Abstract
The purpose of this article is to critically assess the ‘three-world theory’ as it is presented—with some slight but decisive differences—by Jürgen Habermas and Karl Popper. This theory presents the philosophy of science with a conceptual and material problem, insofar as it claims that science has no single access to all aspects of the world. Although I will try to demonstrate advantages of Popper’s idea of ‘the third world’ of ideas, the shortcomings of his ontological stance become visible from the pragmatic point of view in Habermas’s theory of communicative acts. With regard to the critique that the three-world theory has met in both its pragmatic and ontological versions, I will take a closer look at John Searle’s naturalistic counter-position. By teasing out some problematic implications in his theory of causation, I aim to show that Searle’s approach is, in fact, much closer to Popper’s than he might think. Finally, while condoning Habermas’s distinction between the natural world and the lifeworld, I will opt for a pragmatically differentiated view of ‘the real’, rather than speaking of different worlds.
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Notes
Although my intention is to speak on behalf of science in general, I am aware that the word ‘science’ is not used with the same connotation in English as in other European languages, where the concept is still influenced, among other things, by the Neo-Kantian distinction between Naturwissenschaft (‘natural science’) and Geisteswissenschaft (roughly ‘the humanities’). Although the specific qualification indicated by the general concept of the ‘social sciences’, as well occasional references to ‘interpretative sciences’ and ‘life sciences’ have widened the scope of the science concept somewhat, it is my impression that, in general, ‘science’ is taken to include methods of testing theories from the collection of hard data. Nevertheless, it is the purpose of the present article to tackle some philosophical problems of coping scientifically with ‘reality’ in its various shapes and forms, and for that reason, I take the liberty of using the concept of ‘science’ in a very broad sense.
Although Husserl coined the term ‘Lebenswelt’, Habermas refers to its sociological conception as presented by Husserl’s student, Alfred Schütz, cf. Habermas (1981), II, 189.
The obvious objection would be that, in fact, this amounts to claiming metaphysically that res and verba correspond to one another. Without pursuing the matter here, I will merely refer to the agreement between Habermas and Putnam on this matter, in that they subscribe to a form of realism in which concepts are regarded as revisable tokens of actual reference, cf. Putnam (1975, 215 ff); Habermas (1999, 44 ff).
At an etymological level, it would be rather difficult to make a clear-cut distinction between the Greek ‘ethos’ and the Latin ‘mores’, but Habermas obviously borrows Hegel’s distinction between ‘Sittlichkeit’ and ‘Moralität’.
As already mentioned, subjective statements occupy a different position in this respect, inasmuch as they cannot not be immediately submitted to discursive criteria of rational validity, yet they still partake in the sphere of communicative rationality, by way of sincerity or ‘truthfulness’ (‘Wahrhaftichkeit’).
Although we generally use the word ‘theory’ in a much narrower sense, we should not overlook the basic meaning of ‘beholding’ as in the Greek ‘theoria’ (normally rendered as ‘contemplation’), insofar as it is the framework of the ‘outlook’ that defines the factual criteria needed for falsification, cf. Chalmers (1978).
Popper actually hails Plato for being the first to have “discovered … the objective Forms or Ideas” (1972, 156). Plato’s concept of Ideas is, in fact, literally incompatible with Popper’s definition of world 3 objects as being “products of human mind”, inasmuch as the notion of ‘idea’ in most of the Platonic dialogues has it the other way round: ‘Man’ is an instantiation of ‘the idea of man’ which means that nous, the faculty of reason in man, only participates in the realm of eternal ideas, which originate in nothing but themselves. Even so, Popper rejects the view of ideas as simply man-made, and finds that Platonists “are supported by the fact that we can speak of eternal verities”, (1972, 158).
According to Popper, Frege’s criticism of Husserl’s initial psychologism (in Philosophie der Aritmetik, 1891) may have pushed Husserl towards the anti-psychologism of Logische Untersuchungen (1968 [1901]), where he actually divides science into the interrelated dimensions of “objects under investigation”, “cognitive experiences” and “logical interrelations” (Husserl 1968, 224 ff) concurring with ‘the three world’ theory of Bolzano, to whom he refers.
This doesn’t entail ‘meaning’ being superfluous, but rather that it must be cast as ‘the means of communication’ involving some kind of socio-cultural ontology, or world 3 in Popper’s vocabulary.
Popper defended the same view in his criticism of historicism, in 1957, when he explicitly condoned the positivist view that the methods of sciences of nature and of society are “fundamentally the same” (1966, 130 f).
In this respect, Popper has famously condemned the “prophetic argument” of Marxism (2003, 182 ff.), and not least the communist movement, which he criticized specifically for having neglected obvious instances of historical falsification, ibid. 206 ff.
