Karl Popper Defines "Rationality"

Everyone is all in favor of "reason" and contemptuous of the other guys that substitute "feelings" or "faith" or "bigotry" for reason.

What we really mean is that "our" account of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is the correct one, the rational one, but the other guy... Well, he's probably living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Karl Popper is famous for the idea of "falsification." He argues that unless it is possible to test your theory against real-life data then it's not a theory but just a narrative.

By the way, he has nothing against narrative. Man "can invent stories, fairy tales, myths." But when a myth can't be tested...

Not that there's anything wrong with narratives. It's just that a narrative isn't science.

In Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In defence of interaction, adapted from a series of lectures given by Popper at Emory University in 1969 and published by M.A. Notturno, Popper develops his ideas. 

He has two Big Ideas to present. The first is the process of scientific discovery. It goes like this:

1. A theory has a problem.
2. Propose a tentative revised theory.
3. Test the theory.
4. Wait for the next problem.

The second Big Idea is his "Three Worlds" notion. It goes like this

World 3: the products of our human minds.
World 2: our mental states or processes.
World 1: physical states or processes.

When he says World 3 he means both scientific theories and actual physical products of the human mind such as windmills and temples and jet airplanes.

But at the end of the book, in the last lecture, titled "The Self, Rationality, and Freedom," he defines "rationality."

I mean by "rationality" simply a critical attitude towards problems -- the readiness to learn from our mistakes, and the attitude of consciously searching for our mistakes and for our prejudices. Thus, I mean by "rationality" the attitude of conscious, critical, error elimination.

Simplified, I would say that Popper sees reason and rationality as a process rather than a framework.

And, he says, we humans can only deal with one or two mistakes at a time. We cannot sweep the whole of knowledge-so-far in the trash and start with a blank sheet. So, "our criticism cannot tackle more than one or two problems or theories at a time". But, "there is no problem or theory... that is immune to being made  the object of our critical consideration."

Then, he attacks what he calls "the myth of the framework," the idea that two people cannot have a fruitful discussion unless their world-views are pretty much in alignment. On the contrary, he writes, dealing with someone with a significantly different "framework" can be really productive and interesting. But it does require both sides to admit to themselves that they might be wrong.

Finally he critiques the notion of "self-expression," that

the quality of the work we do depends on how good we are. It depends only on our talents, on our psychological, and, perhaps, on our physiological states.

Popper regards this as sick and wrong. That's because he regards all successful theory and knowledge as "objective knowledge" in his World 3. The point is that all scientific knowledge is a public thing. It is a monument that is pushed out into the public world. Then either you, or someone else, critiques it and tries to improve it. I suppose that the point is that if you make a scientific discovery it might be because of your astonishing talent. Or it might be because you got lucky and "noticed" something that nobody else did.

Either way, once you have created a new theory, it is back to the drawing board and on to the next thing. 

What Does a Culture of Real Criticism Mean?

In yesterday's post on The Emergence of Criticism I discussed the utter novelty of a society in which criticism was genuinely tolerated.

Normal human society has one myth and one religion and if you don't agree you are a problem.

I interpret this not as a scandal but as a profound understanding of pre-scientific society. In other words, before humans had a developed system of understanding and predicting the common events of life, it was perfectly serviceable to have myths and legends and evil spirits to explain things. If you don't have Newtonian mechanics, what are you supposed to do in the matter of understanding and prediction?

But then, after humans have developed a serviceable system of mechanical prediction, what are we supposed to do about the myth and legend and evil spirits system that got us here for the previous 100,000 years, or however long humans have had conscious minds that could gussie up myths and legends and evil witches.

Obviously, we have to think about it.

Obviously, I would say, humans need a myth that explains the meaning of "life the universe, and everything" for the time being, and we always will.

But, it probably isn't a good idea to burn witches and heretics at the stake or send saboteurs and wreckers to concentration camps. Or imprison mostly peaceful protesters at the January 6 riots for six months while they await trial, or until they agree to cop a plea.

Yesterday I pondered Bryan Magee's idea that Marxism makes complete sense, because the idea of a world in which everything is not tied down by a saving myth -- as proposed for the Era of Criticism -- is too terrifying to contemplate.

Now, our Founding Fathers imagined a cunning solution to this problem, for their time, with the separation of church and state. In that way, in the United States of the time, no one Christian sect could make itself the state church. Of course, when it came to the Irish Catholics in the mid 19th century the political punks of the time -- I mean you Horace Mann -- decided to do an end run around the Catholics with gubmint common schools that would use the Protestant Bible. But God said to the Irish, "first build the school, then the church," and it was so, and the Irish nuns ran the best schools in the nation for the next century.

