Popper quotes
I thought you might like to read some quotes from philosopher of science Karl Popper:
You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence “democracy”, and the other “tyranny”.
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle ”” the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.
I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous ”” from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows. For these troubles are the by-products of what is perhaps the greatest of all moral and spiritual revolutions of history, a movement which began three centuries ago. It is the longing of uncounted unknown men to free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority and prejudice. It is their attempt to build up an open society which rejects the absolute authority to preserve, to develop, and to establish traditions, old or new, that measure up to their standards of freedom, of humaneness, and of rational criticism. It is their unwillingness to sit back and leave the entire responsibility for ruling the world to human or superhuman authority,and their readiness to share the burden of responsibility for avoidable suffering, and to work for its avoidance. This revolution has created powers of appalling destructiveness; but they may yet be conquered.
The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. ”” In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.
It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it. Poland fought for freedom as no other country did. The Czech nation was prepared to fight for its freedom in 1938; it was not lack of courage that sealed its fate. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 ”” the work of young people with nothing to lose but their chains ”” triumphed and then ended in failure. … Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things ”” and above all on ourselves.
Simple simon democracy always defaulted to a tyranny of the majority — and then collapsed into despotism.
Democracy is not the ideal.
Democratic-Republics — with a limit on government powers, terms of office and systemic law is the requirement.
We’ve seen democracy in Iran, Gaza and elsewhere. After one vote, one time you are left with a fake democracy.
In fact most of the despots today self-label as democratic republics. North Korea comes immediately to mind.
Putin & Co and Hu & Co are both running fake democracies. Even Hitler campaigned for democratic assent AFTER assuming absolute power! Remember the famous Jah! campaign? He pulled down well over 90% of the vote!
With the Resident we have American despotism. He’s installed extra-legal ‘Czars’ all over the Federal Government. He’s enacting new legislation by bureaucratic fiat: EPA regs.
But the worst is that the Resident is busting out the entire American economy like it’s a Polynesian themed lounge in Brooklyn!
I’m a Popper groupie:
“In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”
and
“It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.”
When you put people like this up, i wonder if your baiting me to reveal their history? 🙂
The Open Society and Its Enemies
The work criticises theories of teleological historicism in which history unfolds inexorably according to universal laws, and indicts as totalitarian Plato, Hegel and Marx for relying on historicism to underpin their political philosophies
three related names to look up…
Thomas Kuhn
Imre Lakatos
Paul Feyerabend
he was a “Fallibilist”: is the philosophical doctrine that all claims of knowledge could, in principle, be mistaken. Some fallibilists go further, arguing that absolute certainty about knowledge is impossible. As a formal doctrine, it is most strongly associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and other pragmatists, who use it in their attacks on foundationalism.
However, it is already present in the views of some ancient philosophers, including Xenophanes, Socrates, and Plato.
In fact, it had a such a direct philosphical relationship with Pyrrhonistic Skepticism, that Pyrrhonists of history are sometimes referred to as fallibilists, and modern fallibilists as Pyrrhonists.[1][2]
Another proponent of fallibilism is Karl Popper, who builds his theory of knowledge, critical rationalism, on fallibilistic presuppositions. Fallibilism has been employed by Willard Van Orman Quine to attack, among other things, the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. – from wiki
Its at this point that things cross each other, and become not as clean as otherwise first glance would seem. for if you notice in this grouping is also Dewey, and others who decidedly were makers of utopia.
he is an EXCELLENT person to read given today and whats going on… he attacks the historicists… who believe by slamming together things under hegelian dialectical reason, you get a new synthesis, however the trick for them was to control both sides, so the new synthesis would be or follow their historicist positions.
