The Poverty of Popperism

THE POVERTY OF POPPERISM ((OURAGE", WROTE Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, " is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit." 1 Of all the intellectual legacies that Popper inherited from Kant, none was more formative and deeply influential than the distinction between the so-called " dogmatic " and " critical " attitude. Early on in his intellectual career, we see Popper claiming the " critical " attitude as the distinctively scientific oll!e, and opposing this to the "dogmatic", which is rejected as the hallmark of the pseudo-scientific. Just as in Kant's ' Critique' we encounter the rejection of " the dogmatic procedure of pure reason " whose endemic sin is to proceed "without previous criticism of its own powers ",2 so in Popper's autobiography we are told how early on in his life he was led to contrast the " dogmatic attitude of Marx, Freud, Adler and even more so of their followers " with " the true scientific attitude " of Einstein: " Thus I arrived, by the end of 1919 " (at the raw age of seventeen) " at the conclusion that the scientific attitude was the critical attitude, which did not look for verifications but for crucial tests; tests which could REFUTE the theory tested, though they could never establish it." 3 The division of the process of human reasoning by Kant into the two fundamental attitudes of the " dogmatic " and the " critical " is, of course, parallelled by that other hoary philosophical distinction to be found in his writings between the " a priori" and the" a posteriori", that is, between reasoning that proceeds independently of experience and reasoning which is derived from, or remains connected with, experience. However, 1 Critique of Pure Reason, (London: Macmillan, 1933). Preface to first edition. A xi a. 2 Ibid., Preface to second edition. B xxxv. a Unended Quest, (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 38. 92 THE POVERTY OF POPPERISM 98 the making of such distinctions need not be-and historically has not been-the only way of approaching an understanding of how the acquisition of knowledge takes place. One need only consider the term " a priori " in its historical context to realise that it originally indicated that which is prior in NATURE, rather than that which is gained by the mind independently of experience.4 Thus, for Aristotle: " The path of investigation must lie from what is more immediately cognisable and clear to us (a posteriori) to what is clearer and more intimately cognisable in its own nature (a priori); for it is not the same thing to be directly accessible to our cognition and to be intrinsically intelligible. Hence, in advancing to that which is intrinsically more luminous and by its nature accessible to deeper knowledge we must needs start from what is more immediately within our cognition, though its own nature is less fully accessible to understanding ." 5 That the " a priori " came to acquire the meaning which it did in Kant's philosophy points to the state of affairs that had come to prevail in the consciousness of civilized Europeans by the 18th century: namely, that the ideas which men conceive are not felt to have an ontological foundation in nature, that what is" prior" in the human mind could have no correspondence to that which is " prior " in nature, and that the latter is something from which, according to Kant, the human mind is irrevocably estranged. The comparative novelty of this outlook in the history of philosophy becomes evident when we turn to consider, for example , the assumptions that underlay epistemological theory in med~eval times. We find there that nothing could be further from the presuppositions concerning man's relationship to nature than those set forth in the 18th century by Kant. Not only were ideas regarded as residing within nature, but as a consequence of this view the distinction most widely adhered to regarding the activity of the mind in the acquisition of knowledge -far from being the polarity between the dogmatic and critical 4 The Philosophy of Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 148. 5 Physics 184a 17-22, (London: Heinemann, 1970). 94 JEMMY NAYDLl!lR process of reasoning-was drawn between the faculty of RATIONAL INSIGHT...