Abstract
Popper always told us to open a paper with a problem: I have two problems. The first is whether in the years that have elapsed since 1943–1944, when “The Poverty of Historicism” was originally published, there have emerged new arguments to challenge what Popper said about the differences between the natural and the social sciences. To address this problem I have to face a second one: just what, in that work and his other comments on the topic, did Popper consider the main differences between the natural and social sciences to be? Both problems are enmeshed in a sociological problem, that of the strange reception of Popper’s ideas in general,1 and the extraordinary sidestepping of The Poverty of Historicism in particular.
Parts of this essay were read to the Philosophy Department, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California, April 22, 1980. I wish to thank my questioners and also Joseph Agassi.
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Notes
Popper’s “Replies to My Critics,” in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. P. A. Schilpp (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), concentrates on the ideational content of the Popper legend. As we shall see, however, the logic of the situation of new ideas has a sociological dimension that can help explain the frustrating misunderstanding and misrepresentation from which Popper has suffered.
Sociological hypothesis: those who deceive themselves into believing they have given up a doctrine will be particularly withering and dismissive of criticism of that doctrine. Compare the reaction of fellow-traveling historicists to Popper with that of fellow-traveling language philosophers to Gellner, not to mention fellow-traveling justificationists to Bartley, fellow-traveling inductivists to Popper again, and so on.
“The Poverty of Historicism is, I think, one of my stodgiest pieces of writing. Besides, after I had written the ten sections which form the first chapter, my whole plan broke down.” Popper, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Schilpp, p. 90.
Translated into English and published in late 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books).
In the 1950 “Preface” to the revised edition of The Open Society and Its Enemies, and on p. 91 of the “Autobiography,” Popper writes of the mood of gloom in which that book was written, perhaps fearing the war would be lost by the Allies, a mood that apparently lifted only after his first visit to the United States.
Stalinists use the specious justification of Lenin that you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. Breaking human heads and bodies does not yield a pleasant-tasting dish. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper & Row, 1973–1978) systematically shows how in virtually every respect conditions were worse in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia than under the czars.
Excellent examples of the latter were given in an article, “Many Benefit as Inflation Goes Higher,” by Martin Baron, Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1980, pp. 1ff.
Thus he is not allied with those who attack the social sciences because of pretentiousness, such as Pitrim Sorokin, C. Wright Mills, A. R. Louch, and Stanislav Andreski. It should be noted that Popper had second thoughts about the Oedipus Effect, as he recalls in the “Autobiography,” pp. 96–97.
See The Poverty of Historicism, secs. 29 and 31, and his “La rationalité et le statut du principe de rationalité,” in Les fondéments philosophiques des systemes economiques, ed. Emil M. Claassen (Paris: Payot, 1967), pp. 142–150.
I have expanded on this in Concepts and Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), esp. chap. 1.
A bold extension of the method to explain fashion and style is attempted by E. H. Gombrich in “The Logic of Vanity Fair,” in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Schilpp, pp. 925–957, a paper generously praised by Popper in his “Replies.”
See Alan Musgrave, “Impersonal Knowledge: A Criticism of Subjectivism in Epistemology” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1969).
and J. Agassi, Science in Flux (Dordrecht: Reidel 1975), chap. 6.
W. W. Bartley, III, “The Philosophy of Karl Popper: Part I: Biology and Evolutionary Epistemology,” Philosophia 6 (1976): 463–494. [See also his essay in the present volume—Ed.]
It appeared too soon after to be read as a reply to The Poverty of Historicism, and it criticizes Popper on matters (such as social engineering and the unity of method) treated fully only in The Open Society and Its Enemies. Winch’s teacher was Rush Rhees, author of a denunciation of The Open Society and Its Enemies, namely, “Social Engineering,” Mind 56 (1947): 317–331.
The argument is also fully discussed by F. A. Hayek in The Counter-Revolution of Science (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1955) (originally in Economica, 1942–1944).
Wittgenstein’s reflections on Frazer, recently published as a slim volume (Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1979]), are fascinating. Winch hints at all this in his elusive and allusive paper in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Schilpp. The example he gives is understanding the “force” of the reasons Sorel offered for supporting the General Strike: “the force of these ‘reasons’ could be understood only by someone who was familiar with the particular character of the movement within which it was offered” (p. 903) (the anarchosyndicalist movement). Winch’s statement (on the same page) that “to understand such situations, we have to understand the peculiar character of these institutions and people’s participation in them… a kind of understanding quite different from anything that Popper gives an account of,” is something of an understatement. For although Popper’s logic of the situation reconstructs understanding, it does so in a critical spirit, seeking typicalities as well as peculiarities in the situation, governed by the problem at hand, not treating any position as privileged, and so denying any special understanding to the participants.
Namely, Winch’s castigation of Evans-Pritchard in “Understanding a Primitive Society,” American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964): 307–324, and the immense literature of debate this has generated, which can be tracked through the Philosopher’s Index, and the widely scattered writings of Robin Horton, Ernest Gellner, Steven Lukes, Martin Hollis. John Skorupski, and myself.
V. Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967).
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), Natural Symbols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). More recently, see Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication (Santa Monica, Calif: Goodyear, 1979). Agassi and I have offered transcendental criticism of this position in “The Problem of the Rationality of Magic” and “Magic and Rationality Again,” both in British Journal of Sociology 18 (1967): 55–74, and 24 (1973): 236–245. Severe criticism is already to be found in Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).
