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Bartley, W W Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth Portrait - Optimized OCR
Bartley, W W Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth Portrait - Optimized OCR
Wittgenstein
J. B. Lippincott, 1973; second, revised and
enlarged edition. Open Court, 1985; Hutchinson, 1986
As Editor:
-I
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE,
UNMEASURED WEALTH
W. W. BARTLEY, III
Open Court
La Salle, Illinois
1990
OPEN COURT and the above logo are
registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office. Copyright © 1990 by William Warren Bartley, 111.
E A . von Hayek
A false hypothesis is better than none at all, for that it is
false does no harm at all; but when it fortifies itself, when it
is accepted universally and becomes a kind of creed that
nobody may doubt, that nobody may investigate, that is the
disaster of which centuries suffer.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
PREFACE xiii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xv
introduction
1 . What 1 Was Taught, and What I Learnt xvii
2. What this Book Contains xviii
X
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Answer Matter?
1 . The Rhythms of Evolution and Strategies
for Survival 203
2. Then There Is Plain Envy 209
xii
PREFACE
Stephen Kresge
March 12, 1990
xiv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
W. W. B.
XV
INTRODUCTION
xviii
INTRODUCTION
xix
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
W. W. B.
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace
Stanford University
June 1989
From about the 1960s onwards, the social base of Marxism shifted steadily from the
working-class movement to the university." Sec Frank Parkin, in The law-like and the man-
made . Times Islerar, Supplement. July 25. 1980, p. 838.
XX
A MANIFESTO BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE
A MANIFESTO BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE
Not long ago I was drinking coffee with my friend and colleague
Mikhail Bernstam in the Senior Common Room at the Hoover
Institution. No one had asked the question: What is indispensable to
freedom?, but it must have been in the air. For suddenly, setting
down his cup and waving his pipe in a large circle, Bernstam an-
nounced that there was a necessary’ condition to freedom: namely,
the freedom to supply.
Bernstam is an economist and demographer by profession. What
he alleged seemed to me original, and deeper than most character-
isations of freedom. Certainly I preferred it to Voltaire's “Quand je
peux faire ce que je veux, voih la liberty”1, or to Bertrand Russell’s
"Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to
the realisation of desires”.* If it is an original idea, he should have
all the credit. On the other hand, since ours was a casual conver-
sation, leaping from one topic to another with great liberty, he may
hardly be blamed in case the formulation of freedom that he so
freely supplied should prove faulty. Caveat emptor!' Nor should he be
held responsible for the following meditation that I composed on
the theme he set.
In the spirit of our conversation, and of the Common Room, I
retorted that there was another necessary condition to freedom:
namely, the freedom to receive. He objected to this not on the ground
that it is more blessed to give than to receive; instead he insisted
that the freedom to receive can be reduced logically to the freedom
to supply. I have remained convinced, as I shall explain in a mo-
ment, that the freedom to receive is just as basic. The logical point
’ I.e., “Liberty is when I can do whatever I want.” Compare K. R. Popper’s anecdote: “Once
an American was brought into court because he had punched someone in the nose. He defended
himself on the grounds that, being a free citizen, he had the liberty to move his fists in any
direction he wanted. Whereupon the judge cautioned him, ’The freedom to move your fists is
limited. These limits may vary from lime to time. But the noses of your fellow citizens are almost
always outside these limits’.” Sec K. R. Popper, Bemrrkungrn zu Throne und Praxis des demokratischen
Staates (Zurich: Bank Hofmann AG. 1988), p. 19.
’ Bertrand Russell, “Freedom and Government*’, in Ruth Nanda Anshen, cd., Freedom: Ils
Meaning (New York: Harcourt. Brace & Co.. 1940). One might ask: “Any desires?”
1
“Let die buyer beware!”
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
is, however, not what most interested me. I was more intrigued by
the fertility of the two freedoms when taken together. These twin
freedoms sow the seed for a free order.
The primacy and necessity of the freedom to supply and the
freedom to receive are evident in the way that they limit one
another—that is. in the way they pose obstacles to one another.
One’s freedom to supply—even in the most libertarian or anar-
chical of states, burdened by a minimum of laws and frowns—is of
course never unlimited in practice. But there is one limitation on
the freedom to supply that precedes all law and practical regulation,
and stems from the existence of the freedom to receive alone. For if
I am to have the freedom to receive (as opposed to being com-
pelled to receive), I must also have the freedom (or right) not to re-
ceive—i.e., the freedom to reject, refuse, or exclude what others
want to supply to me.4 Your freedom to supply is abridged by my
right to refuse what you wish to supply me. This is why the free-
dom to receive, placing a priori restrictions on the freedom to
supply, could not be reducible to the freedom to supply. And vice
versa.
One cannot be free to supply me contrary to my will or consent,
and I may even cut public lines of access to me. Thus I may throw
away my mail unopened, screen my telephone calls, and shut off, or
throw away (or supply to others) my television and radio.’ A free-
dom to supply uncurbed by this right to refuse would lead to the
extinction of virtually all rights: had I no right to refuse or exclude,
I would have no private domain. One sees here how short-sighted
was Lord Russell’s notion of freedom.
Similarly, my freedom to receive or obtain cannot be unlimited.
There is also a prior limit on it, antecedent to any law, regulation,
or other restriction, stemming from your freedom to supply. If you
are to possess the freedom to supply, you must also possess the
freedom (or right) not to supply: otherwise you would be compelled
The freedom not to receive —i.e.. the freedom to reject—mull of course be distinguished
from die lack of the freedom to receive.
There are limits to my freedom to refuse to receive too: I cannot refuse a subpoena,
a t lough I am free to hide, so long as 1 can, from the server thereof. We shall return to such
*l*‘c *1 arc secondary limits far distant from the basic limit just mentioned, and to other
problems of being compelled to receive, below.
4
A MANIFESTO BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE
to supply whatever you have that I want to obtain, and I could take
from you at will.6
This applies not only to goods but also to information. If I am
free to supply information I must also be free to keep secrets. Thus,
while a person is free to receive or obtain whatever knowledge he
can, he cannot have an unlimited “right to know” if this means that
I, who happen to know, am compelled to supply him with my
information.’ My information may have been hard to come by and
be precious to me. And if what were meant is a general right to
know, who could grant anyone any such right? And who could
supply anyone who had such a right?
This applies not only to goods and information but also, especial-
ly, to attention. Most ordinary people and children and domestic
animals—and tyrants and rulers and politicians, and actors and
intellectuals—crave attention. Although Andy Warhol declared that
“In America, everyone gets to be famous—for fifteen minutes”, that
is not sufficient for many people whose desire is unlimited. If one is
to be free to supply attention, one must also be free to withhold it.
Otherwise one would be drained. In another conversation in the
Hoover Senior Common Room, die economist Max Hartwell once
asked me (after 1 had revealed to him that 1 had five cats), “How
can you possibly do that? I find it difficult to have more than five
good friends in addition to family. It’s too time-consuming, and it’s
too demanding emotionally and intellectually!” I understood what he
meant, and sometimes I think my cats do too.
Converse to the craving for attention is the wish for privacy. If
one is to be free to receive attention one must also be free to refuse
it: that is, to enjoy privacy.
• What I have just written applies to relations amongst individuals and ordinary companies
and enterprises. There are. however, some things which the state is obligated t o supply as a
consequence of its duty to protect its citizens and to provide recourse from injustice. For instance,
one has an unlimited right to receive a fair trial, the attention of a jury of one’s peers, and free
legal representation if one cannot afford to pay. Whether the stale wishes to supply these or not,
it is obligated to do so.
’ Plato well understood this. When Hippocrates came to Socrates to complain dial Protagoras
had robbed him by keeping his wisdom from him. Socrates admonished him to offer him money
in payment for it See the humorous exchange in Protagoras, 310-311.
5
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
* 'Hie legal faculty at the University of Stockholm is attempting to deny the right of a
colleague. Professor Jacob Sundberg, to supply to his students the doctrine that people have any
rights apart from those that the law of a particular land may state them to have. See “'rhe Right
t o Differ". The Economist, February 11, 1989. p. 32. See also Gerard Radnitzky’s detailed study of
the Sundberg case, “Academic Freedom in Conflict with the Party’s Cognitive Capital: Two Case
Histories", forthcoming in Afmmvr and in Cnhcmi. On the differences between Anglo-Saxon and
continental traditions with regard to rights, and on the erosion of the Anglo-Saxon tradition
during the past century, substituting "sociology for jurisprudence and ad hoc jural orders for
predictable results", sec Ridgway K . Foley. Jr.. "Invasive Government and the Destruction of
Certainty". The Freeman, January 1988. pp. 11*19. Foley writes: “The history of the common law
of promissory obligations makes one point patent: The law has slowly but surely evolved to an
ameliorative stance wherein a promisor whose expectations are thwarted or whose forecast is
flawed stands a Hkeiihood of relief from his obligations, in whole or in part, at the expense of a
promisee who forecasts more correctly and who now experiences punishment (in the form of hu
thwarted expectations) for accuracy. . . . The result: Parties to a contract do not know if. and to
what extent, the courts will enforce their voluntary bargain."
6
A MANIFESTO BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE
any drug not sold over the counter unless one has a pre-
scription; any drug not approved by the Food and Drug
Administration; alcohol or pornography unless one is above
a certain age; certain sorts of sexual favours; more than one
spouse al a time; particular (e.g., seditious or blasphemous)
ideas; stolen property; sunken treasure, beached whales in
• Anyone who supposes that he must have misunderstood this sentence, should read Michael
Cartner. “Don‘t Repeat What Your Uncle Sam Tells lliose Other Folks", Wall Street Journal, June
9 . 1988. p. 29.
10
The law is in the making: it may now be assault, or worse, for a person knowing that he
or she has an HIV infection or even herpes to have sexual intercourse without so informing the
partner.
7
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
11
Some of these prohibitions may of course have unintended good consequences. Because of
Crown ownership of beached whales in England. British records of beached whales are unusually
good. These records enabled testing and corroboration of the recent hypodiesis that whales steer
according to magnetic Gelds, and that whales are apt to run aground where magnetic contours
cross the coast at right angles. Sec Thf April 8. 1989. pp. 96-97. See also Gary Gentile,
Shipwreck Legislation: Legality vs. Morality", Thf Hrtman. June 1989. pp. 217-223.
8
A MANIFESTO BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE
” See William F. Buckley, “Why not legalization of narcotics?", March 26, 1989; and David
Boaz, "Let s Quit the Drug War", The New fork Times, Thursday, March 17. 1988. Sec also James
Ostrowski, "Thinking About Drug Legalization", Calo /'b/tq no, 121, May 25. 1989.
” See Martin Anderson, "Decriminalize the Carrying of Mail", in "A Six-Day Plan for
Reagan", The Washington Post, June 16, 1987.
14
See S. David Young, The Rule of Experts (Washington. D.C.: The Cato Institute, 1987).
9
U N FATHOM ED KNOWLEDGE
Z>. Goods or artions forbidden to supply or receive in order to pennit the state
the power of censorship, direct and indirect
" "In I860 a liberal. of whatever nationality, was one who favored free trade, a market
economy with little or no government intervention, a limited constitutional slate, and a social
policy based on self-help. , . . Those who espoused the views defined as liberal in 1860 were, by
the mid-twentieth century, now commonly labelled as conservatives.” Stephen Davies, in “Biblio-
graphic Essay: The Decline of Classical Liberalism: 1860-1940”, Human/ Studirs Rnnrw, vol. 5, no.
"'j nter '987-1988, pp. l-)9. This is most unfortunate, for classical (or nineteenth-century)
liberals were not conservative in either the earlier or the more recent senses.
10
A MANIFESTO BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE
“ See Professor Ronald Dworkin, of Oxford University (an American), as quoted in The
Stanford Daily, May 11, 1988, p . 2. who declared that the moral majority, “are not concerned
about the slate of my immortal soul. They just want me to take my sin the hell out of the
country" I n Tailing Rights Srnoush (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). Dworkin disputes
Lord Devlin's argument that “any society wanting to pass the lest of morality had to criminalise
homosexuality first”. Setting up and passing “tests of morality” is not die business of the state
” J. Raliove, “Mr. Meese, Meet Mr. Madison", The Atlantic, December 1986, p. 82. As Rakove
points out, Madison's is not an argument for large government but for government transcending
local and partisan interests. See also F. A. Hayek, “Why 1 am Not a Conservative". >n Die
Constitution of Itberti (London: Routledge A- Kegan Paul. 1960; Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. I960).
II
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
See F. A. Hayek. The fatal Conteil, vol. I of The Collected H’orE: of F. A. Hinek (London:
Kouuedge, 1988; Chicago. Lmveraty of Chicago Preu. 1989).
12
A MANIFESTO BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE
'* See Gerard Radniuky. "Science a» a particular mode of thinking and the ‘taming oi the
State'", in Fred D'Agostino and Ian C. Jarvie, edi.. Freedom and Rulionahh (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1989).
13
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
doing jury duty. If fit, young, and male, we are also compelled to
defend the state. And thus one is compelled to supply oneself in
time of war, and in time of peace to register for the call-up20. The
justification for these latter compulsions is that in defending the
state we are defending ourselves, our families, our possessions, and
our liberties—a claim that is often untrue when the state is power-
ful, and less likely to be true the more powerful and unchecked the
state becomes.
There are also subordinate compulsions to supply, stemming
from the licensing activity of the state. Thus one must supply a
sample of one’s blood if one wishes to be married; apart from quite
exceptional circumstances, one must supply one’s child to an ap-
proved school to be educated; one must supply one’s automobile for
a smog test if one is to drive it; one must supply plans of one’s
house to obtain a building permit. And one may not even live on
one’s own land unless one has supplied for oneself a dwelling
conforming to the standards and codes of the community. This last
regulation, had it then existed, would have driven Henry David
Thoreau from Walden Pond, for neither would his shanty have
conformed nor did he even own the land —double trouble for the
author of “Civil Disobedience".
Some of these compulsions would be less onerous—at least many
people would support and participate freely in such activities—if one
had any confidence that the state were competent and disinterested
in its licensing and regulating. But the state is rarely competent.
One might almost say that it debases whatever it touches. The
schools are a scandal. 21 The Food and Drug Administration is a
sewer of pseudo-scientific methodology, financial and intellectual
corruption, and gross immorality.22 Nor can anyone deny that the
armed forces have at times and places behaved scandalously. Nor is
the state disinterested: licensing is a source of revenue, corruption,
” “The draft is an infringement of basic American liberties." See Martin Anderson. “A Six-
Day Plan for Reagan", op. dt, The Washington Post, June 16. 1987.
” See Robert B. Everhart, cd.. The Public School Monopoly: A Critical Analysis of Education and
the Stale in Amencnn Society (San Erandsco: Pacific Institute, 1982). For an account of the greatly
enhanced control the Federal Government has gained over the schools, and virtually all other
institutions, through the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, see George Roche. “The Price of
Independence", fmpnmis, January' 1989.
” See "Progress and Placebo", The Wall Street Journal, June 29. 1989, p. A12, and Harry
Schwartz, “A ’Miracle’ Drug That Languished Among the Worms", The Wall Street Journal, July 18.
1989, p. A14. The latter article discusses the potent anti-cancer drug levamisole, first discovered in
1966, but languished at die FDA for thirty-three years before being added to the oncologist’s
14
A MANIFESTO BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE
M
I have a hypothesis about relative unassigned costs—or what economists call “externalit-
ies" —in the regulation of the freedoms to supply and to receive. Regulation of freedoms may
tend to be asymmetrical in that freedom to supply tends to produce more externalities titan free-
dom to receive. The speculation is worth investigating, although not o n this occasion.
15
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
** The State of California recently undertook to provide a direct-payment medical plan for its
employees on the grounds that it would provide better services more economically. Although
reasonable reimbursement was approved only for certain “preferred " doctors, laboratories, and
hospitals, so that one was rather severely penalised for using other providers of services, the cost
of the program immediately increased, and benefits decreased. Moreover, nurses, engaged by die
Mate, now determine important aspects of one’s medical treatment, overrule doctors’ instructions
(even prrftrrtd doctors), and dius practise medicine without a license.
16
A MANIFESTO BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE
What are the duties of the state towards a citizen? And the
entitlements of the citizenry? Protection against certain sorts of
dangers from others to his life, health, and property. These are the
sole duty of the state, the sole entitlements of the citizen. All other
duties of the state, accumulated while treading the indirect path, are
dangerous additions.
” On the other hand. I felt a bit cheated when I found that there ii no entry for freedom
•n the Fontana/ Harper Dictionary of Modem Thought.
17
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
18
A MANIFESTO BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE
18
Sec Part IV below.
19
UN FATHOM ED KNOWLEDGE
” For a tale of two threatened identities that are a part of Western culture — Protestantism
and rationalism — see my The fatrral to (jnmmtmml, second edition, revised and enlarged (La Salle:
Open Court. 1984).
tiompare James M . Buchanan. "Towards the Simple Economics of Natural 1-iberty: An
Exploratory Analysis”. Kuklm, vol. 40. last . 1. 1987. pp. S-20, esp. p. 10.
20
Part I
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
Chapter 1
LIBERTY, KNOWLEDGE, AND T H E
MARKETPLACE O F IDEAS
* K. R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge & began Paul. Ltd.. 1962).
’ The freedom is at the moment being eroded. Anti-abortion lawmakers are drafting
legislation that would compel women to see photographs of aborted fetuses before having the
operation performed on themselves.
’ For an explanation of why this should be so see Arthur Kantrowitz. "The Weapon of
Openness”, Foresight Background, no. 4. 1989, pp. 1*4-
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
24
LIBERTY. KNOWLEDGE. AND THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS
* Alvin M. Weinberg. Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Energy Analysis. Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, believes that “the market approach to allocation was first articulated by M . Polanyi" in
1963 See Weinberg's " H o w the Scientific Marketplace Works”, paper delivered at the 16th
Annual Conference on the Unity of the Sciences. Atlanta. Georgia. November 26-29. 1987.
* One sometimes finds this passage cited as evidence of “American materialism". People who
practise this sort of sociology are capable of anything, and have no regard for evidence: in
addition to being a pragmatist. James was a spiritualist who went to stances and talked with
‘pirns See Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou. Willum Jamn on Psychical Research ( N e w York:
Viking Press. 1960).
* The spelling is of course Milton's. See “Areopagitica: a Speech of Mr. John Milton for the
Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing to the Parlament of England". 1644, printed in John Millon.
Spirited Prase: New and Reived Edition, ed. C. A Patrides (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1985), pp. 196-248. esp. p . 242. The phrase “free market of ideas" does not occur in "Areopag-
jfica". but the other economic terms that he uses make the metaphor entirely appropriate. Thus
be sap; “Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopoliz'd and traded in by
tickets and statutes, and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the
knowledge in the Land, to mark and licence it like our broad cloath. and our wool packs.
tbe incredible losse. and detriment that this plot of licencing puts us to. more then i f som enemy
41
sea should stop u p all our hav'ns and ports, and creeks, it hinders and retards the importation
25
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
And though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the
earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licencing and
prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple:
who ever knew Truth put to the wars in a free and open encounter?
of our richest Marchandize, Truth." See also Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861): "Grace is given of
God, but knowledge is bought in die market," TAr Bothie of Ibbema-Vuoluh, text of 1848 edited by
Patrick Scott (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1976. reprint of 1848 edition), part iv.
The idea appears also, in a pragmatic version, in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: "The
ultimate good desired is belter reached by free trade in ideas—-that the best test of truth is the
power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market . . . . That al any
rate is the theory of our Constitution." (Abrams v. United Slates. 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919).) For
background see Robert W. Wallace, The Arropagai Council, to 307 B.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press. 1988),
See K. R. Popper, Bemcrkungm zu Theone und Prtuas den drmokraiuchen Staates, op. dL, and
Auf drr Surhr nach rmcr be&frrn HW/ (Munchen: Piper, 1984). chapter 7. "BOcher und Gedanken:
Das erste Buch Europas"
26
LIBERTY, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE MARKETPLACE O F IDEAS
Milton’s comforting dictum, they rarely identify its flaws. These flaws
have for instance nothing to do with Gresham’s Law," We begin to
identify them if we notice that Milton’s assurance—that Truth is
never put to the worse in a free and open encounter—is unfalsifiable
in die sense that it can be juggled in such a way that no evidence
ever counts against it. Ironically, this watchword of critical debate
shields itself from refutation by deflecting critical examination.
It is easy to see how this works, for we all have been in situa-
tions where truth seems to have been bested: indeed, most people
have occasionally lost arguments yet remained convinced that they
were right. Such an experience never need force one to jettison
Milton’s dictum, but may even serve to confirm it. In defeat, one
may hang on desperately to the dictum itself —not to concede that
truth did win, but in order to insist, in excuse, that the encounter was
not free and open, and that one would have won had it been so. This
way of shifting the blame or burden of proof to an opponent or
circumstances makes those who employ it ever right in their own
eyes, even if at the cost of tending to render them practising
paranoiacs.
The main mistake in Milton's metaphor lies in its being dressed
out in the presupposition that truth is naturally "manifest”9: the idea
that once truth is set out plainly—the “naked truth” as it
were—anyone can distinguish it from falsehood and recognise it for
the truth that it is. This assumption we find in both rationalist and
empiricist traditions, in the "clear and distinct ideas” of Descartes,
and in the “immediate certainty” of the sense observations of the
empiricists. It is diametrically opposed to the main thesis of this
Part and of this book as a whole: namely, that knowledge is un-
fathomable. If knowledge is unfathomable, truth could not possibly
be manifest. The assumption that truth is manifest, moreover, leads
to an interventionist or conspiracy theory of ignorance and error: that if
what is true is not manifest or obvious, then some party must have
intervened to prevent its being seen. That is, it presupposes that
error or ignorance arises only from deliberate intervention or
conspiracy to suppress truth, whereas in fact interesting truths are
anything but obvious, while error and ignorance are omnipresent
That "bad money drives out good". Orcsme had already taken such a view in the 14th
century.
Unfortunately, the fallacious assumption that truth is manifest is closely linked to the
(equally fallacious) understanding that many people have of .Adam Smith's "invisible hand".
27
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“ On Milton. see K. R. Popper: Conjecture! and Refutations, op. dt., pp. 8 and 16; and J. W.
N. Watkins. The Listener, January 22. 1959.
11
See an essay written long before Eco’s work, namely Walter Kaufmann's, “Why most
philosophers cannot laugh" in his Cntujue of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press. 1958/72). section 8.
" R H . Coase. "The Market for Ideas". The American Economic Review, vol. 64. 2, 1974, pp.
884-391. reprinted in National Review. September 27. 1974. pp. 1095-1099; and "The Market for
Goods and the Market for Ideas", in Private Higher Education: The Job Ahead (Malibu, California:
AAP1CU. 1976). pp. 17-21. See also his "The Nature of the Firm". Economica vol. 4. 1937, pp.
386-405; "The Problem of Social Cost". Journal of law and Economics, vol. 3. 1960, pp. 1-44; and
Adam Smith's View of Man", Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 19, 3. 1976, pp. 529-546.
See The Fatal Conceit, op. cit.
28
LIBERTY. KNOWLEDGE, AND THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS
they are responsible for most mishaps.) Fallibilists like Hayek and
Coase do favour “free and open encounter” and oppose intervention
and conspiracy, but this is because the latter make error harder to
eradicate. Error is there in any case.
Hayek and Coase see unfettered markets as the best means not
only to generate more ordinary forms of wealth, but also to uncover
knowledge and better to identify error, even if never fully to elimi-
nate the latter. Yet unfettered markets are rare, and even unfet-
tered markets are not perfect. Nor can they become so. For error
and ignorance—and consequently occasional market failure even in
the marketplace of ideas—exist regardless of intervention: regardless
of its presence and regardless of its absence.14 Error walks always
with us, fallibility is our lot, and any marketplace of ideas (or
indeed any marketplace at all) can function only in such a dismal
setting. Knowledge, like wealth, is hard to obtain, and even when
won may easily be lost again.
Others see matters differently, supposing that knowledge, unlike
other forms of wealth, always keeps growing—or at least never
diminishes. Thus Arthur Koestler once declared that “We can add
to our knowledge, but we cannot subtract from it".’* In a similar
vein, Thomas S. Kuhn held “that the sequence of conceptions
espoused by a scientific community is irreversible, and that there is,
therefore, something like progress involved—but this is progress
away from confusion, rather than toward any antecedent reality”.16
And on the occasion of Harvard's 350th anniversary, President
Derek Bok stated that “In most other walks of life, institutions come
and go. Institutions that seem to be doing very well in one genera-
tion decline in the next. That’s not true of universities. Being a
Stanford man, the President of Harvard was easily impressed by the
surroundings that he adopted.
I was comforted, in my dismal and dissident view that knowledge
too can be lost and in my sad reflection that even one’s own alma
mater may decline, by a dissenting observation made on the same
“ E A Hayek: The Constitution of laberty. op. de, pp. 22 and 29. See also Hayek's The Fatal
Conceit, op. dt. and his comments in Congress for Cultural Freedom, Science and Freedom
(London: Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd., 1955), pp. 5S-54.
" Arthur Koestler. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing llrion of the Universe (London:
Hutchinson. 1959). p. 19.
’* But if one is less confused, what is one less confused about? Believing as I do in an
antecedent reality", I evidently am confused,
n
Interview with Derek Bok, President of Harvard University, published in “John Harvard s
Journal", Harvard Magazine, September-October 1986, p. 207. Italics added.
29
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
Compare Douglass North: "Stagnation has been more characteristic of economic societies
i lari growth throughout history", in Michael Hinn. ed„ Proctfdings of tht Srvrnlh Inlmuitumal
•ronomic History Congress. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 1978), p. 212. Sec also Thomas
dCIS Nrwslrttrr. vol. 56, Summer-Fall 1985, p. 15.
30
Chapter 2
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE1
' The substance of this chapter was delivered as a lecture at Hendrix College in March 1989.
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
32
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
liberate themselves. Not only the latter are frustrated by this limita-
tion. The totalitarians of this century, and their precursors in past
ages, who thought they knew, and that they should and could
control, have repeatedly been taken by surprise. “While we differ in
the little things we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all
equal.”1
2. Fallibilism Transcended
33
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
Lord Quinton, who wrote the article on fallibilism for the Fontana,'Harper Dietionary of
Modem Thought, expresses fallibilism in a n unacceptable justifications way. So I do not want to
insist on the word “ordinary", and atn willing to allow laird Quinton the credit for being
ln
a d'ftirt ’ cluc or a tT
’“ <l u e °f justificationistn. see my The Retreat to Commitment, op. cil..
I shall on the whole follow Popper's exposition in Unended (tuest, op. dt., in the n e x t few
paragraphs, b u t I shall also add some ideas of m y own. so that Popper should not be held
responsible for my errors.
34
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
’ Alfred Tarski. "On the Concept of Logical Consequence", chapter 16 of his Logu, SemantKS.
Mftamathemaius (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1956). pp. 409-420. We exclude tautologies
from consideration because all tautologies are implied by any statement whatever.
‘ See Watkins, Hobbes. op. dt„ p. 23, footnote I. and Popper, l/nended Quest, op. cit.. pp - h
27 and footnote 18. page 199.
35
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
* I have qualified my meaning with the word) "little if anything" and “negligible" to allow
for the objection that, ray. the statement about the die does prohibit various things—for example,
it prohibits the die from turning into a large rabbit!
36
UNFATHOMF.D KNOWLEDGE
37
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
what has been discovered, at a certain time, in the light of the pre-
vailing problem situation, about the theory’s content; it [that is, its
significance] is, as it were, a projection of this historical problem
situation upon the logical content of the theory". 10
I like to call this projection the “accessed slice” of the objective
content of a theory, and to think of it as falling across the informa-
tive as well as the logical content of the theory."
This point is important in the effort to convince language ana-
lysts (and positivists preoccupied with the “explication" of “concepts”
in the “language of science”) that a theory’s meaning has compara-
tively little to do with the particular words and terms used in it.
Almost any statement may be rendered in different terms without
change of meaning. In fact the meaning and objective content of a
theory are not identical; the meaning, relevance, and common
understanding (and thus also the economic value-, see below) of a
theory shift as we uncover more of, or gain access to a larger slice
of, its objective logical and informative content.**
4. An Objection
38
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
following chapter). Nor is the issue how large an accessed slice of his
own theory its author has himself cut out for himself. The issue is,
rather, the objective content of the theoretical system itself. In many
familiar examples these fail to coincide, and indeed often have
hardly anything to do with one another. Anyone familiar with the
history of mathematics will realise that mathematics generates prob-
lems wholly independent of the intentions or personal understand-
ing of its creators, and is full of crossed expectations. The early
discovery of the distinction between odd and even numbers, and
such questions as whether there exists a highest prime number, or
highest twin primes, are unintended consequences of the discovery
of the sequence of natural numbers. Nor, when Russell and Hilbert
began their work, did anyone intend or anticipate, let alone want,
the discoveries of Kurt Godel and Alonzo Church about incomplete-
ness and undecidability.1*
Finally, the feeling of oddness in our characterisation stems
mainly from a kind of time warp: with a case such as the contrast
between the theories of Newton and Einstein, where theories are
separated by over two hundred years, the result may seem peculiar.
The peculiarity vanishes when we consider successive and incom-
patible theories close in time, or the unpredictable, yet soon to be
discovered, content of current theories.
11
On Godel see Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman. Gdde/'s Proof (New York: New York
university Press. 1964).
„ view that HIV causes AIDS has been challenged by Peter Ducsbcrg, ’‘Retroviruses as
atl
*H utnan ° Cimmunodeficiency
n S an Pa ,o eni:
d 8 virus Expectations and immunodeficiency*
and acquired Reality", Cancer Rtstarch,
syndrome:March 1, 1987.
Correlation but and
not
UsaL o n
* . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,USA, vol. 86, February 1989, pp- 755-764.
39
UNFATHOMF.D KNOWLEDGE
“ When it was discovered not to be effective as hoped in treating cancer, its economic value
fell. See the article on the drug, a n d on the work of Jerome P Horwitz in developing synthetic
AZT in the 1960s. in The New York Times, September 20, 1986, p . 1 and, on p. 7 , “A Failure Led
to Drug Against AIDS". See also Erik Eckholm, "Test Results Are Due on Drug to Fight Aids".
New Times, September 18, 1986, p. A22. and "AIDS Drug is Raising Host of Thorny Issues",
Neu* >frrA Times, September 18, 1986, p, 38. See also Marilyn Chase, "Promise Is Seen in Tests of
Drug for Treating A I D S " , Wall Street Journal, March 14, 1986, p. 18, and "Burroughs-Wellcome
Test of AIDS Drug May Be Halted, Suggesting Initial Success", lib// Street Journal, September 17,
1986.
*• Its safety has recently become more questionable. The dosages of dextran sulphate widely
recommended for treatment of H I V infection can cause a condition akin to ulcerative colitis in
some individuals, although the condition appears to dear when the drug is discontinued or its
dosage is decreased. Absorption of the drug into the blood stream when taken orally is also a
matter of dispute.
” See F. A. Hayek, The Total Conrrii. op. cit. See also "Economics and Knowledge" and "The
Use of Knowledge in Society" in F. A Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (London: Rout-
ledge. 1948).
40
L'NFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“ Kozo Yamada. Hurnio Kuzuya et al.. “Studies on Some Actions of Sulphated My-
saccharides on Arteriosclerosis (IV). Oral Administration of Dextran Sulphate". Jafxmtu emulation
Journal, vol. 25. June 1961; US Patent No. 3.126.320. March 14. 1964; Yuki Tashini and Shinichi
Fukumoto, Therapeutic Results of Arteriosclerosis by Dextran Sulfate (MDS)", in Japaruu
emulation Journal, vol. 29. March 1965; I. Hirono et al.. “Carcinogenicity of Dextran Sulphate
Sodium in Relation to Its Molecular Weight*'. Cancer letters, vol. 18, p. 29. 1983; Rvuji Ueno and
Sachiko Kuno. "Dextran Sulphate, a Potent Anti-HIV Agent in Vitro Having Synergism with
Zidovudine". The Lancet, June 13. 1987, p. 1379. reporting also a personal communication from
II Mitsuya and S. Broder, of the US National Cancer institute; M. Berenbaum. “Anti-HIV
Synergy Between Dextran Sulfate and Zidovudine". /Az Lancet, August 22. 1987. p. 461; H.
