Digressions&Impressions

Popper on the Right and Duty of Violent Resistance

[1] I am not in all cases and under all circumstances against a violent revolution. I believe with some medieval and Renaissance Christian thinkers who taught the admissibility of tyrannicide that there may indeed, under a tyranny, be no other possibility, and that a violent revolution may be justified. But I also believe that any such revolution should have as its only aim the establishment of a democracy; and by a democracy I do not mean something as vague as ‘the rule of the people’ or ‘the rule of the majority’, but a set of institutions (among them especially general elections, i.e. the right of the people to dismiss their government) which permit public control of the rulers and their dismissal by the ruled, and which make it possible for the ruled to obtain reforms without using violence, even against the will of the rulers. In other words, the use of violence is justified only under a tyranny which makes reforms without violence impossible, and it should have only one aim, that is, to bring about a state of affairs which makes reforms without violence possible.
[2] I do not believe that we should ever attempt to achieve more than that by violent means. For I believe that such an attempt would involve the risk of destroying all prospects of reasonable reform. The prolonged use of violence may lead in the end to the loss of freedom, since it is liable to bring about not a dispassionate rule of reason, but the rule of the strong man. A violent revolution which tries to attempt more than the destruction of tyranny is at least as likely to bring about another tyranny as it is likely to achieve its real aims.
[3] There is only one further use of violence in political quarrels which I should consider justified. I mean the resistance, once democracy has been attained, to any attack (whether from within or without the state) against the democratic constitution and the use of democratic methods. Any such attack, especially if it comes from the government in power, or if it is tolerated by it, should be resisted by all loyal citizens, even to the use of violence. In fact, the working of democracy rests largely upon the understanding that a government which attempts to misuse its powers and to establish itself as a tyranny (or which tolerates the establishment of a tyranny by anybody else) outlaws itself, and that the citizens have not only a right but also a duty to consider the action of such a government as a crime, and its members as a dangerous gang of criminals. But I hold that such violent resistance to attempts to overthrow democracy should be unambiguously defensive. No shadow of doubt must be left that the only aim of the resistance is to save democracy. A threat of making use of the situation for the establishment of a counter-tyranny is just as criminal as the original attempt to introduce a tyranny; the use of such a threat, even if made with the candid intention of saving democracy by deterring its enemies, would therefore be a very bad method of defending democracy; indeed, such a threat would confuse the ranks of its defenders in an hour of peril, and would therefore be likely to help the enemy.--Karl Popper (1945 [1994] The Open Society and Its Enemies, 360-361 [emphases and paragraph numbers added to facilitate discussion.]

The quoted passage is, in context, an aside on Popper's analysis of the political drawbacks of Marxist prophecy of violent revolution. In order to understand his remarks we need to be reminded that for Popper it is constitutive of democracy that "it permits reform without violence" (369; there is more to Popper's idea of democracy.)  One of the bad-making, constitutive features of tyranny is that "it makes reforms without violence impossible." Popper does not define violence, but let's stipulate it's clear he means something like the use of physical force, maiming, torture, killing, murder, etc. More problematically, Popper does not define any of the legitimate limits on reform or a sense of proportionality about the conditions that count as 'tyrannical.'*

As we see in paragraphs [1]&[3],Popper does not rule out political violence categorically. In the first paragraph Popper embraces the idea of legitimacy of tyrannicide. Strikingly, he does not refer to republican writings (Cicero, Seneca, etc.) or to Locke, but to folk we now might associate with the Monarchomachs, perhaps even Aquinas. Tyrannicide is justified only if (a) the rule is tyrannical (and so relies on force); (b) "reforms without violence impossible," and  it aims for a democratic polity, that is, one "which makes reforms without violence possible." 

In fact, Popper has an expansive understanding of tyranny. He does not limit it to the rule of one or a small group. He thinks democratic majorities can be tyrannical (368). If a minority risks being a permanent minority and as a consequence has to bear disproportionate burdens (Popper offers an example of unfair tax burdens), Popper views the majority as tyrannical. In such circumstances, the minority would be justified to use violence.  

Popper is clear [2] that he views legitimate (even if illegal) political assassination as an exception. Because once assassination becomes an instrument of policy he thinks it is foreseeable that it leads to new (generally somewhat fascist) tyranny. Popper's argument here is a mixture of empirical prediction and consequentialism. But in larger context, he is relying on a plausible analysis of the tactics of social democrats, marxists, reactionaries and fascists.

The most striking paragraph here is the third one.** Here Popper confronts the possibility of a democratically elected government, or its extra-governmental allies, undermining the democratic character of the state. Popper is, of course, not responding to a hypothetical case. He personally experienced this in Austria, and the phenomenon is, alas, not a limited one. 

Popper is explicit that only a kind of defensive violence is permitted, in order and only in order to restore democracy. In fact, Popper isn't just claiming it is permitted, he thinks it is obliged ("duty")!  Even if the letter of the law rules against such assassination, one follows then a higher political law. From the perspective of one's democratic conscience, the state and its functionaries ought to be viewed as outlawed. To be clear, Popper does not view this as a general right to resist unjust government. It's a special duty limited to the abolition of tyrants and would be tyrants. 