THIS is why the missives of the mid 1800s are trying to be proved by any means possible by the socialist social engineers and so forth (Even if they ahve to engineer the answer as a fix).
women and man are the same and if not for social programming women would be like men adn the behavior they hate that women have would disappear as its visited upon women by force. ergo our women trying to be mini men and eradicating anything feminine.
that we are all sexual beings as the original sex communes that this comes from declare. so you have franz boas, kinsey, and meade cook the books to make that claim of their prophet come true.
its why they want to fund fetal stem cells over others as that would justify abortion, a key to a society were we all have lots of sex like horses or cattle, and we don’t raise our kids, and so on.
ultmately its why science has finally be bolderized and taken over so much that they can use its trusted cache to also establish by other means prophetic truth.
and on and on it goes…
is it any wonder that they are in with the twelvers who believe that if you make the conditions, you trigger the event, rather than you make conditions at the wrong time, you just get a mess, and no event. ie. they think that they can induce a god to appear at their will by forcing a prophecy early
though in all this popper was really thinking about the actual thing, while the others were always thinking about how they could use such things.
though sadly… despite being against utopia, he could not resist trying to make the evil he opposed workable
to quote the hoover institute:
he could not work out that its not just the idea of it, but also any kind of practice. that his work was contradictory at that point.. that he could believe in social engineering and freedom and the individual, and not realize that once you taint it, its not individual any more…
so ultimately, his work against it was completely undone by his being caught up in its own vanity.
if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still.
For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple and free life in an egalitarian society.
It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream;
that freedom is more important than equality;
that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom;
and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.
but the left didnt hear what came AFTER:
if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still.
they heard that and changed their tack and so attempted to paint this concept and so through popper they had a means to acquire people like him.
he gave them the key to what false image to paint to make another net to catch another subset of the population.
Both the work of Popper AND Hayek are at the hoover institute…
AND, if one cares to, one can also hunt and search and read the papers from hoovers investigations and internal spies showing how the (new) progressive party was funded, owned, micromanaged, by the soviet union, and Wallace was their dupe. [the book REDS is excellent source!!!!!]
by being so honest, he helped that which later he ultimately opposed.
but there is a huge list of people whose later work are ignored because their younger worked helped the movement. Langston Huges is a classic of that… and so was Richard Wright, who wrote too smart to be a communist… a book about how he nearly became a communist, but they didnt want him if he was too smart, and would figure them out!
the book is out of print and almost impossible to find… kind of like books like Sanger autobiography.. you can read articles of leftists under certain orders to go to libraries and remove books and drop them in the trash as a way of erasing stuff faster that was embarrassing or would be better erased than show their face.
i hope i made an interesting contribution to the discussion that will come…
neo, I have to go with this: “You cannot have a rational discussion with–
–Wisconsin Democratic legislators who prefer to hide in a Best Western in Illinois to being convinced by you.”
I could play this game all night.
Art is basically right about Popper. I studied him as an undergrad and there is much that is great and admirable in his work, but ultimately he falls short, especially on the practical level (his scientific philosophy of “fallibilism” has been persuasively critiqued by David Stove in an amazing take-down called “Karl Popper and the Jazz Age in Science.” Anyone with any interest in this subject should read the book, which I believe is now published under the title “Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists.”)
Philosophically, as well, Popper was quite wrong about Plato, although he was mostly right about Hegel and Marx (without getting to the essence of what exactly was wrong with them, as Art noted).
Popper is a really interesting case. He had a lot of good sense, but ultimately remained a socialist – he reminds me of no one more than Sidney Hook. The key flaw in both Popper and Hook is their pragmatism, which, as GK Chesterton’s marvelous one sentence refutation has it, “doesn’t work.” More exactly, what Chesterton said in Orthodoxy was this (I’m quoting from memory, so it’s a paraphrase):
“Pragmatism is a philosophy which says we should focus always and only on human needs. But the first human need is to be something more than a pragmatist.”
Popper and Hook were constitutionally incapable of understanding that. And this led them to an anemic procedural conception of democracy that, as blert wrote above, is not adequate to sustain actual democracy. Actual democracy requires republicanism and its virtues and moral code. Popper and Hook could pay lip service to that on occasion, because their hearts were in the right place, but their philosophies cut out the notion at the knees.
