Abstract
In his Autobiography, R.G. Collingwood writes that at a certain point in an academic’s life, his colleagues gather together to write a Festschrift in his honor, and thereby to indicate that, in their judgement, he is over the hill.2 In the case of Joseph Agassi, this is far from the case. Indeed, the present contribution should be understood as a plea to Agassi as a philosopher of immense erudition and productive capacity to mend his ways, and to give us the important work of which I think him capable while he is in his intellectual prime.
...if the wisest man would at any time utter his thoughts in the crude indigested manner as they come into his head, he would be looked upon as raving mad1
This draws in part upon a paper delivered at the APSA conference in Canberra, September 1992.
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Notes
Jonathan Swift, Some Thoughts on Free Thinking’, in: The Works of Jonathan Swift, volume 2, London: Bohn, 1850, p. 200.
R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939, 1970, p. 119.
In light of the Postscript (London: Hutchinson, 1983), this might seem a strange remark to make. But it is striking that the first volume of that work, like The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), moves swiftly and rather abruptly from a fascinating and tantalizing discussion of epistemological issues which leaves many issues under-explored, to an at least to this reader much more dull discussion of technical aspects of the theory of probability.
Compare, for documentation, my `Epistemological Limits of the State’, Political Studies,1989.
Compare The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1962), chapter 3, section 4.
Compare The Open Society and Its Enemies,chapter 25, and also Popper’s ‘Emancipation Through Knowledge’, in: A. J. Ayer (ed.), The Humanist Outlook,London: Pemberton Press, 1968.
I have written “almost”? because of the way in which Popper, when discussing institutions, stresses the need for “knowledge of social regularities which impose limitations on what can be achieved” by them. Open Society,chapter 5, section iv, text to note 9.
Compare the discussion in his `The Aim of Science’; for example, in volume 1 of his Postscript.
Compare, on all this, my `Political Thought of F. A. Hayek’, University of London Ph.D. dissertation, 1987.
Compare, however, Open Society,chapter 9, note 4, in which Popper argues that Hayek’s argument in The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944) can — in part — be assimilated to his ideas about piecemeal social engineering.
For some discussion, compare my `Hayek and the Case for Markets’, in: J. Birner and R. van Zijp (eds), Hayek, Coordination and Evolution, London: Routledge, 1994 and P. S. Edwards and J. Shearmur, `Street-Level Jurisprudence’, paper delivered at American Political Studies Association, Chicago, 1992.
Open Society,p. 22.
Ibid.
Ibid.,p. 24.
Compare Open Society,chapter 25, and `Emancipation Through Knowledge’.
For some critical discussion, and an indication of the way in which I would depart from Popper’s view, compare my `Epistemological Limits of the State’. My personal view is that Popper’s stress on the autonomy of ethics, and on our own responsibility for our ethical decisions, makes sense only if one adopts a view in some ways akin to ethical realism; something which — in light of what Popper says in Open Society,chapter 5, note 5, part (2), and in his Addendum 1, 1961, about parallels between truth and the validity of norms — is not quite as outrageous as it might at first seem as an interpretation of his views. However, if such an interpretation were adopted, one would face a problem of how it relates to Popper’s criticism of the idea of a “scientific ethics”, and, as I suggest in that paper, to his own “negative utilitarianism” in the sphere of public policy.
Open Society,volume 1, p. 22.
In his Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge, 1963). Compare also his `The Nature of Philosophical Problems and their Roots in Science’ in Conjectures and Refutations,and also his `The Myth of the Framework’ in:E. Freeman (ed.), The Abdication of Philosophy,La Salle: Open Court, 1976.
Open Society,chapter 25, p. 278.
One reason why it became less prominent was, presumably, because Popper later came to the view that metaphysical theories could be rationally assessed in their own right. Compare his Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), page 40, note 9.
See The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 1957), pp. 135ff.
See Open Society,volume 2, chapter 11, pp. 9–21.
Ibid.
The paper, subsequently reprinted in his Conjectures and Refutations,dates from 1953. It is striking that, when discussing the idea of essentialism there, Popper refers back to The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society. (See note 5 on page 169 of Conjectures. This would seem to bear out the view that this is the first occurrence of the idea, outside of Popper’s discussions in the social sciences.)
Ibid.,p. 173.
Ibid.,p. 174.
Also now in Conjectures and Refutations.
This paper, drawn from Popper’s Postscript,was first published in Ratio,and then, subsequently, in his Objective Knowledge. It is now also available in his Postscript,volume 1, to which I will refer in the present paper.
See `The Aim of Science’, chapter 15 of Realism and the Aim of Science; the other quotation is from `Truth, Rationality and the Growth of Knowledge’, Chapter 10 of Conjectures and Refutations,p. 241.
Postscript,p. 139.
See Popper’s Postscript,volume 3.
See `The Trend of Economic Thinking’, in:F. A. Hayek, The Trend of Economic Thinking: Essays on Political Economists and Economic History,ed.W. W. Bartley III and Stephen Kresge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 19. See also, for discussion, my `Political Thought of E A. von Hayek’.
See The Open Society,volume 2, pp. 119–20. Of course, one might defend Popper by saying that, on the “Hayekian” account that I have given, the structures in question themselves depend on human decisions of various kinds. But it is exactly on this point that it seems to me that Popper’s account is open to criticism, in that — understandably enough, because he was discussing Marx — it conflated structural questions of the kind that I have here raised with issues of historical inevitability.
See his Anarchy,State,and Utopia (New York: Basic, 1974) chapter 1.
This is an allusion to the British government’s declaration of Australia as such, thus disregarding the fact that it was already full of aboriginal land rights (of a kind).
Compare, for further discussion, Edwards and Shearmur, `Street-Level Jurisprudence’.
There is, possibly, a parallel here with views that see the natural sciences as having as their subject matter the products of God’s prior activities.
In this respect, Juergen Habermas’s characterization of science as instrumental seems to me mistaken. The development of scientific knowledge can, surely, just as easily be understood as a search for meaning, which has changed its idea of the kind of meaning that might be found in nature, as its search has progressed. Such a realist approach to science is not without its problems. But, in my view, it should not be dismissed out of hand.
Compare note 10 above.
Compare, for some discussion, my `Hayek and the Wisdom of the Age’, in:N. Barry and others, Hayek’s `Serfdom’ Revisited. London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1984.
Compare, for more extended discussion, Edwards and Shearmur, `Street-Level Jurisprudence’.
Although there is a sense in which, with such concerns, one would merely be returning to approaches which were familiar during the Eighteenth century, but from which, alas we then fell away.
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Shearmur, J. (1995). Philosophical Method, Modified Essentialism and the Open Society. In: Jarvie, I.C., Laor, N. (eds) Critical Rationalism, the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 162. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0441-0_2
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