W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), p. 27. For a useful guide to Quine’s view (no straightforward matter).
see Christopher Hookway, “Indeterminacy and Translation,” in Action and Interpretation, ed. Christopher Hookway and Philip Pettit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1978).
This would generate some obvious criticisms of the views of Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1930).
and R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt Brace. 1924/1926).
Bartley, The Retreat to Commitment (New York: Knopf, 1962); “Rationality versus the Theory of Rationality,” in The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy, ed. M. Bunge (New York: Free Press, 1964).
See the papers by Agassi and myself, “Problem of the Rationality” and “Magic and Rationality,” and the work of J. H. M. Beattie to which we refer there.
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937).
See the literature indicated in note 17.
I have had to reconstruct wholly the argument from interests, since I find much of the literature obfuscating and unquotable. Recently, P. K. Feyerabend has espoused it: see Against Method (London: New Left Books, 1975).
Francis Bacon bluntly declared the aim of science to be power over nature, in Novum Organum, and added that truth was the best means to power. He also alluded to God’s promise to Noah of domination over nature as a warrant.
On what could not possibly be otherwise, see my “The Notion of a Social Science,” in Recent Approaches to the Social Sciences, ed. H. K. Betz (Calgary: Calgary University Press, 1980), esp. sec. 3.
The private language argument is essentialist, turning on what language is and does, or must minimally be or do. If we refuse to place such stress on the words “language” and “private,” then the talk of the San Diego twins Gracie and Ginny (see Jean-Pierre Gorin’s documentary film Poto and Cabengo, 1979), speaking in tongues, and even Wittgenstein’s own coded (and now, we understand, deciphered) notebooks, can be treated as private languages.
Arthur Jensen, Bias in Mental Testing (London: Methuen, 1980).
Consider the argument in R. P. Wolff and H. Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 1970), where tolerance of freedom and democracy is to be restricted because they are vulnerable to fascism.
I have discussed Mannheim in Concepts and Society, chap. 5.
The principal literature is cited at p. 495, note 29, in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 9 (1979).
An entire literature on this topic has grown out of the work of Robert K. Merton and is now being added to by the Edinburgh group and some ethnomethodologists, for example, such recent volumes as Roy Wallis, ed., On the Margins of Science (London: University of Keele, 1979).
Bruno Latour and S. W. Woolgar, Laboratory Life (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979).
and Barry Barnes and Steve Shapin, eds., Natural Order (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979).
L. Laudan offers some further criticism in “Views of Progress: Separating the Pilgrims from the Rakes,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 10 (1980): 273–286.
This reading of Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
Thomas Kuhn is developed in my “Laudan’s Problematic Progress and the Social Sciences,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 9 (1979): 484–497.
Thomas Kuhn and my review of Kuhn’s The Essential Tension, in Queen’s Quarterly 87 (1980): 65–68.
In his “Normal Science and Its Dangers,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), Popper writes: “Professor Kuhn’s criticism of my views about science is the most interesting one I have so far come across” (p. 51).
Recent more healthy trends in Soviet anthropology are chronicled by Ernest Gellner in the conference volume Soviet and Western Anthropology (London, 1980), and his papers, “State before Class, the Soviet Treatment of African Feudalism,” European Journal of Sociology 18 (1977): 299–322, and “Soviets against Wittfogel,” forthcoming.
See Section 1 of Bartley’s “Popperian Harvest” in the present volume.
D. F. Pears argues in his Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy (London: Collins, 1967) that after early Russell the torch of British empiricism passes to Wittgenstein and his followers.
Examples are: John Canfield and Keith Lehrer, “A Note on Prediction and Deduction,” Philosophy of Science 28 (1961): 204–208.
R. H. Vincent, “The Paradox of Ideal Evidence,” Philosophical Review 71 (1962): 497–503.
A. Grunbaum, “The Falsifiability of Scientific Theories,” Mind 73 (1964): 434–436; after 1967 further examples can be found through the Philosopher’s Index.
In this respect I fully endorse the sociological discussion in Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (London: Gollancz, 1959; Routledge, 1979).
Carnap’s “Testability and Meaning” included Popper as one of the gang in a manner that somewhat pleased Popper at the time (see his comments in “The Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics,” in Conjectures and Refutations [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963], p. 255; and pp. 968ff. of “Replies”) but that obscured his very deep differences with the Vienna Circle and thwarted his subsequent efforts to dissociate himself from their concerns. (See the whole discussion of this in secs. 2 and 3 of “Replies.”)
Important exceptions are P. D. Shaw, “Popper, Historicism, and the Remaking of Society,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1 (1971): 299–308.
John Passmore, “The Poverty of Historicism Revisited,” History and Theory, vol. 14, Essays on Historicism, pp. 30–47; Peter Urbach, “Is Any of Popper’s Arguments against Historicism Valid?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 29 (1978): 117–130.
Astonishingly, there is a recent counterexample in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, a journai Popper helped found, and which has long been known as a forum for his ideas and those of his followers. See Mark Wilson, “Maxwell’s Condition—Goodman’s Problem,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 30 (1979): 107–123.
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© 1986 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Jarvie, I.C. (1986). Popper on the Difference between the Natural and the Social Sciences. In: Thinking about Society: Theory and Practice. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 93. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5424-3_5
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