A lesson of all this, I guess, is that it is better to be a utilitarian or a pragmatist than a Marxist-Leninist, but at the same time, utilitarian-pragmatism is one step on the road to perdition. Popper, to be sure, never called himself a pragmatist or a utilitarian, but rather a “critical rationalist.” Same thing.
Nothing about Black Swans?
Popper’s recomendations would be fine if humanity consisted of people like Popper. Alas, this is not the case. Ability for rational discussion sadly belongs to a tiny fraction of general population, and the most important things can not be discussed rationally. “Reality” as Popper defined it is also a tiny fraction of larger reality, which includes also transcendental truth, which never can be proved or refuted by purely rational arguments or observation. Rationalism has its inherent limitations. Scientific method, this embodiment of rationalism, also has its inherent limitations. And even worse, the observable reality of behavior of complex systems is often beyond applicability of scientific method. Philosophy and religion are necessary means of understanding reality, and they never can be rationalized.
Popper is a Gnostic.
which includes also transcendental truth, which never can be proved or refuted by purely rational arguments or observation.
for thos with a bent to mathematics, see Kurt Godels incompleteness theorem (if you read it with enough starka, it starts to sound like dick cheney! 🙂 )
anyway, what kurt proved in its simplest conception is that within a system and that systems function parts there are areas of the system that are forever out of reach to that system. that one would have to stand outside the system from a meta view to peer down and into that other system to reveal areas that are inaccessible.
this also relates to alan turings stopping problem now referred to as the optimal stopping problem as mr turing imagined a second turing machine in that position looking at the other turing machines data, and computing whether the machine will stop in the future. he proved there was no way to prove this (at least within the framework we use for proofs).
so technically turing extends godel to prove throuhg the optimum stopping problems issues that some things may not even be accessible to the outer system either. while this may be what it seems to imply, it depends on whether the unknowns over lap and so are inscrutable up the scales infinitely, or whether they are not perfectly matched, and so one can reduce its size to some smaller one by stacking and nibbling away the edges.
sorry… i tend to have no one to talk to that gets this kind of thing… (and even harder) they lied when they said no mans an island, for every man is an island and some are farther away than others.
he observable reality of behavior of complex systems is often beyond applicability of scientific method.
actually this is my area of expertise… they are not beyond the method, but the methods have to change. that over and over i am working with people made extreme in their materialist conceptions, and so much of this is emergent, which tends to creep into the metaphysical and fractal nature of our common reality.
you CAN work out the emergence system but not if one is constantly attempting to look at it from a outer view rather then inside with things from what they view (much as Einstein did with his gedanken).
OFTEN the concepts are flipped over and there ARE rules that one can apply that are at least for me a tenuous set of guide posts. things like automatically tossing out any answer which evokes a secondary position or perspective to work.
funny thing is that the emergent way, as in genetic algorithms is often counter intuitive (at least before they are accepted), and tend to be VERY powerful but quirky (as we only have functional isolated parts not a whole).
the puzzle of extending this to a whole, which self organizes in more than one level or dimension as it does now, is one of the items of my lifes work in isolation.
about a year ago i solved this morphological self organizational problem and how to grow solutions of a higher order. been playing with software and writing papers trying to explain it over and over from different angles. and if you guys think i am long here, ha!!! my poor partner on this gets hit with 15 to 30 page documents a day when we are producing! (and thats besides typing here, AND doing my work at work, AND doing things at home, including making prototypes and tinkering with other ideas at the same time)
the materialist view locks them into what they can see, and despite examples all aroudn them that you can illustrate, they fear to believe the seeming magical happening of emergence. oh, they may pay lipservice to the term, like they do with diversity, and not think mich about it, but when confronted with a tiny atomic example, or some fundemental point they kind of stare at you.
here, i will give you a classic example. most genetics and genomics and biology researchers, including the softer social sciences of population control by some over others, is dominated by blind statistics. that is, they memorize or use tools to apply things they really dont understand, but can use this way as the years have kind of standardized it.
but i tell them that there are classes of problems which are completely deterministic, and that are completely inscrutable by statistical methods, and more so the better they are at what they do.
to them this is an impossibility. something you cant analyse and reach answers with that cant be statistically analysed.