In our day the end-run Horace Manns are the lefty activists that are too stupid to understand that their activism and their cancel culture amount to an establishment of wokey religion: worse, a combination of religion and politics that we have learned to call totalitarianism, and as such a very present danger to the Republic and in simple terms a monstrous and evil injustice perpetrated on all Americans that don't worship at the church of Woke.

And the worst thing of all is that the wokeys have No Idea. They have No Idea that their activism is really a religion. And they have no idea that politics leads directly to injustice, do not pass Go. And they have No Idea that the conjunction of their activist politics and government is totalitarianism, straight up. No Idea.

I think that the answer lies somewhere close to elevating the Culture of Criticism to a Holy Writ. It is interesting, of course, that our lefty friends believe that their Critical Race Theory does just that.

It is comical, really, that in fact the lefty implementation of critical theory in fact does the opposite, and far from being a genuine critique of the ruling class and the ruling narrative is is fact a cunning way of bullying all narratives critical of our present ruling class out of the public square.

But here's the thing. The point of Popper's notion of falsification and the notion of knowledge -- beginning with a problem that requires the imagining of new theories and their testing and probable falsification -- is that in the modern world the path of the single myth and narrative fails every time it is tried, Joey S, and Mao Z.D.

The only way to avoid disaster and killing fields and utter failure is to abandon the Single Narrative notion and let a thousand ideas bloom, and set forth the idea that the only way forward is by trying things out and correcting the errors and then doing the whole thing over again.

And that means the end of political supremacy and cancel culture and "disinformation" findings and naming and shaming and shunning, and marches through the institutions and faculties that are 95 percent liberal and silly woke girls in publishing houses deciding not to publish "controversial" authors.

Not because it is wrong, but because, you silly ignorant liberals, it will end up in disaster for you and your ideas.

Why do you fools and knaves not get this?

It seems to me that the key to all this is that Americans be taught to believe that wokism is a religion. And that wokeys be put on the rack until they agree that their beliefs are a religion, and as such must not be established in the government as a state religion.

So let's do it.

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.

Towards a Critique of Meaning

One of my little conceits is to parrot Douglas Adams' line in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Only, I got it wrong.

I just looked it up in my five-books-in-one Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, and that is not how it is presented. Chapter 24, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"O Deep Thought computer," he said, "the task we have designed for you to perform is this. We want you to tell us..." he paused, "The Answer!" 
"The Answer?" said Deep Thought. "The Answer to what?"
"Life!"urged Fook.
"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.
"Everything!" they said in chorus.
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.
"Tricky," he said finally.
"But can you do it?"
Again, a significant pause."
"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."
"There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement.
"A simple answer?"added Lunkwill.
"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about it."

Now, at La Wik, they phrase this as the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." And the Answer, of course, is 42.

So I got it wrong. And so did La Wik. But I am going to have to change my quote. I think that I will henceforth refer to "the meaning of  'Life, the Universe, and Everything.'" Just to make it fair.

The thing about the meaning of Life is that everyone wants a short-cut. And why? Because you need to have some idea about the meaning of Life before you get up in the morning. It is much harder to live life in the knowledge of ignorance, that you don't have a clue what is going on, than living life when everything has been decided on the meaning front by your local priest or your local activist.

The fact is that the meaning of Life is unfathomable. Indeed, the more we know about "the Universe, and Everything" the more we wonder. How is it possible? How did it come to be? How big is it? Is there Life elsewhere? What is Life? What is the Universe?What is Everything? And what does it all mean?

Also, the question of the meaning of Life only occurs for a being that has a conscious mind. If you are a dog or a lion or a mosquito, you just live the life you are programmed to live, as we now think, by your DNA. You don't think about it; you don't worry about it: you just wake up in the morning and go about your business.

So our primitive forbears didn't think about the meaning of Life. They just went about it. And as they began to acquire the glimmerings of a conscious mind, they initially attributed all the angst of life to evil spirits. Notice that, at this stage, the human does not yet feel responsible for his life. Therefore, he does not really need to know the meaning of Life. The gods have decided all that. All the primitive human has to do is get on with it. And suffer, if the gods will it.

It is only with the gods of the Axial Age that humans get to be responsible for their own lives. Even then, God has decided pretty well everything you need to know about the meaning of Life. God just says: now you are responsible for organizing your Life according to the meaning of Life that I have vouchsafed to the Prophets.

Indeed, I would say that down to the Protestant Reformation, all the Average Joe had to do was listen to the priests, and do what he was told.

But with the Reformation a new concept arises. With the advent of printing, your bourgeois citizen wanted to read his own Bible. But that meant that the bourgeois citizen was taking on the new responsibility of trying to figure out what it all means in the Bible.

And now, with Nietzsche's Death of God, we are on our own. It's up to you to figure out the meaning of Life on your own.

Only, of course, most people don't do that. If they can't believe in God anymore then they pick up the secular gods of their school teachers. Or the meaning of Life revealed to them by a political leader, or a religious guru.