Mitsuya and Samuel Broder. "Strategies for Antiviral Therapy in AIDS", Mtfurr vol. 325, 1987,
pp. 773-778; Ryuji Ueno and Sachiko Kuno. "Anti-HIV Synergism Between Dextran Sulphate and
Jdovudine", The leaned . October 3, 1987, M Ito, et al.. “Inhibitory Effect of Dextran Sulphate
*d Heparin on the Replication of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in Vitro", AfUrurm/
’ onh, vol. 7, no. 6, 1987. pp. 361; H. Nakashima et al., "Purification and Characterization of
* n Avian Myeloblastosis and HIV Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitor, Sulphated Polysaccharides
acted from Sea Algae". Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, vol. 31, no 10, 1987, p. 1524;
* n Hiroaki Mitsuya, Samuel Broder, David J . Looney and Flossie Wong-Staal, with Sachiko
ino and Ryuji Ueno. Snence. April 1988. See also Marilyn Chase. “Defusing a Bomb: Doctors
Patients Hope AZT Will Help to Stave Off AIDS". Wall Street Journal, April 28. 1988. pp. I
1
19. in which dextran sulphate is discussed briefly, and "Cholesterol Remedy Might Find a
in fighting AIDS", Wall Street Journal, April 29, 1988, in which dextran sulphate is discussed
* greater length
41
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
'* Sec Biumeu IWv*. Apnl 24. 1989. p. 29, and Michael S. McGrath, Jeffrey D. Lifson, ct al ,
"GLQ223: An inhibitor of human immunodeficiency virus replication in acutely and chronically
infected cells of lymphocyte and mononuclear phagocyte lineage", Pmaedmgi of thr National
Acadrmy of Same. USA. vol. 86. pp. 2844-2848. April 1989.
42
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
understood at all well for less than two decades. 20 Indeed immuno-
logical theory, and genetics, have been in a state of nearly constant
revolution throughout the current century, with changes taking
place as radical as those between the theories of Newton and Ein-
stein. Until the mid 'sixties, what is sometimes called "Crick’s dog-
ma" went virtually unchallenged—the doctrine, that is, that biologi-
cal information flows only, and irreversibly, from DNA to RNA and
then to protein structure. Yet it is now known that the retroviruses
contain an enzyme, reverse transcriptase, which enables the RNA
virus to form a DNA copy of itself and then incorporate itself into,
and change, DNA genes. In short (although interpretations still
differ), information can flow “backwards” from RNA to DNA, thus
violating at least the original interpretation of Crick’s doctrine. 21
Thus it was part of the objective informative content of immuno-
logical knowledge of the time, and part of the background knowl-
edge used in the production of these drugs, that such diseases, and
such flows of information, did not and could not exist.
It was also part of the objective (yet unfathomed) content and
objective (yet unfathomed) potentialities of AZT, dextran sulphate,
and tricosanthin (all of which did exist), that they could be used in
treatment of a disease, AIDS, that did not yet exist, and which,
when it did come into existence, would function in a way then
believed to be immunologically and genetically impossible. Yet there
was no way to gain access to this “slice” of their content. What is
crucial about an item of objective knowledge—a book, or a pill, for
instance—is its potential for being understood, or being utilised in
* They were of course not initially described and understood as they are today i n terms of
UNA, RNA. and reverse transcriptase, these aspects of genetic theory being at the time not yet
discovered. Reverse transcriptase was discovered only in the late 1960s. and David Baltimore and
Howard Temin were awarded the Nobel Prize for it as recently as 1975. See Dani Bolognesi,
Human Rrtrovirustt, Cantor, and AIDS: AMnathes to Pmenlion and Thrratn ( N e w York: Alan R . lass,
Inc-. 1988).
” See F. M . Bumct. "Dogma Disputed: M a n or Molecules: A Tilt at Molecular Biology",
nr,l
f January 1. 1966. pp. 37-39, who writes, “The latest development has been the recognition
■■■ a portion of the genetic material of a virus can be incorporated into the genome of the
1,1
ected cell and induce changes in the behaviour of the cell." Jacques Monod. however, cate-
8®cically reaffirms "Crick's Dogma". See Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (London: Collins,
“• PP- 107-108 and note, where he writes: "Information is never seen being conveyed in its
PP°**te direction . . nor is it conceivable that it could be. This certitude rests upon an
~™utnulation of observations by now so complete and so well verified — a n d its consequences,
f r
fun 'l"?
Rental. ? tenets
"olutionary theory.
of modern are so
biology. . . important
. There —
is that it may be mechanism
no conceivable considered one existence
in o f the
C
cndr V instruction or piece of information could be transferred to DNA. Consequently the
fton>C totally. intensely conservative, locked into itself, utterly impervious to any ‘hints'
43
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
some way that has not yet been imagined, a potential that may exist
without ever being realised. At that earlier time there was no way
even to fantasise this particular potential.
Our time warp should not only be much diminished, but should
now begin virtually to disappear. For there is nothing quixotic or
misleading about this example. Rather, drug developers, manufac-
turers and distributors are well aware of such possible unforeseeable
effects and uses of drugs. In the development, testing, patenting,
and licensing of their products, they both hope for such results (if
beneficial) and fear them (if harmful). When buying rights to and
licensing such knowledge, one is dealing with what cannot be
predicted; hence one is speculating, and one takes precautions
accordingly using all the resources of the law. Moreover, existing
patent law already largely recognises (although it does not use our
language or epistemological and logical analysis) the objective con-
tent of such discovered yet unfathomed products.”
" I am much indebted to Dr. ('.(inter Wkchtershauser for instructing me in patent law. In
order to obtain a patent, one must show that the knowledge that one seeks to patent was not
predictable from the prior art; and one attempts to state explicitly in one’s patent everything that
one believes to be derivable from it.
" There are of course several different forms of determinism. The most serious and
influential is l-aplacean determinism, which is concerned with predictability of future states of the
universe with any required slate of precision. From Laplacean determinism one may derive
trivially an ontological or metaphysical version of determinism according to which all states of the
world are fixed, despite their not being predictable. All serious arguments for determinism, and
those that have played an important role in science, pertain to a laplacean determinism requiring
predictability, For a dear distinction amongst the various forms of determinism, and a refutation
of them, see K. R. Popper. /Tie fbtierty of Historvism (London: Routledge, 1957), especially the
preface, and K. R, Popper, The Open Universe An Argument for Indeterminism. vol. Il of ftnljcripi to
the Logic of Scientific Discovery. ed W. W. Bartley. I l l (London: Hutchinson. 1982). especially
secuons 20-24. See also Karl Popper. "Is Determinism Self-Refuting?", Afind, vol. 92. 1983, pp.
103-104. See also Popper’s discussion of Laplace's classic statement of determinism in K. R.
Popper and John C. Eccles. The Self and Its Oram (New York: Springer Verlag, 1977). section 1*8.
44
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
45
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
they may also be used for us. Another individual, such as a capital-
ist or entrepreneur, may take an idea or tool that we have made,
discover in it something that we had not noticed, and develop it in
a way that aids us. This benefit to us may also occur contrary to the
intentions of the person who obtained the idea or object from us.
There is no need to assume either benevolence or malevolence, or
to deny either exploitation or altruism. They are all present, and all
play a relatively minor role. The important thing is that the recipients or
new owners of products cannot control them either. These products
continue to be autonomous: no matter who temporarily owns or
“controls” them, they “outgrow our control, cross our expectations,
and nullify our calculations”. One function of a market is to get rid
of purchases or investments that do not turn out (at least so far as
one can tell) as expected or hoped.
Thus it is wrong to characterise the process of exchange mainly
in terms of exploitation. People need one another and a competitive
exchange process to help probe and objectify their ideas and other
products—and thereby to discover their potentialities. Especially, we
need to be able both to give and receive criticism and correc-
tion —not in order to dominate or humiliate one another, but to
learn better what we have already produced. In science, and in
intellectual life generally, this is supposed to happen through the
marketplace of ideas.
46
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
v or v avid McLellan. "Alienation in Hegel and Marx". Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New
k: Charle* Scribners Sons, 1973), vol. 1. p 39a.
Sec F. A Hayek. The fatal Conceit, op. cit.
47
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
48
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
It may also assume that, where ignorance does exist, all parties
know in advance what they are ignorant of, and have deliberately
chosen whatever existing ignorance they enjoy following a cost-benefit
analysis of the cost of remedying it.” Such requirements and as-
sumptions are utterly incompatible with the unfathomability and
” One sign that this may be happening is that the key terms of the theory become matters
of definition or convention, as happened to Newtonian theory in the late nineteenth century
immediately prior to the discovery of Einstein's theory. The economist Fritz Machlup evidently
did not understand the relation between economic value and the quality and level of knowledge
when he took the position that “price theory ought to be largely uninterested in the level of
knowledge individuals (or firms) possess or in the problems of information acquisition they face”.
See Richard N. Langlois. “From the Knowledge of Economics to the Economics of Knowledge
ritz Machlup on Methodology and on the ‘Knowledge Sodety’", Research m the History of Economic
Thought and Methodology, vol. 3, 1985, pp. 225-235. See the next footnote but one.
Valuing can. however, affect the history and development of the accessed slice of a theory.
nu
y for instance lead one part or aspect of a theory to be investigated prior to another.
*° Machlup also did not understand how this works. Sec his Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribu-
conomw Significance, vols. I. II, and 111 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
«)• Machlup reasons, fallaciously, that knowledge cannot be objective since expectations are
**a ys fallible. See vol. HI, op. at.. pp. 2 If- See also Warren J . Samuels, “Machlup on Knowl-
* Cand
*enCCMethodology,
' u ’Jccll vism
vol.and the Soda!
5. 1985. Nature ofesp.Knowledge”,
pp. 243-255. ffzsmrrA rn tAr History of Economic
pp. 253-254.
w Joseph S. Fulda, “Dimensions of Competition”. The Freeman, June 1988, p, 212.
v . 5 Esteban F. Thomsen, “Knowledge, Discovery, and Prices”, in Humane Studies Review,
* no. 1, Fall 1987. pp. 1-17.
49
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“ The Open Society and lb Enemies (London: Routledge &■ Kegan Paul. 1945), vol. I. chap. 5.
note 6 (2); vol. I, chap. 9 , note 2.
“ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume. 196S. See also Ninian Smart. Mind.
October 1958; J. J. C. Smart, ,4n Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics (Carlton: Melbourne
University Press. 1961); H. B. Acton, "Negative Utilitarianism". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
Supplementary Fo/ume. 196S; and Richard Robinson. An Atheist's Values (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 18. See also Eduard von Hartmann, Das sitlliche Brwufllsein (Berlin: Duncker,
1879), and Aurel Kolnai, "The Thematic Primacy of Moral Evil", Philosophical Quarterly. January
“ But see John Boswell. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.Gay People tn Western
Europe from thr Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University
Press. 1980).
“ See my The Retreat to Commitment, op. dt.. Appendix 1.
50
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
A qualification is needed. I t was suspected in the 1960s and became widely known in the
WOs that hepatitis was a venereal disease. Although most hepatitis passes quickly without serious
damage, a tiny percentage of hepatitis cases are fulminant, and usually fatal. A somewhat larger
number of hepatitis cases develop into persistent or chronic active hepatitis, which in turn
■onjctimcs leads to serious disease and death.
’ii Watkins’s paper was, incidentally, published in 1963, when homosexual activity was still
L *n Britain, and was widely being referred to as a “victimless crime". Sec The Wo/fendrn
Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution, Authorized American Edition,
Introduction by Karl Menninger, M.D. (New York: Lancer Books, 1964), and Edwin M .
. U r * Crimes Without Lictiffu, Ttevianl Behavior and Public Policy. Abortion, Homosexuality. Drug
(Englewood Cliffs. N.J.. Prentice-Hall. Inc., 1965).
, , See Winifred Rosen. “Down the Up Staircase", Harper's, June 1973, pp. 28-36. Reports o f
cnazos work and even a cartoon about Arica also appeared in The New }brker. See the discussion
- ‘ and dialogue with, Ichazo by John C. Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone: An Au/nbwjgropliy of Inner
'***' (New York: Bantam Books. 1973).
51
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“ See Robert S. De Ropp, 77w Mailer Game: Beyond the Drug Experience (New York: Delta.
1968), pp. 154-57.
” Examples of discoveries which were unpredictable in terms of their precursors could be
multiplied. 'ITiere is for example the discovery of the usefulness of aspirin in preventing heart
attacks.
“ See J . Wright. Robert Redfield. William James, Stephen Jones, Charles Brown, Donald
Burke, The New England Journal of Medicine, March 1987. wherein these doctors at Walter Reed
Hospital warn against plans to use modified versions of the smallpox vaccine to combat other
diseases in developing countries. See also the series of reports in The Tones, London, beginning
with the lead story of May 11. 1987. "Smallpox vaccine "triggered AIDS virus"". Articles in The
Tones continued on May 12, 1987, p, 1. " W H O seeks evidence over vaccine link to Aids virus”;
D«tor backs smallpox link". M a y I S . 1987, pp. I . 22; "Smallpox virus link with Aids", May IS.
1987. p. 13; -Vaccines and Aids". May 25. 1987, p 2 1 ; "Vaccines and Aids". May 28. 1987; and
52
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
'Fate of smallpox virus in balance", November 4, 1987, p. 8 . The Ttmrt stories raise only the
possibility that Vaccinia awakened or triggered dormant H I V infections. It is also quite possible, as
explained in the text, that H I V is a direct recombinant descendent of bovine leukaemia virus and
vtsna virus. Litde of the vaccine employed by WHO in Africa was from tissue culture or eggs;
most of it was crudely produced directly from catde even though, in the United Slates, sixty to
seventy per cent of dairy herds are contaminated with bovine leukaemia virus.
“ See J. A. Georgiades, A. Billiau. B. Vanderschueren. "Infection of Human Cell Cultures
with Bovine Visna Virus". Journal Gm. Vir, 1978. vol. 38. pp. 375-81; M . J. van der Matten, A D
Sooth. C. L. Seger, "Isolation of a Virus from Cattle with Persistent Lymphocytosis", JNCI. 1972,
49, pp. 1649-1657; A D. Booth, M. J . van der Matten, Ultrastructural Studies of a Visna-likc
Syncyua Produdng Virus from Cattle with Lymphocytosis", J. Vir. 1974, vol. 13, pp. 197-204; M
< Cr
r h * fallen. J M. Miller. A D. Booth. "Replicating Type-C Virus Particles in Monolayer
"*** Lulturev of Tissues from Catde with Lymphosarcoma". JNCI. 1974. vol. 52, pp. 491-494; J.
. f <lds, R I . Hamilton, "Structural Interactions between Viruses as a Consequence of Mixed!
J'fc’Stons”, in M. A* Lauflcr, F. B. Bang, K. Maramorosch, and K . M. Smith, eds., /Mimed rn
Stan* (New York: Academic Press, 1976). pp. 33-86; and J . Sodroska, C. Rosen, F. Wong-
* et aL. "Tram -Acting Transcriptional Regulation of Human T-Cell Leukemia Virus Type I I I
RTernxinal Repeat". Scwncr, 1985. vol. 227. pp. 171-173.
ankles in Th? Tine, op. ciL. explained the connexion through a triggering of latent
y the smallpox vaccine. While this is theoretically quite possible, there is no evidence that
r a5 an
r y y "ktent H I V infection" for the vaccine to trigger.
Ren P°P u iar ideas that the H I V virus came from green monkeys or dr novo have now
havec n , keen discredited. Sec for instance Robert J. Biggar, "The AIDS agent could not
pD ° K r »ated de novo", in his "The Aids Problem in Africa", Lancrt. January 11. 1986. vol. I,
*9-83.
53
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
I f the W H O smallpox vaccination program, the Hepatitis B experimental vaccine study, and
the AIDS epidemic are connected in this way, the possiMih o f an epidemic resembling AIDS,
although not of courxe the details, was predicted in 1973 by J. Clcmmcsen, who warned: “We are
. . . establishing conditions for a possible pandemic of a n oncogenic virus variant on the scale of
the influenza of 1918. . . . We have in tissue cultures created conditions for propagation of virus
in cells from a host different from the original This will tend to increase enormously the chance
of mutation into variants acceptable to new hosts and by their heterogenic qualities they may have
neoplastic capacity in a new host. So it is possible to visualize a mutation of a virus into a variety
of high contagiosity to man. resulting in a pandemic of neoplastic disease." See his "Summation".
Comparative Leukemia Research1973, Leukemogenests, Bibliotheca Haematologica. no. 40, ed. Y. Itao and
R. M. Dutcher (Basel: Karger, 1975), pp. 783*792. The danger was also seen by the National
Academy o f Sciences, which, in 1974, recommended that "Scientists throughout the world join
with the members of this committee in voluntarily deferring experiments (linking) an i null viruses".
Clcmmesens prediction and the National Academy recommendation arc hardly surprising, for
earlier, in 1970, in a workshop jointly sponsored by the Fogerty International Center for
Advanced Study in the Health Sciences and the World Health Organization, i t was proposed that
" I n relation to the immune response, a number of useful experimental approaches can lx?
visualized. One would lie a study of the relationship of HL-A type to the immune response, both
humoral and cellular, to well defined bacteria and viral antigents during preventive uamnahom"
(emphasis mine) (D. B Amos, D. B . Bodmer, R. Ceppelim, et al.. "Biological Significance of
Histocompatibility Antigens". Fogerty International Center Proceedings, no. 15. Federation
Proceedings, vol 31. no. 3. May-June 1972, pp. 1087-1104, esp. 1102). And in 1972. a number of
scientists (including W H O and NIH personnel) had called for “ a systematic evaluation of die
effects of viruses on immune functions . . . . The effects of virus infection on different cell types
(r.g., macrophages. T and B lymphocytes) should be studied in greater detail , An attempt
should be made to ascertain whether viruses can in fact exert selective effects on immune
function, e.g,. by depression 7S vs 19S antibody, or by affecting T cell function as opposed t o B
cell function. The possibility should also be looked into that the immune response to the virus
itself may be impaired if the infecting virus damages more or less selectively the cells responding
to the viral antigens." (A C. Allison, et al.. The Bulletin of the World Hr al th Organization, 1972. pp.
257-274. See also John Higginson, in Seventh National Cancer Conference Proceedings (Philadelphia: J.
B . Lippincott. 1972), esp. p. 680.]
As t o the possible connexion to the hepatitis vaccination program, see Annals of Internal
Medicine, vol. 97, no. 3, 1982, pp. 362-369. I n 1984 the Centers for Disease Control admitted that
60 percent of those who had received the experimental hepatitis vaccine were infected with AIDS.
Since 1984 further information has not been released.
There arc some alarming coincidences here, and it is easy to see the vaccination programs as
having been designed to carry out precisely the "experimental approaches" and "studies" called
for. Vet I cannot bring myself to subscribe to the conspiracy thesis argued by Theodore A
Strecker and Robert Strecker of Los Angeles in mimeographed papers, radio talks, and video
cassettes—according to whom all of this was earned out according to a carefully laid plan. To lx*
specific, they suggest that the National Cancer institute, in collaboration with the World Health
Organization, deliberately made the HIV virus in their laboratories at Fort Detrick. Any such plan
would have required a bizarre admixture of medical malignity, extraordinary intelligence in
execution, and exceptional stupidity in goal (i.e„ hunching a n uncontrollable virus with a 10-15
year latency period!) that is hard to credit. On the other hand full information o n the matter
should be available t o the public, yet information on the Hepatitis B study has been seized by the
U.S. Attorney Generals Office and is no longer available from the Centers for Disease Control
54
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
" Not that negative utilitarianism was ever a promising account of moral evaluation:
Watkins's analogies between science and morality are crudely drawn, most especially his analogies
between decisions about basic observation statements, on the one hand, and decisions about
unsatisfactory consequences of moral standards, on the other. Nor, as he thinks, does one need
decisions for basic statements in science. Moreover, it is doubtful whether criticism even in natural
Science is centered chiefly on observational test statements. (See 7'Az Rrbeai la Commitwieni, op. ett.
Appendix 5, for support of these claims). Nor is it plausible that the way to reject hypothetical
moral postulates is by reference to negative feelings. Feelings of revulsion vary greatly from one
person to another. As George Bernard Shaw wrote in the preface to Major Barbara, " I t is
exceedingly difficult to make people realise that an evil is an evil". On controversial questions, it
ts hardly clear that our negative feelings really do, as Watkins suggested, tend to lead in the
direction of agreement, or that, in case they did. that that would even be relevant in constructing
an adequate account of ethics. M a n y people arc remarkably, if regrettably, callous about the
suffering of others— particularly where the violation of religiously-endorsed taboos is concerned. It
>s still sometimes argued that, if sexual practices lead to suffering (as. for instance, in A I D S
victims), then this is only proper punishment for sinners. N o r is the ineffectualness of the
existence of suffering as an argument for moral reform at all new. " I n the Victorian age", as
Turner reports, "a reformer stood a better chance of success if h e could present his reform i n
such a way as to show that the victims of injustice were in moral danger; ami even today this is
i’y no means the weakest card to play. What shocked the middle classes, who read the reports on
conditions in the mines, a little more than a century ago, was not so much the system under
which children crawled on all fours dragging sleds behind them, or in which men ruptured
themselves lifting loads on to their daughters' backs; it was the revelation that lightly-clad young
women working in proximity to naked men al the coal face made no strenuous efforts to save
•heir honour when molested, which was fairly often".
Incidentally, it ought to be noticed that Popper himself is not a utilitarian, and thinks of himself
*ts a modified or critical Kantian in ethical matters. His recommendation to "minimise avoidable
’“Bering". which by itself is hardly objectionable, was made i n passing in connection with social
P*™y. not as part of a n attempt to formulate a criterion for moral evaluation. Sec Unrnded Quest,
“p- dt., «2. 193; Thr oprn Soatty and lb Entrna. op. dt., p . 107. 108, 139. 235. 237, 2 3 8 . 239.
"6. 304. 324, 384-85; Conjecturts and Rrfutatums, op. dt.. pp. 181, 345. 361: Tht Stif and lb Brain.
°P- dt.. p. 168.
55
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
56
Chapter 3
INTENTIONS AND EXPRESSIONISM:
THE OBJECTION RECONSIDERED
' See K. R. Popper, Objectwr Knmtrdgr. op. ch.; my “Ein schwieriger Mensch: Eine Portrait
skizze von Sir Karl Popper", in Eckhard Nordhofen, ed.. /’Ay.oognomien. Philosophen dtt 20
Jahrhundrrt.1 in Portraits. op. du pp. 43-69; and my "Wittgenstein and Homosexuality", in
WmniBraoui/ity Samlrgr, fuion, Politics, in Salmagundi. vol. 58-59. Fall 1982-Winter 1983, pp. 166-
58
INTENTIONS AND EXPRESSIONISM: THE OBJECTION RECONSIDERED
See C . Radnitzky and W. W. Bartley. I l l , eds., F.volutianan EbKtmolan Rationality. anil thr
hoaology of Knowledge. op. dt.
®ee Hayek, Law. Legislation, and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973, 1976.
). vol. I, 1973, esp. chapter 2. It u not of course suggested that those engaged in the market
n
and' act .*n or,naI *on on
° intelligently or
their
market behaviour
prices people ismust
unintelligent.
be alert toQuite the contrary,
changes tn prices, toand
be must
guidedhave
by
riain specific goals, such as attainment of profit and avoidance of loss. But they do not and
cannot
con know
. .' I'trnces of the why andof how
actions prices are
themselves and changing,
others. Secand
alsoalso cannot
Hayek, Thr know the unintended
Fatal Conceit. op. dt..
Individualism and Economic Order. op. dt.
59
L’NFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
60
INTENTIONS AND EXPRESSIONISM: THE OBJECTION RECONSIDERED
utilised in some way that has not yet been imagined. This potential
may exist without ever being realised. These potentialities, un-
actualised as they may well be, are nonetheless very real, as our
examples of the old drugs now being used to treat a disease, AIDS,
that was not imaginable when they were synthesised, illustrates.
Objective knowledge—including all the potentialities that are a part
of it—thus forms a major component of our ecological niche. The
niche itself may be considered as a field of potentialities.’ Objective
knowledge interacts with the individuals living in that ecological
niche, and may transform the niche itself. And it develops in a way
analogous to, although not identical with, biological evolution.
• See Popper's discussion of the propensity theory of probability, and of propensities, in the
three volumes of the ftubcn/H to the Logic of Scientific Discover,. ed. W. W Bartley. 111: Rrahm and
dim of Science. The Open Universe: d n Argument for Indeterminism. and Quantum rhron and t <■
Sdustn tn Physics, op. cit.
61
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
‘ For examples see J. D. Unwin's amusing introduction to his Sex and Culiurr (London:
Oxford University Press, 1934), and my "Fin Schwieriger Mensch", op. dt„ esp. p. 59.
This is true even, or especially, of Marx himself: a writer uses his notes and diaries, his
musings, just to transcend them and himself. I t was after he had p u t down and worked through
his early jottings and notes that Marx became ready in part to transcend his Hegelianism, and to
begin to publish in a rather different vein As die years went by. he dropped more and more of
ie Hegelian background. For example, after his encounter with Darwin's work in 1859 and
62
INTENTIONS AND EXPRESSIONISM: THE OBJECTION RECONSIDERED
I860, he began to try to interpret his dialectic not in Hegelian but in Darwinian evolutionary
terms
Sec Popper and Ecdes, The Self and tts Brain, op. dt., chapter P4, especially section 42.
nipare John Rawls, A Theory of Jiutue (Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1971).
. hich does not necessarily make it objectionable. On counsels of perfection sec my Morality
(London: Macmillan, 1971), chapters I and 4.
63
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
10
For a critique of Marx's account of alienation that explores additional difficulties not
covered here, see William R- Beer, “The Fault Lies Not in Our 'Starrs' But in Our Sociology",
Aaidrttuc Questums, vol. 1, no. 3. Summer 1988. pp. 68-69.
" See F. A. Hayek. Tht Counter- Revolution of Science (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1955); Studies tn
Philosophy, Poliiu, an j economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1967). esp. chapter 5; Neu1
Srudiw tn Philoiophy Polina. Economics and the Union of Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978). esp. chapter I, and The Fatal Conceit. op. at.
64
INTENTIONS AND EXPRESSIONISM: THE OBJECTION RECONSIDERED
65
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
*’ For Buhler's work see my discussion in The Retreat to Commitment; Popper's numeral 1*
discussions in Conjectures and Refutations. The Self and /ti Brain, and elsewhere; and Karl Buhler
Sprachlheorie: Dir Darstellungsfunktion dor Sprache, 2nd edition (Stuttgart- Gustav Fischer Vcrlag-
1965).
14
See his admirable article on “Knowledge. Discovery and Prices", Humane Studies Review. vol
5, no. 1, Fall 1987. pp. 1-17. The passage cited appears on p. 15.
66
jNTENT1°ns AND EXPRESSIONISM: THE OBJECTION RECONSIDERED
the “Afterword" to the second, edition, revised and enlarged, of my W/grruta'n, op.
pp 47 Sigmund Freud. Collected Pspm, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1959). pp. 45-50, esp.
Mam j 4 footnote on those pages. On the apparent difference between the attitudes of
Anal here, see Freud, “On the Transformation of Instincts with Special Reference to
Process’□fd” .* fiapm, vol. 2. pp. 164-71, esp. p. 168. where Freud writes: “The
tic and ’JJ’7ae cation affords die first occasion on which the child must decide between narcissis-
UI
love Ot * “"ject-loving altitude. He either parts olxrdiently with his faeces, ‘offers them up' to his
*fcrti ng fotown l n1| - lbCm for purposes of auto-erotic gratification and later as a means of
67
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
” On inch matters. consult th? rich material Helmut Schoeck has assembled in his Emrj: d
ThtoTy of Sonal Rrhaxwur (London: Seeker 4 Warburg. 1969).
” See Gerardo and Alicia Retchel-DolmatofE. Thf PropU of Antama Tht Cultural Ptnmudity of a
Colombian Mtshw ruiagr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).
68
INTENTIONS AND EXPRESSIONISM: THE OBJECTION RECONSIDERED
the seller will hate him, and will pursue him vindictively, with black
ffrtgic and otherwise, for the remainder of his life. He must take precau-
tions accordingly. The seller here also “cannot let go”. His claim to
his property persists; he envies the buyer’s superiority in being able
to pay. and feels that he has been cheated of something substantial
in return for something as evanescent and transitory as money.1’
In modern exchange societies, it is harder for such primitive
emotions to arise: the institutions themselves foster a more benign
attitude. Anonymous production of goods enables one to purchase
practically anything without having to reckon with the envy of the
producer or supplier. Such a relatively anonymous exchange economy
has, at least in this respect, a civilising effect. Yet it is still common
amongst romantics to glorify primitive society. They deplore the
impersonality of modern relationships, and plead for a return to the
days when one had a personal relationship in economic transactions,
when nearly every article had to be purchased from some known
individual. In such a setting, as Schoeck puts it, “the romantically
inclined . . . have no idea how subtly the relationships between
producer and customer strangled the circulation of goods".
He|
rnut Shoeck, op. dt_. pp 52-5S.
69
UNFATHOMF.D KNOWLEDGE
70
INTENTIONS AND EXPRESSIONISM: THE OBJECTION RECONSIDERED
which (see the Prologue) one is free to supply and receive, and to
refuse to supply and receive. It is produced whilst treading a path
that involves increasingly “abstract or depersonalised" relationships
with one’s fellows.20 This path involves great strain. Marx himself
seems to have suffered from it, and craved personal contact—as may
|x? seen in the way he differs from Hegel in insisting that social
institutions never suffice to mediate man's social nature, but that
one must (again, to overcome alienation) forge direct bonds of
fellowship with individual fellow workers.
Yet, strain or not, such alienation or estrangement from nature,
society, one’s fellow men, and oneself is an essential part of growing
up. Certainly it has everything to do with freedom. We must detach
from the womb—from the assumptions of our environment and our
communities—in order to become independent persons, individuals.
In this process we may come to look upon ourselves, others, and
the world about us as strange and perplexing—as indeed alien.
Many thinkers, just like Marx, have called on man to transcend
himself, his past, his origins. Yet few comprehend that it is only
through something like alienation that we can do any such thing.21
Still fewer have perceived that it is the objectivity and autonomy of
our products that enable us to alienate ourselves from them, and
thus to attain such transcendence and increased liberty.
, - Sce r
’’*>PPc r. Th/ Open Socwtj and Its Enrrnrs. op. tit., Chapter 10; and Hayek. Emu.
‘"'i liberty. op. dt.. Vol. III. "Pbsiscript”. See also note 14 above.
w
Walter Kaufmann. Brwnd Guilt and Justice (New York: Peter H. Wyden. 1973).
71
Chapter 4
T H E SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS O F
KNOWLEDGE
Ludwig von Mises. The Ultimate Eoundahon of Economic Same (Kansas City: Sheet! Andrews
and
McMcel. Inc., 1978).
there is a vast literature on the sociology of knowledge. To start see Karl Mannheim.
