Karl Popper, Self-Evident Truth, and Certain Knowledge

 I think that by the time Popper gave his Medawar Lecture he was very much in the realm of self-evident truth and certain knowledge, whether he realized it explicitly or not:

The strange thing is that teleology enters the world with adaptation. Organisms are problem-solvers. Organisms seek better conditions. All of these are thoroughly teleological terms. “Better conditions” introduce evaluation. And no doubt organisms value, organisms prefer, organisms like this or that better than something else. We cannot avoid all teleological terms, and we cannot avoid all anthropomorphic terms. (2014, 124)

I take "no doubt" to be a synonym for "certainly".

And then his agreement with Mises expressed in his address to the American Economic Association in 1992: "Like myself, [Ludwig von Mises] appreciated that there was some common ground, and he knew that I had accepted his most fundamental theorems and that I greatly admired him for these” (2008, 404).

Professor Reinhard Neck of Klagenfurt presented at the workshop I attended in Vienna from 12.02.24-14.02.24 (Professor Neck's abstract below) and was completely ignorant of this quote from the AEA address when I asked him about it and attempted to somehow attribute it to Popper's state of mind in light of Hayek's recent death, but the address was actually given a couple of months previously.

Popper had also argued the irreducibility of biology to chemistry and/or physics due to the issue of purpose in biology.

I conclude that Popper's views as they applied to the physical sciences became increasingly difficult to hold as they applied to the biological and social sciences, and as a good critical rationalist (or evolutionary epistemologist), his views were at least in flux, if not decidedly changed, by the time he gave the Medawar Lecture.

Popper, Karl. 2008. “The Communist Road to Self-Enslavement (1992).” In After the Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings, edited by Jeremy Shearmur, 402–10. London: Routledge.

Popper, Karl. 2014. “A New Interpretation of Darwinism.” In Karl Popper and the Two New Secrets of Life: Including Karl Popper’s Medawar Lecture 1986 and Three Related Texts, by Hans-Joachim Niemann. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck.

Professor Neck's abstract:

Karl Popper — Interlocutor or Killer of the Vienna Circle and the Austrian School of Economics

In this paper, I investigate the position of Karl Popper’s philosophy vis à vis both the Vienna Circle and the Austrian School of Economics. While Popper has claimed to have killed logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle but communicated with its proponent s, especially Carnap, in a polite and even submissive manner, his relation to Hayek, the most prominent representative of the Vienna School of Economics, was characterized by gratitude and friendship, and he appreciated the methodology of (neoclassical and Austrian) economics as blueprint of his own methodology of the social sciences, especially his situational analysis. We argue that Popper’s relation to both approaches was more ambiguous. His own philosophy of science and epistemology was rather different from and highly incompatible with that of Mises, the early Hayek, and most subsequent Austrian economists, and he even contributed to Hayek’s later renunciation of Austrian praxeology and essentialism and adoption of (at least some) philosophical position s of Critical Rationalism. On the other hand, Popper’s positions in philosophy did not only develop out of his disputes with the Vienna Circle but contained some key elements of its way of doing philosophy, especially the use of formal and clearly formulated arguments and their logical foundations. Hence Popper can be seen as both a critical but friendly discussant of the Vienna Circle’s ideas but only a fellow traveler of the Austrian economists. It can even be argued that those elements of Austrian Economics that seem to be outdated today are quite contrary to Popper’s approach and introducing ideas of Critical Rationalism into Austrian Economics can help the latter gaining more scientific respectability among economists of different persuasion.