I am so tired of this i tend to bet them that if i can show them this in 10 mins, they have to buy me lunch. (its seems that if they dont lose anything, they have no reason to really pick a side other than personal whim).
ready..
iterative mathematical structures like pseudo random number generators cant be analysed by statistical methods applied to their output. oh, you could apply things like the kolmogorov smirnov formulas and determine a level of randomness as some kind of abstract measure, but that wouldn tell you how the series was generated, or even let you pick which generator was doing the deed determinant or not.
the better the pseudo random number generating formula, in which the output is the input to the next iteration, the less likely they can tell. and since there is no way to tell when the pseudo random number series will ‘break down’ a la fractal math, and the stopping problem, there is no way to know if going a bit farther would reveal the difference by the numbers falling into a steady pattern.
all this is beyond a lot of them, but they are hungry to know as i show and extrapolate things for them and am more right than wrong most of the time with a incredible hit rate (and when i miss i am usually close).
my problem is that i am outside the wall passing notes through the cracks, and my contemporaries are nice but relatively common people with common motivations… and as far as a problem for me, common reflexive fears and behaviors towards intelligence. so i am warehoused…
like dilberts garbage man, but not by choice…
and very often kicked around arbitrariily and punished due to tall poppy syndrom, fear i will pass them or take their place if my real skills were known
so rather than use them to mutual success, they spend their time putting the ‘oppressor’ in his place, denying years of experience, making up crap, and generally dumping all their failures on me like a sink hole…
thanks social engineers who said, we don’t need you in academia, with you there, our reports on the current level of equality will not work out well, so we are going to cut your life off at the knees, and sculpt a future aesthetic where inconvenient people like you are either gone, or pass on their work.
so most of all this never goes past my pile of paper and junk or a few friends who believe in me.
we do not live in a world where merit alone can move you as merit confounds Procrustean equality. and one has to cut the top of the bell off to have a nice plateau of equality!!
every time someone figures out what i have figured out years ago, they erase me a tiny bit… 🙁
I should point out that the name of George Soros organization coordinating the new progressive party (like the old progressive party we forgot about) is called Open Society Institute.
I’m a bit puzzled by Kolnai’s discussion of Popper. I’ve been very much impressed by Popper myself, but I haven’t read Stove’s book.
The idea that Popper would be an irrationalist is puzzling to me, given Popper’s apt description of his post-Kantian philosophy as “critical rationalism”.
I’m very familiar with the criticism of Popper’s criticism of Plato. Classicists love to ridicule Popper for it. But the more I’ve had the time to look into it, the more Popper’s basic take on Plato strikes me as rather convincing. Plato *did*, after all, go to Syracuse. Furthermore, the Nomoi (generally considered to be a late work) is very anti-utopian, strikingly different from the earlier Politeia. And even if Plato was misunderstood by Popper (try proving that) he certainly left himself open to broad misunderstanding. Strange, for as careful a writer as Plato.
As far as his politics is concerned: he was a social democrat of the old variety. That would (sadly) be considered to the right of Atilla the Hun today. More importantly, however, he recommended (as nobody seems to deny here) a liberal (in the European sense) society. He rejected socialism. No wonder his papers are at Hoover! Hayek, with whom he overlapped at the LSE, was his life-long friend. And he had a significant impact in the circle around Mrs Thatcher.
I think I came to the wrong cocktail party . . .
I am a very ardent Popper admirer, since he was the first who clearly understood and formulated what scientific method is. Nobody did it better. My only disagreement with him is his concept of reality, which essentially reduces it to its, so to say, rationalizable part. Empiricism is too narrow to grasp other, more elusive parts of it. But intuition can do this, even if it can not formulate its insights in a way that can be subject to proofs or refutations by objective means. That is why we always will have different, incompatible philosophies and belief systems. His obvious inability to properly understand Politeia by Plato roots in his empiricism, too: for Plato, myth creation has a value in itself, and he openly declared this in his dialogues. Politeia never was intended for practical realisation, it was an educational myth to convey some basic ideas, like disdain for democracy which so ruthlessly murdered his dear teacher and degenerated into mob rule. Thought experiments of this kind can be found in many other Plato works.