0
and Utopia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936); Barry Barnes. Interests and the
I- Knowledge (London: Roudedge Direct Editions, 1977); David Bloor. Knowledge and Social
(London. Routledge Direct Editions. 1976); Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin, cds., Natural
ulona
8 2 ' Studies of Scientific Culture (London: Sage Publications. 1979); Martin Hollis and
Qf -u cs. Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge: The M i l ' Press. 1982). See Popper's critique
lcini and
*be sociology of knowledge in The Open Society, op. dt.. Chapter 23. and in The
Rond \ Hutorvism . op. d t . . esp. sections 2 1 and 23. See Hayek's critique of Mannheim in The
phn " (London: Routledge 4 Kegan Paul. l a d . . 19+4). pp. 21. 68, and 158. The
lr
sorneti L g r n Habermas, Michel Foucault. Richard Rorty. and Thomas S. Kuhn are also
conl
Stiener'" “lered to be sociologists of knowledge. See Barry Barnes, T. S. Kuhn and Social
ndon;
hter a r . <■ Macmillan, 1982); and Ernest Gellner. "The Paradox in Paradigms". Timer
thi, , [l a April 23. 1982, pp. 4 5 1 + 5 2 . M y discussion of the sociology of knowledge in
r
Practiu, onc' Crs. on
b w,dl ofunderlying
See my discussion Kuhnassumptions,
Thomas S. false Part will
in the next and not book.
of this single out individual
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
’ E.g., David Bloor, “The Strengths of the Strong Programme”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
vol. 11, 1981. pp. 199-218. Sec Ian C. Jarvie's critique in “A Hague on Both Your Houses", in
J . R. Brown, ed., Scientific Rationality: The Sociological Turn (Boston: D. Reidel, 1984), pp. 165-182.
' See K. R. Popper. "The Death of Theories and of Ideologies", in Im reflexion sur la mart. 2c
symposium international de philosophic. £cole fibre de philosophic “Plethon” (Athens: 1977). pp
296-329; and "The Rationality of Scientific Revolutions”, in Rom Harri. ed., Problems of Scwntipr
Revolution, Progress and Obstacles to Progress tn the Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)
pp. 72-101. See also my discussion in the "Introduction 1984" to my The Retreat to Commitment,op
dt
74
THE SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE
75
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
76
T H E SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE
tion of the represented thing, but one is not sure whether it exactly
fills the whole square of the screen or only the smallest pan of it.
This question can be decided only with the help of the next finest screen.'’
Konrad Lorenz. “Kants Lehre vom Apriorischen im Lichte gegenwlrtiger Biologic", Blatter
DruiwAr Phdosophu. 1941, pp. 94-125; reprinted as “Kant’s Doctrine of the A Priori in the
~*8hl of Contemporary Biology", in Ludwig von Bertalanffy and A Rapoport, eds.. Genera/
stfwu
WurAook of Ou Society for General Systems Research, vol. 7 (New York: Society for General
Systems Research. 1962). pp. 23-35.
Donald T. Campbell. William James Lectures, op. cit
Ibid. p. 42.
Lorenz's discussion in “Gestalt perception as a source of scientific knowledge", in
m Annual and Human Behaviour. 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1971).
77
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
78
T H E SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE
79
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
80
THE SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE
81
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
'* See Hayek. Law. legislation and hberty. op. at., and The Fatal Conceit, op. dt.
82
T H E SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE
J. Ecological Questions
83
UNFATHOMF.D KNOWLEDGE
'* See Kuhn's The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1977), Man'
additional arguments can be turned on (he sociology of knowledge. One, which interests
particularly, has to do with the justificationist form of argumentation, and the exploitation of the
so-called “hermeneutical drde” which is common in such literature. (For this see my “Rationalii'
Criticism and Logic", op. dL. The Retreat to Commitment, op. dL, and chapter 14 of this volume )
Another is its dependence on reductionism and determinism. For a critique of the last two ideas.
*ee K. R. Popper. The Open Universe, op. dL. and Quantum Theory and the Schism tn Physics, op. dt-
84
THE SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE
85
Part II
1 d Gowrnm
l2-!5 I0R7 T L - , ? " . cnt Sponsorship of H.gher Education". Bermuda. February
antl
■mrenchmen. •»>' Wealth of Nations: The Market in Ideas, and the
!u Ph, h,c R an
Pfion 0/ Z UeatUm °PGnwm ’'' > C. Amacher and Roger E. Memers, eds . Federal
9«9) o n <»oo g to Intellectual Freedom (New York. Paragon House.
4
On ecology in such contexts also see the preceding chapter of this book, as well as my The
Retreat to Commitment, 2nd edition, op. dt.. Appendix I. and my essays in Evolutionary Epistemology,
Rotiona/tty, and1 dir Sociology nf Knowledge,op. dt.
4
See Gerard Radnitzky's efforts to integrate economic and epistemological thinking
“Towards an 'Economic* Theory of Methodology*, Methodology and Science, vol. 19, 1986, pp. 124
147; “Erkenntnis-dicoretischr Problemc im Lichte von Evolutionsthcorie und Okonomic: Die Ent-
wicklung von Erkenntnisapparatcn und epistemischcn Ressourcen", in R. Riedl and F. Wuketits.
Dir Evolutiondre Erkenntnistheorie: fiedingungen, Lasungrn, Kontroversen (Berlin und Hamburg: Vcrlag
Paul Parry. 1987). pp. 115’131; ’'Cost-Benefit Analysis in the Methodology1 of Research; The
'economic approach' applied to key problems of die philosophy of science*, in Gerard Radnitzks
and Peter Bcrnholz, rds., Economic Imperialism. The Economic Method Applied Outside the Field oj
Economies (New York: Paragon House, 1987); and "Uber die Nfltzlichkeit des ‘Economic Approach
in dcr Wissenschaftstheorie: Handlungsrationalitiit. Basisproblcm und Theorienpriiferenz”. in R
Born and J. Marschner. cds., Festschrift fur Rudolf Wohlgenannt (Berlin: Springer Verlag. 1987), in
the series “Linzer Universitatsschriften. Festschriftcn. Monographien. Studirntextc”.
See Gerard Radnitzky and W. W. Bardcy, III, cds., Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality and
Sociology of Knowledge,op. dL. chapter I. and Part 111 below.
90
EPISTEMOLOGY AND ECONOMICS
IM views 1 argued in The Retreat to Commitment. 2nd edition, op. de The first edition
u
** York: Alfred A Knopf, Inc., 1962), is half the length of the 2nd edition and lacks
<r>erous developments of the original position; so I should prefer that the reader consult the
edition. J elaborated the approach, and applied it to questions of evolutionary theory.
“logs and economics, in Gerard Radnitrky and W. W. Bartley. III. eds., Evolutionary Epistemolo
15 ““"nality, ttni i fa Sociology of Knowledge. op. at, chapters I and 18. See also chapters 14 anil
91
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
Modern economics began with Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations9. Smith investigated and tried to
account for the differential growth of wealth from place to place and
time to time. Real economic growth—in the sense of increased per-
capita production—came late in the history of mankind. It appeared
in the sixteenth century, first in the Netherlands, and then a little
later in England, where and when a rise in the standard of living
coincided with an expansion of population. This increase in wealth
was localised. Elsewhere, as in nearby France and Spain, standards
of living stagnated or even declined. In later years, conspicuously in
our own century, England and the Netherlands have also under-
gone economic decline relative to other lands. The rise and decline
in relative wealth, both within and amongst economies, continue
today as Americans now witness a relative decline of their wealth vts
a vis that of Japan and other lands; and as the countries of the
Eastern block turn away from socialism—moved less by theoretical
arguments than by the practical failure of socialist ideas reflected in
the relative poverty of these lands.
The same sort of localisation and differential growth, or relative
rise and decline, occurs in the production of knowledge as well. 1
92
EPISTEMOLOGY AND ECONOMICS
10
* Soe Part I V below. See also “ F B I Woos Librarians to Spy on "Commie' Headers". Thf Wall
Journal, May 19. 1988. p. 28.
See K . R. Popper. “Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition", chapter 4 of Conjirturrs arid
Op c j
93
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
94
Chapter 6
AN END RUN: WHY DO PROFESSORS LIKE
KUHN SO MUCH? OR—WHY IS KUHN A
SOCIOLOGIST O F KNOWLEDGE AND NOT AN
ECONOMIST O F KNOWLEDGE?
1
Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (London: Mercury- Books, 1959), p. 18.
’ Especially genteel from the author of “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism". Journal if
tulmophy, 1983. pp. 583-589. On Rorty see Peter Munr, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Rorty . in
c. Radnitrky and W. W. Bartley, 111, Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of
Knowledge. op. cit., chapter 16.
.. ’ See my "Ein Schwieriger Mensch: Eine Portratskizze von Sir Karl Popper", in Eckhar
Nordhofen. ed.. Physuignamien Philosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Portraits, op. cit., pp. 43-69, an
™»P'ers 9 and 17 below.
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
* Congress for Cultural Freedom, Sc™* and Freedom (London; Martin Seeker & Warburg.
Ltd., 1955). p. 47. Another statement of the difference between the university and bufine
organisations appears in Association o f American Universities, The Rights and Responsibilities oj
Universities and Their Faculties. March 1953, reprinted in the University Bulletin of the University fl
California, vol. I, no. 33, April 20, 1953, pp. 162-64. See also the debate in Minerva, 1963 an<l
1964. by Michael Polanyi. Stephen Toulmin, C. F. Carter, and Alvin M . Weinberg; C. F. Carte’
“The Distribution of Scientific Effort". Minerva, vol. 1, 1963. pp. 171-172; Michael Polanyi, ”
Republic of Science—-Jis Political and Economic Theory”, Minerva, vol. I , 1963, pp. 54-*
Stephen Toulmin. "The Complexity of Scientific Choice: A Stocktaking", Minerva, vol. 2. 1964. p
343; and Alvin M Weinberg “Criteria for Scientific Choice”. Minerva, vol. 1. 1963, pp. 159-17 1.
96
WHY DO PROFESSORS LIKE KUHN SO MUCH?
William Broad and Nicholas Wade, Artagrrs of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit 1*1 dir Hails *}/
Simon and Schuster, 1982). Sec also "Nobel winner's research to be probed
’Whistle-blowers pay the piper" in The San Francisco Chronicle, April 10. 1988, p. A-3.
97
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
North also points out that even those who discuss such matters
often wrongly assume that property rights are perfectly and costless-
ly specified and enforced, i.e., they assume zero transaction costs
and no externalities. Others, however, have seen matters more
realistically. The sociologist Robert K. Merton has noticed the
roughneck character of academic behaviour, although he does not
put it in economic terms.’ Sir Karl Popper has described the history
• See Proceeding! of the Seventh /ntematumaJ Economic Hillary Congreu. ed. Michael Flinn, op.
dt., p. 211. See also Michael Ricketts. “The New Institutional Economics and the Structure of the
Firm". Economic Affain, April/May 1989. pp. 23-26. One thinker willing to pay the costs of
attempting to enforce priority and intellectual property rights has been Popper. H e had to pay
dearly — through “retaliation by conspiracy of silence", by further plagiarism, and by deliberate,
systematic misreporting of his ideas — for his priority controversy with Neurath (started by
Neurath, after Neurath had plagiarised from him); for helping Tarski to defend himself against
an attempt by Carnap to plagiarise his work; and for his own accusations of plagiarism against
Carnap. Lakatos, Reichenbach and others (sec Part Hl below). There is an alleged social
convention amongst academics (rationalised as if for the sake of modesty and generally called o n
only to dismiss or chastise the claims of others) that one not make claims about the originality of
one's own work. To the extent that this convention is imposed, it outweighs the sense of owner
ship and increases the cost of enforcing any claim. I t is rather as in Austria after the abolition of
titles in 1919. Others might be expected to refer to one by one's title (there was no law against
that), but one could not so refer to oneself. Deployed in conjunction with this convention is the
myth that intellectual innovation is, these days, always a result of team work.
' Merton, in “Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science". Amen
can Sociological Review, vol. 22. December 1957. pp. 635-59; and Campbell, "The Universities and
National Priorities", address a l Stanford Campus Conference on Relevance, May 22. 1971. op. cit
Like many academics. I have myself often been slandered (but not so often as 1 have been
plagiarised) The most amusing example of slander was provided by a certain Bernd Frohmann
98
WHY DO PROFESSORS LIKE KUHN SO MUCH?
*hu in the 1987 Russell. having misread my IFiHgmrtrtn and ignored the evidence, including
evidence from Wittgensteins own pen, described my book as “discredited" and me as “the
Lyndon Larouche of professional philosophy”* Should 1 sue the man (who, for all I know, may
have no assets anyway)— and give up my time for research and writing for the next year or so?
Better to refer others to his article and let them enjoy the human spectacle. Sec my
second edition, op. dt. See Frohmann, Russell, vol. 7, no. I, Summer 1987, and Frohmann s
exchange with David Ramsay Steele in Russell, vol. 8. no. 2, Winter 1987-88. Russell declined to
print other replies to Frohmann, a member of the Russell archives staff. Bertrand Russell, if his
philosophy did not prohibit such behaviour, would be spinning in his grave. For a defence of my
position see William H. Gass's review of Brian McGuinness’s 4 Lt/r m A Life at
Death’s Door”, The New Republic. May I . 1989. pp. 35-40.
* Op. ql Sec also Jean Lindenmann, "Lcichen im .Schrank der Wisserwehaft? C her e
c mtwortung von Mitautoren”, Neue Ziirther Zeitung, April 1, 1987.
* Richard B. McKenzie, The Political Economy of the Educational Process (The Hague: Mar tin us
‘ ‘jhoff, 1979), chapter seven; Charles J . Sykes, ProfScam: Professors and the Demise o/ ig - r
ucaiton (Washington, D.C.: Rcgnery Gateway, 1988).
99
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
The market for ideas is the market in which the intellectual con-
ducts his trade. . . . Self-esteem leads the intellectuals to magnify
the importance of their own market." That others should be regu-
lated seems natural, particularly as many of the intellectuals see
themselves as doing the regulating. But self-interest combines with
self-esteem to ensure that while others are regulated, that regula-
'• See his remarks as quoted in K . R. Popper and Konrad Lorenz, Dir Zukunft ut offtn: Dai
AUmbrrgrr Gnfrriuh ml dm Trxtrn drs Wimrr Popprr-Sympmmmi, ed. Franz Kreuzer (Munich and
ZOrich: Piper Verlag. 1985). On the development of the commercial morality and traditions that
created the conditions for civilisation, see F. A. Hayek. Tht Fatal Concrd. op. cit.
11
Op. cit.
” This is so even of many free-market intellectuals, who do not hesitate to quote the devil
when useful. Thus one of the few Keynesian sentiments generally approved by free-market
thinkers is Lord Keynes’s declaration, in the famous closing passage of Thr Gmrral Thran, that
“the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they arc
wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else."
But are ideas really so influential? Almost all economists are in favor of free trade, and the
evidence is all o n their side; yet the idea of free trade has, recently, faltered more than it has for
many decades. What are we to conclude? That the marketplace of ideas has not been free and
open? Or that decisions arc being made elsewhere, without much reference to that particular
100
WHY DO PROFESSORS LIKE KUHN SO MUCH?
“ National Review. op. dt., p, 1096. Sec also Aaron Director. “The Parity of the Economic
Market Mace", Journal of Law and Economics 7, October 1964, pp. 1-10. See also George J. Stigler's
The Intellectual and the Marketplcue, enlarged edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
•An example of academic contempt for free speech in practice is the attempt made at Stanford
during 1989 by some students and faculty to impose a "Fundamental Standard” on campus
speech, requiring all speech to conform to "accepted community standards" on questions such as
race relations and relations among the sexes. One student complained that "uv don't put as many
restrictions on freedom of speech as uv should". We! Sec Richard Starr. " I n Dire Meed of Reality
Therapy ", Insight, May 22. 1989. p. 64, The debate is not concluded as I write this. As another
example see the report of the academic ostracism of Lord Bauer in Forbes,February 22. 1988.
H
11100105 L. Haskell. ACLS Newsletter 36, Summer-Fall 1985. p. 11 (italics mine). Further
evidence of antipathy to competition within universities comes from ’’Collegiality and Responsibility
n
* Academu Governance-, a statement (opposing awards to faculty based on scholarly merit)
prepared by the Executive Committee of the Academic Senate of the California State University
and presented to its Board of Trustees. 9-10 July. 1985: “ I n order to function as a community of
scholars, the faculty within its own ranks must necessarily practice collegiality, grounded in mutual
respect for their diverse professional and disciplinary expertise . . . . The introduction of collective
bargaining into matters of salary, benefits, and related aspects of faculty employment has brought
'**th it a procedure that, because of industrial precedents, is adversarial. That adversarial
characteristic must not permeate the remaining areas of educational policy development, which
nnoi be achieved in an atmosphere of polarization", The Academu Senator: Newsletter of the
Academic Senate,The California State I'ntvenU). November 1985. p. 5. There is indeed little of the
jyarkrt (here called "industrial precedent") in university settings. When the faculty unionizes, as it
done here, it is to make it more guild-like, less open to competition from within or without.
Adversarial, i.e., competitive, activity for "merit awards" is to be punished, not rewarded.
101
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
In this country [the USA] the educational reformers who played the
key roles in establishing the academic disciplines within which we
work today . . . regarded the establishment of specialized profes-
sional disciplines as a way of defending certain ideas of the good,
the true, and the beautiful against what they perceived as corrosive
competition. In their eyes, academic professionalization was a defen-
sive and culturally conservative measure, though also an immensely
hopeful one, for it was designed to create safe havens for sound
opinion in a mass society that threatened to withhold deference
from even the highest values . . . . Many of the academic profes-
sionalizers in this country saw professionalization as a conservative
cultural reform, a way of ameliorating what might be described as
an ‘epistemological crisis', or, at any rate, a ‘crisis of authority'.
" Mikhail S. Bernstam, “Bleeding Hearts and Liquid Assets: Seeking Rent on Public Goods",
in Modem Age. Spring-Summer 1986, and Letter, in Commentary. June 1985. pp. 9-13.
'* A good example is Karl Marx himself. See Leopold Schwarzschild, Karl Man: The Red
Prussian (London: Pickwick Books, 1988), new edition with an introduction by Antony Flew.
1
See Armen A. Alchian, “Private Property and the Relative Cost of Tenure”, in Philip D
Bradley, ed.. The Public Stake m Unum Power (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1959).
pp. 350-371.
102
WHY DO PROFESSORS LIKE KUHN SO MUCH?
cure their own positions and to corner the market, and thus to
remove, not create, a free market in ideas.18 Whatever the goal may
be, some 80 percent of faculty members now hold tenured appoint-
ments.
11
“Academic freedom'', as developed in Germany, was different from what is understixid by
that term today. There, professors, who were civil servants paid by the stale, were granted
freedom to teach their subject matter as (hey wished — provided that they refrained from
questioning die faith, morals, and politics of dteir society. See Walter Kaufmann, The Future of the
Humanities (New York: Reader's Digest Press. 1977).
•• Ian C. Jarvie, "Popper on the Difference between the Natural and the Social Sciences".
an
d W. W. Bartley, 111, “A Popperian Harvest", in Paul Levinson, cd.. In Pursuit of Truth: Essays
ni
Honour of Kart Popper's 80th Birthday (New York: Humanities Press, 1982), pp. 83-107 and 249*
*8® respectively.
See his “Explanation, Reduction and the Sociological Turn in the Philosophy of Science—
ur K u h n as Ideologue for Merton's Theory of Science", in Gerard Radniuky, cd., The Unity of the
v
°h I l (New York: Paragon House. 1989). See also I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi,
®deMes. Footnotes and Problems", in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 16 (1986), pp- 367-74.
” Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2 n d edition, enlarged (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. 1970).
103
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
into the spirit of sociology (which I do not recommend, but two can
play this game) and appeals to a sociological measure—the citation
index—one finds that Kuhn is one of the most frequently cited
contemporary authors. If one bears in mind that the basic Kuhnian
ideas stem from Ludwig Wittgenstein—who is also amongst those
most often cited—one gains, if only in sociological terms, some
impression of the influence of the ideas underlying Kuhn’s work.
Many people praise Kuhn not only for having realistically described
life in the various scientific disciplines, but also for having appreciated
that it could not be otherwise.22
What sort of report does Kuhn give? Is it of a marketplace of
ideas? Hardly. Kuhn reports a milieu in which nothing resembling a
market operates, and he ignores economic explanations almost
entirely. Kuhn might have investigated institutions of learning from
an economic rather than a sociological point of view, but he did
not.2’ Both Kuhn and Wittgenstein (the latter will be discussed in
chapter 14 below) have created philosophies which justify and
rationalise entrenchment and reduce competition.
As Kuhn’s views are usually reported, he is supposed to have
attacked “idealised” accounts of science (such as Popper’s). Such
accounts emphasise the parallel between the growth of science and
biological evolution and natural selection, and claim that scientific
ideas are subjected to sharp competition, that science is a revolu-
tionary activity dedicated to pursuing truth by overthrowing error,
and that unsuccessful ideas are weeded out by confronting them
with difficulties, such as contrary evidence. Kuhn, by contrast, is
supposed to have described how science really proceeds. On his ac-
count, most of science is bound by precedent, tradition, and com-
mitment to reigning paradigms that are guarded, licensed, and
franchised by scientific elites, elites concerned to train, indoctrinate,
supervise, socialise and politicise initiates into the scientific enter-
prise. The main activity for which initiates are to be trained is the
solving of relatively minor problems—the word is “puzzles”—set by.
and in conformity with, the reigning “paradigm". Intellectual revolu-
tion is a rarity, likely to be more disruptive than enlightening.
” An exception is the Nobel prize-winning economist George J. Stigler, who has noticed t hu l
Kuhn’s views are not falsifiable and come close to being (autologous. See his TAe Economist <*'
Preacher and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1982). pp. 112-1 14.
n
Kuhn's personal association with the sociologist Robert Merton, and the deep influrm*
exerted on him by Wittgenstein, as purveyed to him by his colleague Stanley Cavell, may ha' 1’
contributed to his preference for sociological to economic explanations.
10-1
WHY DO PROFESSORS LIKE K U H N SO MUCH?
l
h»t - n t h e Incommensurability Thesis”. See J . O. Wisdom's very brief and indsive essay of
» • , n w hkh Ote position is refuted, in Philoyyfthual Studies, vol. 25, 1974. pp. 299-301.
* r ,n politicisation of university studies, see Sidney Hook, “Intellectual Rot", op, cit.
, °tnas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension, op. oL
105
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
n
My hero Ronald H. Coase, in another lecture, finds it “strange*’ that such a normative-
theory should be offered, objecting (although to Milton Friedman not Popper) that “What we arc
given is not a theory of how economists, in fact, choose between competing theories but . . . how
they ought to choose". (See Ronald H. Coase. How Should Economists Choose*, The G. Warren
Nutter Lectures in Political Economy (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1982), p. 8.)
That Friedman and Popper both speak of “the aim of science" in this connection in no way
conflicts, as Coase misleadingly suggests, with the principle that only individuals have goals. After
all Popper is an ardent champion of methodological individualism (see The Poverty of Historicism,
op. tit.). Thus Popper opens his classic article on “The Aim of Science” with these words: "To
speak of ’the aim’ of scientific activity may perhaps sound a little naive; for clearly, different
scientists have different aims, and science itself (whatever that may mean) has no aims. I admit all
Oils. And yet . . . ", For Popper's defence of his usage, see Objective Knowledge,op. tit.. Chapter 5
One may. without violating the principle of methodological individualism, attempt to describe
practices and institutions that would be needed in order for individuals who wanted to maximin
their understanding of the world to be able to succeed—just as one may describe the law and in-
stitutions needed for individuals wanting to maximise other kinds of wealth to succeed. If thc
diesis with which I opened this chapter is correct, these descriptions would overlap greatly—or hr
part of a common enterprise.
On some other occasion, 1 should like to analyse Coast's argument in detail. Meanwhile, ibe
reader is referred to Ian C. Jarvie’s review of M. Blaug, The Methodology of Economics (Cambridge
Cambridge University Press, 1980), in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 34 (1983), pl’
106
WHY DO PROFESSORS LIKE KUHN SO MUCH?
Yet even sensible academics have fallen for Kuhn. Ronald Coase,
jn the lecture cited (p. 16), does not see matters as I do. He argues,
with Kuhn, that to ignore discrepancies between theory and fact is
“more efficient". Efficient for what purpose? To perpetuate the
profession? Or to advance knowledge? Coase’s suggestion is wholly
uneconomic. He gives no evidence for it, and it is also countered by
some of the evidence that he himself, in the same lecture, brings
from the history of economics.
A qualification is in order —and it is possible that this is what
Coase was thinking of when he wrote these lines. It is true (and a
part of Popperian normative methodology) that one should not
necessarily immediately abandon an apparently enlightening and
powerful theory when a contradiction or other difficulty in it crops
up— particularly when this happens early in the life of the theory,
before its content and power have been investigated in depth. The
differential calculus, when first put forward by Newton and Leibniz,
was full of contradictions. Had scientists abandoned it—as Bishop
Berkeley had urged in his Analyst— the loss to science would have
been great. But scientists and mathematicians did not ignore these
contradictions; they did not suppress them; they did not “abandon
critical discourse” relating to them. Rather, they developed and
transformed the differential calculus so as to overcome its initial
difficulties. Indeed, speaking simply of the "differential calculus", as
if it were essentially the same theory before and after these modifi-
cations, is anachronistic.
Josef Poschl and Gareth Locksley, taking as their example not
mathematics but economic theory, see clearly where a Kuhnian
approach can lead.'79 They report:
107
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
108
WHY DO PROFESSORS LIKE KUHN SO MUCH?
11
Janie, op. cit.. italics mine.
” Numerous examples could be given, perhaps most conspicuously the "Edinburgh School”
etiology of knowledge led by Barnes and Bloor. Barnes is the author of a study of Kuhn s
*nrk. See also my discussion of the Wingensteinian problematic in chapter H below.
* Alvin M. Weinberg. “How the Scientific Marketplace Works" (Institute for Energy .Analysis.
Ridge), 1987. mimeographed. In opposition to Weinberg's position see Simon Rottenberg
'University of Massachusetts). "The Economic Approach Applied to Science Policy".
JJWneograplied. and Hans Otto Lenel (University of Mainz), "Comment on Weinberg and
Rottenberg; Introductory Statements". 1987. mimeographed.
109
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
M
Harold 1. Brown, Perception, Theory and Commitment: The New Philosophy of Science (Chicago
Precedent, 1977),
“ Sec also Barry Barnes and David Bloor. "Relativism. Rationalism and the Sociology
Knowledge", MS, 1980, p. 5, quoted in Jarvic, "A Plague on Both Your Houses", op. tit.
On Wittgenstein — and o n the assumptions behind his approach and Kuhn's— sec chapter
110
Chapter 7
WHAT IS THE ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF
OUR RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS?
Tenure is neither necessary nor efficient. Its survival de-
pends upon the absence of private ownership. . . . Compe-
tition amongst schools, teachers, and students provides
protection to the search for truth without tenure.
Armen A. Alchian1
1
Armen A. Alchian, “Private Property and die Relative Cost of Tenure", in Philip D.
Bradley, ed., Tht Public Stake in Union Power (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1959), p
To sec how little effect Akhian's argument has had o n the professorate, see J . J . Thomson,
Burton S. Drcben. Eric Holtzman, B. Robert Krcisler, “Academic Freedom and Tenure: Corporate
Funding of Academic Research", Jcod/mc, vol. 67, November- December 1983. pp. I8a-23a. See
Howard R. Bowen and Jack H . Schuster, .4wncan Professors: .4 National Resource Imperiled
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), a n d John Braeman's critical review of it, "Financing
Knowledge Industry". The World and I, May 1987, pp. 394-404.
* James M. Buchanan a n d Nicos E. Devletoglou, /fradrsma in Anarchy; .4n Economic Diagnosis
( -ondon: Basic Books, 1970). Trustees do, however, fix prices. See "Educated Moves: Elite Private
leges Routinely Share Plans for Raising Tuition. Saying It's Done Openly. They Deen Price-
Probe; Critics Charge ’Arrogance*", The Wail Street Journal, September 5 , 1989. p. 1. I n this
fQ t. C c Chester E. Finn Jr., former Education Department aide, is quoted as stating: "Colleges feel
5
shouldn't be making price decisions when it comes to deciding where to go to college. And
’F want to. [the colleges) won't let them."
35g e Fl. Geoffrey Brennan and Robert D. Tollison. "Rent-Seeking in Academia", pp 344-
• and, for a more general study of economic behaviour in bureaucracies and other non-
thJPp P t a r y • ctt n g 5 « sre Armen A. Alchian and Reuben A. Kessel, “Competition, Monopoly, and
Ur
p *uit of Money*, in Aspccb of labor Economics, ed H . Gregg Lewis, et al, (Princeton
■Won University Press. 1962). pp. 157-175.
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
* See my “Facts & Fictions"*. Encounter, January 1986. pp. 77-78, and Part 111 below. The
matter is also discussed in the Introduction to the Japanese translation o f my Wittgenstein, op. d t
• Use of curriculum requirements to manipulate supply and demand is explicitly endorsed b '
Howard Bowen and J. Schuster, of Claremont, in a study financed by the Carnegie and Ford
Foundations, and by Exxon. T1AA and CREF. Sec the report in The United Professors of California
Advocate X V I I , November 1986, p. 4. See Gareth B. Matthews, American Philosophical Association
letter to Departmental Chairman, September 1985: "The Board of Officers of the A.P.A. believe*
that it is important for professional philosophers to be consulted in the development of curricula
and tests in critical thinking".
112
THE ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF OUR RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS
113
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
• See George Steiner. "America as the Archive of Eden”. Times Higher Education Supplemcni.
March 6. 1981. pp. 12-13, and also "Archives of Eden", Salmagundi, Autumn 1980, which contains
replies to Steiner's paper.
* In short, they remain as Adam Smith described them in The Wealth of Nations, Book V,
Part III. In describing them as feudal I am not referring to the content of the ideologies and
political ideas held generally within them. These may well tend towards a watered-down socialism
or Marxism, as is often maintained, but this question is not our concern here. See John Marconi.
Jr., "Britain's 'Oxbridge' Suffers Lack of Funds, Brain Drain; To Government, Oxford and
(aimbridge Universities Are Socialist Bulwark", The Wall Street Journal, August 18. 1988.
’ This view is not widely shared by university intellectuals. Thus James N. Rossc. Vice
President and Provost of Stanford University, defends the freshman requirement in "Cultures.
Ideas and Values" as part of the provision for a marketplace of ideas. See "Stanford and the
Marketplace of Ideas". Wall Street Journal. February 24. 1989. See Sidney Hook's critique of the
underlying conceptions of “Culture, Ideas and Values", and an implicit reply to Rossc. in "The
Politics of Curriculum Building". Measure. January 1 989.
114
THE ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OE OUR RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS
One of the most ironic uses of course requirements is to compel students in schools and
Universities to take courses in democracy. I f students were permitted to choose their courses more
“eely. they would have something of die rxpmrnrt of democracy.
* According to Kenneth H . Keller. President of the University of Minnesota, die “tyranny of
departments" makes it very difficult to make curricular revisions "except as minor modifications to
essentially disciplinary programs". Sec the report of his David M . Mason Lecture, “Universities
sdvised to counter ‘tyranny of depanmenu'", in The Campus Report, Stanford University.
115
Chapter 8
T H E ENTRENCHMENT O F FALSE P H I L O S O P H I E S
l g7 W, Glenn Campbell, "The Universities and National Priorities', speech given on 22 May
* Stanford Campus Conference on Relevance, mimeographed.
p, Ludwig von Mises, Ept lemologwai Problems of Economm (New York: New York University
’ 9 8 l hpp . I8JM .
Sidney Self, "Government, university bureaucracies squander research money, prof.
« Campus Report, Stanford. June 10, 1987, p. 20.
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
but of professors who must (or think they must) publish or perish?
The bulk of this publication is of little worth, consisting chiefly of
misreadings, and is well known to be so by those immersed in it.’
