"The Chronicle of Higher Education"
July 26, 2002

Giving Karl Popper His Propers

By DAVID COHEN

In the soft light of an antipodean afternoon, Graham
Macdonald is careful to impress his academic orientation upon
a visitor. Mr. Macdonald is, as he says, director of the
department of philosophy and religious studies here at the
University of Canterbury.

"I am not a member of the Karl Popper church," he adds
emphatically, during a conversation -- one of many he's had in
recent weeks -- on the growing international reputation of the
academic trailblazer. Popper popularized the term "open
society" in political discourse and pushed scientists in a new
direction with theories that would later be hailed as a
"philosophical revolution." 

Mr. Macdonald has spent much of this past year limbering up
his epistemological muscle in preparation for the July 28
centennial of Karl Popper's birth. He and others describe the
Austrian-born philosopher as one of the 20th century's most
neglected scholars. Yet he does not wish to be mistaken for
one of those who gaze at Popper's work as if through a
messianic mist. A striking paradox for someone who championed
critical thought like few others, in the view of Mr.
Macdonald, is that Popper, who died in 1994, has always
attracted acolytes who uncritically accept that he was right
about pretty much everything. "I've attended academic
conferences," the professor says with a sigh, "where
criticizing Popper is regarded as a kind of heresy." 

Although he admires many aspects of Popper's "intellectually
bracing" ideas about politics and science, Mr. Macdonald
insists that his own lifelong enthusiasm, which began for him
as an undergraduate majoring in philosophy during the 1960s,
is tempered with a "healthy dollop of skepticism."

Even so, Mr. Macdonald feels that much of what Popper had to
say "could and should be taken on board by scholars around the
world."

He may get his wish. As the organizer of one of two major
academic conferences honoring Popper this month -- one here at
the University of Canterbury, where, during World War II,
Popper produced some of his most enduring work, and the other
at the University of Vienna, Popper's alma mater -- Mr.
Macdonald is pleased to play a part in the renewed wave of
interest in the philosopher's ideas, even as those who knew
him struggle to get a handle on the man himself. Popper's rise
in the canon, he says, is evident not only among scholars in
New Zealand but also in Australia, Britain, the Middle East,
and North America, and in the wider political culture as well.


"In one way or another I'm reminded of his intellectual
contributions every week," says Tom G. Palmer, a senior fellow
at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in
Washington, where Popper's political writings rate highly on
account of their often corrosive critiques of Communism. The
end of the cold war and the upsurge of libertarian ideas on
both sides of the Atlantic "appears to have been to Popper's
benefit," says Mr. Palmer, "since he always positioned himself
as antitotalitarian, "even when it wasn't fashionable to do
so."

The National Review, a conservative magazine, recently ranked
Popper's major political work, The Open Society and Its
Enemies (Routledge, 1945), sixth on a list of the 100 most
important nonfiction works of the past century. In a different
cultural corner, one of America's best-known philanthropists,
the Hungarian-born George Soros, was sufficiently moved by the
ideas he acquired from Popper while an undergraduate at the
London School of Economics and Political Science that he named
his Open Society Institute after the book. "What Soros took
from Popper, I think, was this notion that we, as humans, are
fallible, and along with that, so, too, are all of our
institutions, our markets, our systems," says Leonard Benardo,
a manager of the institute's main American office, in New
York. 

"Open society," he says, means that societies need to be as
open as possible to new ideas and fresh criticisms, whether at
home or abroad, where the Soros institute has a particular
interest in the countries of the former Soviet Union. 

Indeed, the phrase itself is increasingly used in the
geopolitical context; late last month, President George W.
Bush invoked it in a speech calling for reform in the
Palestinian government.

For all that, though, Mr. Macdonald says, "my impression for
now is that a lot of American academics probably still find
Popper hard to categorize. The professionalization and
specialization of academe in the United States is not
something he really recognized, since his work touched on many
aspects of philosophy and other issues beyond." 

