Abstract
Most of our colleagues are either dogmatists or justificationists. This makes friendship with them a delicate matter: one constantly faces the dilemma of either doing them the (closed society) curtesy of overlooking their faults, or offering them the (open society) service of readiness to criticize their opinions. Bunge is one of the few who make both friendship and criticism easy: he avoids both dogmas and justifications.
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Notes
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Russell objected to Popper’s anti-inductivism. He said, we distinguish between the ravings of a mad person and an Einstein. And whatever Popper says is the advantage of the one over the other may count as his principle of induction. Popper admitted that this is so, and that it makes sense, yet he found this kind of preference significantly different from justification, since it is possibly erroneous, hopefully given to improvement, and should apply well also to our preferences of scientific theories which have already been openly acknowledged as refuted, over the madman’s ravings.
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Sadly, Ludwig Wittgenstein found the search for philosophical explanation irksome, Wittgenstein (1953, §§109, 116, and 255).
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For more details of the story see Agassi (2012).
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Popper (1963, Chapter 10, note 31).
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Bunge (1961b, p. 279) offers a competing view: he prefers science with confirmations even at the cost of refutations.
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Bunge (1961a).
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Bunge (2017, pp. 3–12).
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Bunge (2017).
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Bunge (2009, pp. 64, 82–3, 90, 290).
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Agassi, J., Bar-Am, N. (2019). Bunge contra Popper. In: Matthews, M.R. (eds) Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16673-1_15
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