Which is one of several reasons why it is, for the most part, not
read. As to size, Claire Friedland and George Stigler report, after
studying the record of doctors in economics of major American
universities, that in the first fifteen years after receiving the 1’h.l).,
one-third do not publish a single article and the median journal
output of those who do publish is about two articles. “For the
profession as a whole", as Stigler concludes, “the output of articles is
probably one per economist per 20 years."6 Studies of the output of
' Among the first to remark that the increase in sire of the academic establishment did not
imply a necessary increase in quality, in "pushing back the frontiers of knowledge", or in other
public benefit were Karl Popper and W. Glenn Campbell, former Director of the Hoover
Institution on War. Revolution and Peace, an institute for advanced studies in the social sciences
at Stanford University. See K. R. Popper, "University Expansion: Threat to Literacy", report in
Times Educational Supplement. January 20, 1961, p. 98. In his address on May 22. 1971 at the
Stanford Campus Conference on Relevance, "'lite Universities and National Priorities", op. cit..
Camptwll asked whether the university sets an example for other sections of society to imitate and
follow. The answer suggested in the present paper is, like Campbell's, an emphatic "No".
* To give one pertinent example of casual misreading (which, to a writer, is akin to casual
murder), Brian J. Loasby writes: “lite knowledge thus produced is better regarded as ttuersubjer
live than objective (which is Popper's preferred adjective) . . . *. See "Public Science and Public
Knowledge". Research OS the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, vol. 4. 1986. pp. 211-228.
esp. p. 220. What Popper actually writes is: "The objectivity of scientific statements lies in the fact
that they can be imer-subjectrvely tested." See K. R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit..
p. 44.
The best evidence that people are aware that scholarly publication is so full of misreading is
perhaps that it is not much read. See my “facts and Fictions", Encounter. January 1986. Studies
have shown that only about half of one percent of the articles published in journals of chemistry
are read by any one chemist. Studies of reading amongst psychologists give closely comparable
results. See Robert K. Merton, "The Matthew Effect in Science", Science, vol. 159, January 5,
>968. pp. 56-63. As to the quality of the material published, see the comment by Arnold Reiman,
editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (as reported in The San Francisco Chronicle, May 15
1989, p. A l l ) : "Almost anything people want to publish, if it’s not grossly in error or grossly
untrue, will get published somewhere." As reported in the same article, politicians, having become
aware of the problem, arc now eager to do something about it. But how would they know how to
judge academic articles better? Thus the reaction of the editor of the British Medical Journal is
plainly silly. He stales: "If we don’t put our house in order, then, believe me, those chaps on
Capitol Hill and in the House of Commons will." Government is of course often happy to
interfere, but will hardly pul any scientific—or political — house tn order. For another report ol
the threat of government intervention to "correct" scientific abuses, see Warren E. Leary.
"Business and Scholarship: A New Ethical Quandary", New Fork Times, June 12, 1989, pp. 1, 11
* See George J. Stigler: The Economist as Preacher and Other Essays, op. di., p, 61. The finding'
of Stigler and Friedland do not vary much from a variety of similar studies in other profession*
A study of the publication record of sodologists shows that, among members of the sample
studied (the sample consisted of all those who earned their doctorates between 1945 and 1949).
for the period 1940 through 1959. six percent had no periodical publication, 31 percent had one
to three articles. 12 percent had four or five articles, another 12 percent had from six to nine
articles. 7 percent from 10 to 14 articles, and 3 percent had 15 or more. See Nicholas Babchuk
and Alan p. Bates, “Professor or Producer: The Two Faces of Academic Man", in Social Forces,
118
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FA1.SE PHILOSOPHIES
May 1962. pp. 341-48. Similarly, in an earlier study laigan Wilson reports (The Academe Man
(New York: Oxford University Press. 1942). p. 108) that “A survey of 35 lesser institutions found
, . . that only 32 percent of all staff members made any contribution to printed literature over a
five-year period, and that die median number of contributions was only 1.3 items. An inquiry
conducted by the American Historical Association . . . revealed that only 25 percent of the doctors
of philosophy in history are consistent producers. Similarly, 'among 1,888 persons in the United
Stales who look the Ph.D. in mathematics between 1862 and 1933, after graduation 46 percent
prepared no published papers; 19 percent only one paper; 8 percent only two papers; 11 percent
three to five papers; 6 percent six to 10 papers; 2 percent 21 io 30 papers; and 2 percent more
than 30 papers'. These figures indicate that if the average academician in the typical college or
university depended on his quantitative scholarly output for employee advancement, in rank and
status, the hierarchical pyramid would show very few members at or near the top. The actual
situation in such institutions proves, therefore, that the research function is not participated in
extensively by most (acuity members.” See Babchuk and Bates, footnote 8, for further figures.
The results of these relatively early studies are confirmed by recent findings. See Yoram
Neumann and Lily Neumann. "Research Indicators and Departmental Outcomes: A Comparison
of Four Academic Fields", in International Social Science Review, Spring 1982, pp. 94-97; and
Michael H. MacRoberts and Barbara R. MacRoberts, “A Re-evaluation of Lotka's Law of Scientific
Productivity”, in Social Studies of Science 12, August 1982, pp. 443-450. Ernst Boyer finds that 60
percent of faculty members have never published or edited a book in their field. See his "The
Faculty: Deeply Troubled”, Change, September-October 1985, p. 34. See also Martin J. Finkelstein.
The American Academic Profession: .4 Syniteu of Social Scientific Inquiry Since World War II (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1986). “ I b e American academic profession”, Finkelstein writes, "is
essentially a teaching as opposed to a scholarly profession", and records that more than half of all
professors devote fewer than five hours a week to research, and that more than a third admit
dial they do no research at all.
’ See also Derek J, de Sofia Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University
Press. 1963), and Barbara F. Reskin, “Scientific Productivity and the Reward Structure of
Science". American Sociological Review. vol. 42. June 1977, pp. 491-564, esp. p. 492. By mentioning
these examples, which relate chiefly to publication. I do not want to endorse the uneconomic and
fallacious assumption, so often found in sociological studies of research, that one's goal should be
output” and "production". For output sometimes represents no growth or development at all.
a
nd output for its own sake — regardless of demand, interest, or usefulness —can he pointless or
oven counterproductive, rather like the continuing manufacture of steel when it is a glut on the
market or the continuing mining of unproductive mines for die sake of keeping miners in the
Joi's that they are used to.
Nor should the counting of publications be taken too seriously. For example. Reskin, just cited,
'’’eluded from her study of scientific productivity among chemists (as she reveals in passing, and
’’•plains only in a footnote) unpublished work, books and patents. She explained that “books
119
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
represent a very small parr of sample members' publications". No doubt: comparatively fe»
persons publish books. But to ignore such paramount example of productivity, even among
chemists, distorts understanding of scholarly activity. That the omission of patents distorts het
findings she herself acknowledges. (See "Where scientists fear to tread: Peter Medawar accuses hi’
colleagues of lacking the nerve to write books —and tells of those which have most influenced
him", in Times Higher Education Supplement, September 25, 1987, p. 119.)
Nor do I want to endorse the use made by such sociologists of “citation counts”, for citations
are biased towards those who agree with one, or are a part of “accepted and acceptable" sources
from one's own point of view, and thus frequently omit reference to creative challengers to one ’
point of view. In the case of extremely threatening rival viewpoints, there may even occur whs*
can only be described as a conspiracy of silence. For a study of some of these issues see I 1
Jarvie, op. dt.
' Essay by Christopher Rathbone, The Times Higher Education Supplement, February 8, 1980- P
10.
* John Marcom Jr., "Britain's 'Oxbridge' Suffers Lack of Funds, Brain Drain: To Govern
ment. Oxford and Cambridge Universities Are Sodaiist Bulwark", op. dt.
" See Waller Kaufmann. The future of the Humanities (New York: Readers' Digest Pr* ’
1977), p. S8.
120
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
See his "Inputs. Outputs, and the Prestige of University Science Departments", in Sociology
vol. 44, 1971, pp. S75-S97. See also his "Competition in Science", .4mmrun Socuilogical
ttti '■ V °' S9, Fcbruar
Y 1974. pp. 1-18. A more plausible statement from die same period, con-
on competition in physics rather than in universities in general, is found in Jerry
ton, “Secretiveness and Competition for Priority of Discovery in Phvsics", Minerva, vol. 9 ,
1971, p p 472-492.
Sc
n ,, e Henry Rosovsky, "Our Universities Arc the World’s Best: Highest Education". The New
July i s and 20. 1987, pp. 13-14.
121
UN FATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
122
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
topetor David Strauss was dismissed from his post at the University of TObingen. and the
“"'nation for him to take a chair at the University of Zurich aroused so much opposition that it
had
to be dropped.
y ’ See Friedrich Paulsen. The German L’ntvmitus: Then Character and Historical Development (New
v Or'r . : Macmillan and Co., 1895). pp. 6f., and The German Universities and University Study (New
* Charles Scribner s Sons. 1906).
123
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
” Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1983).
” See GOntrr Wachtershauser. “Light and Life: On the Nutritional Origins of Sense
Perception", in Gerard Radnitzky and W. W. Bartley, 111. Evolutionary Epistemology. Rationality. anti
the Sociology of Knowledge, op. dL, pp. 121-138; “An all-purine precursor of nucleic acids”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 85. pp. 1134-1135, February 1988; "Pyrite
Formation: the First Energy Source for Life: a Hypothesis". Systematic and Applied Microbiology, vol
10, 1988, pp. 207-210; "Before Enzymes and Templates: Theory of Surface Metabolism", Microbio-
logical Reviews. vol 52, December 1988; and C. R. Woese and GOnter Wachtershauser, "The
Origin of Life", Encyclopedia of Paleobiology.1989.
124
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
“ Alan Wood. Bertrand Russell, the Passumale Sreptic (New York: Simon and Schuster. 195ft). p
125
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
126
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
See reviews of The Fatal Conceit, op. cit. including: "The Fatal Conceit by F. A, Hayek: A
Special Symposium”, Humane Studies Review, vol. 6, no. 2, Winter 1988-89; “Der Socialism us ah
intellektucllei Irrwnf, Neue lurcher Zeitung, 26 October 1988, p. 35; Robert Hetlbroner. “A
Conservative Credo”, The Nation, April 17, 1989, p. 525; Thomas Sowell, "The Moral Glue",
faawn, December 1988, pp. 35-37; Peter F. Drucker, "Understanding Socialism's Failure”, Insight,
Ms
*v 15. 1989. p. 63; Ronald Bailey. “The World Turns”, Forbes, May 15. 1989, pp. 43-44; David
5; Henderson, " W h y Socialism Isn't Dead", Fortune, May 8, 1989, pp. 159-160; Tom Bethell.
Evolutionary Economics". National Review, May 5, 1989, pp. 50-51; Edward H . Crane, "World
Wording to Hayek". The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 1989; Ralph Harris, "Socialism a mis-
take— official". The Sunday Telegraph, November 20, 1988; "The 'champion oF capitalism’ — the
Uected works of economist Hayek". Pubhrk Enterprise, Annapolis, March I , 1989; Hans Middcl-
tnann, "Hayek, the messiah of the market", Buswsj Day. May 12. 1989,
127
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
The case of music is similar: it is, for the most part, taught and
performed, but not created, within the university. There have been
some exceptions, such as Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Leon
Kirchner, but many contemporary composers consider a university
professorship as almost a stigma.
A few great architects have taught in universities. Thus Gropius
and van der Rohe, when fugitives from Hitler’s Germany, took
university jobs in America while re-establishing themselves. But
Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, and Le Corbusier were not profes-
sors. Indeed, Frank Lloyd Wright could not get his school ol
iZh** R“*>cn Beich. "Economics Can't Explain Everything". Wall Strut Journal, January
128
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
” Amongst these I would place those aspects of philosophy which deal with epistemological
ar
*d methodological questions.
M
Irving Louis Horowitz, "In Defense of Scientific Autonomy: The Two Cultures Revisited",
dcudrmir Quntwns, vol. 2. 1, Winter 1988419, pp. 22-26.
129
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
I should like to give just a few examples to argue the claim that
our universities serve for the entrenchment of false ideologies or
philosophies. The false philosophies that I have in mind (which
sometimes present themselves as sciences rather than as philoso-
phies) are found not only in departments of philosophy, but in most
of the arts and in some of the sciences: they include Wittgensteinian
“analytic" philosophy, logical positivism, phenomenology and herme-
neutics (the view that the world consists of variant misreadings),
behaviourism, pragmatism, determinism, and scientism. The academ-
ic disciplines that diey shape most deeply include physics (especially
in the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics); psych-
ology; sociology; intellectual history and the history of science;
anthropology; literary criticism and the theory of art; and also
professional economics. 27
“ See Antony Flew, Power to the Parente; Reversing Educational Decline (London: Sherwood.
1987).
* David Riesman, “Ethical and Practical Dilemmas of Fieldwork in Academic Settings: A
Personal Memoir”, in Robert K, Merton, James S, Coleman, and Peter H. Rossi, eds., Qualitative
and Quantitative Social Research: Papers in Honor of Paul F. Lazarfeld (New York: The Free Press.
1979), pp. 210-231, csp. pp. 223 and 225.
n
It is curious to find Austrian economists embracing hermeneutics. Hermeneutics has some
of its most important roots in, as well as sharing some of the fundamental theses of, Hiitonsrntv.
which was the main object of Carl Menger’s methodological attack, and the main subject of die
MethoderutreU. It is relativist, idealist (anti-realist), authoritarian, and romanticist in many of
manifestations. Most of its major proponents have embraced political opinions radically opposed
by the founders and traditional leaders of Austrian economics. Thus Herbert Marcuse and mos(
the members of the Frankfurt School were Marxists; Jurgen Habermas and Paul Ricocur rt'
socialists; and Heidegger was, for a time, a leading Nazi. When, after Hitler’s rise to power. Lord
Beveridge (then Sir William, and Director of the London School of Economics), negotiated a
130
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
contract with the Frankfurt School that would have brought them and their library to the LSE,
Lionel (later Lord) Robbins (then a follower of Austrian economics) learned of Beveridge’s
negotiations at the very last minute when he by chance went into Beveridge’s office. Robbins
immediately ran to Hayek's office at the LSE to enlist his support, and they intervened successful-
ly to thwart Beveridge's plan. There is only one intellectual ancestor of any importance that
Austrian economics and hermeneutics could be said to share —this is Max Weber; and Weber can
•* construed as an ancestor of hermeneutics only by neglecting most of his later methodological
*ntings. whereas most of contemporary hermeneutics would be deeply antithetical to the entire
wust of his thought.
r cr t c snu
w° ‘
. sec *Hans Albert, Treatise onphilosophy
of hermeneutic Cvtiical Reason, the point
from trans- Popper’s
view ofRorty
Mary*of Varney "critical Princeton
(Princeton: rational-
diversity Press, 1985); Hans Albert, "Critical Rationalism: The Problem of Method in Social
Pnccs and Law", Ratio Juris, voL 1, March 1988, pp. 1-19, and, especially, Albert's "Hennencu-
3n< conornics:
Ittft A Criticism of Hermeneutical Thinking in the Sexrial Sciences” , Kuklos, vol. 41,
fas< 4, pp. 573-602. Sec also the essays by Peter Munz and Gerard Radnitzky in G.
nitzky and W. W. Bartley, I I I , eds., Evolutionary Epistemology. Rationality, and the Sociology of
op. dt. On Hans-Georg Gadamer, see Jonathan Barnes, "A Kind of Integrity", in
don Review of Books, November 6, 1986, pp. 12-13; on Habermas see Roger Scruton, "Thinkers
£ jOrgen Habermas", Salisbury Review, October 1984, pp. 22-27.
gg- $ ce J- Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p.
131
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
" See my The Retreat to Commitment, op. etc, and my "Rationality versus the Theory of
Rationality", in Mario Bunge, ed.. The Cntual Approach to Science and Philosophy (New York: Free
Press, 1964), and chapter 14 below.
** I n a graduate paper, never published, arguing the structural similarities between (hr
philosophy of Heidegger and American neo-pragmatism. as represented in the work of C. I
Lewis.
11
The way in which justificationism works to diminish criticism is explained in the introduc-
tion to the second edition of my The Retreat to Commitment, op. ciu
132
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
** See my Lrwu Carroll's Symbolic Logic (New York; Clarkton N. Poller, lnc„ 1977. second
billon, 1986). pp. 23-27; and my Wingmslern , 2nd edition, op. cit., pp. 58-60.
133
UNFA! HOMED KNOWLEDGE
M
Sec William 11100135 Thornton, On Labour (London: Macmillan & Co., 1869, second edition
1870); John Stuart Mill. “Thornton on labour and its claims* (1869) in Essays on Economics and
Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), pp. 631-68. See Taskashi Negishi, “Thom
ton's criticism of equilibrium theory and Mill", History of Political Economy, vol. 18, 1986, p p . 567-
577.
M
W. S. Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (New York: Kelley & Millman, 1871), p. viii
” 1 had feared that I must be the only one to have noticed how damaging this assumption
for the whole project of neoclassical economics. 1 a m delighted to report that, since writing this
chapter, I have had the chance to read an unpublished manuscript by Jack Sommer, of the
National Science Foundation— “Unifying Themes in Non-Mainstream Economics: A Proposal
(1986} —which pursues a similar line of argument (also by reference to the work of Prigoginc)
with regard to reversibility and equilibrium in economics. As this book is going to press I have
found the point also noticed in Philip Mirowski. dguiru/ Mechanism: Protecting Economics from Sciw
(Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), p. 26.
** For this assumption see Max Born: Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance (Oxfool
Clarendon Press, 1949), esp. pp. 25ff. For criticisms of the position, see K . R. Popper: "The
.Arrow of ’rune", Mshtrr. March 17, 1956, p. 538; “Irreversibility and Mechanics", Nature. AugU* 1
18. 1956, p. 382; and E. L. Hill and Adolf Grunbaum: "Irreversible Processes in Physical
Theory". Nature. June 22. 1957. pp. 1296-97.
134
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
for it is unlikely that they could really have wanted to import such
an assumption. In economics, as in the life sciences generally, one
deals with processes assumed from the outset to be irreversible. Not
that economists ordinarily think that any state of equilibrium will be
long preserved, but they do not expect or allow for a return to an
earlier state. Rather, economics (at least when it is dealing with what
happens in the world, as opposed to spinning models for their own
sake) treats open systems and the evolution of higher structures. If
there were any doubt about the possibility or potentialities of such
systems, Ilya Prigogine has shown that open systems far from
equilibrium can build u p new structures rather than moving towards
entropy: chaos at the microscopic scale can yield order in the
macrocosm.’ 7
Of course many contemporary economists welcome such develop-
ments. Unfortunately they cannot do so consistendy while retaining
much of the theory of general equilibrium. The processes men-
tioned —being intrinsically unpredictable—are also incompatible with
the assumption of “perfect knowledge" that lies at the heart of
general equilibrium theory and which is, in turn, an import into
economics (usually not recognised or acknowledged) from now
obsolete Laplacean physics and its perfectly informed "demon" (no
doubt an ideal social manager) that is able to predict any state of
affairs with any required degree of precision. Nor does this difficulty
from physics stand alone. There is also die crucial problem that the
assumption of perfect knowledge is incompatible with the unfathom-
able character of objective knowledge (see Part I above).
Actually, such historical points may be academic except in show-
ing that the scientistic analogy to physics is faulty. For it is now
known that the old assumption of the reversibility of all classical
mechanical processes is false, and that irreversible classical processes
do exist. A simple example is that of the propagation of a wave
from a center. A film taken of a large surface of water initially at
fest into which a stone is tossed will, if reversed, show contracting
n
Ilya Prigogine: From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity m /Ar Physical Sciences (San Fran-
00
jjj * W. H . Freeman, 1980). esp. pp. 88-89; Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of
Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984); and Ilya Prigogine. “’lime,
Structure. and Fluctuations", Science, vol 201, no. 4358, September I , 1978, p 777, See also A.
™*tein. Annalen der Phynk vol. 17, 1905. pp. 549-560. and vol. 19. pp. 371-381; and i n
Zeitschnft, vol. 1, 1919. p. 821. See Popper’s discussion in The Open Universe, op. di.,
gM Jeremy Clampbell, Grammatical Man. Information, Entropy, Language, and Life (New York: Simon
Schuster, 1982).
135
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“ Incidentally, the irreversibility involved here is independent of that other sense of equilib
n u m having to do with entropy increase. See the articles cited in the previous footnote.
" Even Newtonian physics was. contrary to what is usually supposed, indeterministic, as has
been maintained by Popper since 1950 (for discussion and earlier references, see his: The Open
Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism, op. dL, and Quantum Them and the Schism in Physics. op
cit.). Tile view has now been confirmed by Sir James Lighthill in “lite recently recognized failure
of predictability in Newtonian dynamics", Proceedings of the Royal Society, A. vol. 407. 1832.
September 8, 1986. pp. 35-47.
" See J. F. Clauser and M. A Horne. Physical Review, D 10, 526, 1974; T. D, Angelidis.
"Bell's Theorem; Does the Ctauser-Home Inequality Hold for All local Theories?", Physical Review
Letters, vol. 51, 1819, 1983; Anupam Garg and A J. Leggett. "Comment" in Physical Review Letters
vol. 53, 1019-1020, 1984; A O. Barut and P. Metstre, “Rotational Invariance. Locality, and
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Experiments", in Physical Review Letters, vol 53, 1021, 1984; and "An-
gelidis Responds", Physical Review leUen, vol. 53. 1022. 1984. See also James T. Cushing-
“Comment on Angclidis's Universality Claim*. Physical Review Letters, vol. 54. 2059, 1985.
“ Mark Blaug: The Methodology of Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1980),
p. 192. For a review of Blaug's book see I. C. Jarvie, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
34, September 1983, pp. 289-295. Ollier students of the matter have taken an even dimmei vie*
of developments in contemporary professional economics. See Richard Whitley, The Intellectual a '“
Social Organuatum of the Sciences (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1984), who writes of economics, "tl"’
dominant theoretical framework is well entrenched in the major graduate schools, the centra
journals, and the international prestige system. Tight control is exercised over intellect"-1
136
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
the real faults of the theory are, from the point of view of logic,
physics, and the life sciences, more basic: the project of general
equilibrium theory is not just useless, irrelevant, and futile. It is
incoherent.
Why then does the program continue to dominate professional
departments of economics? A very brief answer may be sketched.
Just as an unexamined assumption about self-reference motivated
the mathematical program within philosophy, so an unexamined
circularity underlies the use of mathematical equilibrium theories in
economics.'1* To understand this circularity and the role it plays, one
must understand the change in economics that took place between
the time of Adam Smith and that of Ricardo and his successors.
There are two very different approaches to the tasks of econom-
ics. Both perceive a problem of coordination at the basis of economic activity
and any theory that might account for it. The first of these stems from
Adam Smith and David Hume. Smith saw economics as dealing
chiefly with “the nature and causes of the wealth of nations”.
Smith’s arguments against the protectionists of his time did not
dispute their aims, to accumulate treasure4’, but insisted that their
policies, contrary to intention, led to the decrease rather than the
increase of wealth. Within Smith’s approach the existence of scarci-
ties is acknowledged, but no fundamental scarcity is assumed. This
approach is reflected in the present book—and is illustrated in the
unfathomable character of knowledge as a source of unmeasured
wealth. On this first view, economics should study how the self-
interested actions of competing individuals can—unbeknownst to the
agents themselves—coordinate to produce surpluses or wealth that
can benefit not only the individuals who initially generate it but
their communities. This approach is concerned with the problem,
stated earlier, of explaining the differential production of wealth in
different localities, and explains this phenomenon chiefly in terms of
I’Horitics, the selection of 'real' problems, and the sort of analysis which is admissible. . . . Of
special note . i s the domination of undergraduate and postgraduate instruction in economics
“T ■* small number of textbooks which inculcate a distinct and rather rigid set of intellectual
I’pKiices . . . . The price paid by the insistence on analytical coherence and restriction has been
Ule
increasing difficulty of using economic theory to explain empirical phenomena " (pp I84-IH5).
I B - . * For an analysis of these matters, sec Stephen Kresge's Introduction to F. A. Hayek. Afeney
’’“bottom, being vol. 5 of TV Collected Works of F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago
rrtu
. 1990. in press).
“ On this point Smith remained a bit of a mercantilisL See Charles P. Kindiebcrger,
w Monetarism and Other Essays m Financial History (London: George .Allen Hr Unwin.
88s
>. p 17.
137
U N FATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“ David Ricardo. Letter to Thoma* Malthus. October 9, 1820. in David Ricardo. I*""
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1951). vol. 8, pp. 278-279.
138
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
139
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
•’ Sec “Global Risk: Problem for Reagan's Plan", Wall Street Journal, November 9, 1981, p. 1
“ Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (London: Gollancz, 1959).
” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956).
“ Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press.
1979). See Peter Muni's brilliant dissection of Rorty's work in Bartley and Radnitzky, eds., Evolu
tionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge, op. dt. Hans Albert's Treatise on
Critical Reason, op. dt., can be seen as a reply to this particular cartel. He writes (pp. xiii-xiv)
This book . . . was devised to present critical rationalism as an alternative to the philosophy - i;
views characteristic of the German situation: the conception of the Frankfurt School; hermeneutic
thinking as represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer, a former student of Martin Heidegger; analvtx
philosophy, which — foremost under the influence of the posthumous writings of Ludwig Witt
genstein — began to gain a foothold here; and logical empiricism, which had then influenced
philosophy of science through the writings of Wolfgang Stegmuller. . . . Gadamer's hermeneutic
thinking has spread to America, as has the thinking of the Frankfurt School . . . . But when I
tried to discuss these views with people outside of Germany, 1 found that many know nothing at
all about the criticisms that are available in Germany."
140
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
It is interesting that Albert, whom Popper has described as "by far the most important
Mltemporarv Oerman social philosopher", began his career as an economist and continues to
told economic views of a generally “Austrian” perspective. See his Marklsouologu und Enbchad-
mgdopS (Neuwied am Rhein und Berlin: Luchterhand. 1967), See also Albert's “Hermeneutik
*nd Realwi&senschaft", in Pladoyer fiir kntischrn Rntioiuilismus (Munich: R. Piper & Co.. 1971);
Nteologische Holzwege (Tubingen: J . C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebcck) Verlag, 1973); Transzrndentale
heiumercten: Karl Otto Apcls Sprachspiele und setn hermeneutischrr Gott (Hamburg: Hoffmann und
iunpc, 1975); "Geschichte und Gescta", in K. Salamun. Sozialphdosophie als Aufklarung: Festschrift
Sr Ernst TopUsch (Tubingen: J . C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebcck) Verlag. 1979); Traktal Uber rationale
!Wcm (Tubingen: J . C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebcck) Verlag, 1978); and “MUnchhausen oder dcr
Stuber der Reflexion" and ”Transzenden taler Realismus und rationale Heuristik", both in his
gftttnschaft und die Fehlbarkeit der Vemunft (Tubingen: J- C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebcck) Verlag, 1982).
iec also Hans Albert and Herbert Keuth, eds., Kniik der kniischen Psychologic (Hamburg: Hoffman
Ind Campe, 1973). In his “Hermeneutik und Realwissenschaft", Albert argues that valid elements
if the older hermeneutical school can be "continued within the framework of critical rationalism
t’t., Popperian thought) by taking into account the linguistic work of Karl Buhler" See also
Argon von Kempski, “Die Well als Text", in Berechungen. Kritische I'ersuche zur Philosophic der
•tgenwart (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964), pp. 585fT. On Heidegger see also Walter Kaufmann.
tiscovcnng the Mmd: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber, Vol. II (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980).
* See “Of Policy and Pedigree". The Economist. May 6. 1989, pp, 52-54.
141
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
devised ways to obtain support that many lobbyists might envy: they
have infiltrated the government. They have brought pressure to
create (and then they have virtually captured control of) such bodies
as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National
Endowment for the Arts.50 Where there exists a strong profession
backed by government agencies, it becomes more cost-effective for
academic groups to attempt to manipulate or even take over the
government or professional apparatus, and more expensive to
engage in the competitive behaviour that creates social surpluses
such as the advancement of knowledge. In the circumstances, one
may wonder how much separation of ideology and state still exists
in American education.” National research agencies tend to be
staffed by members of the same professions, guided by the same
presuppositions, as those whom they fund. In those areas that deal
with the mind, the dwelling place of human freedom —psychology,
education, and philosophy—control, funding, and licensing is in the
hands of departments, academies, and professional guilds whose
directorates interlock with state bureaucracies.52 With such support
they can last for a long time, whereas business cartels usually fall
apart after a relatively short period.
Not only state control is involved. Entrenched ideologies posing
as the only legitimate producers of professionals, and exercising
exclusive power to license and grant credentials through universities,
gain control of institutions formally independent of universities, such
as professional associations, and from there—appealing to the power
to license and give credentials that they already control—gain even
greater access to state power and funding (which is itself usually the
source of professional licensing power) the better to police, through
rewards and punishments of various sorts, their own domains. The
tentacles of the ideologies extend outward to tap the power of the
Sec Edward C, BanfirId, The Democratic Muse: Visual Arts and the Public Interest (New York
Basic Books, 1984); Heinz Pagels, The Dreams of Reason (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p
38; and Arthur Squires, The Tender Ship (Boston: Birkhauser. 1986).
*’ The lack of separation begins of course in the secondary schools, for which an elaborate
system of state control of belief has been created. See the studies collected by Robert B. Everhart,
ed., in The Public School Monopoly: d Critical Analysis of Education and the State in American Society
(San Francisco: Pacific Institute. 1982). The strongest resistance to government activity in research
appears to come from biological scientists. Sec Jack Sommer, American Scientist, May-June 1987
and Sidney Self, "Government, university bureaucracies squander research", op. cit. See al-'1
Simon Rottenberg, "The Economy of Science: The Proper Role of Government in the Growth •'*
Science". Mtnma, vol. 19. no. I, Spring 1981. pp. 43-71.
" See S. David Young, Tht Kulf of Exprrts: Occupational he castng m America (Washington, D 1
Cato Institute. 1987).
142
T H E ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
professions and of the state, and then turn back upon their mem-
bers to enforce conformity.55 Eventually, in the course of the expan-
sions and contractions that mark this process, few uncontrolled
sources of ideology (apart from the free-thinking individual, on
whom all hope rests) are left to staff whatever independent positions
may remain for a time—such as those provided by the platforms of
occasional institutes, newspapers and periodicals. But how long can
these be independent? And if they can be independent can they also
be taken seriously by those who grant credibility—or must whatever
they say, at least if it is critical, be dismissed?
” See Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Mediant (New York; Basic Books,
1982), and the review by William R. Beer, “The Fault Lies Not in Our ‘Starrs’ But in Our
Sociology", Academic Questions, vol. 1, no. 3, Summer 1988, pp. 64-73. Sec also the reviews in The
Journal of American History, September 1983, pp. 433-434, The American Historical Review. vol, 89,
April 1984. pp. 532-533, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 98, Winter 1983-84, pp 708-709. The
American Political Science Review, vol. 78, September 1984, pp. 811-812, .4menrun Journal of Sociology,
VoL
90, 1984, pp. 197-199. and Social Forces, vol. 62, December 1983, pp. 550-551.
M
George J . Stigler, The Intellectual and the Marketplace, enlarged edition, op. cit.. especia y
chapter 1.
143
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
growth is very abstract in the sense that it is not used —and thus
does not grow in proportion to its potential. Such ideas may be
neglected for centuries; or they may never be implemented.
One need not resort to philosophy to illustrate this effect. Take
agriculture. Three-crop rotation was invented in the eleventh centu-
ry but did not spread within Europe at that time. Indeed, the
invention was virtually ignored. Why? Agriculture was organised and
operated communally, so that little advantage accrued to any partic-
ular individual in attempting to implement any such innovation. For
example, a non-innovator would profit as much as any innovator
himself would: he would be what economists call “a free rider”. In
addition, transaction costs to the innovator were involved in any
such initiative. It would be prohibitively costly in terms of time, and
probably also in terms of payments of various sorts, to reach what-
ever agreements would be necessary to implement the changes.