Some of the other issues figure in one of this year's
unlikeliest best sellers, Wittgenstein's Poker (Ecco), by the
British journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow, who
describe their quirky investigation into a celebrated tiff
between Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1946, which took
place in a tutorial room at the University of Cambridge during
a meeting of Wittgenstein's normally genteel Moral Science
Club. Popper, 13 years younger than the eminent philosopher,
had arrived from London that balmy evening, he later wrote in
his memoir, Unended Quest, "to provoke Wittgenstein into
defending the view that there are no philosophical problems,
and to fight him on this issue." He succeeded in provoking
him. The Edmonds-Eidinow book turns upon the question of
whether an enraged Wittgenstein really did menace Popper with
a red-hot poker, in the presence of a third great philosopher,
Bertrand Russell, who, as legend has it, was moved to separate
the feuding scholars.

The book ponders whether or not Popper, when taunted by
Wittgenstein to give an enduring instance of a moral rule, bit
back, "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers." The
authors figure that he probably did, but that the enduring
theme of the incident was the need of both men to enjoy
Russell's graces -- and, indeed, those of the scholarly world
at large. (As for the poker, it was eventually dropped on the
tiles of the hearth "with a little rattle," the book says.) 

A More Enduring Legacy?

Peter Munz, who was in the tutorial room that night -- and who
now counts himself as the only person alive to have studied
under both Popper and Wittgenstein -- agrees with the writers
on both counts. But while Wittgenstein's reputation has long
since solidified in scholarly circles, the same cannot be said
of the man he may, or may not, have waved a poker at. That is
a pity, Mr. Munz believes, because Popper's scientific ideas,
first set forth in his 1934 Logik der Forschung, later
translated as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, were not only
among the most cogent to be made against Wittgenstein's
position, but also, in some respects, have better stood the
test of time. 

What, then, were these pre-eminent Austrian-Anglo-Jewish
philosophers hectoring each other about -- and why does it
still matter? Until Popper, explains Mr. Munz, now an emeritus
professor of history at New Zealand's Victoria University of
Wellington, scientists tended to believe that their task was
to find as many examples as they could to confirm their
theories, a conclusion that Wittgenstein, author of the
Tractatus, appeared happy enough to go along with. Popper, on
the other hand, believed that scientists ought to look for
examples that are apparently inconsistent with a theory;
"falsification," he held, not "induction," is the only
credible basis for scientific inquiry. He reduced the precept
to a slogan: "No number of sightings of white swans can prove
the theory that all swans are white. The sighting of just one
black one may disprove it." 

Whether or not they admit it, whenever and wherever scientists
today find themselves looking for black swans and, seeing
none, pronounce themselves reasonably sure of their theory,
they are taking a deep bow in Popper's direction, says Mr.
Munz. According to Malachi Haim Hacohen, an associate
professor of European intellectual history at Duke University
and author of Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945
(Cambridge University Press, 1998), the promulgation of this
idea marked a philosophical watershed. Even among those who
pooh-pooh the notion that Popper somehow managed to resolve
the issue of how scientific knowledge can ultimately be
validated -- Anthony O'Hear, director of Britain's Royal
Institute of Philosophy and author of a number of books on
Popper, thinks it "quite absurd" to make the claim -- few
dispute the lasting trace that his argument has left on
scientific research over the past quarter-century. 

The Man vs. His Ideas

In 1945, Popper applied much the same principle to the realm
of political philosophy, in The Open Society and Its Enemies,
an exegesis on the ideas of Plato, Hegel, and Marx, all of
whom Popper excoriates for their claims to "certain knowledge"
about how societies ought to be organized. The late Isaiah
Berlin, a biographer of Marx and a professor of philosophy at
the University of Oxford, counted himself among the book's
admirers, calling it perhaps "the most scrupulous and
formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical
doctrines of Marxism by any living writer."

Still, as Mr. Macdonald's disclaimer about the Popper "church"
suggests, this month's centennial raises anew the problem that
many have in disentangling the ornery reputation of Popper the
man from the validity of his ideas. That appears to be the
case regardless of whether the reference is to his formative
years as a peripheral member of the Vienna Circle, in Europe,
his early career as an associate professor of philosophy at
Canterbury, or the bulk of his teaching life, which he spent
at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where
he remained until around the time of his death.

