the content of which is determined by our genetic make up. Whatever is thereafter produced inside our heads - cut off as it is from any objective contact with reality - must be subjective.
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Popper's Kantian premise thus deprives CR of universality. Since it is ultimately the product of the pre-programmed interpretation of the data which entered Popper's mind, CR is a theory which can only be applied to Popper. According to his own view of his contact with reality, he would not be able to verify the relevance of CR to anybody else.
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In Unended Quest Popper observed bluntly that "there is no such thing as an unprejudiced observation" [UNQ 51]. Although this appears to rule out the possibility of objectivity, that was not Popper's intention. Rather, again following Kant perhaps, he thought the basis for objectivity lay elsewhere: "the objectivity of scientific statements lies in the fact that they can be inter-subjectively tested" [LSCD 44]. He later restated this slightly differently: "it is the public character of science... which preserves the objectivity of science" [POH 155-6].
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