Bernhard Rensch and Laws in Biology and the "absolutely certain" Existence of Psychic Phenomena

 Anyone familiar with Mises's praxeology (a formalization of what Mises viewed as the accepted method and epistemology of economics) will be in sympathy with the following, although it ventures further afield and contradicts Mises's unfortunate rejection of the applicability of biology to his project:

"In the realm of living beings most processes are extraordinarily complex, and many special laws act together or interfere with one another. Thus “exceptions” to the laws result, and therefore we often speak of “rules” only and not of “laws.” However, we must not forget that, finally, most “rules” are effected by laws, the complicated interactions of which we often cannot analyze and the results of which we cannot predict in each case... "With absolute certainty we can suppose the existence of psychic phenomena, that is to say, sensations, ideas, feelings, etc., only in man (more exactly: only each Ego for its own self). However, it is an obvious consequence of uttermost probability that psychic processes also exist in animals, at least in higher ones. We are convinced that a dog or a parrot is not only a physiological machine but a being capable of seeing, hearing, remembering, feeling pleasure, etc. Hence psychic phenomena (awareness in its broader sense) surely did not arise suddenly in the course of phylogeny (for instance, in Pithecanthropus) as something which was absolutely new and peculiar." Rensch, Bernhard. 1960. “The Laws of Evolution.” In The Evolution of Life, 1st ed., I:95–116. Evolution After Darwin: The University of Chicago Centennial. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

The Cruel Twist of Fate: Imagination

Karl Popper suggested that the amoeba, if it has an erroneous theory, will probably forfeit its life; but humans have the capacity for reason, can criticize theories, and discard those that crumble under criticism. But, in a cruel twist of fate, god (metaphorically) furnished us with an imagination that can conjure up that which cannot exist. For that reason we are still forfeiting our lives in defense of erroneous theories.

Mises, the Human Being

 

I just received a copy of Lionel Robbins's book, Autobiography of an Economist, and out of curiosity I looked in the index to find references to Ludwig von Mises. Here is the first thing I read:

The story begins in Vienna in the spring of 1933. My wife and I, who were on a visit to that city, had arranged one day to spend the evening with von Mises, when we ran into Beveridge, who was there on the last day of negotiations about the projected History of Prices in Central Europe with which he had an editorial connection. It was too late to change our commitment for the evening. It was agreed therefore that we should meet at the Hotel Bristol before going out to dinner and get von Mises to join us there. It thus came about that, as the three of us were sitting together exchanging impressions of travel, von Mises arrived with an evening paper carrying the shocking news of the first academic dismissals by the Nazis — Bonn, Mannheim, Kantorowicz and others. Was it not possible, he asked, to make some provision in Britain for the relief of such victims, of which the names mentioned were only the beginning of what, he assured us, was obviously to be an extensive persecution. This was one of Beveridge's great moments — his finest hour I would say. All his best instincts, his sympathy with the unfortunate, his sense of civilized values, his administrative vision and inventiveness, were quickened by the question. Slumped in a chair, with his great head characteristically cupped in his fists, thinking aloud, he then and there outlined the basic plan of what became the famous Academic Assistance Council — later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning — to which hundreds of émigrés even now living in the English-speaking world owe the preservation of their careers and, in some cases, probably there lives. (p 143-144)

 Hayek saved Popper, and Mises, through the concern prompting his question that evening, may have initiated the saving of many more. I have recently seen the question, "Where is our Milton Friedman?"; but more importantly, where is our Ludwig von Mises?

Increasing Constraints by Higher Levels of Biological Organization

Feared by the bad, loved by the good,

Robin Hood! Robin Hood! Robin Hood!

                -Refrain from the theme of the television show The Adventures of Robin Hood

In the very interesting book by Raymond and Denis Noble, Understanding Living Systems, there is a figure (8.2 on page 128) that depicts a direction of increasing constraints by higher levels of organization on lower levels, and to my surprise, I agree.

However, these increasing constraints do not usually consist of threats of pain. In fact, the great majority of pain signals flow in the opposite direction, from lower systems to upper ones. It's Scotty in the engine room yelling to Captain Kirk in his Scottish brogue, "I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!" (although he apparently never quite said that). When the increasing constraint does consist of threats of pain, say in a pack of wolves, the individual doing the threatening is very much at risk, direct or indirect.

In the case of human governance by the state, there is a combination of both threats of pain—inconvenience, imprisonment, or even death—and the absence of risk as the "deciders" are insulated by the many layers of bureaucrats and enforcers "just following orders" from the pain being inflicted.