Many others would have to agree; established ways of operating
would have to be overthrown; people would have to stop doing
what they knew how to do, i.e., they would have to stop repeating
(one of the most difficult things for anyone to do, and something
that is almost never done without clear and present advantage). In
the circumstances, there was little clear advantage to anyone to
implement the change. It is this possibility, which is always present
when an innovation is made, that I referred to earlier, when writing
of Kuhn, as the problem of the cost of overthrowing a paradigm.
If we remain for a moment with our agricultural innovation, we
find that not until the seventeenth century, some six hundred years
after the invention, was it fully in effect. Why? Institutions and laws
pertaining to individual property, ownership rights, and market
exchange had by that time gradually developed, especially in the
Netherlands where, already by the middle of the sixteenth century,
the monopolistic rights of local guilds and corporations had been
greatly weakened. Something very similar happened in England
during the same period of time. These institutional and legal
changes, and the accompanying weakening of the guilds, created
economic incentives by reducing transaction and other costs, as a
result of which innovation began to pay both for the individual and
for his community. It was also then that the scientific and industrial
revolutions began. Indeed, only with the improvement in agricultur-
al methods did it become possible to sustain the larger populations
required to support the industrial revolution.
144
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
M
Lester C. Thurow, 7%r Zero-Sum Solution: Building a World-Class American Economy (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).
145
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“ Differences between economic and sociological approaches are essential yet often forgot 1011
Even the distinguished economist Fritz Machlup capitulated to sociology of knowledge. When I”*
Tfu Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United Stales [Princeton: Princeton CnivcrM 1'
Press. 1962] was hailed in a journal of sociology as “a theory of growth of knowledge as part '
the sociology of knowledge**. Machlup seemed pleased, and responded: “the notions of
knowledge, or a social stock o f knowledge, and its social usefulness and valuation, are sociology J
concepts before they are economic concepts. Moreover, the social priorities in evaluating
promoting the creation and distribution of knowledge, in general and of particular kinds. J ’ ‘
issues of sociology as much as they are issues of economics," (Fritz Machlup. Knowledg*
146
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF FALSE PHILOSOPHIES
Erratum, Distribution, and Economic Signifuancr. vol. 2, The Branches of learning (Princeton: Princeton
University Press. 1982). p. 4.] Machlup's statement is unfortunately very near to being gibberish:
1) Notions anti concepts are purely instrumental and are not essentially sociological or economic
or philosophical— sir wedged in the domain of any other discipline. Nor are they one thing
"tiefore" another. I f notions and concepts could be rendered sociological, say, merely by placing
the adjective “social1’ in front of them. Machhip's comment would of course be true— but only by
definition. Placing what Hayek calls "the weasel word" social [see Thr Fatal Conceit, op. cit., pp.
114-117] before words and phrases such as hiaulrdgr, stock of knowledge, usefulness, and priorities
tends to empty them of meaning. 2) Concern with notions and the definition of concepts, which
is generally a subjectivist undertaking, tends to deflect attention from the economic importance of
such real entities as knowledge, slocks of knowledge, and differing individual priorities, and
implicitly encourages the rejection o f the methodological individualism that Machlup elsewhere
usually observed. [Israel Kirzner has remarked on Machlup’s lack of appreciation and understand-
ing of a Hayekian approach to knowledge (and hence with expectations and disequilibrium) i n his
Comment on R. N. Langlois, "From the Knowledge of Economics to the Economics of Knowl
edge: Fritz Machlup on Methodology and o n the "Knowledge Society"1", Research tn the History of
ttonomie Thought and Methodology. vol. S, 1985. pp. 237-241. See Langlois’s own paper in the same
number, pp. 225-235.) Fhe meaning of a concept is relative and instrumental, dependent utterly
°n the theory in which it occurs. A theory— aiming to solve a problem— purports to describe the
S™ world All the words, terms, or concepts of a theory may be replaced willtout altering the
Meaning of the theory. I t is theories, and the question of their testability or criticisability, which
jS* primary, not the words or concepts within them, which are largely arbitrary. This is elemen-
B’f__ lne thodofogv. ’ )ut methodology of which sociologists tend to be ignorant. [For detailed
5™ques of the use of “concepts" (a practice which is so ctimmon that it is usually taken
l
*cally for granted) see K . R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, op. cit., chapter I I ,
An' 7'a 1 * R 1 ’’'’PP*: 1’. TAe Poverty of Histoneism, op. cit., section 10; K . R. Popper. Objective
l v u
12'J i ' s ’ “"nary Approach, Rev. Edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp.
Ine Hu n i509-318, and chap. 9; K . R Popper, Realism and thr Aim of Science, op. cit., sect. 33.
See I . C. jarvic’s statement i n Concepts and Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Thai M 5 8 - 5 9 ] See also chapter 2 , section 3 above.
show n' | ’ ac, ’ l u P * conclusions about priority of sociology over economics could not be correct is
< lc
folh.w-i ' * differences between sociological and economic approaches pointed out in the
"ten: 7 g l t,ur
discussion of the unfathomable nature of objective knowledge, and by our argu-
dreory J 1C c °mpalibility between the subjective theory of economic value and the objective
hnowL, ) knowledge. Individuals speculate economically in terms of their own dispersed access to
8r (1 tllr
indivi,/ , "' discussion in chapter 2 of “the accessed slice"). Objective knowledge and
'he dem? P r t ’ c r f n c e 5 precede, both temporally and logically, the activities of interest groups and
r P dytnent of knowledge for allegedly community purposes by so-called social representatives.
147
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
*’ “The Role of Knowledge in Invention and Economic Development", The American Journal of
Economics and Sociology, vol. 22. 1963, pp. 463-472. esp. p. 471.
" "Policing the Page", The Economist, June 3. 1989. pp. 8S-84.
” Hundreds of examples could be given of Marxist influence in various academic and
professional areas of the university. See "Critical Legal Studies: The Death of Transcendence and
the Rise of the New Langdells", New York University law Review. vol. 62. no. 3. June 1987. pp
429-496; James W. Tuttlcton, "The Uses and Abuses of Literature at the Modern Language
Association Conference: The Uses of Ideology in Literary Criticism", and "The Abandonment of
Literature", in Academic Questions, vol. 1, 1. Winter 1987-88, pp. 36-40 and 41-44 respectively See
also D. G. Myers, "The New Historicism in Literary Studies", Academic Questions, vol. 2, 1. WinU'i
1988-89, pp. 27-36. where Myers writes of the 'New Historicism': "New Historicists like to picture
themselves challenging 'the institution of criticism' . . . . In reality, however, the movement is
another step toward the reconfinement of literary study. As jobs are created for New Historic 1’
and space in the critical journals is set aside for their essays —as academic decisions arc into’-1'
ingly made on the basis not of scholarly competence but of methodological affiliation —t| i c
pressure on younger scholars and graduate students to enlist in the movement becomes en<"
mous: that way employment, advancement, and prestige lie. It seems to worry no one that tin*
might take away from individual scholars the determination of what son of research to pur»ue
and put it in the hands of hiring committees and editorial boards. Yet such a state of affairs < "
only end by narrowing the possibilities for fruitful scholarship and abridging the acadet” 1
freedom of those who would go their own way. Michael Oakesholt has pointed out that a studt'1
of tlte past cannot learn the history of something without first discovering what kind of thing •• '
In this respect, the New Historicism is not a genuine historical inquiry; it does not inquire i" *
the true nature of literary works, because it is confident it already knows what they are. They ■'1
agents of ideology. Contrary to appearances, the movement is not an effort to discover wh.'1
148
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF F/M.SE PHILOSOPHIES
jP***185 *or » literary work to be historical; it is really little more than an attempt to get literary
j k * * to conform to a particular vision of history. For the university as a whole the movement
H rescnts a
further stage in literary scholarship’s progressive abandonment of literature.” See also
Bn T'P 0 -1 situation in the English department al Duke University, as reported by David
From Western Lit to Westerns as Lit", The Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1988. For
s ,n
»lar matters in Britain see Francis Mulhern. "Intelligentsia regroups to fight the
Times Higher Education Supplement. May 22, 1981. pp. 11-12; Paul Johnson.
(Lon ? 5 (New York. Atheneum. 1977); Julius Gould. The Attack on Higher Education
S rhe
» 1977). Institute, 1977); C. B. Cox and Rhodes Boyaon, cds.. Black Paper (London: Temple
■«hith°?
149
Part III
Late one afternoon in the early winter of I960, I was sitting with
Karl Popper in the waiting room of his doctor's office on Harley
Street in London. Popper loved to spend time with his students. To
cram in conversation with us, he used his spare moments to the
full. So we would tag along with him everywhere—to his doctor and
dentist, on walks, in taxis or on the underground, back and forth to
the Marylebone or Paddington train stations—talking philosophy
incessantly.
That afternoon we had been talking heatedly about the pre-
Socratics. There was a lull in the conversation, and I could see
Popper's brows darken as an extraneous thought flickered across his
awareness. He turned to me:
“Bill, people say that I am a difficult man. Am 1 a difficult man?"
'Hie reply bolted out of me unhesitatingly: “Karl, only a difficult
man would ask a question like that!"
1
Much of the material in chapters 9-13 and in chapter 16 of Part Hl is a greatly reviled
'*pansion of nty 1982 Neil Arnott Memorial lecture. Robert Gordon's Institute of Technology,
11 'C 7?een ' Scotland. This Pan of the book, it should be recorded, is an unintended by-product of
inneU„ °Kra P,1 'cs . in some four volumes, that I am writing of Popper and also of another eminent
«'ual outsider: F. A. von Hayek.
4 J- Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (Edinburgh: Penguin Books, 1956). p. 7.
Karl R. Popper. “Preface to the English Edition. 1958”. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, op.
PP 15-16.
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
154
1
HE DIFFICULT MAN
155
UN FATHOM ED KNOWLEDGE
* Charles S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear", in Collected Papers, voL 5 (Cambridge.
Mass,; Harvard University Press. 1934), p. 252. The essav was first published in Popular Science
Monthly in 1878.
Popper, Unended Quest, op. cit., p. 40.
156
THE DIFFICULT MAN
157
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
158
THE DIFFICULT MAN
159
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
As 1 recall, the American professor was Avrum Stroll, later my colleague at the Univcrsit'
of California. San Diego.
160
T H E DIFFICULT MAN
and his work was least well known —those nine years that he spent
in New Zealand during the 1930s and 1940s. His New Zealand
student Peter Munz, later professor of history at the University of
Wellington, reports Popper’s unselfconscious vitality and exuberance,
throwing the chalk into the air and catching it as he lectured. The
geologist R. S. Allan, Popper’s colleague in New Zealand, recalls
how Popper "strode up and down the room gesticulating wildly and
poured forth ideas”.9 The historians of the University of Canterbury
report that “Popper’s impact on the academic life of the College was
greater than that of any other person, before or since”. They write
that he "acted as a kind of intellectual champagne after the dry
depression years . . . . Staff and students alike crowded his open
lectures not for instruction or information, but for enlightenment
and the sheer intellectual joy of exploring the unknown with him”.10
This energy was still astounding when I was his student in the
late 1950s and his colleague in the early 1960s. At age sixty, Popper
used to run up the escalators on die deep tube lines in London,
two steps at a time, while I, a young man of twenty-seven, strug-
gled, panting and breathless, behind him. I do not know whether
this was owing to, or in spite of, his strict personal habits: he
neither smoked nor drank, and never ate more than a bar of Swiss
chocolate for lunch. He did not impose such habits on his students
(although they were stricdy forbidden to smoke in his presence). Yet
it is interesting that most of them do not smoke, and—to this
day—use alcohol with great restraint, if at all.
The simplicity of his personal habits was reflected also in his
home. After 1950, he and his wife lived at Fallowfield, in the village
of Penn, in the Buckinghamshire countryside, an hour’s train ride
from London—secluded from the interruptions of London life. The
peace of this retreat gave him the opportunity to write."
I once asked him how they had selected Penn, but did not
expect the answer that was immediately forthcoming. "Oh, we
decided on it when we were still in New Zealand”, he told me.
Shortly after receiving his invitation to join the LSE, he got hold of
the University of London regulations, which required him to live
"rithin thirty miles of Senate House, the administrative headquarters
161
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“ See Greg Lawless, ed,, Thr Hanard Crimson Anlhologj (New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1980).
162
I HE DIFFICULT MAN
" Popper. Object™ Knowledge. op. dL, p. 32. (Pop(wr attributes the last line to R llochhuth.)
See also Bryan Magee, Modern British Philosophy (.New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971) pp
163
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
a high teaching load. That did not matter at all. Popper advised
him. Since the students would not be very bright, one would just
teach them at half the ordinary pace; so the teaching load would
not matter. What mattered was whether one would have the condi-
tions to learn, to grow, and—if one had the talent —to write. Popper
himself had thought through his basic philosophical ideas when he
was a carpenter’s apprentice in Vienna. And until his mid-thirties he
had been a high-school teacher. 14 His first two books. Die beiden
Grundprobleme der Erkennlnistheorie and Logtk der Forschung, had been
written in the late evening, after a hard day’s teaching.
Popper was eager to put across his ideas, and disappointed and
sometimes offended that he was not more successful in doing so, for
he was passionately convinced of their importance to western cul-
ture, and to the defence and enhancement of the open society. But
he had not the slightest interest in academic politics. And he took it
for granted that his students would have similar priorities. In this
assumption he was, in part, mistaken.”
16-1
Chapter 10
THE CRISIS IN PHILOSOPHY
In this chapter I want to consider not the man Karl Popper but
the harvest of his thought. I have already indicated that a problem
arises both for Popper and for me about the philosophical profes-
sion. This problem will emerge as a theme for this chapter and
those that follow, in an attempt to illuminate the discussion of
intellectual revolution.
There is a widespread impression—created in part by a superficial
reading of Popper's own writings' —that the development of scientific
thought is very simple: a fact is found—an experimental observation
is made—that conflicts with a theory, and that the theory is at once
dropped and a search undertaken for a new theory. By extension,
this view may be applied to philosophy: that when an argument on
which a philosophical theory rests is refuted, that philosophical
theory is immediately dropped and gives way to a new one—or at
least to the search for a new theory. It is also widely supposed that
it is the professional community of scientists—or philosophers— who
do the deciding, who determine when one viewpoint has been
refuted and another is to be put in its place. However the actual
process may be, many would maintain that the scientific and philo-
sophical professional communities—and the elite of these communit-
ies—should indeed decide when such a shift need take place.
Yet if we look at the reception of Popper’s own revolutionary
new ideas, we find that no process of this sort has taken place, and
that the process that has taken place is more complicated and
interesting. For although Popper's philosophical ideas have been
widely acclaimed by members of scientific elites—including numerous
Nobel prizewinners and other scientists who stand at the very peak
•f scientific achievement—they are widely dismissed or ignored by
. e bulk of the professional philosophical community.2 Wittgenstein’s
eas
- on the other hand, are largely ignored by the scientific elite,
c
•nd Popper's objection to this misunderstanding in the "Introduction 1982” to his Rtalum
I ’ n!*" ar<? cncc vo *- 1
scvcral to /Az Logv of Scientific thicmtery. op. at.
25, 1984 sense* in which 1 liked the declaration in Phtlasofthual Booh, vol.
Iw
<3Qfcntieth c ntUr "Sir Poppers status as one of the major original thinkers of the
tld U (] c,l5 >' « now, among those qualified to judge, almost universally accepted.” One must
Her dial this statement is rather too strong, or that professional philosophers are not
10
judge Popper’s thought.
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
’ What is or is not a science, however, is pan of the question. To the extent to which
ideology and philosophical ideas permeate the content of would-be sciences. Popper tends to he
excluded from discussion, or discussed in curious ways. An example is economics. While Poppe'
has had a considerable influence on economists, his name may be absent where one would
assume that he would be mentioned — especially i f an ideologist or philosopher has had a chance
to exert his or her influence. See for example The Nm Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economic'. ed
John Eatwell. Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (London: Macmillan. 1988), and Arthut
Seldon’s critical study of its ideological skewing: "'rhe New Palgrave: For Readers Who Want
Know What Economists Think. Pan I: Description”, and "Enlightenment or Ideology? Part 11
Assessment”. Economic Affam, February/March 1988.
166
THE CRISIS IN PHILOSOPHY
countries during the last four decades, that one easily forgets that in
the 1930s philosophy of science, as an independent discipline or
profession in these countries, barely existed. There were, of course,
, classically important English-language works in the field—such as
those of Mill and Whewell—and the main problems of the subject
were part of the philosophical curriculum. There were also some
philosophers in the ’30s who did philosophy of science profes-
sionally, but the greater part of these were newly arrived emigres,
of Austrian or German origin, arriving in the English-speaking
countries from the prewar positivist centers of Vienna, Prague, and
Berlin. During the preceding six decades, most of the best-known
philosophical treatments of the sciences, in English, were not even
written by professional philosophers. Amongst their authors, W. K.
Clifford was a mathematician; Karl Pearson, a biologist and statisti-
cian; John Maynard Keynes, a polymath, a government official, an
insurance executive, an economist; Joseph Needham, a biologist and
the greatest sinologist of the century. Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir
James Jeans were physicists, as was my own undergraduate teacher
Percy W. Bridgman.
It would be easy to find exceptions to this list—C. D. Broad and
Bertrand Russell most conspicuously—but the point has been made.
And perhaps Russell is an exception to the exceptions: for he spent
comparatively few years in his long life working within universities.
This situation began to change in the 1930s, as a result of the
crusading positivism of the Vienna Circle and the forced emigration
of its members. In the chief doctrines of the Vienna Circle there
was already a basis for communication with English-speaking philos-
ophers. The public organisation formed by members of the Circle
had been called the “Ernst Mach Verein”, after the Austrian physi-
cist, psychologist, and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838-1916)/ The
Viennese championing of Mach’s sensationalist ideas as the basis for
the philosophy of physics reminded English-speaking philosophers of
a part of their own heritage that had been in eclipse. Several
' See John T. Blackmore, Ernst Mach,- His Wort. Life, and Influence (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1972); and my “Philosophy of Biology umtu Philosophy of Physics, in lunia-
Scientuic, vol. 3, no. I. 1982, pp. 55-78. and in much expanded form, under the same title.
,n
Gerard Radniuky and W. W. Bartley. III. eds.. Evolutionary Epistemology. Rationality. and the
Steialogy of Knowledge, op. dt_, chapter 1.
167
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
* See Popper, “A Note on Berkeley as Precursor of Mach and Einstein", in his Conjectures o’’1
Refutations, op, eje, pp- 166-174; John Myhill, "Berkeley's 'De Motu': An Anticipation of Mach.
I'nitetuty of California PiMvatims in Philosophy, vol. 29. 1957. pp. 141-157; and Gerard Hinrichr
T h e laigical Positivism of De Motu", Review of Metaphysics, vol. 3, 1950. pp. 491-505.
168
THE CRISIS IN PHILOSOPHY
* For an explanation o f the notion of logical strength see my “Logical Strength and Demarca-
’°n", in Rationality in Science and Politics, ed Gunnar Andersson (Boston: D. Reidel, 1984), pp. 69-
and Appendix 2 to my The Retreat to Commitment, 2nd edition, op. dt.
, ’ On the antidpation of Hume by Sextus Empiricus, see R. H. Popkin. The History of
fapticism from Erasmus to Spmoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), and FAr /figA
to Pyrrhonism (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1980).
" See Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
955; new edition, 1973), esp. pp. 74fT. See also W. V. Quine, "On Popper's Negative Methodolo-
in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, 111: Open Court, 1974). p 220.
nty "Goodman's Paradox: A Simple-Minded Solution", in Philosophical Studies, December 1968,
T “Theories of Demarcation between Sdencc and Metaphysics." in Problems tn the
°f Science, ed. I . Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Amsterdam. North-Holland. 1968), pp 40-
y Critical Study: The Philosophy of Karl Popper: Part H I : Rationality, Criticism, and Logic ,
Sophia (1982); and "Eine Losung der Good man -Paradoxons", in Feraussrtxwngm und
7 Wissenschaft, rd. G. Radnitzky and G. Andersson (TObingcn: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Sie *c
1981).
169
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
are either logically true or are scientific) from those that are mean-
ingless. The aim of such demarcation was, as expressed in Carnap’s
famous essay, “Die Uberwindung der Metaphysik durch logische
Analyse der Sprache”, the elimination of metaphysics (including all
philosophy of value and normative theory) through the logical
analysis of language.9 Alleged statements of metaphysics were
deemed to be, as Carnap put it, “entirely meaningless” pseudo-
statements. One avoided these—and here was the demarcation—by
making no utterances not reducible to or probabilistically confirm-
able by sense observation reports. This position is imperialistic (see
chapter 14 below) in the sense that all legitimate statements are
required to conform to what are claimed to be the standards of
logical and scientific discourse. 10
All this is a truncated version of an older and wider problem.
Consider the following table:
true false
clear & distinct unclear & indistinct
probable improbable
empirical unempirical
scientific nonscientific
verifiable unverifiable
meaningful meaningless
Reprinted in A. J. Ayer. ed.. logical Pmithism (London: George Allen & Unwin. 1959). PP
60-81.
See Rudolf Carnap. "Prefare to the First Edition", of Th/ Ijigwal Structun of ihr
(Berkeley: University of California Press. 1967), p. xvii.
170
THE CRISIS IN PHILOSOPHY
ip For examples sec Popper, Thr Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit; and C. G. Hempel,
(l95Q enw Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning", Revue Internationalr de Philosophic
)• reprinted in Ayer, ed., Logical Positn'ism,op. cit.
171
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“ Kun Gtidel, "A Remark about the Relationship between Relativity Theory and Idealistic
Philosophy", in Albert Einstein: Philosopher- Scientist, ed. P. A Schilpp (La Salle: Open Court, 1949;
3rd edn. 1969).
172
THE CRISIS IN PHILOSOPHY
curve, travel into any region of the past, present, or future, and
back, just as one familiarly travels to other parts of space.
Notwithstanding the popularity this idea has acquired amongst
writers of science fiction, there is as yet no agreement about the
implications of Godel's argument. But the possibility he demon-
strates of anomalies of temporal order in general relativity gives rise
to the question, as Howard Stein put it nicely, “to what extent the
existence or non-existence of a univocal time-ordering along all
time-like world-lines is susceptible to manipulation (by the physical
rearrangement of matter) within a given cosmic model.’’”
11
Howard Stein, “On the Paradoxical Time-Structures of GddcT, Phifot y Sdmce,
December 1970. pp, 589-601. .
** Impossibly since Einstein had, in relativity theory, made the speed of light a constant anc
a
maximum velocity.
173
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
” Eugene P. Wigner, VvmmiWnzi and Refactions (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press
1967), p, 186. Sec m y “Critical Study: The Philosophy of Karl Popper: Part I I : Consciousness and
Physics: Quantum Mechanics, Probability, Indeterminism, the Body-Mind Problem*’. Philosophic
1978, pp. 676-716. See also Popper, Qiwn/um Theory and the Schism in Physics, vol. 3 of d , c
Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, op. cit,
11
Pierre Duhem. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theon (Princeton: Princeton Universit'
Press. 1914/1954).
174
THE CRISIS IN PHILOSOPHY
' Two such pseudo-paradoxes are Goodman’s puzzle about "grue" emeralds and Lewis
roll 5 Barber-Shop Paradox. See my discussions of Goodman, as died above; and my discussion
Carroll in Bartley, Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic, op. cit., pp. 444-449.
1
. ’ Sec Ernest Gellner. lEbrdj and Things (London: Gollancz. 1959). and chapter* 14 ant
175
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
176
Chapter 1 1
AND HOW T H E CRISIS WAS RESOLVED
It was into this crisis situation that the revolutionary ideas of Karl
Popper were broadcast in January 1959, with the publication of The
Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Popper's book had been published in late 1934, in his native
Vienna, as Die Logik der Forschung.' But as the storms of war gath-
ered, the philosophers of science at the great centres of Vienna,
Prague, Berlin, and Warsaw were already dispersing, many of them,
like Popper, being of Jewish descent. The first edition of Logik der
Forschung thus had a limited circulation. During the war itself
communication was badly interrupted everywhere, and Popper
himself was removed from the scene, teaching in New Zealand. He
did not return to Europe, to the London School of Economics, until
early 1946; and at that time he became well known first as a social
and political philosopher, a philosopher of history, and a historian
of philosophy, in response to the publication of his The Open Society
and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1944 and 1957).
The Logic of Scientific Discovery is, however, the theoretical work on
which his historical, political, and other studies depend.2 In it he
was able, simply and straightforwardly, to resolve many of the issues
in the philosophy of science. I mean this literally. In the domain of
objective knowledge and abstract argumentation’, the problem of
induction is solved, and the verificationism that lies behind it is
refuted.
Popper shows that induction does not exist. Rejecting the em-
piricist theory of learning as in conflict with biological knowledge,
Popper sees the mind as no passive “bucket" into which experience
rains and which can at most recombine that experience in various
ways. On the contrary, all experience is impregnated by theory. The
mind anticipates the future with hypotheses that necessarily go far
beyond experience: hypotheses precede observations psychologically,
logically, even genetically. Every animal is born with expecta-
tions—i.e., with something closely parallel to hypotheses, which, if
' See Popper's extended discussions of induction in Objective Knowledge, op. cit., chapters I
and 2; and in Realism and the Aim of Science. op. cit., chapter 1. See also David Miller, “Conjectural
Knowledge: Popper's Solution of the Problem of Induction", in Paul Levinson. ed„ In Pursuit of
Truth, op. cit., pp. 17-49 See also the recent discoveries of Popper and Miller, devastating to
induction, in K. R. Popper and David Miller. "Why Probabilistic Support Is Not Inductive", Phil
Trans. Royal Society London, A 321. 1987. pp. 569-591, and “A Proof of the Impossibility of
Inductive Probability”, vol. 302. Nature, 21 April 1983. pp. 687-688, and "A Proof of the Intpossi
bility of Inductive Probability (A Reply to Some Critics)", Nature, vol. 310, pp. 433 434. See also
Alain Boyer's review, “Logique el philosophic des sciences", Revue philosophique, vol. 175. 1985. PP
358-359. See also K. R. Popper, "The Non-Existence of Probabilistic Inductive Support", in Georg
Dorn and Paul Wcingartner, eds.. foundations of Logic and languishes (New York: Plenum
Publishing Corporation, 1985), pp. 303-318.
’ for a discussion of work in psychology that refutes the inductivist approach, see Walter b
Weimer's discussion of Karl Pribram's work on habituation, in Walter B. Weimer. " Hie Pxycholo-
gy of Inference and Expectation", in Induction, Probability, and Confirmation, ed. Grover Maxwell
and R. M. Anderson. Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1975), p. 459. See al’"'
Weimer's Notes on the Methodology of Scientific Research (Hillsdale, N, J.: Erlhaum [John Wileyb
1979), and bis "'Hie History of Psychology and Ils Retrieval from Historiography", Parts 1 and 1 1
in Science Studies, vol. 4. 1974, pp. 235-258 and 367-396.
Falsifying observations are also theory-impregnated and thus also falsifiable. See K. b.
Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. op. cit.. sec. 27. and Gunnar Andersson. "Naive a "1
Critical Falsificationism". in Paul Levinson, ed., In Pursuit of Truth, op. cit., pp 50-63.
178
AND HOW IT WAS RESOLVED
, Although Popper’s criticisms of Freudian theory are on the whole sound, they are on
ccasions somewhat overstated. .Adolf Grunbaum has gone to the other extreme in his Is
feudian Psychoanalytic Theory Pseudo-Scientific by Karl Popper's Criterion of Demarcation?
’ Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 16. 1979. pp. 131-141. See Popper’s extended discussion of
* n K fa llvrn the dim of Science,op. cit. See also the evaluation of GrOnbaum’s work by M-
alturni1
Af tophilosophy,and Paul R. McHugh,
vol. 18. July/October 306-320. Psychoanalytic Theory’ Really Falsifiable? ,
1987,“Ispp.Freudian
and Watkins, “Confirmable and Influential Metaphysics”. Mind. 1958. pp. 345-347.
chapte f ' 8* Scientific Discovery, op. dt, sec. 15. and Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit..
See chapter 2 above.
Sec Popper, Unended Quest, op. dr., p. 38.
179
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“ Moreover, as explained earlier, positivist preoccupation with meaning steins from an error
alter the classical logical paradoxes had indeed been able to be resolved through meaning
analysis, it was mistakenly assumed that the traditional problems of metaphysics would similar 1'
disappear under meaning analysis. This is however presented by a decisive difference between thr
traditional logical paradoxes and the traditional problems of metaphysics: the paradoxes are
produced by self-reference, whereas self-reference is absent in traditional philosophical problems
Hence the parallel fails. Sec my discussion in Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic, op. dt., and in Part I
above.
” See my The Retreat to Commitment. op. dt, chapter 5; and "Rationality. Critidsm. am
Logic", op. cit.
” See my "Critical Study: The Philosophy of Karl Popper: Part I: Biology and Evolution.o '
Epistemology," Philosophies. vol. 6, 1976. pp. 463-494. and Radniuky and Bartley. Evolutum" 1
Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge, op. dt.
' See K. R. Popper, The Open L'niterse: An Argument for Indeterminism, op. dt.
AND HOW IT WAS RESOLVED
181
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
'■ See Popper's Quantum Theory and the Schism m Physics. op. dt.; see also my "Conscious'"''
and Physics", Phdosophia. 1976; and Jim Edwards. "Hidden Variables and the Propensity Theft'
of Probability", British Journal far the Philosophy of Science, vol. SO. 1979. pp. 315-328.
'* See Blackmore. Ernst Mach, and my "Philosophy of Biology versus Philosophy o f Physic'
chapter I of Radnitzky and Bartley, Evolutionary Epistemology , op. dt.
“ K. R. Popper, in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Schlipp, op. cit.. p. 1061; sec also ""
"Biology and Evolutionary Epistemology", op. dl„ and the essays by Campbell. Popper.
myself in Radnitzky and Bardey. Evolutionary Epistemology, op. dt.
" See Donald T. Campbell, "Blind Variation and Selective Retention in Creative Though'
in Other Knowledge Processes". Psychological Review, vol. 67, 1960, pp. 380-400, and in Radu"
and Bartley, op. cit.
i ao
AND HOW IT WAS RESOLVED
* 183
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
** K. R. Popper, “On the Possibility of an Infinite Past: A Reply to Whitrow," British Journal
for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 29, 1978, pp. 47-48; and Popper. Unended Quest, op. cit., secs. 28.
30. 35-56.
H
Sec my "Rationality, Criticism, and Logic", op. 6l. and The Retreat to Commitment. op. cit
Appendices 2 and 3. See also Gunnar Andersson. "The Problem of Verisimilitude", in Progress and
Rationality in Science, rd. Gerard Radnitzky and Gunnar Andersson (Boston: Reidcl. 1978). pp
291-310, and the bibliographical references died there. See also Joseph Agassi. "The Role of
Corroboration", tufraZanan Journal of Philosophy, vol. 39. 1961. pp. 82-91; and Popper’s Objective
Knowledge, op. at. rev. ed., Appendix 2. on Miller's paradoxes.
184
Chapter 12
POPPER’S RECEPTION BY T H E PROFESSION-
CON LAMENTO
* For a few examples see. "Popper Unwinds the Clockwork", Independent, August 25, 1988;
"Popper parades a propensity for defending science". Daily Telegraph. August 25, 1988; "Russians
leave glasnost back in the USSR". Independent. August 26, 1988; “World Congress of Philosophy:
Intellectual athletes enjoy their Olympic Games", The Times, August 28. 1988; "The loaded
question of dice", The Times, August 25. 1988.