I would be reluctant, however, to include in this critique the principles of existential re-enactment in Heidegger’s early works. Although this ‘stance’ has generally been associated with classical British or neo-Kantian hermeneutics, it may rather be seen as Heidegger’s first steps towards his fundamental ontology, which, after all, is something rather different, cf. Kisiel (1995, 59 ff.; 315 ff).
The tendency of neuroscience to put a micro-process in the brain on the same footing as a conscious thought is, according to Bennett and Hacker, to commit ‘a mereological fallacy’, that is, to conflate the part with the whole, a fallacy they also ascribe to John Searle’ s biological naturalism, Bennett and Hacker (2007, 444), see below.
In Freedom and Neurobiology (2007), Searle does not hesitate to refer to his earlier work on the rediscovery of the mind (1992), which marked what many regarded as a departure from the rule-governed pragmatics of his theory of speech acts (see, in this respect, the critical remarks with which Habermas (1993) and Apel (1993), reacted to this development. Thus, Searle writes: “[W]e need to see language as derivative from … more basic, biological forms of intentionality”, (2007, 29). Although his books from 1995 and 2007 took up different issues, I see no fundamental disagreement with the points he emphasized in his initial engagement with the philosophy of mind.
It should be noted that Habermas is aware of this split as well, but that he draws an entirely different conclusion from it than Searle, cf. (2005, 155).
It would be more in line with Popper’s principle of demarcation to speak only of a theoretical conjecture that has gained some foothold in natural science.
Popper doesn’t exactly make such a distinction, but, as is discussed below, his demarcation between physical entities and products of the human mind is not entirely different from Searle’s distinction between brute facts (of nature) and institutional facts, (1995, 34 ff).
Despite the issues dealt with in 2007, which are at least partly different from those of 1995, Searle actually refers to this study as a more elaborate presentation of the ideas brought to fruition in the present discussion of ‘Political Power’ (2007, 79 ff), and there is no reason to believe that he distances himself from any of the ideas developed in 1995.
Jarvie, whose book was published in the same year as Popper’s Objective Knowledge, is referring to two early articles on the subject, which Popper published in 1967 (Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject) and 1968 (On the Theory of the Objective Mind), but the 3 world model presented there doesn’t differ from his 1972 presentation of them.
In his Tanner Lecture, he actually deals with Beethoven’s 5th Symphony as an example of a world 3 object, 1978, 145.
Interestingly, Searle puts his concept of ‘constitutive rules’, a term coined in his Speech Acts (1969), to use in his explication of an ‘institutional fact’. Admittedly, an institutional fact differs in important respects from the brute facts of nature, but what makes an institutional fact ‘solid’ is the social stability of having something (X) count as something else (Y), and this is, basically, what a constitutive rule is (1995, 45). Instead of simply taking note of this rule as efficient, a point that the analysis of speech acts brings out rather forcefully, he proceeds along the lines of his philosophy of mind by stating that “collective intentionality assigns a new status to some phenomenon, where that status has an accompanying function that cannot be performed solely in virtue of the intrinsic physical features of the phenomenon in question. This assignment creates a new fact, an institutional fact, a new fact created by human agreement”. (op. cit. 46) I am not sure what kind of intentionality this ‘human agreement’ is thought to bear out, but at least Searle makes it obvious that ‘institutional facts’ are, in line with Popper’s ideas, ‘products of the human minds’ that attain ‘autonomy’.
On the surface, this may sound like Dennett’s ‘solution’ to the problem of “human autonomy” and “free will” (1995, 366), when he states that “what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes—thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes” (op. cit. 365). In fact, Dennett rather repudiates the problem insofar as the memes, “which have played a major role in determining who or what we are” (ibid.), are themselves blind (or pre-conscious) entities of natural selection. How can there be decision where there is only competitive replication? Memes pull us back into nature, as it were, making World 3 collapse into World 1. A similar accusation against Popper would not hold up, because of his insistence on the autonomy of World 3 and its realization in World 2 pertaining to World 1.
That this reconstruction may, in many respects, be counterfactual is duly noted by Habermas himself, and is rightly dismissed as an immaterial argument against it. The problem is that Habermas’s reflective enterprise, being a communicative theory about communicative acts, eludes any precise estimation as to its theoretical status, and it is, after all, announced as a theory of communicative action, claiming merely the status of plausibility.
Subscribing to Peirce’s notion of fallibilism, Habermas himself acknowledges that we cannot obtain a final knowledge. More importantly: we need not to know, since it is not, ultimately, a question of epistemic truth, but the need of a social praxis to sustain itself that matters, and this issue still demands a reflective sociology.
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Albinus, L. Can Science Cope with More Than One World? A Cross-Reading of Habermas, Popper, and Searle. J Gen Philos Sci 44, 3–20 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-013-9221-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-013-9221-9