Mr. Munz, who will give papers at both of this month's
conferences, got to see Popper through most of those phases.
He well understands, he says, the frustration that readers
coming to the philosopher only recently would have in properly
assessing his legacy. A diehard Platonist in his undergraduate
years, Mr. Munz first met the older man at the university
library at Canterbury. Popper, who would become a lifelong
friend, beckoned to him from near the stacks "and asked me if
I would like for him to explain why I was wrong about Plato."
Mr. Munz chuckles at the memory. "He didn't offer to argue the
point, or for us to exchange views -- just to tell me why I
was wrong. I later learned that that was his style."

In the event, Popper did convince him that Plato not only was
wrong in his claim to certain knowledge about how societies
should best be organized, but was a tyrant to boot. It was the
beginning of what Mr. Munz describes as his own intellectual
dawn, despite their lifelong differences over the subject of
history. "Popper thought that people who are honest become
scientists but people who are dishonest become historians,
sociologists, and so forth, because these were people who
could convince others of anything they like" -- especially in
the realm of philosophy.

"Since he had already solved the philosophical problems, as he
saw them, he didn't really see the point in why there should
be another generation of philosophers," says Mr. Munz,
laughing.

According to Alan Chalmers, a professor of the philosophy of
science at Australia's Flinders University, who attended many
of Popper's "spellbinding" seminars in London during the 1960s
and still lectures on him, his one-time hero's scholarly
practices often clashed with what he preached. Although Popper
emphasized the importance of criticism, he found it "very
hard" to accept criticism of any sort, says Mr. Chalmers, who
eventually became disillusioned with aspects of the
philosopher's style. 

At the London school, recalls Mr. Munz, "people used to joke
about the open society and its one enemy: Karl Popper. When
people contradicted him in class, he would tell them that they
had obviously not listened to what he'd said, because if
they'd listened, they would know that he was right." Each
dissenter would be asked to apologize, "and if no apology was
forthcoming, he would then ask the student to leave the room."

Another problem was Popper's apparent tendency to caricature
his philosophical opponents, says Mr. Chalmers. "That's not
novel among academics, of course, but students would go on to
discover time and again that the people Popper had talked
about -- Wittgenstein and Marx and so forth -- actually held
views that were much more sophisticated than what he had given
them credit for." Popper also insisted that words are "not
that important" in the discussion of aspects of science and
philosophy, says Mr. Chalmers, "which was fine, but woe betide
those who diverged from Popper's standard usages. He was
liable to give the speaker a very hard time." 

Mr. Macdonald, who sat in on a number of Popper's lectures in
London during the 1970s, agrees. Describing the philosopher as
"a powerful, lucid speaker," he was nonetheless struck by the
degree of veneration that Popper demanded -- "in the way, for
example, he was ushered in and ushered out again at these
events, as if he were some kind of god. That atmosphere,
particularly around somebody who viewed criticism as the most
important value of all, struck me as being rather unhealthy."

Why the need for such control? Insecurity, speculates Mr.
Chalmers: "I've come to feel that Popper was extremely good at
putting his finger on the pulse of important academic issues
but not quite so good at the technical detail of science
itself."

Alan Musgrave, a research assistant of Popper's from 1963 to
1965 at the London school, where, with Imre Lakatos, he edited
Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge University
Press, 1970), an influential collection of essays on the
recent philosophy of science, wonders if some of Popper's less
appealing attitudes were born of a certain anger at his work's
not being sufficiently recognized by his contemporaries. "He
was proud of what he achieved, rightly so, I think, but he was
also very bitter."

Would Popper have been made any happier by this month's
centennial commemorations? Mr. Macdonald glances toward the
window overlooking the Canterbury campus, under whose flag the
philosopher produced much of his celebrated work. These days,
he says, "as I move around the university and the
higher-education world, I keep meeting people who have things
to say of Popper's influence across many areas of research
culture, and how important he's been as a reference point." 

So many academics have been influenced "very much for the
better" by Karl Popper, he concludes. "Even those who have
since departed from the church."

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Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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