* For reports see, for example, Georg Ltlhrs, Thilo Sarrazin, Frithjof Spreer, and Manfred
Tietael, cds.. Kritischer Raltonahsmus und Saualdemokratu. with Foreword by Helmut Schmidt (Berlin:
J . H. W. Dietz Vcrlag, 1975); or T. W. Adorno, H Albert, R. Dahrcndorf. J . Habermas, H. Pilot,
and K. R. Popper. The Positivist Dupuis m German Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1976). See also
Ralf Dahrcndorf. /trisen nach innen und auflen: Askpete der Zeil (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1984), p. 50. Sec also: Irene Meichsner. “Zum 85. Geburtstag von Karl Popper. Philosophic der
kleinen Schritte. BOrgcrliche Parteien berufen sich auf ihn", in Kdbur Sladt-Anznger, vol, 173, 28
July 1987, p. 21; Holger Jergius. “Wissen braucht Freiheit", NZ, vol. 168, 25 July 1987, p. 9;
Willy Hochkeppcl. "Das Suchen ist die Philosophic." in Du Zed, vol. 31, 24 July 1987. p. 31.
Helmut Schmidt. 'Der Mann mil dem Goldhclm". Du Zed, vol. 31, 24 July 1987, p. 31; Volker
Friedrich, “Interview mil Sir Karl Popper: Der Warner vor falschcn Prophetcn (III): Karl
Raimund Popper liber Evolution, Sichcrheit und Wirklichkett: Wahrheit ist eine absolute und
objektive Sadie"; Walter Allgaier, “Wcltverbesscrcr sind die eigentlichen Feinde: Seine Ideen
wirkrn weltweit in 22 Sprachen: Der Phiiosoph Karl Popper wird 85 Jahre alt", in Mdnchnrr
Merkur, 24 July 1987; Franz Kreuzcr, "Auf der Suche nach einer besseren Welt: Karl Popper zum
flinfundachtaigsten Geburtstag". Die Prase, Vienna. 25/26 July 1987; Eberhard Ddring, “Wit
wissen nicht. sondem wir raten: Zum 85. Geburtstag von Karl Popper, dem Vordenker des
1-iberalismus". Reindcher Merkur, vol. 30. 24 July 1987; Volker Friedrich, "Sir Karl Ober Philo
sophie, den Zeitgeist und die Postmoderne: Ohne groBe Liebe kcinc Leistung". Rrinischrr Merkur,
vol. 30. 24 July 1987; Stephan Wchowsky. “Phiiosoph des I mums. Zum 85. Geburtstag de*
Wissenschaftstheoretikers Karl Popper”, SUddeulsche Zettung, vol. 168, 25 July 1987, p. 49; Jurgen
Lohle, “Auf der Suche nach dem Irrtuin”, Stultgarter Zeitung, vol. 168, 25 July 1987, p. 5; Tom
Meissner. “Fur sein Dcnken gcadelt". ,4Z, 28 July 1987, "Optimismus und Toleranz", NUmbergrr
Nachnchten, 27 July 1987.
* See Henri Lepage, Demmn Is liberalisms (Paris: labrairie Gln&ale Fran iis. 1980). pp. 48611
186
POPPERS RECEPTION BY T H E PROFESSION
* The winners o f the Sonning Prize include: Winston Churchill. 1950; Albert Schweitzer.
1959; Bertrand Russell, I960; Niels Bohr. 1961; Alvar Aalto, 1962; Karl Barth, 1963; Dominique
Pirc, 1964; Richard von Coudenhove-Kalcrgi. 1965; Sir Laurence Olivier. 1966; W. A. Visscr't
Hooft. 1967; Arthur Koestler, 1968; Halldor Laxness; 1969; Max Tau. 1970; Danilo Doici. 1971;
Sir Karl Popper, 1973; Hannah Arendt, 1975; Arne Naess, 1977; Hermann Gmeiner, 1979. A
Sonning Music Prize is also awarded annually, whose recipients include Leonard Bernstein,
Andres Segovia, and Mstislav Rostropovitch.
’ Sec Institut Calais d'Etudis Medttcrranis. Premi hilemacimal Catalunya 1989 {Barcelona:
Generalitat de Catalunya, 1989).
* See Konrad Lorenz, Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge
(New York; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); and Alec Nisbeu, Konrad Lomu; A Biography (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). See also Donald T. Campbell. "Reintroducing Konrad
lorenz to Psychology", in Richard I. Evans. Konrad Ijrreru; The Man anil His Ideas (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1975). But see tny commentaries in Rupert Riedl and Franz M.
Wuketits, eds., Die evolutiondre Erkenntndtheone (Berlin: Verlag Paul Parey, 1987), pp. 37-89.
’ Ralph Raico, "Master Iconoclast: A Celebration of ILiomas Szasz". Ijtisse; Faire Books,
November 1988, p. 22. Raico writes: "As regards psychiatry and psychology, Szasz is the great
advocate of die principle of voluntary exchange, the rule of law. and the open society. But in the
course of struggling for some thirty ,’ears
y on behalf of these libertarian ideas in a field virtually
I monopolized by the purveyors —and beneficiaries— of collectivist ideologies, Szasz has achieved
Nothing less than a Copernican revolution."
“ See "11 grande filosofo al convegno su 'individuale-colicttivo': Torino, un'ovazione per
Popper”, La Stampa, January 14, 1983; "Inconlro con Karl Popper, il filosofo ottuagenario in Italia
P*r un convegno: 'Sono sordo, cieco e stupido'", II (iiomale, January 14, 1983; “Convegno a
I Torino: Con Popper e Bobbio alia cicerca dello Stato di Ragione", Il manifesto, January 14, 1983.
11
The way in which Popper has reached the general public began to become apparent in
*®78, when The Tones Higher Education Supplement printed a critique of Popper by an Oxford
Philosopher, there were many letters of protest from die general public, some of them printed in
•bhsequent issues. Most responses, although clearly competent, were by members of the public
I Unknown to the professional community—including Popper's group. Times Higher Education
187
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
The story behind that lament suggests that Adam Smith was right
to say that the people “would soon find better teachers for them-
selves than any whom the state could provide for them"1’, that is,
the state . . . or the philosophical profession, most of whose mem-
bers are now funded, directly or indirectly, by the state.
Supplement. July 14. 1978. p. 11; August 4, 1978, p. 10; September 1, 1978, p. 11.
11
Adam Smith, d n Intfuin Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, op. cil.. p. 621
“ See the Carnap Archive at the University of Pittsburgh, especially the corresponded c
between Mrs. Carnap and Mrs. C. G. Hempel, and Carnap's own correspondence with Popp t r
Carnap was not of Jewish descent, and had left his Professorship in the University of Prague f‘,r
career purposes and to leave what, he correctly anticipated, would soon become a war rone
188
POPPER S RECEPTION BY T H E PROFESSION
'* Eluehl ms Engagement (Munich: Szczesny Verlag, 1964); retranslated by Klaus I’ahlcr.
following the second, expanded American edition of 1984, and published in Tftbingen by J . C. B.
Mohr (Paul Siebcck) Verlag, 1987.
189
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
190
POPPER’S RECEPTION BY THE PROFESSION
See A. J. Ayer. Part of My Lift (London: Oxford University Press, 1977); Ayer. Mort of My
K?? (London: Collins. 1984). and Ayer, "The Currents of an Independent Ayer", Tima Hightr
Supptrrruw, January 23. 1981. pp. 9-10.
M David Miller, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy. University of Warwick.
E--8-. Larry Brisktnan, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Edinburgh. Professor Jeremy
thc i>, n U r ' **’° was Lor some years lecturer in Edinburgh and Manchester, has since moved to
ned States, to the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.
'*nrks Eflhrs et al.. Kntuchrr Kalionalismus. op. ciL; Adorno et al.. PosUtiosI Dispulr; and the
° Hans Albert. See also the citations given above.
191
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
192
POPPER’S RECEPTION BY THE PROFESSION
Tiffin Literary Supplement, February 27, 1959. p. H 177. A similar comment appears in
I an
' Mager. Modem British Philosophy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), p, 66.
193
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
another, both encompassing and contradicting the first, was the cuk
of ordinary language and of the later Wittgenstein. These two
positions were already firmly in place when the university systems
throughout the world began to expand after the war, and to ex-
pand again (in America) after Sputnik and (in England and Wales)
after the Robbins Report; and almost all new appointments to
philosophy departments were made by representatives of these
entrenched positions.” Popper himself made his view of university
expansion quite clear when he declared:
” As noted earlier, the late Gilbert Ryle, formerly Waynllete Professor of Metaphysical
Philosophy at Oxford, and also Moore’s successor as editor of Mind, the leading r l l . . , , , r v h II . d
periodical, virtually controlled philosophical appointments for nearly two decades in the sense th-1-
hardly a professorial appointment could be made, anywhere in the British commonwealth, will"'"
his approval. Ryle's successor as editor of Mind now exerts strong influence over British app*’" 11
menu in philosophy, although — since the expansion of philosophy departments has nl ' w
ceased— his influence is far less than Ryle's was.
” “University Expansion: Threat to Literacy", report in The Times Eduratuinal Suppl'1"'
January 20, 1961. p . 98.
194
POPPER'S RECEPTION BY THE PROFESSION
S” n*y discussion of Ayer and White in Tht Rttrtat to Commitment, op. cil. For Richard
*C Philosophy and tht Mtrm of Naturr, op. cit., and Peter Munz. “Philosophy and the
*rror of Rorty”, in Radnitzky and Bartley, Evolutionary Etnslrmology, Rationality, anti tht Sociology of
tttnolrdgt, op. cit., chapter 16.
Ute distinction between the actual content of ideas and opinions about idea* — the
of' 1" rtlon
between the objective (’World S') slate of a discussion and subjective ('World 2 ) states
an
affiliation —is deeply embedded in Popperian thought, and needs to be under-
p * - This is the distinction stressed in part I , especially in chapters 3 and 4, and introduced by
|-T*per in Objccttvr Knowledge, op. de Failure to make it makes sodology of knowledge possible.
195
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
sciences, one could rest content with the result, and say that it had
succeeded. Yet the relevance of Popperian philosophy extends
beyond the natural sciences, into the heart of the humane sciences.
In consequence of his de facto exclusion from the philosophical
profession, Popper and his followers are not true participants in the
contemporary professional philosophical dialogue woven by these
two schools (positivism and Wittgensteinian philosophy). Rather, he
has ruined that dialogue, and this is deeply resented. To point out
that he is not recognised is not to say that he has been unheeded.
If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philoso-
phers the world over have wasted or are wasting their careers. And
they know it. Yet so unwilling are they to swallow this bitter medi-
cine that the gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and
that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers remains
as great as that between astronomy and astrology.
Thus the dialogue may have been ruined but the discussion
continues. It is one in which Popper's work is either ignored or
radically misunderstood. By reading professional journals, one would
not gather that the problems discussed earlier have been solved.
Inductivism continues as before; and a philosophy that presupposes
the insolubility of the problem of induction dominates all profes-
sional discussion.
A good example of the ignoring of or boycotting of Popper’s
work is Justification and. Knowledge, a book of essays by some of
America's best-known episteinologists, including Keith Lehrer,
Roderick M. Chisholm, and Wilfrid Sellars. As George Pappas, its
editor, proudly reports in his Introduction: "The literature on
epistemic justification . . . in English-language journals and books is
vast and growing all the time.”55 The entire discussion of this book
was, however, rendered obsolete by Popper’s work in the 1930s, and
“ George S. Pappas. cd„ Justification and Knowledge (Boston: Rcidel. 1979). p. xv. For Otho
examples see David B . Annis. “A Contextualist Theory of Epistemic Justification". dmrnrd”
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 15. July 1978, pp. 213’219; William P. Alston. “Has Foundationalis* 1 ’
Been Refuted?". Philosophical Studies, 1976, pp. 287-305; James W. Comman, "Foundationalistn
versus Nonfoundational Theories of Empirical Justification”, American Philosophical Quarterly. 19" J -
pp. 387-397; David B. Annis, “Epistemic Foundationalism", Philosophical Studies, 1977, pp. 345-35**
Nicholas Reseller, “Foundationalism. Coherentism, and the Idea of Cognitive Systematizatio”
Journal of Philosophy, 1974. pp. 695-708; W. P. Alston. "Two Types o f Foundationalism", Journal
Philosophy, 1976. pp. 165-185; Richard Foley. "Inferential Justification and the Infinite Regres 1’
dmrruwi Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 15, October 1978, pp. 311-316; laurence Bonjour,
Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?”. American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 15. January 19"‘
pp- 1-13. See also the issue of Philosophia, July 1978, devoted to Roderick Chisholm’s work.
196
POPPER S RECEPTION BY THE PROFESSION
M
See my The Unreal to Commitment,op. dt. ; "Rationality versus the Theory of Rationality".
°P- dt.; and "Rationality. Critidsm. and Logic”, op. dt.
” It is easy to get an advanced education in issues of justification in American graduate
programmes without ever having heard of the work of Popper and his students. A good example
u that of Michael Williams. a young philosopher at Yale, who published a brilliant book.
Groundless Relief (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), which presents the problems of justification in a
Bunner somewhat similar to that of Popper and myself. Williams reaches the conclusion that
empirical knowledge neither has nor needs foundations—and that in so far as die traditional task
- epistemology has been to place knowledge on its proper foundations, one need not concern
°neself with epistemology further. Yet Williams's argument is left hanging: he fails to find a
Motion to the problems he sees, precisely because he does not know the distinction between
Justification an( j nonjustificational criticism (for which see chapter 14 below). In the preface to his
J**>k. Williams writes: “A reviewer pointed out to me that some of (he views 1 defend have been
vocatcd on various occasions by Popper. To my regret, 1 had not read Popper before the
®j*nuscript was complete and so was not influenced directly, though I now agree that Popper is a
P uosopher whose epistemological views desene serious attention." It would have been harder for
SUc
" an oversight to have occurred in Europe, and it is interesting that the reviewer of the
uscript for a British publisher called Popper’s work to Williams's attention. Sec also Williams s
rCnCC
263 ’ J tification. ant Analysis of Knowledge", Journal of Philosophy. May 1978, pp. 249-
N. M. L. Nathan, Evidence and Assurance (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
197
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
* Stephen P. Stich and Richard E. Nisbett, "Justification and Psychology of Human Reason-
ing", Philosophy of Science, vot 47, 1980. pp. 188-202. After reading this passage, one of my
research assistants, a Stanford undergraduate, wrote on the margin, “This is incredible!", not
believing that anyone could assert such a thing. So we double-checked the quotation— and it is
accurate. How much more complicated the story is. is readily illustrated in Paul Starr's The Social
Transformation of Amervan Medicine, op. dt, which tells how American medicine passed from
populism to a position of "cultural authority", and yet how the autonomy of American physicians
has more recently greatly diminished. See however several critical reviews of Starr's book which
argue that, in concentrating on the formation and development of the medical profession he
neglects the inner content of medical theory and practice: Arnold Reiman. The New York Review"J
Books, March 19, 1984, pp. 29-33. and Florence Ruderman. "A Misdiagnosis of American
Medidne". Commentary, January 1986, pp. 43-49. In any case, the entire discussion of Starr's work,
and the book itself, illustrate not deference to cognitive authority, as recommended by Stich an1
Nisbctt, but, rather, the necessary critical examination of it, wherever it may manifest itself.
“ Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet Actor and Martyr (New York: George Braziller. 1963), p. 24.
198
POPPER S RECEPTION BY THE PROFESSION
” Harold I. Brown, Perception,Theory and Commitment.The N'ew Philosophy of Science, op. rit
u
See Sanford Levinson, Constitutional Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1988), p
176, and Thomas L. Pangle’s review of it, ” Post-Modernist Thought". The Wall Street Journal,
January 9, 1989, p. A9.
° See Campbell, “Descriptive Epistemology. Psychological, Sociological, and Evolutionary”.
Ujuneographed (William James Lectures, Harvard University, 1977). See also Campbell, “A Tribal
JJodel of the Social System Vehicle Carrying Scientific Knowledge", in Knowledge: Creation,
tyfusum, Utilization 1, 1979, pp. 181*20!. See also Donald T- Campbell, Methodology and
Epistemology for Social Science: Selected Papers, cd. E. Samuel Overman, op. dt. Incidentally, one
Unremarked unintended consequence of the current sociology of knowledge is almost certain to
| growth of knowledge. Namely, some professionals will take advantage of (heir
owlcdgc of the sodology and psychology o f academic communities in order to manipulate them
° their own advantage and thereby to perpetuate themselves at the expense of the growth of
*®owlcdgc
199
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
11,1
“ See Popper, in K. R. Popper and J . C. Eccles, Thr Self and Its Brain, op. di., sec. 42:
Sell Anchored in World S.” See also Auf der Siuhr noth finer bessrrm Writ, op. di., chapter 1.
200
POPPER S RECEPTION BY THE PROFESSION
, See Lewis H Gann, “African Studies: A Dissident's View", Acadrmu Quotums, vol. 2. Spring
l9S
«. pp. 80-90.
201
Chapter 13
WILL THE POPPERIAN POSITION SURVIVE?
AND DOES THE ANSWER MATTER?
Ideological conflict at its lowest, mixed with academic
jealousy at its pettiest, has resulted in campus politics at its
filthiest.
George Roche 1
i the first level Popper and the group around him are doing
didly, in terms both of the professional communities and the
culture. There have been some remarkable developments of
3sition, including Ernst Gombrich’s application of it to art and
Campbell’s application to biology and evolutionary epistemolo-
id a series of important mutations have sprung from the midst
: Popperians. One is the philosophy of Paul K. Feyerabend,
wildly overemphasises the role of unjustified variation in the
to'mis, voL 17, no. 12. George Roche is President of Hillsdale College.
“justified" variation would be one that could lie seen in advance to be •'progressive or
See Campbell, "Evolutionary Epistemology ", in The Philosophy of Kari Popper, cd. Sc r p p .
P 413-463. and in Radnitzky and Bartley, op. cit.
Chapter 18
WILL THE POPPERIAN POSITION SURVIVE?
AND DOES THE ANSWER MATTER?
Ideological conflict at its lowest, mixed with academic
jealousy at its pettiest, has resulted in campus politics at its
filthiest.
George Roche1
On the first level Popper and the group around him are doing
splendidly, in terms both of the professional communities and the
wider culture. There have been some remarkable developments of
his position, including Ernst Gombrich’s application of it to art and
D. T. Campbell's application to biology and evolutionary epistemolo-
gy. And a series of important mutations have sprung from the midst
of the Popperians. One is the philosophy of Paul K. Feyerabend,
which wildly overemphasises the role of unjustified variation in the
1
Imprimis, vol. 17» no, 12. George Roche is President of Hillsdale College.
* A “justified" variation would be one that could be seen in advance to be “progressive or
adaptive. See Campbell. “Evolutionary Epistemology", in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, cd. Schilpp,
op. cit., pp, 413-463. and in Radniuky and Bartley, op. cit.
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
* See P. K. Feyerabcnd, Against Method (Ixindon: NLB. 1975); Science tn a Free Society
(London; NLB, 1978); Knowledge without Foundations (Oberlin: Oberiin College, 1961); Realism.
Rationalism and Scientific Method and Problems of Empiricism (Cambridge: University Press, 1981).
* See my The Retreat to Commitment, op. cit.; "Rationality. Criticism, and Logic”, op. cit-; and
"Rationality versus tile Theory of Rationality', op. cii. The idea of unjustified criticism will be
explained below.
* See Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); The
Methodology of Scienlifu Research Programmes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1978); and
Mathematics, Science and Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). See also
chapter 18 below.
* See Weimer, Notes an the Methodology of Scientific Research, op. cit., p. xi.
’ Fhis is not surprising. Phases one and three are at war with one another: to the eaten*
that the Popperians succeed in phase one, they are likely to have trouble with phase three. See
Campbell, "Descriptive Epistemology", and 'A Tribal Model”, both in Methodology and Epistemology
for Social Science: Selected Papers, op. at.
* See D. L, Krantz and Lynda Wiggins, "Personal and Impersonal Channels of Rccruitmen*
in the Growth of Theory", Human Development. vol. 16. 1973, p. 133.
204
POPPER S RECEPTION BY THE PROFESSION
See Alan C. Kors's remark that “people who are not playing by the rules ■!?*'
age in replicating themselves within their departments . in Voces Aca emicae v ol ,
t and Education: A View from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor n
•wed by Carol lannone", Acadrmw QueUvms. vol. I. no. 4. Fall 1988, pp 75- .
For this terminology see Campbell's work, and chapter 4 above. iLivv"
See David L. Krantz. “The Separate Worlds of Operant and Non-Opcrant P 8 ■
of Applud Behainor Analysis. vol. 4, 1971, pp. 61-70.
205
UN FATHOM ED KNOWLEDGE
not itself become a vested interest. Yet it survived, and has since
participated widely in the ongoing process of science. 11
” Allen Wheelis, The Quest for Identity (New York; Norton, 1958), pp. 153-154.
” Compare Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and thr
Development of Higher Education tn America (New York: Norton, 1977), and Thomas L, Haskells
review "Power to the Experts" in The New York Review of Books, October 13, 1977, pp. 28-33.
206
POPPER’S RECEPTION BY THE PROFESSION
Kors: I don't think we yet know what would happen if, in addition
to standing up within our own institutions, we made the broader
public aware of how many areas of the social sciences and the
humanities have become intellectually marginalized, and of how
much better educated their children would be from reading things
Left, Right and Center produced by think tanks rather than from
studying the social sciences at a university. . . .
Kors: Excepting the natural and applied sciences, yes. In the social
sciences, and in many of the humanities, the most interesting things
are occurring outside the university. In some ways it reminds me of
the relationship of the universities to the physical sciences in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There was an ideological
commitment to a certain Aristotelian scholasticism in the seven-
teenth century that forced the new experimental scientists to find
homes outside the universities. As a result, the most interesting
science in the seventeenth century was not done at the University
of Paris or at Oxford, but in the Royal Society or the Academy of
Sciences in France, or in diverse private societies throughout
western Germany, northern Italy, and. indeed, France and En-
gland. . . . That’s the case now in the social sciences. What hap-
pens in the American Sociological Association is trivial. But what’s
coming out of certain think tanks and certain foundations and
“ Kors and lannone, op. dt., pp. 88-89. Another example of academic persecution of a
articular point of view is that of the historian Ernst Nolte. The case is not widely known outside
Germany, where JUrgen Habermas and others have attacked Nolte's work, an attack described as
•ne of the most lengthy and intensive assaults on freedom of investigation in the Germany
diversities. See the repons in FrnhrU drr Wiumuhafl. November 1987. p. S.
“ Sec David Gress, “Talking Terrorism”' at Stanford". Thr Nrw Crilmon. April 1988. p p 15-
■2. esp. p. 21: "What lessons can one draw? . . . The first surely is that the condition of our
ulture and in particular of our universities must be truly pathetic if one can take it completely
“ r granted, and hr right, that a university conference on terrorism arranged by professors of inc
lUtnanities will exonerate progressive terror and condemn the policies of democratic states as
liemselves terroristic "
207
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
certain institutes is very exciting and much more central to the real
debates about the problems of American society.
208
POPPER’S RECEPTION BY THE PROFESSION
“ See David Ricsman. /ndnndualism Reeonndered (Glencoe. III.; Free Preu, 1954). p- 163- Sec
Robert E. Park. “Human Migration and the Marginal Man.” The American Journal of Sociology,
Ma
> 1928. pp. 881-893.
” The New Fonker, June 3. 1974. p. 107.
209
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“It doesn't really work, that Fourth—does it! . . . Let’s try the Third
above . .
As Shaffer's stage notes report, “He repeats the new interval,
leading up to it smartly . . . . On and on he plays, improvising
happily . . . laughing gleefully each time he comes to the amended
interval of a Third. . . . Mozart's playing grows more and more
exhibitionistic—revealing to the audience the formidable virtuoso he
is. The whole time he himself remains totally oblivious to the
offence he is giving. Finally he finishes the March with a series of
triumphant flourishes and chords."1’ What had been a quite ordi-
nary march becomes a thing of wonder. And Salieri becomes at that
moment Mozart’s deadly enemy.19
Popper has done this sort of thing over and over again to his
colleagues during a very long professional career.
1 discussed some of these matters several years ago with Popper's
friend Sir Peter Medawar. “What you say is quite correct", he said
to me, “but rather too complicated. The situation is really very
simple. These chaps are simply green with envy".
" Peter Shaffer. Amadfus (Harmondsworth, Penguin. 1981), pp. 32-38 and pp. 110-111
*• Salieri's murderous reaction to Mozart—at least in Shaffer's account, which does
pretend to be historically accurate —is hardly unexpected. A philosopher too. once he has lost ' 1
dreams and aspirations of his youth, may turn in rage and set out to uproot whatever traces ‘
this lost Eden remain in his intellectual landscape. In his murderous and also suicidal treatnt*
of what is superior there is far more than simple stupidity.
210
Chapter 14
T H E UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS
O F POPPER’S OPPONENTS:
T H E WITTGENSTEINIAN PROBLEMATIC AND
JUSTIFICATION ISM*
1 . A n Approach to a Chasm
1
An early version of this chapter appeared in "The Division of Knowledge'. Chapter 5 of
C'ntnprod Fonts m the Sciences, ed. Gerard Radnitzky (New York: Paragon House, 1987). p p 67-
102
* The Order of Thmgs: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House. 19/0).
P' 246. See also his The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972). esp.
I chapter 6.
. ’ p H. Hirst. Knowledge and the Curriculum (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul. 1974). |>
*37.
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
* Henry Leroy Finch, H'ittgrnWrui—Thr ljUer Philosophy (New York: Humanities Press. 1977).
pp. vii*viii.
’ Gerard Radnitzky, “Popper as a Turning Point in the Philosophy of Science: Beyond
Foundationalism and Relativism", in Paul Levinson, In Pursuit of Truth, op. dt, pp. 64-80. See al*’
Radnilzky’s “Disappointment and Changes in the Conception of Rationality: Wittgenstein and
Popper**, in Thf Search for Absolute Values and the Creation of the New World: Proceedings of the Tenth
International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (New York: ICF Press, 1982), pp. 1193-1233,
• Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (London: George /Mien & Unwin. 1959). p
7
See my 2nd edition, op. dL
212
T H E UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS OF POPPER'S OPPONENTS
213
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
’ Sre K. R. Popper. Tht Oprn Sodfty and IU Enrmia, op. dl., vol. I, pp. 248-25S, and
Conjectures and Refutations, op. at., chapter 2.
• 1 use the term "research program" in the sense given by Popper in the “Metaphysical
Epilogue" to his Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, vol. 3, Quantum Theory and the Schism tn
Physics,op. cit. This idea was popularised, and given a somewhat different sense, by the late I inn-
Lakatos, for which see his The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, op. cit., and my chapter
18 below.
te
By "structure" here is meant nothing mysterious—only certain features of a philosophy
such as justificationism, which predetermine the kinds of questions asked and limit the range ol
answers deemed appropriate.
214
THE UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS OF POPPERS OPPONENTS
11
See my “Rationality. Criticism, and Logic", op, dt.; “Rationality versus the Theory of
Rationality", op. dt.; and The Rrtmil to Commitmen/,op. dt.
” Sec K. R. Pbpper, (Jnrndtd Quetf, op. dt.; my “Theory of Language and Philosophy of
Science as Instruments of Educational Reform", op. dL; my IfiWgrwstom, op. dt.; and my Ein
Schwienger Mensch", op. dt. I am, as mentioned, at present writing Popper’s biography, in which
1
attempt to reconstruct his own problematic or ’Problemstellung*. Popper’s large Archive of
Manuscripts and correspondence, incidentally, is deposited in the Archive of die Hoover
Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Stanford University.
” See my WtUgmston, second edition, op. dt. The most up-to-date account of my views on
Wittgenstein is contained in the Japanese translation of this book (Tokyo: Mintis hi. 1990).
215
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
H
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractates Logico-Phtfosophicus (London: Roudrdge & Regan Paul.
1922). See the discussion in m y op. dL, chapter 2, sections 9-10; see also Janies
Griffin, Htagnuiftni logical Atomism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964).
’* See Radnitzky and Bartley, Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowl-
op- dt., especially chapter 1.
216
T H E UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS OE POPPER S OPPONENTS
then philosophy may take the path that most professionals, following
Wittgenstein, have staked out. If Popper has, as he claims, solved
the problem of induction—and if the key to his solution is the
nonjustificational character of his approach—then professional
Wittgensteinian philosophy is a mistake, and continued mining of
that vein is wasted effort.
The issue is then not just one of fashion or power or influence;
certainly it transcends sociology. What is at stake is not the sort of
thing that Bertrand Russell seemed to have in mind when he wrote
of his displacement by the Wittgensteinians: "It is not an altogether
pleasant experience to find oneself regarded as antiquated after
having been, for a time, in the fashion. It is difficult to accept this
experience gracefully."16
Russell’s experience, as reported in this remark, both caters to
and lies outside the Wittgensteinian problematic. Russell could not
solve, and did not claim satisfactorily to have solved, the problem of
induction, even though he was preoccupied with it throughout his
life.” Both Wittgensteinian and Popperian philosophy, by contrast,
begin with the conviction—the correct conviction—that the problem
is insoluble in Russellian terms, and proceed from there. From the
Wittgensteinian and the Popperian viewpoints, Russell's work is anti-
quated. Yet both Wittgenstein and Russell are justificationists16,
whereas Popper is not.
If we reconstruct historically the problem situation that leads to
the development of contemporary professional philosophy, it be-
comes evident how the entire development hinges on the assump-
tion that the problem of induction cannot be solved. After doing
this, we can see how different the entire matter looks from a
perspective within which the problem of induction has been solved.
1 proceed in tltis way because most professionals come in —and
settle in—in the middle of the story, as it were, and never have the
opportunity to look at the development as a whole, or to consider it
as something that was anything but necessary or desirable.
217
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
218
THE UNDERLYING /ASSUMPTIONS OF POPPER’S OPPONENTS
’• Sec the reference to the work of R. H. Popkin, given in the following chapter
20
Bishop Butler, as quoted in G. E. Moore’s epigraph to Pnnafna Ethica.
11
See Hilary Putnam's remark, quoted above.
a
Ludwig Wittgenstein. PhUosophtcal Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell. 1953). paras. 481
219
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
220
THE UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS OF POPPER'S OPPONENTS
* See the Introduction to the second edition of my The Retreat to Commitment, op, dt.
221
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
5. Research Programs
° See Paul H. Hint, Knoutcdgt and Ihf Curriculum. op. a t . p. 135. See also Paul H. Hirst and
R S. Peters, The l*ogic of Education (New York: The Humanities Press, 1971); Paul H. Hirst.
"Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge", in R. E Dearden, P H, Hint, and R. S.
Peters, Education and Reason (London: Routledge 8c Kegan Paul, 1972).
” The word "research" should be taken lightly Genuine research, advancing knowledge,
does more than grindingly apply a central theme to various areas. On "research programs" see K
R Popper, "Metaphysical Epilogue" to Theon and the Schism in Phpics, op. dL; and also
chapter 18 below.
222
THE UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS OF POPPERS OPPONENTS
" Set? my pp. 167-170. or (second edition, op. cit.), pp. 144-145.
w
I n my **Achilles, the Tortoise, and Explanation in Science and i n History". British Journal
- the Philosophy of Science, May 1962, 1 examine one product of the application of this research
ogram: the debate about historical explanation. In the light of the Wittgensteinian problematic,
aders will be able to appreciate more fully why that debate—often called the “covering law
odel" debate—was one of the most intense controversies in professional philosophy during the
e 1950s and early 1960s. I t was a test case. The debate, it will be recalled, concerned whether
fpper’s model of scientific explanation (also referred to as the “Popper-Hempel model" or the
Dvering law model") could be applied, as Popper and C. G. Hempel maintained, to explanation
historical writing as well as to explanation i n physics and other sciences. This debate was
culiar for several reasons: (a) because of the large numbers of philosophers independently
rarted to i t ; (b) because it was a pseudo-debate, depending almost entirely on misreadings of
tat Popper and Hempel had actually written, and on a string of non sequiturs; and (c) because
e issues involved were intrinsically not very important: what Popper says about historical
planation is trivially correct —and rather uncnlightening about the actual practice of historical
pcstigation.