“Strange, for as careful a writer as Plato.”
Nothing strange, if one keeps in mind the general perspective of Plato worldview and broader context of his works. For a transcendental philosopher of Pythagorean school all these implicit suppositions were obvious and did not require to be explicitly stated. Only historical and cultural distance fuels this misunderstanding. Popper had a blind spot for metaphysics, as most British philosophers. Even in works of Kant he took only epistemology, but totaly ignores his metaphysics. This simply is not his element.
we follow intuition to new empirical facts.. 🙂
A Fan –
I’m a fan too, but we should be honest. Popper was a man of the left, essentially a progressive liberal. Yes, his papers are at Hoover – so are Sidney Hook’s. The reason these guys were at Hoover was because they were very effective anti-communist activists, not because they were conservatives. That Popper was a friend of Hayek’s I have no doubt, but that’s neither here nor there. That he influenced Thatcherites is neither here nor there as well – Pat Moyniham was friends with a lot of conservatives and had a big impact on a lot of Reaganites. A man of the left regardless.
I may have been overbroad when I said flatly Popper was a “socialist” – full stop. If that implies I think he had some sort of sympathy for the Fabians then I retract. He was a socialist in the sense that Hook was – perhaps social democrat is the best way to describe it, but not if you mean by that Hayek-style or Manchester liberalism. “The Open Society and Its Enemies” makes it very clear that Popper is against laissez faire – he saw libertarian “social Darwinism” as yet another totalistic system. What Popper was in favor of never gets much farther than vague prescriptions for experimentation, which is the social democratic line, and is the line Hook and other anti-communist pragmatists took. “Experiment for progress in a democratic regime” might best sum up Popper’s politics. If one wants to interpret that in a conservative way, then ok. I just don’t see it that way, and I don’t think Popper meant it that way.
The fact that he called himself a critical rationalist doesn’t mean that he had a cogent rationalism to uphold. Marx called himself a scientist. We have to see how such appellations hold up under scrutiny. To my mind, Stove convincingly showed that critical rationalism collapses under scrutiny. You can read the book for the full argument; we shouldn’t go too deep into the weeds here.
As for Plato, we disagree. I don’t “love to ridicule” Popper for his simplistic view of Plato, but I really do think it is simplistic. I’m not ridiculing him; I’m noting my criticism. It’s a scholastic point anyway, and has nothing to do with what Popper was for or against. He took the standard line that Plato was the proto-totalitarian par excellence, and he despised him for it. So Popper makes his argument against totalitarianism, and it’s well-taken.
It’s true that Popper’s methodological principles are not of the right or the left, and politically he is not easy to place (which I surmise is why we’re emphasizing different parts of his “record” – I tend to emphasize what Bryan Magee called his “emotional” commitment to social democracy, while you seem to stress his “shift to the right” in his later years – the question is how far to the right he shifted). My point was bigger than his overt positions – it was his metaphysical positivism enmeshed within a generally progressive orientation. To be as simple and short as possible: Popper denied there were universal laws, but he affirmed there was such a thing a progress. “Progress to what?” some of his students and friends asked. And thus we got what Stove calls Scientific Irrationalism from Popper’s Critical Rationalism.
I admire few people more than Hook and Orwell, but that doesn’t mean I have to commandeer them for conservatism. I think we should be mindful of that with respect to Popper too.
Classical liberalism of Popper sounds very much conservative now, even if at his time it looked more left-leaning rather than right-leaning. The whole ideological spectrum had shifted to the left after WWII and advent of post-modernism. But we compare Popper now not to his contemporaries, but to today ideologues. And in this political landscape he certainly looks conservative, just as Orwell does. This is not conservatism of principles, but conservatism of common sense. Reality is conservative, anyway, and if your positivist approach is connected to reality, it brings you into conservative camp.