Karl Popper: The Emergence of Criticism

Karl Popper is famous for his notion of falsifiability. La Wik:

Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments.

Or, as my guy F.S.C. Northrop wrote: "knowledge begins with a problem," or when existing theory doesn't work in a particular situation. In his Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper Bryan Magee explains things thusly.

The old model of scientific method was:

1, observation and experiment; 2, inductive generalization; 3, hypothesis; 4, attempted verification of hypothesis; 5, proof or disproof; 6, knowledge.

According to Popper, it goes like this:

1, problem...; 2, proposed solution, in other words a new theory; 3, deduction of testable propositions from the new theory; 4, tests... observation and experiment; 5, preference established between competing theories.

Actually, I describe the process a little differently, as 

1. Problem with the old theory;
2. propose a new theory;
3. Make predictions;
4. Survive attacks on new theory. 

Until a new problem emerges. And it will. And I think that my description of the problem is better than Magee's. Maybe you have a better idea.

But then Magee goes on to say how radical this new approach is, not just in science, but in life. He calls it "the emergence of criticism."

[A]ll, or almost all human societies of which we have knowledge seem to have an interpretation of the world which was articulated in some myth or religion, and in primitive societies any questioning of its truth is usually punished by death.

There is One Truth, and you'd better not mess with it, peasant. 

But let us be fair. There was a very good reason for that in the days Before Science. Supposed you, Farmer Joe, changed the routine of farming that had successfully brought food for the table to your household. What's the odds that your brilliant idea is wrong, and your family starves?

We can see how this works in the recent COVID experience. The government and its bureaucrats decree what is going on and what to do about it. Any disagreement is banned by the media as "disinformation."

Nothing new here.

But we live in a critical age. Magee:

Popper believes that... the first schools to not only permit criticism but encourage and welcome it were those of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece... This spelt the end of the dogmatic tradition of passing on an unsullied truth, and the beginning of a new rational tradition of subjecting speculations to critical discussion.

In the old days, if society had a wrong theory, the whole society would die. Under the new dispensation, where criticism of existing theory is permitted, the wrong theory dies instead of society.

It is important to understand how radical this is: to allow heretics and intellectual rebels to argue their point. Humans are not programmed that way. We want to believe in the truth of our religion and our way of life, and it is extremely frightening to allow an open discussion of competing ideas. 

So Popper explains the emergence of Marxism. Marxism is a religion that pretends to be scientific and to predict, with scientific precision, that society will trend towards a perfect world because Marx claims to have discovered the "Natural Laws of capitalist production...  [and to] lay bare the Economic Law of Motion of modern society." You could call it the last stand of Newtonian mechanics.

It is natural, Magee says, for the modern "emergence of criticism" to inspire an opposite faith, in the One True Marxism. That's because the responsibility of searching out the best path to the future is terrifying, and most of us would rather leave the heavy lifting to the priests and the politicians.

Only, of course, if we leave everything to the priests and politicians, then when they are wrong we will all die. Hey Mao! How yer doin' pal?

Popper argues that the culture of criticism requires that we go forward piecemeal. We discover a problem, we propose a solution, we find it works, sort of, but not quite, so we admit our error and revise the solution. It's all very messy, and we humans don't like mess.

Indeed, I argue, the problem with churches and governments and hierarchies is that the leader is not allowed to admit a mistake. In the recent retreat from Afghanistan you can see this operating. President Biden cannot admit that his plan to withdraw was an absolute clown show.

It's not just that Biden made mistakes; the point is that social leaders down the ages have never been able to admit mistakes. The problem is nicely illustrated in the Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven. If things start going wrong in China it is a sign that the emperor has lost the Mandate of Heaven, and that means the end of the dynasty.

That is the old world.

But in the new world we accept that things are going wrong all the time, that we will be butting up against the limit of our knowledge all the time. But that's OK. It's not the end of the world. In the new order we try to figure out what went wrong and come up with a better idea, and try it out.

In a way, the Apollo 13 disaster shows us the modern can-do spirit in action. Two days into the flight in 1970 an oxygen tank in the Service Module failed, and this meant that there wasn't enough oxygen to sustain the crew in the Command Module. What happened next is that a team back on Earth went into a room with all the equipment available on the spacecraft and figured out how to jury-rig life-support for the crew long enough for them to return to Earth.

In other words, "Houston We Have A Problem" is the very essence on the modern culture of criticism and adaptation. We something goes wrong we don't all start pointing fingers at each other. Instead we figure out a way to solve the problem, and when anyone comes up with an idea, we test it to see if it will work.

Tell that to the politicians and activists.

There's a piece in Unherd today that acts as a corrollary to this. "Life is one big status game" is about how people always listen to socially dominant people, and how people are always taking advantage of social dominance to beat up the peasants with virtue-signaling. This is Old World.

New World is that techy nerds are out there in Nowheresville thinking up whacky ideas, and that every now and again one of them comes up with a whacky idea that works.

New World is adapting to climate change rather than completely changing energy use in accordance with a grand plan of Building Back Better from the rich guys in the World Economic Forum.

New World is ten thousand different schools trying out how to educate kids, rather than slavishly following the latest One Size Fits All No Child Left Behind ukase from on high.