This debate can be understood only within the wider context of the Wittgensteinian problcrn-
C. I f it is assumed that standards of inference must be field-dependent and not universal, then
y important standard-setting feature of investigative activity in any area—and certainly so
portant a feature as explanation— that purported to be universal, applying to all fields, would
se a challenge. Hence the debate over the covering law model was really an attempt (an
empi contemptuous of the facts and of what was written) to show that explanation must be
Id-dependent too. What was really involved —though I do not believe anyone mentioned it was
r a prwn rejection of the contention that a model of scientific explanation could apply anywhere
-ept in the strictest scientific undertaking — for anything else would have to have a different
223
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
"logic". Consequently this debate produced no serious investigations of historical narrative, but
only disguised and misplaced polemics against what was conceived as scientific imperialism.
" See The Retreat to Commitment, 2nd edition, op. cit., pp. 124-133. See also Antony Flew and
Alasdair MacIntyre, eds,. New Essays m Philosophical Theology (London: Macmillan. 1955), chapter I
224
THE UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS OF POPPER’S OPPONENTS
Thus it is that Ludwig Wittgenstein, for all his trials and tribula-
tions, never had to batde for recognition—-for he, like Kuhn, told the
professionals what they wanted to hear. It is consoling for “specialists"
isolated from the wider culture to be reassured that it is all right
merely to “do their thing”. It is consoling for them—ironically,
through “team work” with colleagues—to believe that there is no
alternative to continuing to destroy rather than to create communi-
ty, and that their own particular usage and activity, whatever it may
be, is indeed authoritative.52 1 wrote in Parts 1 and II of the cre-
ation of intellectual cartels—a phenomenon not restricted to the
profession of philosophy. Here, in the underlying abstractions of contem-
porary philosophy, one finds a theoretical defense of such cartels and of
protectionism—a ready-made ideology to defend such cartels (al-
though, needless to say, these words are not used and these paral-
lels are not drawn).
Yet, ironically latent in this theoretical justification of fragmenta-
tion and protectionism, is a new imperialism, generally unarticulat-
ed, according to which disciplines or forms of life must conform.True
forms of life (a) must not judge one another; and (b) must not try
to describe some common world in collaboration with other disci-
plines since each form of life creates its own world. In this generally
agreed theoretical justification itself resides all that remains of unity.
Popper’s approach does not conform to either of these principles.
Hence he and his students are not simply followers of a different way of life,
to be treated tolerantly like all the rest. Rather,in Wittgenstein’s words, they
are "bad pupils".
” See Thf Rrtreal to Commitmrnt. 2nd edition, op. dt., p. 100 & n.. as well as chapter 15
K
below
225
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
“ See Peter Muru, 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Rorty". and my "Alienation Alienated The
Economics of Knowledge versus the Psychology and Sociology of Knowledge", both in Radnitrky
and Bartley, Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge, op. cil.
M
See Hans Albert, “Hermeneutics and Economics: A Criticism of Hermeneutical Thinking ,n
the Social Sciences". Kiddos, vol. 41. 1988. fiuc. 4. pp. 573-602.
“ My statement here challenges those who say that Popper and Wittgenstein —whatever thru
differences may be—are in agreement with regard to "non-foundationalism" or “nonjustifica
tionism". Thus J. J. Ross writes of “an approach in epistemology held in common by Karl Popprt
and the later Wittgenstein . . . which has now come to be called ‘non-foundationalism’". ("Th c
Tradition of Rational Criticism: Wittgenstein and Popper", in Wi/Zgeruton, the Vienna Circle, and
Critical Rationalism. Proceedings of the 3rd International Wittgenstein Symposium (Vienna: Hdlder-Pichler-
lempsky, 1979), pp. 415-419.) Ross and others who have argued in this way are wholh
mistaken —as I hope will be evident from the argument and evidence of the present chapter. ♦»'
well as from my “Non-Justificationism: Ripper iwjm Wittgenstein", in Epistemology and Philosophy a/
Science: Proceedings of the 7th International Wittgenstein Symposium (Vienna: Hdlder-Pichler-Tempsky-
1983), pp. 255-261). See also Alvin 1. Goldman, "What Is Justified Belief?", in George S. Papp35 *
d-. Justification and Knowledge, op. cit., p. 14.
226
THE UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS OF POPPER’S OPPONENTS
227
Chapter 15
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
1. Comprehensive Rationality
What is justificalionism?
Justificationism is a characteristic of most philosophical theories of
rationality. Rationality is of course opinion and action in accordance
with reason. But what this amounts to is disputed by philosophers,
and the theory of rationality grows from such disagreement.
While there are numerous ways to draw an inventory of theories
of rationality, all important variants fall into one of three main
categories: comprehensive rationality (the traditional account, of which
logical positivism is an example), limited rationality (the most common
Wittgensteinian account of rationality, and the account accepted by
niost contemporary philosophical professionals), and pancritical
1
See Thr Krtrral to Commitment. 2nd edition, op. cit.; and also K. R IVipper. Realism and the
? ,m
' of Science. op. cit.. Part I, section 2.
UN FATHOM ED KNOWLEDGE
* See W. P. Alston and Richard B Brandt, The Problems of Philosophy (Boston: Allyn arid
Bacon, Inc., 1978), p. 605: George S. Pappas and Marshall Swain, eds.. Essays on Knowledge
Justijtraium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1978).
’ Rudolf Carnap. The Logical Structure of the World, op. cit., p. xvii.
This consideration plays a prominent role in the theories of Popper and Hayek-
230
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
Sextus Empiricus, Works in four volumes. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University I >*
fe also Richard H. Pupkin. The History of Srrpnrinn from Erasmus to Spinoza. op. dU a n d "W
to Pyrrhonism, op. cit.
231
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
2. Limited Rationality
232
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
233
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
' Hirst gives different accounts of the alleged principles of rationality in different places A
"third" principle that turns up is that to be rational one must sun with clear and specific
objectives. No one would deny die general desirability of clear and specific objectives: and if one
does specify one's objectives as best one can, one may get a somewhat clearer idea of what is
happening in one’s life as one meets or fails to meet them. But it is "scientism" to identify
rationality with any such goal. Any such approach is dioroughly undermined by Hayek's
argument concerning complex orders, and the discovery that in objective knowledge it is
impossible for one ever to know what one is talking about. See Part I above; K. R . Poppet-
t'nmdfii Qutu. op. dL, sec. 7; and F. A. Hayek, Thr fatal Contnl. op. dt.. chapters 4 and 5.
234
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
* Norman Malcolm. "The Groundlessness of Beller, in Stuart C. Brown, cd.. Reason and
Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). pp. 143-157.
'• Ibid.
235
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
3. Pancritical Rationality
11
See my list in The Retreat to Commitment, secund edition, op. dt.. "Introduction 1984". See
also Hayek's discussion in The Sensory Order, op. dt. of limits of prediction and explanation of
complex phenomena, and his review of limits of rationality in The Fatal Conceit, op. d t , chapters 4
and 5 .
” See E A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason, op. d t . , and
The Fatal Conceit, op. dt,, as well as his other writings, some of which are dted in Part 1 above
Hayek is sometimes misunderstood on this point. Ihus I disagree with John Gray's study in The
Ijteralure of liberty. 1983. where he states (p. 32) that Hayek believes that in social theory " " r
come to a stop with the basic constitutive traditions of social life”, which “like Wittgenstein's forms
of life, cannot be the objects of further criticisms, since they are at the terminus of critidsm and
236
justification and rationality
lu’iifiiation: they are simply given to us and must he accepted by us”. A more accurate account of
raayek's views on such matters is given by Walter Weimer i n his “Hayek’s Approach to Complex
Phenomena: An Introduction to the Theoretical Psychology of The Sensory Order", in Walter B.
Reimer and David S. Palermo, cds„ Cogni/wn and ihe Symbolic Process, vol. 2 (Hillsdale: Lawrence
•ribaum, 1982). pp 241-285. especially pp 283-284. Weimer quotes Hayek's Nrw Sludui, <>p- ••
’• 298: “the liberal must claim the right critically to examine every single value or moral rule of
* society".
“ Dir hrulm Grundproblrmr drr Erkenntnisihronr . op. cit, p . 394.
” See my discussion in Thr Rrtrrai to Commitmrnt. 2nd edition, op. cit., and also Poppet s
“tuition in Rrahim and thr Amr of Scinur, op. dr. part I . section 2.
237
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
238
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
239
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
11
Sec Radnitzky and Bartley, Evolutionary Epistrmology. Rationality and th/ Sociology of Knowl-
edge. op. de, chapters 1 and 18.
'• These questions are not merely rhetorical. Detailed partial answers to them are provided
by the “public choice" school of economics. Buchanan and Tullock are primarily concerned with
the reform of political institutions. An approach parallel to theirs needs to be developed for the
reform of educational institutions. See Part I above.
240
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
* ’ Within this basic unity, many important subdivisions or speciations of knowledge may of
course exist — as in Hayek's distinction between simple and complex phenomena On these
questions see my paper. The Division of Knowledge", op. cit.. and my discussion of Hirst in the
next section.
“ See Radnitrky and Bartley, Evolutionary Efnstrmology . op. cit., p . 25.
241
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
tually be refuted too. 19 All disciplines and forms of life can be seen
as evolutionary products which, as far as their intellectual viability is
concerned, are to be subjected to critical examination—an examina-
tion which includes the critical review of their fundamental princi-
ples. There are no longer any principles—or frameworks—that are
fundamental in the sense of being beyond criticism. There is no
method peculiar to philosophy or to science or to logic (see the
epigraph to chapter 9). The same general critical method, itself
subject to modification, is universal. Moreover, it is only now that
the question can arise as to what extent the methods of the sciences
are applicable to other areas.
♦***
In this chapter and the last I have argued that the Wittgen-
steinian problematic lies at the heart of the differences between
those who approach matters in a Popperian spirit and most of those
who are professional philosophers. I have argued that Wittgenstein,
like most professional philosophers and the entire philosophical
tradition, is thoroughly justificationist in his approach, abandoning
justification only vis d vis frameworks rather than systematically; and
that where he does abandon or retain justification, he does so for
thoroughly justificationist reasons.
The approach taken by professional philosophy is then so much
at odds with our approach that when one compares and contrasts
them one risks failing to get anywhere at all: failing to reach any
understanding of the underlying disagreements let alone any resolu-
tion thereof. In such a situation, it is relatively ineffectual to dispute
details. In such situations, a little preparatory work, a little context,
helps.
Thus the presentation that 1 have given—contextualising the
doctrine of the fragmentation of knowledge and revealing its struc-
ture—may prove more effective than haggling about details that
arise only within that structure. I have aimed to pull the rug from
under such philosophy.
“ The claim that there is a parallel between, on the one hand, natural selection in or 8‘*1' 9
evolution, and. on the other hand, trial and error learning, involves no naturalistic fallacy
claim is not that the growth of knowledge ought to follow an evolutionary pattern, best 1 '
processes that lead to increased fit—or correspondence —do happen to be parallel in n ' "’
respects. Whether anyone should aim for such "fit" is another question.
242
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
Fool: The reason why the seven stars are no more than
seven is a pretty reason.
Lear: Because they are not eight?
Fool: Yes, indeed: thou wouldst make a good fool.
King Lear, V, i, 39-41.
. ” See Skilbeck's Inaugural Lecture at the London Institute of Education. .< Can Curriadum
Common School (London: University of London Institute of Education. 1982). esp. p 19. See
Hvi Majesty’s Inspectorate. A View of the Curriculum (London: HMSO, 1980).
R. S. Peters, “General Editor's Note” to P. H. Hirst. Knowledge and the Curriculum. op. at-,
243
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
approach derives, and to illustrate the reach they now have into the
very heart of our cultural life.25
Hirst claims that all knowledge is divided into “seven or eight"
essentially different, “primary", “necessary”, “final”, “unique", and
“irreducible" categories or forms, each of which has a “distinctive
logical structure" stemming from the “logic”, "truth criteria”, “criter-
ia of validity", “criteria of meaning”, “manner of justification”, and
"central concepts” that are peculiar to it and distinguish it from all
the others. These categories are described alternately as “forms of
knowledge" and “forms of understanding" and are explicitly linked
with, and sometimes identified with, Wittgenstein’s language games.
These essentially separate, “logically delimited” domains seem to
be mathematics, the physical sciences, knowledge of persons, litera-
ture and die fine arts, morals, religion, and philosophy. I write
"seem" because Hirst makes differing listings in different places: for
instance, he once seemed to want to classify “historical knowledge"
as a separate form, but later thought it best “not to refer to history
or the social sciences in any statement of the forms of knowledge as
such". He also sometimes writes as if there is a more general
underlying distinction between the “human sciences" and the “phys-
ical sciences”. And he has vacillated over the question whether
religion constitutes a separate form of knowledge.
About one thing, however, he is unwavering: whatever the forms
may be, they are essentially different, “primary", “necessary", “final”,
"unique”, and “irreducible”. That is, his theory, like much profes-
sional philosophy, despite its pretence to analyse the concrete, is a
priori. Hirst got his ideas from reading Wittgenstein, not from any
investigation of the different areas of knowledge about which he
purports to write. He did not for instance gel it from investigation
of, or reflection on, the current state of die sciences.
One sees this a priori quality from a brief look at one of his
"separate and irreducible forms”— mathematics. The most casual
look at mathematics shows that one could, on Hirst’s own terms,
push the number of “forms of knowledge” very much higher than
In any case Hirst does not claim originality for his position, and acknowledges as precur-
sors. in addition to Wittgenstein, Michael Oakeshott's Experience and Its Modes, John MacMurrray *
Interpreting the Universe, R. G. Collingwood's Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Oxford University Pre**-
1956). and Louis Arnaud Reids Wiiyj of Knowledge and Experience. A position similar to Hirst s 1,1
some ways, and similarly inspired, was published by Stephen Toulmin in The Uses of
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1958) and Human Understanding (Princeton: Princeton
University Press. 1972).
244
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
” See K . R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Stif and Its Brain, op. cit., pp, 20-21; and Peter
B- Mcdawar. "A Geometric Model of Reduction and Emergence", in F. Ayala and T. Dobzhansky.
cds.t Studies tn the Philosophy of Biology (London: Macmillan. 1974), pp 67-73.
* 1 suppose that Hirst might try to evade part of this objection by claiming that the concepts
of natural science, however they may differ i n character, are all rmpinral. But this would be
positivist nonsense, as can be seen from Popper's reductio demonstration of how, on positivist
terms, even "God" can be rendered an "empirical concept". See K , R. Popper. CewyectHrcs and
Refutations, op. du chapter 11, pp. 274-277. See also Popper’s discussion in The Open Universe, op.
Gt, Addenda 2 and 3, on reduction, esp. pp. 166-167.
” 1 wish simply to list, without comment or explanation, some of the more detailed points on
w
hich 1 disagree with Hirst: a) he wrongly restricts knowledge to true statements, thus revealing
•‘gain that he holds to the epistemology of "justified true belieF, and has failed to absorb (or even
to notice) die biological and epistemological arguments that objective knowledge includes false as
W
®11as true statements; b) whereas he wants to distinguish forms of knowledge according to truth
criteria, there are no truth criteria of any interest; c) whereas his division of die forms of
*towledgr proceeds according to criteria of meaning, meaning analysis is irrelevant to most
P*o enil> philosophy —and the idea dial such analysis is relevant is based on a false analogy
tween the propositions of philosophy and the logical paradoxes, and d) his “principles o
rat
>onality, which he regards as beyond assessment, are incoherendy stated and, so far as they can
245
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
be understood, false
1,
” Ser chapter 17 below; my Morality and Rriigion, op. cit„ and my The Retreat to Commit ■
op. dL, Appendix 2,
246
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
247
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
n
Sec my discussion of Hilary Putnam in The Retreat to Commitment. op. de, second editin’1 '
PP 102-105. and in chapter 10, section 8 above.
■ Hirst, op. de, p. 210.
248
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
" For an example of this sort of reasoning see Aristotle, Nuhamarhean Ethia, book I . section
*'■ and book X, section i x ; F. H . Bradley, "Why Should 1 Be Moral?", in Elhwal Studio. Essay I I .
second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927); H . A. Prichard, "Does Moral Philosophy
on a Mistake?", in Mmd. N.S. vol 2 1 , 1912. and in Moral OHtgalum (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1949). See m y discussion of these arguments in my “Rationality, Criticism, and
opc", op. ciL. footnote 37.
“In this connection sec my discussion of unintended consequences in my “Fin schwieriger
■ crisch: Fine Portritskizze von Sir Karl Popper", in Eckhard Nordhofen, e d . PhtlMophm do 20
J rhuiuirrt. tn Portrait. (Kdnigstein/Taunus: AthenAum Verlag, 1980), as well as m y Alienation
cnaicd", in Radnitzky and Bartley, eds.. Evolutionary Epulmology, op. cit.
249
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
" For a related argument about presuppositions of logic in logical argument, see my
Rrtreal to Commilmml, op. dL, Appendix 5 , as well as my "Rationality, Criticism, and Logic”, op
at, sections 17-19.
250
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
251
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
” H . L. Finch. "Wittgenstein and Pnpper". in Thr Srardi for Absolute t'alurs and thr Crration "/
lhe- New World: Proceedings of the I Oth International Conference an the Unity of the Sciences, op. cit.. PP
1173.1190.
M
See my U'rnier Erhard: The Transformation of a Man (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,
my ZJw Prtrrat to Commitment. op. cit., Appendix I; and my “Rationality, Criticism, and Logic . 111
Philasophta, vol. I L February 1982, pp. 121-221, especially section IV.
252
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
Even this view, which is so pure and so clear, if you cling to it, if
you fondle it, if you treasure it, if you are attached to it, then you
do not understand that our teaching is similar to a raft, which is
for crossing over, and not for keeping hold of.”
This is plainly in the spirit of fallibilism, and goes very much against
what Wittgenstein teaches—even in its use of metaphor. For to quote
Wittgenstein:
Buddhists, like Popperians, realise that one needs rafts and ladders
(we call them conjectures) to get anywhere—including that evanes-
cent space known as living in the present moment. It is not the use
of ladders and rafts that keeps one from living in the present
moment; rather, it is attachment and dogmatic commitment to those
rafts—for example, the belief that one has the right raft or the best
ladder. It is this attachment—whether deliberate or uncon-
scious—which keeps one stuck in the past and fixated on the future,
and to that extent unable to grow.
253
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
254
JUSTIFICATION AND RATIONALITY
255
Chapter 16
T H E POPPERIAN HARVEST
When I reflect on what has gone before in the light of the theme
of transformation, I have to conclude that there is nothing trans-
formative in Wittgenstein's philosophy. It is a playing out of the
structural assumptions of justificationist philosophy, and these
structural assumptions prevent all the main problems of philosophy
from being solved. With Popper’s philosophy the situation seems to
me to be quite different. Not only does Popper solve fundamental
problems, he effects a structural transformation. To suggest what I
have in mind and to bring this part of my discussion to a close, 1
shall state without elaboration the main achievements of the Popper-
ian work and perspective, and thereby remind the reader one final
time of themes that recur throughout this book.
(1) Popper solved the problem of induction, in all its classic
manifestations?
(2) His solution to the problem of induction proved to be ex-
emplary, in the first sense that Kuhn gives to the term “paradigmat-
ic”.1 Exactly comparable approaches, using the same strategies and
ideas, could immediately be applied to all the main problems of
epistemology and methodology: the is/ought problem;’ the problem
of other minds, of the external world, of the uniformity of nature,
of the existence of the past, of the existence of matter, of the
existence of physical space, and of time independent of perception.
This is no arbitrary listing of epistemological problems. These are
the problems treated by Bertrand Russell in his classic work The
Problems of Philosophy (1912), and by A. J . Ayer in his The Problem of
Knowledge (1956) and The Central Questions of Philosophy (1973). They
are Hume’s epistemological problems?
Popper has rendered obsolete classical epistemology—and also
many other areas of traditional philosophy. .Ml classical epistemology
can be shown to depend on a mistaken fusion of justification and
criticism.
1
See The Logic of Scientific Discovery. op. dt., for extended treatments by Popper of the
Problem of induction in its various aspects; see also his Conjectures and Refutations, op. dt.. Objective
Knowledge, op. dt., chapter 1. and Realism and the d m of Science, op. dt., chapter I, esp. sees. 4-7.
also David Miller, "Conjectural Knowledge: Popper’s Solution to die Problem of Induction".
,n
Paul Levinson, e d . In Pursuit of Truth, op. cit., pp. 17-49, for a detailed reply to Popper’s
pities.
’ Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed., op. dt.. "Postscript— 1969 .
PP I75ff.
See my Morality and Religion, op. dt.. chapter I.
’ See my “Logical Strength and Demarcation", Appendix 2 of The Retreat Io Commitment, op.
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
258
THE POPPERIAN HARVEST
259
Chapter 17
ON MAKING A DIFFERENCE:
T H E DIFFICULT MAN AGAIN 1
This chapter was originally given as a lecture at the celebration of Popper’s 80th birthday
« P ach European forum. Alpbach. Tirol. Austria, on 26 August 1982. In it. retaining the
die original talk. I return to the theme of the “difficult man” with which this Part of the
opened.
* See my "Ein schwieriger Mensch" in Eckhard Nordhofen, ed.: Physiognomm: Phtlosoffhrn drs
i ‘ rn PortraUS, op. dL. pp. 43*69. Another part of this essay, also in a revised form,
Included in the “Afterword" to the revised and expanded second edition of my K'urgensldn. op.
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
262
ON MAKING A DIFFERENCE: THE DIFFICULT MAN AGAIN
the way of life which he believes the new regime in Russia stands
for". 4 And on the very evening before the Anschlufl, Wittgenstein
I dismissed the report that Hitler was poised to annex Austria as “a
[ ridiculous rumour"? But enough of this sort of difficult man. I do
not recommend this sort of difficult man.
Karl Popper is also a difficult man, and his difficultness also
| stems in part from his view of language. But he is a very different
sort of difficult man from Count Buhl or from Wittgenstein. Popper
f speaks out—and does so whether one likes it or not; he engages in
the battle; he is a passionate partisan in the fight for freedom; and
he is as much a realist in his politics as he is in his metaphysics.
Quoting Schopenhauer’s famous remark about Hegel, Popper
I demands, “If we are silent, who will speak?", and thus reminds us of
our responsibilities.
******
I want to approach my theme in two steps. First, I want to say a
I brief word about Popper’s own attitude towards language. And then
I want to connect this attitude to the difficult dialogue in which he
engages us, and to the philosophical reasons for it.
First, as to language, Popper would not for a moment deny
Buhl's remark that “It is impossible to open one’s mouth without
I causing the most ineradicable confusion”. That, Popper would say, is
one of the unintended consequences of using language at all.
Indeed, Popper spends a section of his autobiography, Unended
Quest, arguing that, literally, none of us ever knows what we are
talking about (see my development of this theme later in this
chapter and also, especially, in part 1 above). But Popper also finds,
in this welter of confusion and in the unintended consequences of
language and of ideas, the seeds of and the explanation of our
creativity and the justification of our claims to freedom and respon-
sibility.
Perhaps I should return one last time to the theme of unfathom-
able knowledge, and state again briefly why we never know what we
ate talking about. There are many reasons, but one of the most
important is this: when we affirm a theory, we at the same time
propose its logical implications. (Otherwise we should not have to
‘ Ludwig Wittgenstein. Lettm to RuistU, Krynn and Moon (Oxford: Blackwell. 1974). p. I SB.
w * M. O’C. Drury, "Conversations with Wittgenstein”, in Rush Rhees. ed„ Ludwig WiUgmdnn
nona! Recollections (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), p. 153.
263
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
264
ON MAKING A DIFFERENCE: T H E DIFFICULT MAN AGAIN
chapters 2 and 3 above. Sec also Radnitzky and Bartley, Evolutionary Epistemology, op
* and W. W. Bartley, 111. Man and Alienation: A Refutation. op. ciL
265
LNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
wrote or said was "interesting". But that is not teaching, and does
not involve learning. That is, again, only the genteel ritual of
academe which gives no immediate personal offence. (Of course it may
offend against truth, and may later anger those students who
awaken and discover that they have been cheated or fobbed off.)
Another unintended consequence of talk—of clear talk—is indeed
that people may be offended by what you say. Of course this poses
no hazard for those who are silent or for those who are obscuran-
tists. Although such people cannot offend because they do not com-
municate and cannot be understood, they may nonetheless succeed
in impressing and in dominating. For their listeners may not wish to
risk offending them or to risk appearing ignorant or to risk revealing
that they do not understand. The inflated language and jargon that
is endemic in our universities is not there by accident. It is there
precisely to shore up pretentiousness by hiding ignorance. If it were
not for our fear of giving offence and our fear of appearing igno-
rant, there would be no such thing as oracular obscurantist philoso-
phy.
Thus in his interactions with his students and with his readers
Popper challenges the pretence of expertise and of knowledge and
the fear of appearing ignorant and of giving offence. This pretence
and these fears are the calling cards of many students and profes-
sors, yet Popper has calculated, and his philosophy explains, the
high cost of this pretence and these fears. For example, the experi-
ence of study and the joy of learning are destroyed—as is also the
character of the student. The search for truth is aborted; personal
relationships are diluted; personal energy is diminished. Popper’s
reminders of these high costs—reminders that we often do not want
to hear—are what make him seem so difficult, so “unreasonable” in
his reasonableness.
One of those who seems to have understood Popper’s assessment
of the costliness of avoiding correction and criticism—and also the
wider social and political ramifications of that—is Helmut Schmidt,
the former Chancellor of West Germany. In an article about Pop-
per, Schmidt writes:
Those who claim to possess ultimate truth find that the world falls
into two camps —friends and enemies . . . . In a world of deep-
reaching interdependence, this means that one has to win in order
not to go under. But since in reality, only one who accepts im-
provement can ever improve others, every seeming victory in the
fnend/joe schema only brings about one’s own undoing . . . such black-
266
ON MAKING A DIFFERENCE: T H E DIFFICULT MAN AGAIN
and-white, utopian thinking does not make peace more secure, but
to the contrary increases disorder, and thereby makes war more
likely.’
1
Helmut Schmidt, “Foreword: The Way of Freedom", in Paul Levinson, ed.. /n Punuit of
op. de, p. xii.
267
3
Chapter 18
O N IMRE LAKATOS1
1
Originally published in R. S. Cohen ct al., eds.. Euayt m Mmon of Im Isikalm. op. cit.. PP
7-38.
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
270
Part IV
All Europe seemed, within a few years of the halcyon year 1929, to
have turned into one anarchic feudal state. As in the chaos which
succeeded the barbarian conquest of the Western Roman Empire a
millennium earlier, small peoples “commended” themselves for
safety to greater; the destruction of a common canon law and order
resulted in arbitrary rule and justice; and the worst features of die
Dark Ages became familiar happenings—assassinations, beheadings,
serfdom, the Ghetto, banditry, piracy, expropriation without process
of law. Indeed, the Dark Ages seemed almost bright by comparison.
Graham Hutton’
This chapter is a revised version of the Plenary Keynote Address, delivered at the .Annual
|n
g of the Southwestern Social Science Association, Little Rock. Arkansas. March 30, 1989.
ponsored by the Vera and Walter Morris Foundation.
Aurel Kolnai, “Les ambiguity nalionales". in La Nmntilr Releve. Montreal. 1946147. pp 533-
644-655. Published in translation as “The Politics of National Diversity". The Salisbury Kevin'.
. no. 3. April 1987, pp. 33-37.
I939)iam HUUOn
' Danulnan
* Survey After Munuh (London: George G. Harrap & Co-
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
Her Britannic Majesty doth command and require all those whom
it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or
hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection
as may be necessary.
' See John Maynard Keynes, The Economu Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt.
Brace, Howe, 1920).
* See for example Lord Macaulay's essay on Lord Clive in the former's Historical Essays (New
York: Macmillan. 1926).
274
FORGOTTEN PAST, UNKNOWN FUTURE
That the human race eventually was able to occupy most of the
earth as densely as it has done, enabling it to maintain large
numbers even in regions where hardly any necessities of life can be
produced locally, is the result of mankind's having learnt, like a
single colossal body stretching itself, to extend to the remotest
corners and pluck from each area different ingredients needed to
nourish the whole. . . . To an observer from space, this covering of
the earth’s surface, with the increasingly changing appearance that
it wrought, might seem like an organic growth. But it was no such
thing: it was accomplished by individuals following not instinctual
demands but traditional customs and rules. 6
275
UNFA! HOMED KNOWLEDGE
immigrants were treated intolerantly, and even when they were not,
a certain smugness prevailed, as well as that subtler form of in-
tolerance that confines itself politely to patronising those who do not
meet its standards—which may go so far as to shun or “cut” those
who do not conform, but at least does not stab them. “The frogs
(or the “wogs”) begin at Calais”, as the English continue to say even
today: but Englishmen continued to trade with them, travelled safely
in their countries, and were governed by similar laws and traditions.
In one of those Victorian anecdotes that reveal volumes, we learn
from the nephew and biographer of Lewis Carroll (the author of
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) that his uncle had
been an unusually broad-minded man—as demonstrated by his
having had a Methodist for a friend.8 At a far extreme from this
rather limited broadmindedness, anarchism and terrorism also now
began to appear, and the threat of socialism loomed larger.
Yet if western culture was nonetheless still celebrated and its
superiority assumed, it did not dominate in the sense of excluding
or despising other great cultures. The European powers, and we
ourselves, came to take pride in having assimilated the achievements
of many cultures that had been in many ways our equals and
sometimes our superiors. In the museums and university depart-
ments that were being built up throughout Europe and North
America, larger budgets and grander exhibition halls were often
provided for the study of the cultures and artifacts of Egypt and
the Middle East, of India, South-East Asia, China and Japan than
were initially devoted to the cultures of Greece and Rome, ol
I ra nee and Spain, or of the Germanies, including Britain and
Scandinavia. Lord Macaulay, who had served in India, ranked its
culture as far greater than that of Spain. Max Muller, Oswald Siren.
Arthur Waley, rarely patronised or scorned the foreign cultures that
they investigated, and whose literary treasures and art they collect-
ed. There was only one major exception to this: the African cultures
south of the Sahara." Only two higher cultures were truly destroyed
’ Stuart Dodgson Collingwood. The life and Letters of Lnris Carroll (London: T. Fisher Unwin.
1898).
* See Lewis H. Gann. IWiUr Settlers tn Tropical Africa (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962); Lewis
H. Gann and Peter Duignan. Burden of Empire: .tn Appraisal of Writem Colonialism m Afnea South of
the Sahara (London: F. A Praeger, 1967); Peter Duignan and Lewis 11 Gann, Africa: the Land &
the People (San Francisco: Chandler. 1972); Lewis H . Gann and Peter Duignan. eds.. African
Proconsuls (New York: The Free Press, 1978). p 15; Lewis H. Gann and Peter Duignan. Africa
South of the Sahara: The Challenge to Western Security (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1981).
Africa between East and West (Cape Town: Tafelberg. 1983); Peter Duignan and L. H Gann. The
276
FORGOTTEN PAST, UNKNOWN FU1URE
2. The Division
There are many who would disagree with these reflections on the
time before our world became divided. Edward W. Said’s Orientalism
is only one example of a different and perhaps now more common
point of view." Let us turn however to the Division, for while there
may be some doubt about the Unity that preceded it, there can
hardly be any doubt of the existence of the Division that has domi-
nated our divided century.