I would say that the urgency of knowing the meaning of Life has increased radically in the last century. It is not an accident that with Freud and Jung we see the beginning of a new age in which we have highly trained specialists to help us with our angst. And it is not just a question of taking the word of a priest or a guru to solve your existential problems. With "analysis" it is the patient, the analysand, that is supposed to do the heavy lifting, not the expert psychologist.

The less that society has already determined the meaning of Life, the more the responsibility falls on the individual. And the heavier the weight on the shoulders of the individual.

Even so, nearly everyone picks up a pre-packaged Meaning of Life kit at the store, or the church, or the meeting, or the activist group. Because, really, the alternative, to stand in the full horror of not knowing what you are here for, and what you should do next, is a terror that few of us have the resources to deal with.

But I think with my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we should at least begin to recognize that different people need different meanings of life.

In my reductive system, we can say that your average Subordinate should not worry about such things, but just do what his lord orders him to do. The average Responsible has the overall divine plan all set out for him, but he has to fill in the details, and that is not easy.

Obviously we can see that the Creatives, that are supposed to be figuring it out for themselves, are in completely over their heads. That is why, for the last 200 years, they have been grabbing whatever half-baked canned cults and religions are on offer, like passengers on the Titanic grabbing for life-belts.

Maybe that's as it should be. I just wish that the cults and religions that the Creatives have been grabbing for were, as the Brits say, "fit for purpose." That is what my Great Reaction theme is all about. It is about Creatives grabbing for something to steady their lives: only time and time again, they lurch back to the primitive, to belief systems that are more primitive than the Axial Age religions that they can no longer believe in. Because they are not yet ready to face the Universe without he comfort of a ready-made belief system.

That is the real challenge and the real problem. How do you face the world if you accept that you do not know the meaning of Life and never will, and accept that it is a cop-out to just buy a ready-to-wear suit right off the rack?

How About a Critique of Critique?

We all know that everyone who is anyone has created a "critical theory." The current rage for "critical race theory" is just the latest effort from the global sophomores.

Now, in the official introduction to its Critical Theory page, La Wik writes that critical theory is

an approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures.

Very commendable. In case you weren't aware, 

critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. 

And we can't leave La Wik's article without this gem:

Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

"Challenge power structure." "Liberate human beings." Couldn't agree more, Max old chap. Because I'm sure if you were alive today you'd agree with me that today's "power structure" is a lefty power structure, and its objective is to enslave the minds and the bodies of so-called "deplorables." For their own good, of course.

Now "critique" starts with Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason where he argues that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances.

Then along came Marx with his "critique of political economy," that is to say the economics of the classical economists. He was only just in time, because his critique was exploded in 1870 when the marginal revolution in economics completely set aside the opposition of exchange value and use value that the classical economists used and that Marx critiqued. You could look it up.

Our modern critical theory is a post-WWI phenomenon, based upon the post-Marx reality that needed a non-economic basis for its critique.

And in my opinion it is just as wrong. Here's why. It was crazily wrong for Marx to propose that capitalism was an essentially oppressive system. Why? Because in the first place the market economy rewards people for serving the consumers. Because in the second place, capitalism is associated with an unprecedented rise in income, over 30 times in 200 years. Thirdly, because the capitalists then and the ordinary middle class today are not that interested in power.

So, to develop a critical theory based on the theoretical foundation that the one thing needful is to attack and destroy "power structures" misses the point. Under the market system, power structures come and go.

We see this with the fairy tale of "systemic racism." We made systemic racism illegal half a century ago with the civil rights acts. We made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or sex. And ever since we have had lefty activists, funded by lefty billionaires, running around looking under every rock to find discrimination and root it out.

Oh, there's discrimination still, of course. People are wary around young black males. And when young black males mostly peacefully protest a lot of people head for the suburbs.

Actually, city people have been wary around young uneducated unemployed males since whenever. Because young unassimilated males are dangerous and violent. What do you think Dickens' Oliver Twist was about?

So you can see that for me, there is a desperate need for someone to come along and liberate lefty minds "from the circumstances that enslave them."

Now, when I awoke from a dream during the night the book's chapters presented themselves to me thus:

A Critique of Meaning 

A Critique of Religion 

A Critique of Creativity

A Critique of Morality 

A Critique of Revolution 

A Critique of Activism 

A Critique of Politics 

A Critique of Force 

A Critique of Responsibility 

A Critique of Slavery

I think that will do for a start. Of course, you can see what I am about. I am trying to find a framework in which to fit my overwrought ideas, from my reductive Three Peoples theory, to "downstreamism" -- that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- to my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, to my critique of Activism Culture, to my various critique of the Left's Conceits, Crimes, and Errors, to the problem of the Little Darlings.

And it all starts with the eternal question: why do humans seem to need, nay demand, a sense of "meaning?"