Because of this isolation, we have stories of heroes like Robin Hood, who outsmarted the Sheriff of Nottingham and his boss, the evil King John, and returned money taken through onerous taxation to the helpless peasants. Modern political participants believe that democracy has created a return nerve pathway to signal pain to the rulers, but anyone can see that policies that are bad for the peasants are just as difficult to change as they were in Merry Olde England. Once the campaign is over, the elected politicians simply do as they like and their campaign utterances can only cause them real harm in the next election.

As a rollback of the state seems unlikely, the only remedy for this situation is the possibility of secession on the scale of the individual, possibly leading to a situation like what Chandran Kukathas advocates in The Liberal Archipelago. This remedy was eventually applied in the case of state religions with the happy result that religious wars and persecution, at least in western nations, have ceased. Let each person choose their property regime and method of bringing it to fruition, and let entrepreneurs respond to those choices.

Comments on "Evolution and Human Behavior" by Gordon Tullock

 I just finished reading Gordon Tullock's essay "Evolution and Human Behavior," which is included in The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, volume 10, Economics without Frontiers, and was surprised by his omission of the idea of valuing in discussing human behavior.

As Mises and Popper pointed out (see Mises and Popper on Action), action implies a valuing—a preference for a new state that may be achieved and is hypothetically better than the current one. Tullock, ignoring this fact, asserts that his landing on the beaches of "Normandy on D plus 7" was predicted by his genes rather than his values—he was, like his fellow soldiers, "genetically programmed to fight for their tribe" (p 168).

This assertion might be plausible for tribes, as they were tightly-knit communities in which all members were organically connected to each other, if not genetically through the common struggle for survival. If one person felt pain, everyone felt pain including the chief. In this position, a threat against one was a threat against all, and the willingness to fight would have been an asset.

Fast forward thousands of years and we have the environment of the nation state. Here, outside our family, we are alone. Our tribe is dispersed, and we rely for our existence on people we do not know that live far from us. Our State hardly knows we exist, although a failure to pay our taxes my bring us to its attention. The State is not organic—when we feel pain there is no pain felt in our legislature or the departments that execute the legislation that is intended to limit our actions. In this environment, how can we be convinced to risk our lives to perpetuate our State?

The answer may be quite simple. Perhaps it is to make us dependent—to produce a situation in which we believe that all we are and all we could become is dependent on the perpetuation of the status quo in our particular state. When we combine the social services State with the welfare State we have the ingredients of a potent cocktail to mold the values of citizens to make acting against the State a mortal sin and acting in its favor is a moral duty.

Returning to Gordon Tullock, we can imagine that he was taught, as was I, that our country, the United States of America, was prosperous because of our governmental system, and that we lived in a free country. Tullock was only 7 when the Great Depression began and would have been subjected at an impressionable age to all of the New Deal propaganda and may have even benefited from some of the programs. Even though he claims in the essay that he "wasn't even enthusiastic about the war," we can imagine that when he was drafted (Levy & Pert, p. 4) to refuse would have meant prison and/or dishonor. It wasn't his genes that made him ready to kill or be killed by people he had never met who were across an ocean and thousands of miles from his home of Rockford, Illinois—it was his values.

Now, I confess, genes may have an influence on values; but Tullock, although he had read Ludwig von Mises's Human Action (three times!) (Levy & Peart, p. 4), did not first establish that action depends on values and preferences and then speculate about how those values and preferences might have been affected by our physical evolutionary history as opposed to our psychological development.

2015 Levy, D. and Peart, S., Gordon Tullock and Karl Popper: Their Correspondence

Mises and Popper on Action

 Today the Ludwig von Mises Institute published my short article, "Mises and Popper on Action," a result of my joint project with Rafe Champion to explore the synergy between Popper and the Austrians (The Austrian School of Economics as a Popperian Metaphysical Research Programme).

If two schools of thought seem to be not only right, but incompatible, there are only two choices: 1) one or both of them are wrong; or 2) their differences may be resolved through semantic reconciliation and the discarding of mistakes that are of minor consequence. Rafe and I have been on the latter path for some time and hope our work encourages others to take the same path.