Champion of freedom still
Anthony Quinton
A WORLD OF PROPENSITIES by Karl R. Popper
Thoemmes, £5, pp. 51, available from Thoemmes Antiquarian Books, 85 Park Street, Bristol BSI 5P.1
Sir Karl Popper is the last great paladin of liberal enlightenment, a Roland, batt- ling to the last against a variegated horde of spiritual Saracens: egalitarian collectiv- ists, avant-garde irrationalists, exponents of the mystique of nationality. Champion of freedom, rationality and cosmopolitanism, he sets the highest value on the first of these. He defends freedom in its meta- physical sense — the world is not a huge piece of clockwork and we have real freedom of choice — and in its political sense — human beings ought to be free from the efforts of groups and individuals to constrain them.
He arrived at these conclusions indirect- ly from a philosophical examination of the nature of science. In his first book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, he rejected the ancient empiricist view that science is made up of beliefs mechanically derived from repeated observation. In his view a theory is scientific to the extent that it is possible for observation to show it to be false and it is worthy of (provisional) acceptance to the extent that it has sur- vived our best efforts to falsify it. Theories are not passive registrations of perceived regularities but bold, imaginative conjec- tures by exceptional minds, free construc- tions which cannot be predicted.
In The Open Society he applied this principle to all attempts to produce a general science of history, an account of the neccessary laws of historical change that would enable the future course of human affairs to be foreseen. Seeing this as his war work, he was not hostile to what he called `historicism' as merely an intellec- tual error. He argued that, as central to the social theories of Plato, Marx and Hegel, it is the chief theoretical support of totalitar- ianism. In later works he has gone on to assert the objectivity of theory or science or the general system of our beliefs. It is not simply mental, but an autonomous by-product of human evolution, created by us, but with an independent status of its own, with unintended and unexpected implications that react on us and the world we inhabit.
Popper was 88 this summer and, in the two lectures, delivered in the last two years, which make up this small book, is still extracting fresh consequences from his first, fundamental idea. The earlier was given the summer before last to a grand plenary session of the World Congress of Philosophy in a vast, Bulgarian-looking assembly hall in Brighton. The Russians, with their perestroika still in a preliminary, fumbling state, walked out.
His aim in it is to show that the world is not a rigidly deterministic Newtonian machine but a field of interacting propen- sities, tendencies whose competition has no ineluctably preordained outcome. Sci- ence deals in probabilities and they are not subjective, the expression of our ignorance of what is in fact bound to happen. They are objective propensities, real characteris- tics of real physical situations, formulable in statistical terms. In an experiment we can isolate what we are investigating from outside interference. In the real world no such artifical sequestration is possible. Nothing is definitely going to happen until it does happen. We have been misled by the hypnotic example of the solar system, which does operate in exceptionally iso- lated conditions.
The second lecture was a kind of valedic- tory discourse, delivered 40 years after his appointment as professor at the LSE. It was, as he observes in a slightly thin-lipped way, 'the first public lecture I have ever been asked to give at the LSE'. It seeks to undermine standard empiricism by insist- ing on the continuity of human and animal knowledge, indeed on the continuity of human knowledge and the way in which all kinds of organisms, including the very simplest, exploit and adapt to their environment.
The senses, to which empiricism traces all knowledge, play only a small, if crucial, part. They select interesting and important detail from the torrent of stimulation that pours in upon us. To do so they have to rely on innate principles of interestingness and importance, in particular as to what is nutritive and what is dangerous. He draws on recent biochemical speculations to re- fute the widespread theory that life first appeared in a kind of primaeval soup and goes on to argue that the earliest form of eye was the result of active opportunism on the part of an organism seeking sunlight to feed on, not an inexplicable and myster- ious accident.
Questions rapidly come to the mind about both the bodies of thought he puts forward. Is objective indeterminacy really what is needed for freedom of the will? An agent is effective if what he decides is a crucial determinant of what happens. Is it not more his decision to the extent that his serious desires and serious beliefs underly it, however he came to have these desires and beliefs, rather than if whim or an accident made the difference?
As to the evolution of knowledge: it is one thing to ascribe knowledge to a dog, another, much wilder, thing to ascnbe it to an amoeba. Popper nowhere mentions here the fact that the background know- ledge he ascribes to non-human living things is a matter of genetic inheritance, while that of humans is predominantly learnt. Innate beliefs are likely to be true, since false beliefs are disadvantageous for survival. Nevertheless, wherever beliefs come from, experience is the test of their truth, or, failing that, reasonableness.
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