Only a little over forty-three years ago Winston Churchill de-
clared that “An iron curtain has descended” across the European
continent. The expression was not new: Dr. Goebbels had used it in
February 1945, and in 1920 Ethel Snowden had used the expression
in her book Through Bolshevik Russia to describe the Soviet Union
and its sphere of influence.12 The earlier date is important, foi it is
'• Arthur Waley. Thr Ofnum Hhr through Chmru Eya (Sunford: Sunford Un.vcr.ity
979
'■ Edward W. Said, Onentafoar (New York: Vintage Book. . 1 >’ h "„ d ‘.mp’ "
leglects to consider Islamic law. Said, who is Parr Professor o K [hc pLO.
vc
■iterature at Columbia University, happen, to be a member of t e g" '
be Palestine Liberation Council. See Oavid Gress. "Talking "lerronsm at Stanford . o p . ,
“ Ethel Snowden. Through Bolshevik Russia (London: Cassell and (ximpa y.
277
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
in 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, that our world
began to divide.
Before reflecting on this divided world, I must make two ac-
knowledgements. Inspiring my reflections here are two sources: first,
the ideas of Hayek, as presented for example in The Fatal Conceit.
My talk does not expound or analyse Hayek's ideas, it uses them. I
also want to acknowledge the vast historical, theoretical, and eco-
nomic knowledge of Stephen Kresge.” I am borrowing approaches
and ideas that stem from Hayek’s books and from Kresge’s intro-
ductions to them, and I hope that this may entice readers to study
these books, and to profit from them as I have done.
The Great War, which was to break apart our century and to
bankrupt many of the people living in it, has little to do with the
assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. It was unleashed
deliberately by the Germans, having been planned by them in detail
already late in 1912.14 Its chief root was widespread belief (not only
on the part of the Germans) in an intellectual mistake. It was
started on the assumption that wars can be profitable. In fact, very few
wars, if any, have ever been profitable; almost all have been ruinous
to all parties. But there was one war—the Franco-German
war—which, in 1870, had won Alsace-Lorraine for Germany, and
also required France to pay massive reparations: five billion francs
“ Kresge is editor of volumes 5 and 6 of Hayek’s Collected Hfcrts. namely: Money and Nations.
and Nations and Gold. „
'• See John A Moses, The Politos of Illusion. The Fischer Contonterty m German
mcA drr Weltmarht. Di, KnegsurlpolUsk drr kaiserlichen Deutschlands 191 /1918 (DOsseldorf.
1961); Fritz Fischer. Krieg drr Illusion™. Ito Deutsche PolUik von 1911 bis 1914 (Dusseldorf. .
1969); Fritz Fischer. Wort) Pou-er or Declme—The Controversy over Germany s Aims m l h e first
War (New York: Norton, 1974); Immanuel Geiss. "Weltherrschaft durch Hegemonic ~l
deutsche Polilik im 1. Wellkrieg nach den Riezler lagebUchcm". dus Pnhtik und Zeitgeschuhie , ■
December 9. 1972. pp. 3-22; Kurt Riezler. Tagebtoher. Aufsdtu. Dokumrnte. ed.. with mtroc
by Karl Dietrich Erdmann (Gflttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967); K°nra J ’ voln
"Die AUdeutschen und die Regierung Bethmann Hollweg-Eine l>" «hnft Kurt Riezlers
Herbst 1916”, Virrteljahnheftc fiir Xeiigeschschtr. vol. 21. 1973. pp. 435-46 , J. ■ ■ •
Admiral von Muller and the Approach of the War. 1911, 1914 , Historical Journo . vo . - .
pp. 659-662. Admiral von MOller recorded in his diary on 8 December 1912: rhe Kaiser p
the conference by envisaging the exact sequence of events of July 1914: Austria wou
Serbia, Russia would intervene o n Serbia's behalf, and Germany would n terse ar * al
Russia, France and Great Britain." The Chancellor. Bethmann Holweg. who was not pre
the War Council, insisted that Britain could be kept neutral. However, nett er <us<-
Chancellor were informed of modifications in the Schlieffen plan in 1913 prosi mg or a s
attack on Lidge, in Belgium, on the outbreak of war—the step that brought Britain into a
The Archduke s murder in 1914 provided, so General von Moltke stated, an unusually I.
able opportunity to strike which ought to be exploited".
278
FORGOTTEN PAST. UNKNOWN FUTURE
within four years. This war was also brief, lasting a mere six weeks;
and it had the extra edge, appreciated on both sides, of humiliating
France. Moreover, it was immediately followed by the formation of
the German Empire, with the crowning of Kaiser Wilhelm I in the
great hall at Versailles in 1871. To be sure, the war was widely
perceived as having been far more profitable than in fact it was— if
indeed it was profitable at all. John Maynard Keynes later argued
that the indemnity actually damaged both France and Germany and
led to the world economic recession of the 1870s.[S Had those who
held power in 1914 paid closer attention to the American Civil War,
or, say, to the Boer War, they might have been more sceptical
about the profitability of war. But the lessons of these wars were
neglected, the profitability, if any, of the Franco-German war was
exaggerated, and the attention of the world—and especially of
Germany and France—was fixated on the Franco-German War as, in
effect, a model war—one that might be repeated.
The Great War took place, and virtually everyone who took part
came out the worse for it. The German Empire, which had seemed
by the spring of 1918 to have accomplished most of its goals for the
war, and therefore, in its own eyes, to have won it, was tricked into
an Armistice by the Allies'4; lhe Austro-Hungarian and the Russian
Empires collapsed; the Soviet Empire was created; and the ruinous
treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain made a second world war
almost inevitable. The world was divided.
The Iron Curtain for which Stalin is usually blamed, and which
is commonly thought to have crashed into place only after the
second world war, was a much more direct outcome of the first
world war. Although Russia was involved from the start, this wall or
curtain was not, initially, the handiwork of Russia. Few persons
recall how the curtain that still divides Europe really came into
place.
“ See Thr Collrclrd Wnlmgi of John Maynard Knn/i. vol. XVI. Activiius 1914-1919 (London:
Macmillan and Company for the Royal Economic Society, 1971), pp. 313-34.
w
See Paul Johnson. 4 Hislon of the Modem World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1983),
chapter L
279
L’NFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
Some of its foundations were laid in the 1920s, and it was vir-
tually completed by the 1930s, chiefly through the ingenuity of a
German economist, the brilliant president of the Reichsbank who
put a stop to German inflation in 1923 and became Economics
Minister during the first four years of Hitler's regime (but was
dismissed and then eventually imprisoned by the Nazis on a charge
of high treason)?’ I have in mind Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht
(1877-1970)?“ It was Schacht who invented the modem world economically,
and who put into place the sorts of controls and restrictions that still divide
east and west.
During the first world war there had been few exchange con-
trols. As John Maynard Keynes had put it, reflecting on the tasks of
paying for the war, “Complete control was so much against the
spirit of the age that 1 doubt if it ever occurred to any of us that it
was possible."19 During the first world war, money and credit could
be freely exchanged between, for example, Austria and Switzerland.
Those Germans and Austrians who had cash resources—as opposed
to those who had their assets tied up, say, in bonds and
trusts—were, if they acted promptly, able to avoid ruin in the
Austrian and German inflations.
Schacht’s problem, beginning in the early 'twenties and extend-
ing into the late 'thirties, was how to finance internal development
within Germany whilst maintaining a given foreign exchange rate.
This was no easy problem to solve, for France had, in shaping the
Treaty of Versailles, imposed two incompatible aims on Germany: to
pay, and thus to be able to pay, massive reparations to France; and
yet to be so hobbled that it could never again become rich or
powerful, and thus dangerous to France.
Schacht’s first achievement was to gain for the Reichsbank almost
complete control over the German economy, and thereby to bring
11
Thr Economit, M a r c h 25, 1933. p. 6S0. For background information, sec Heinr Habcdank
Dir Rrichsbanh >n det Wrtinam Rrpublik Zur Rolli drr Zmtralbank m drr Pohtdt drs druUthm Imprrvdu
mtu 1 9 1 9 . 1 9 3 3 (East B e r l i n : Akademie-Verlag. 1 9 8 1 ) ; Harold James, The Rnehsbank and Pubhi
Finance m Orwwjny 1924-1933: A Study of the Politics of Economics during the Great Depression
(Frankfurt a . M.: Fritt Knapp Verlag. 1985).
” Sec .Norbert M (Ihlen, Drr 'Aaubertr. l eben und Anleihen des Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht
(Zorich: Europa Verlag, 1938); Amos E. Simpson. Hjalmar Schacht tn Perspective (The Hague:
Mouton, 1969); Hjalmar Schacht. 76 jahre memes l bens, translated as My First Seventy- Six Years. Thr
Autobiography of Hjalmar Schacht (London: Allan Wingate. 1 9 5 5 ) ; Kleine Bekenntmsse aus 80 Jahrrn
4 6 Handschnfl fiir Freunde gedrucki anldflhch memes achizigsten Geburtstages (Munich, 1 1 January
1957). See also The Economist, August 1 1 . 1 9 3 4 . pp. 264’265.
'* J o h n Maynard Keynes, 1939-1945: Internal Hhr Finance, vol. X X I ! of The Collected
IWuiwgs of John Maynard Keynes (London: Macmillan and Cambridge University Press, 1978), p . 10.
280
FORGOTTEN PAST, UNKNOWN FUTURE
the cd
namely ' X' “ "or of volume 2 of Hayek'. CaUrrW
Us a. -
1967). aeton Watson. Ea f um p, i 9l8 . l94l (New Vork . Harper
9 ,9M 365 41
671. * ' ’ P ' *«*«“« 26- P >• October 7. 1933, P
December 2 1933 „ W till I!. 8 ' Nove ' nber «• l 9 ” - P WM. November 18. 1933. p. W
6 9M ,l76
” nirtrUnV i ' ' * ' P ‘ 23. 1933. p. 1231
of May 17 iq«« ’ J n< i ,2.' ,1 9 3 S ' P' , 3 0 S ’ and September 16. 1933. p 534, See also the
9 ,9 S55
December , 6 . 1933,
1933 p. 11163,
I M VJune'“i 6, 1936. pp.' 550-551.
' ' “ 28. 1936. pp.7 '411-411
”‘ PNovember d l953
' ” "M
281
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
deemed desirable by the state?4 This “iron curtain” was not quite
rigid: it screened chiefly in one direction. In this manner, which I
have only outlined, Schacht created the virtually “complete control"
that, fifteen years earlier, Keynes had seen as unthinkable.24
Schacht’s arrangements with Russia formed a model that could be
implemented elsewhere. He rushed into the ruins of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire to take advantage of the disaster created by bank
failure and depression, and there created a blueprint for economic
relations that the Soviet Union would take over, virtually intact,
almost immediately following the second world war.
For long after the first world war, most of the successor states of
the Habsburg Empire could trade and communicate with one
another only with difficulty. Lines of communication and trade
throughout this massive midland of Europe had for centuries moved
through Vienna, the Empire's centre of trade, finance, and industry,
either by rail or down the Danube. These lines were now cut by
frontiers, tariffs, and customs barriers, aimed to reduce mutual
dependence to a minimum,26 and by the representatives of nation-
alistic hatreds and resentments who stood guard along the borders.27
Moving rapidly through these territories, Hjalmar Schacht created
a series of bilateral trade and transport treaties with the successor
states. The trading centre for Eastern Europe was thus moved from
Vienna to Berlin. This was one reason why Bohemia, Moravia and
the Sudetenland became so important to Hitler, for tolerably good
M
The free import of cereals was forbidden for 1933-1934. See Thr Economist, July 22, 1933.
pp. 179-180. As to tourism. German citizens were permitted pleasure trips to Austria only on
payment of a 1,000-marlt tax See Thr Economist, August 12, 1933, p. 323; Thr Economist.
September 15, 1934, pp, 488-489; September 22, 1934. pp. 535-536.
“ See "Exports by Default". Thr Economist, December 2. 1933, p. 1057.
" See Graham Hutton, op. dt.. p. 24. Sec also Thr Economist. March 25. 1933. p. 640.
" Many of the successor states engaged in wars with one another: little German Austria,
already cut off from trade with German-speaking Bohemia, its industrial heartland to the north,
was attacked by Yugoslavia from the south and by Hungary from the west. Hungary and
Rumania fought several battles for territory, and Hungary diminished greatly in sire. By 1921
Poland had been at war for three years, and was three times the size anticipated by the treaty
Violent attempts at communist coups occurred in almost every one of the new states. For several
months in 1919 there was danger that a communist state would be established extending from
Bavaria through Austria and Hungary all the way to the borders of the new Soviet state. Indeed
communist governments were set up at this time both in Bavaria and in Hungary. It is interest-
ing that this communist power would have crossed central Europe from west to east, where
communications were at their best- Communication in the eastern Habsburg domains had never
been good, not even in die best of times. It is often claimed that the standard of living in eastern
Europe declined absolutely from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the nineteenth
century, that this was chiefly due to poor communications, and that the greatest economic
contribution of the Empire of Franz Josef after 1848 had been to build up communications
somewhat throughout his eastern domains.
282
FORGOTTEN PAST, UNKNOWN FUTURE
" So much so that one might indeed, without loo much poetic license or plain exaggeration,
see the war over the Falkland Islands as the last battle of the Second World War. See 7 hr
Economist, December 2, 1933, p. 1057-1058.
” See The Economist, July 1, 1933. p . 19.
” This was however slow in starting. See The Economist. August 5. 1933. pp. 279-280. But nee
The Economist. March 9. 1935, pp. 526-527: August 26. 1939. p 103.
283
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
11
Graham Hutton, op. dt, p. 168.
” Schacht himself was removed from power, after a long conflict with Hermann
when he insisted that Germany could not afford to pursue its war policies. O n Schac
difficulties with the Naris see ITu Eammnut. April 11. 1936. pp. 75-76. May 2, 1936. pp 2 3 '
May 2, 1936. pp. 244-245. May 9. 1936. pp 304-305, May 23. 1936. pp. 422-423. Octobe. - •
1936. pp. 160-161. On autarchy see Tht Econmusl. September 1, 1934. p. 399. September
1934. pp. 584-585, November 3, 1934, p. 827-828; November 17. 1934. p. 922; January > 9 ' 1
p. 123; and September 26, 1936. pp. 559-560.
284
FORGOTTEN PAST, UNKNOWN FUTURE
tent these agreements and barriers remain. They help account for
Poland's perennial economic difficulties. In contrast, East Germany,
to which West Germany now gives highly favourable treatment, has
virtually become a member of the Common Market, and is far more
prosperous than the other members of the eastern block.
The Division that began in this convoluted way, and which has
marked the greater part of our century, is hardly entirely the fault
of either Germany or the post-war Russian economists and bureau-
crats who copied Schacht's methods. Schacht, who hated socialism
and controls, was forced to devise his ingenious methods—methods
which isolated Germany from the west—by the trickery of the
Armistice and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The United
States imposed a similar isolation on the Soviet block—a policy for
which there were of course many good reasons, but for which, as it
now begins to become more evident, we have also paid rather
dearly. For example, the Soviets invented Eurodollars—which have
played an important role in bringing about the fall of the dollar—in
order to avoid exposing Soviet assets to American control.
At Bretton Woods, Keynes tried to avoid further division, and to
discourage western nations from themselves imposing Schachtian
methods. He succeeded in winning agreement amongst them to a
common monetary standard, based on the U. S. dollar. Moreover,
English had by the time of Bretton Woods already emerged as a
new universal language. Together, these worked against division and
helped to shape al least a partial new postwar unity. But tariffs and
trade and movement of capital were excluded from the Bretton
Woods agreement—which helps explain why there continues to be
virtually no really free trade anywhere in the world, Hong Kong is
an exception; Singapore, often thought to be an exception, is not: it
bars certain information from its borders.
Moreover, it is not only the Soviet Union that has spread dis-
unity. The United States is also at fault, however lofty its motives.
Its mistake lay in its insistence during and after the second world
'var, an insistence made effective by its financial and military domin-
ance, on dismantling the remnants of the old empires. Continuing
to follow the nationalism that carved up old Europe after the first
'vorld war— indeed, championing nationalism as if it had worked
285
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
” See Peter Bauer (Lord Bauer), Equality, the Third World, and Economic Dflusum (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981); Dissent and Development, revised edition (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1976).
* Constructivist rationalism is, for Hayek, the theory of rationality underlying socialism and
many other approaches, according to which one can design human institutions by reason, with
regard to shared aims and predictable consequences. See Law. Legislation and Liberty, in three
volumes, op, du. a n d The Ealal Conceit, op, du esp. pp. 22, 50-51, 60-61, 63-66, chapters 4 and
5.
“ For some sense of the flavour of this cold-war period, during which there flourished the
idea that the West was handicapped by its diversity, see the contrasts between the views of John
Wild and James Bryant Conant in m y old essay. “Religion at Harvard**, The Harvard Crimson,
March 28, 1958, and, slightly abridged, in The New Republic, April 21, 1958.
286
FORGOTTEN PAST. UNKNOWN FUTURE
idea that knowledge was the result of free competition in the open
marketplace of ideas was thus pushed aside, or at least no longer
remained the operating guide to state policy. The theme of western
free thought and speech since Milton, and the main idea behind
Hayek’s theory of knowledge as a competitive discovery process, thus
fell to a poor second place behind secret intelligence, that is, alleged
intelligence on which there was no assured check by reality.3*
For we do enter fantasy land here: these states that the United
States would so ardently control are not at all obedient. We cannot
even control Panama or subdue the Sandinistas, although we have
perhaps intervened effectively in a few cases, as in Chile and in
Guatemala.
So much might have been expected with any state, or other
operation, that wished to control events. The results of a competi-
tive discovery process are always unpredictable. As we saw in Part 1,
even knowledge that we already possess is unpredictable—and
indeed “unfathomable". While the unpredictability of the growth of
knowledge may threaten government control, secret intelligence
unexposed to the contest of ideas is even more unreliable.
" For an amusing example of the lengths to which this can go, see "The Ultimate Secret: A
Pentagon Report Its Author Can’t See", Wall Stmt Journal, February 18, 1986 — which includes
this statement: "Officials from Congress and the Pentagon say they can t think of any previous
case in which the administration has, in effect, seized a report prepared by an arm of Congress
and classified it beyond what members of Congress are entided to see. Some worry that the
handling of the report suggests that the Pentagon can shut the Congress out of its most
important affairs."
” See “Unsichcre Rezepte fur Osttnitteleuropa”. Neur Zurcher Zntung, April 8-9. 1989, p. 1-
287
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
u
Reported in dir media o n March 8, 1989. For a general discussion o f events in rhe Soviet
Lnion. see Calo InMttuif Polity Analysis, March 20. 1989.
288
FORGOTTEN PAST, UNKNOWN FUTURE
289
UN FATHOM ED KNOWLEDGE
41
See Radnitzky and Bartley, eds,, Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of
Knowledge, op. cit. Japanese weakness in original discovery is often discussed. See for example.
“Stifled Scholars: Japan's Scientists Find Pure Research Suffers under Rigid Life Style: They
Discover the Job System and Pressures to Conform Prevent Big Discoveries”, The Wall Street
Journal, October 3 1 , 1988, p p . I and A I 2 . See also: “Research center: There's nothing like it in
Japan”, Campus Report, Stanford. March 22, 1989. p. 7; and “No ideas, thanks, we’re academics'.
The Economist. April 2 3 . 1988, p. 40.
290
FORGOTTEN EAST. UNKNOWN FUTURE
Indeed much of the world today has fallen prey to—and is even
trying to overcome divisions by means of —religious and political
ideologies that would have been laughed at or at least more openly
and honestly despised at the turn of our century. Religion plays a
more important role today in world politics, internal and external,
than it has since the Thirty Years War. Unlike most Japanese,
representatives of such positions have fallen prey to ideologies that
have interfered with their ability to exploit the rapidly growing body
of knowledge.
Such positions include the attempts of fundamentalists in this
country to capture state power to impose their metaphysical views
on their fellow-countrymen. Their numbers have risen rapidly whilst
the numbers of the old mainline Protestant denominations—which
represented the gentler, kinder, decent and unfanatical Christianity
of such thinkers as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich—are dwind-
ling.42 The fanaticism of Islam is perhaps different in degree from
the fanaticism of fundamentalist Christianity, but is not different in
kind.45 The countries of the middle east are largely dosed societies.
The rule of law, and the sense of liberty, does not prevail within
them. This is so not only in our enemy Iran, but also in our ally
Saudi Arabia, as any who watched “The Death of a Princess” will
suspect. Islam goes so far in challenging traditional western law’ and
individual liberty of expression as to oppose the freedom to dissent
from and to criticise religion, a freedom that lies at the heart of all
our liberties. It would override this with so-called Islamic law, with
its casual recipes for murder and terrorism. Thus Iran has now set
a large bounty on the head of a British author who has dared to
" My strung critique of Niebuhr and Tillich, in my The Retreat to Commitment. op. d t , should
not conceal my appreciation of these men and of their work. On the decline of the old mainline
Protestant churches, see the discussion and figures given tn The Son Francisco Chronicle, February
IS. 1989, p. A8.
" Both are what I call "belief religions", belunging to the "juslificalionist metacontext of true
belief See my The Retreat to Commitment. 2nd edition, op. dt-. Appendix I
291
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
What are these fanatics resisting? They are resisting what the
Japanese and some others have accepted. They resist exposure to
alternative points of view. They resist the fact that we live in a
world marked by substantial cultural diversity and in individual
countries that are themselves not unified by any single cultural
tradition. Failing to consider the question of what legal and political
forms are best suited to such a world-wide condition 4*, they continue
to attempt to impose their own political, ' behavioural, and religious
forms—which they perceive as a universal human identity—first on
their own diverse countrymen, then on the rest of the world. Thus
they shut out the competitive process in which new knowledge, and
new wealth, are generated. Whereas the way to join Hayek’s ex-
tended order of human civilisation is to open one’s borders, person-
al or geographical as the case may be, to knowledge and new
experience. This is exceptionally difficult for these closed states,
since knowledge, being, as already remarked, unpredictable and
** They have already murdered several Islamic leaders who have disagreed on the point,
Their victims indude the Saudi Arabian Imam who was leader of Belgian muslims. The latter
agreed that Salman Rushdie’s book was blasphemous but had defended Rushdie's right to speak
his thoughts.
“ 11 it not only western intellectuals who have defended the Iranians. So has the Vatican.
L'Osservaiew Romano, o n March 4, after noting, correctly, that Rushdie's novel was offensive to
millions of people, argued dial "the right of free expression must not trample on the dignity of
others". This lofty sentiment is one of the oldest recipes in the cookbook for the suppression of
criticism. Serious, fundamental criticism is bound to offend; knowledge itself is often offensive (see
chapter 17 above). To protect oneself against being offended is to protect oneself from learning.
As | write this, a debate is raging at Stanford University over a ‘Fundamental Standard’, defended
by many faculty members, that would restrict First Amendment rights on campus and prevent
persons — speakers, for example — from departing from 'acceptable community standards* and
saying anything that might offend those who had chosen to be members of their audience.
** See John Gray’s remarkable essay, “The Politics of Cultural Diversity", in Quadrant,
November 1987. pp. 29-38, from which the epigraph to this Part is drawn.
292
FORGOTTEN PAS'!’ UNKNOWN FUTURE
" "Securities companies are no longer companies that buy and sell shares and need a hit of
information to do it: they are global information companies that happen also to buy and sell a
few shares", Tht Economist. December 10, 1988, p. 16.
293
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
294
FORGOTTEN PAST. UNKNOWN FUTURE
CODA
"It’s all in the music." Elias Canetti, the Nobel laureate in litera-
ture, was—as a boy of nine—attacked by a crowd in a Vienna park
when he innocendy sang out the familiar English words "God save
our noble King" to the music of the Prussian hymn, “Heil Dir im
Siegerkranz" (the melody was the same, and Canetti had spent
much of his early boyhood in England)?*
Why was the Prussian national hymn being sung in a Vienna
park in 1914? Was it out of the enthusiastic mutual admiration that
these German-speaking populations felt for one another now that
they were marching to war together? Yes, but also no—for they had
always felt that; now that they were marching together they felt
perhaps freer to express it. Besides, they already shared another
hymn. For Haydn’s “Austria” (“Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser"), the
“ Elias Canetti, Zhz grrrtttit Zungt Gwhirhlr nwr Jugrmi (Frankfurt: Fischer Kaschenbach
Verlag. 1984). pp. 106-107.
295
UNFATHOMED KNOWLEDGE
296
FORGOTTEN PAST. UNKNOWN FUTURE
" Krcuder had not expected the reaction. Made aware thereby of possible damage to his
priority rights, he brought a lawsuit—the "Eisler-Kreuder case"—to the copyright commission of
the United Nations. See Hans JQrgen Hansen. Hnl Dir rm Siegrrkrant Dir Uymnrn der Deulsehen
(Hamburg: Verlag Gerhard Stalling AG. 1978), p. 77.
“ Karl Barth has written of Mozart. "This man was creative, even and precisely while he was
imitating. Verily, he did not only imitate. From the beginning he moved freely within the frame
of the rules of the art of his time, and later more and more freely. But he did not revolt against
these rules, nor break them. He sought and found Ins greatness in remaining himself precisely
while binding himself to these rules. One must see both his freedom and his restraint, side by
side, and seek his singular quality behind this very riddle." See Karl Barth. ‘'Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart", in Walter Leibrecht. ed., Religion and Culture (London: SCM Press, 1959), pp. 72-73. See
the discussion of Barth in my Morality and Religion, op. cit., chapter 3.
297
NAME INDEX
Keynes. John Maynard. lOOn, 107n. 126. Lorenz, Konrad, 76n, 76-77, 77n, lOOn,
167. 226-227. 274n. 279n. 279-280. 187 & n
280n. 282 & n. 285 Lucian. 25
Kierkegaard. Saren, 25. 124, 233 Luhrs, Georg, I86n, I 9 l n
Kindleberger. Charles P., 137 l.ukacs, Georg, 74
King, Preston, 158 Lukes. Steven, 73n
Kirchner, Laron, 128
Kirzner. Israel, 147n Macaulay, Lord. 123, 274n, 276
Klein, Larence R.. 140 & n Mach, Ernst. 167n, 167-168, 230
Koertgc. Norctta, l90n Machlup, Fritz. 49n, 146n
Koestler, Arthur, 29 & n , 186, I87n. 192 MacIntyre. Alasdair, 224n
Kolakowski. L., 64-65 MacIrtish, Archibald, 128
Kolnai, Aurel, 50n, 273 & n MacMurray, John, 244n
Kors, /Man C„ 205n, 207n, 207-208 MacRoberts, Barbara R., I I9n
Krantz. David L.. 204 & n, 205n MacRoberts. Michael H.. 1 19n
Kreisler, B. Robert. I l i n Madison. James. 1 1 & n
Kresgc, Stephen, 137n, 278 & n, 283 Magee, Bryan. I63n, I93n
Kreudcr, Peter, 296n, 296-297 Malcolm. Norman, 235 & n, 238, 254
Kreuzer, Franz, lOOn, 186n Malthus. Thomas, 138 & n
Kuhn, Thomas S.. Chapter 6, 29, 73n, 81, Mann, Thomas, 128
84, 95-96, 103n, 105n, 115, 149, 166, Mannheim, Karl. 73-74
198-199. I99n. 213, 225. 257 & n Maramorosch, K., 53n
Kuno. Sachiko, 41n Marcom, John, Jr.. 114n, !20n
Kuzuya, Hum io, 41 n Marcuse, Herbert. 67-68, !30n
Marschner, J„ 90n
Lakatos, Imre. Chapter 18. 98n. 157, 169n. Marshall. Alfred, 138
I76n, 190 & n . 193, 204, 269-270 Marx. Karl, 45-18, 58, 62n, 64 & n, 67n,
Lande, Alfred, 184 67-68, 71, 102n. 179, 189, 288
Langlois, Richard N„ 49n, I47n Matthews, Gareth B., 1 12n
Larouche, Lyndon, 99n Maxwell, Grover. I78n
laulfer, M. A., 53n McGrath, Michael S„ 42n
laxness. Halldor, 187n McGuinness, Brian. 99n
Lazarsfeld, Paul F„ 130n McHugh, Paul R_. 179n
Lc Corbusier ((Charles-)douard Jeannerel- McKenzie, Richard B., 99 & n
Gris), 128 McLellan, David. 47n
Leary, Warren E., 1 18n Medawar, Peter, 120n, 186, 193, 210, 245n
Leggett, A. J.. I36n Meese, Edwin, U n
Lehrer, Keith, 196 Mcichsncr, Irene, I86n
Leibniz, G. W„ 230 Meiners. Roger E., 89n
Leibrecht, Walter, 297n Meissner, Toni. 186n
Lcjewski, C„ 208 Mendel, Gregor, 124
Lenel, Hans Otto. 109 Menger, Carl, IO8n, 128
Lepage, Henri. 81n, 108 & n, 186n Menninger, Karl, M.D., 51n
Ix-ube. Kurt, 33n Menon, Robert K.. 98 & n. 104n. 1 15.
Levinson, Sanford, 199 & n 118n, 130n, 147
Levinson. Paul, IO.3n, I78n, 257n, 267n Mclstre. P., I36n
Lewis, C. I., 132n Middelmann, Hans. 127n
Lewis, H. Gregg, 1 1 I n Milford, Karl. 28 In
Lifson, Jeffrey D., 42n Milgalc. Murray, 166n
I .ighlhill. Sir James. I36n Mill, John Stuart, 128, 134 & n. 167
Lilly, John C., 51n Miller, David. 178n, 19ln, 208, 257n
Lin den man n . Jean, 99n Miller, J . M„ 53n
Loasby, Brian J., 1 18n Milton. John, 25 & n. 28n, 287
Locke. John. 168, 230 Mirowski, Philip, 134n
Lockslcy, Gareth. IO7n, 107-108 Mises, Ludwig von, 73n, 73-74, 11 7 and n.
Lohle, Jurgen, 186n 187
Looney. David 41n Mitsuya, H„ 41n
Loos. Adolf, 128 Moltke, Count Helmuth von, 278n
NAME INDEX
310
SUBJECT INDEX
311
SUBJECT INDEX
Taxation Truth
income tax. 12 Milton on, 25-26, 25n
as a state power, 13
Twentieth century, as age of superstition,
Theory/Scicntilic theory xiii
acceptance of, von Mises on, 117 & n
and intent of its creator. 39, 57. 61-62 Unfathomable knowledge. Chapter 2, xiv-
as consensus of scientific community, 110 xv, 30-37, 263-267, passim
as subject of investigation, 60 and content of Einsteinian and
changing nature of meaning of, 38 Newtonian theory, 36-39
content of, 35-38, 57 and control of product. 67-69
contradictions within, how to treat. 107 and immunological theory, 39-44
conjectural nature of. 178 and nature of self. 62
corroboration of, 178 and sociology, Chapter 4
economic value of, 38, 43, 48-49 effect on arts and sciences, xiv
effect on observation, 177 effect on development and exchange of
falsifiability of. 179-180 knowledge. 48
potential falsifiers of, 36 effect on liberty, xiv. 31-32
requisites for understanding of, 34-38 effect on morality, 50-56
treatment of discrepancies with fact. effect on possible ownership or control
Coase on, 107 of ideas, xiv, 32, 45-46, 74
unfalhomed content of. 43, 264 in economics, 134-140
understanding of, 34
Unintended consequences
Theory of economic value examples of. 8n, 53 & n, 249 & n
as related to unfathomable knowledge, of tuting language, 263, 266
48-50, 139-140
in general equilibrium economics, 49 & Unity of the sciences. 218-219, 235, 240.
n. 134-140 251
in intrinsic value theory, 48
in labour theory of value. 48, 48n Universities, Part II, passim
and politicisation of studies, 105n
Theory of gravitation as marketplaces of ideas, xiii
Einstein’s. 36-37, 39 as non-conducive to growth of knowl-
Newton's, 36-39 edge. xiv
as producers of knowledge. Chapter 6, xv
Theory of knowledge, see Epistemology as source of innovative ideas, Chapter 8
as suppressive of new ideas, xiii-siv
Theory of knowledge vehicles, 79 Bok on, 29
Buchanan on. I l l
SUBJECT INDEX
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