But one may well think he is vague about under what conditions violent resistance against a democratically elected state becomes legitimate. This is especially so in circumstances where the state pretends to abide by democratic rules and pretends to be outraged at and wishes to punish (some, but not all) use of political violence or election fraud.

So, given Popper's general aversion to political violence, one might think that for Popper one should err here on the side of caution and not view, say, unsavory political opponents as would be tyrants. Yet, Popper also warns against "attempts to overthrow democracy" by governments.  Popper's special right and duty to resist the undermining of democracy is, thus, expansive. Once governments take action to prevent or insulate themselves from being removed they are, on his view, already de facto outlaw and one is qua citizen obliged to take action. While there is no procedure to settle the matter beyond a doubt, on Popper's view, they have it coming.  

There is a recurring temptation to treat and dismiss Popper's Open Society as a book of the cold war.  But for all its evident limitations, the problems it tackles have not gone away.

 

Popper, Foucault, The Art of Leadership, the Liberalism of Fear, and the Birth of Biopolitics

[I] f we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any fundamental problems, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question ‘Who should rule?’ is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato’s admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently ‘good’ or ‘wise’ (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms), and that it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who should rule? by the new 2 question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?--Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, chapter 7, p. 115 (emphasis in original)

One of the oddities of Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics, is the near-total absence of Popper. It's odd for three reasons: first, Popper's Open Society is explicitly framed as a response to Lippmann's The Good Society. Since Foucault takes the (1938 Paris) Colloquium on the book as a foundational moment for neo-liberalism, the Open Society is part of the larger sweep of events Foucault is interrogating. Second, it is quite clear that for Popper Plato treats medicine as a political art in order to shape and enhance the population (p. 131ff, chapter 8); so lodged in the Open Society is itself a series of critical reflections on biopolitics and its history. Third, as the passage above reveals, Popper explicitly discusses, in a sense, the art of government, which as we have seen is one of the main themes of the The Birth of Biopolitics.

If we go to the (rather long) footnote attached on the new question, we read the following (in part):

Similar ideas have been expressed by J. S. Mill; thus he writes in his Logic (1st edn, p. 557 f.): ‘Although the actions of rulers are by no means wholly determined by their selfish interests, it is as security against those selfish interests that constitutional checks are required.’ Similarly he writes in The Subjection of Women (p. 251 of the Everyman edition; italics mine): ‘Who doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness and great affection, under the absolute government of a good man? Meanwhile laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad.’ Much as I agree with the sentence in italics, I feel that the admission contained in the first part of the sentence is not really called for. (Cp. especially note 25 (3) to this chapter.) A similar admission may be found in an excellent passage of his Representative Government (1861; see especially p. 49) where Mill combats the Platonic ideal of the philosopher king because, especially if his rule should be a benevolent one , it will involve the ‘abdication’ of the ordinary citizen’s will, and ability, to judge a policy.--Open Society, 579-580

I was pleased to see Popper pick up (recall here; and here) on Mill's argument in Representative Government, but surprised he calls it 'new.' For, it seems to me central (recall) to Hume's (and Montesquieu's) argument against (what Quentin Skinner calls) neoroman liberty and the physiocratic tendency toward benevolent despotism. And while I think in Mill's and Hume's hands the intentions is to further a liberal political life, the underlying ideas can be traced back to Livy and Polybius (and, perhaps, the Hebrew Bible (as Mill suggests).

It strikes me there are two insights coupled in this art of government of (to nod ahead (recall) to Shklar [and here; here]) the liberalism of fear. First, this is emphasized by Hume, to ensure there are sufficient countervailing forces against the executive such that the executive can never hope to dominate society, while remaining effective enough to do her job (defend against foreign enemies and govern the state bureaucracy, faithfully execute the laws). It  is insufficiently appreciated how important this element is. From this perspective, the American fondness -- despite regurgitating at nauseam separation of powers in civics classes --  for an imperial presidency simply feeds the potential of tyranny. The whole tenor of twentieth century practice has been, in this sense, generating the conditions for the success of the eventual rise of illiberal governance.

Second, how to organize institutions such that the downside risk of incompetent, self-interested, or malicious rulers is minimized. It is one of the more amazing, even perverse features of twentieth century intellectual life that the very idea of an open society has become synonymous with risk taking entrepreneurship. Underneath it is an enormous aversion to certain forms of political risk, the possibility of awful government.

What is new, and I think this is, in fact, Popper's seminal contribution (although there are plenty of Schumpeterian premonitions), is to argue that this second point not just from risk aversion, but to argue it also from an analysis of why all the mechanisms designed to prevent bad leadership from arising, for the purposes of a society capable of adapting to changing needs,* are incapable of being sufficiently failure proof. It is this part of the Open Society that is capable of irritating the instructors of mankind and the peddlers of technologies of management. Because he points out that their whole program of meritocratic leadership education is self-contradictory; it leads to mediocrity and is incapable of generating "the spirit of criticism... intellectual independence" (127; this connects up to the heart of Popper's philosophy of science). 

It is an open question how successful Popper's particular argument is against political programs of leadership selection that are illiberal but not meritocratic. But I return to that some other time. Let me wrap up with three observations. First, the two elements of the art of government of the liberalism of fear are not its whole art (see here for a lot more). As Foucault recognizes when he is discussing the ORDOs, one of  their key political arguments of embracing market based competition as a permanent process is to help prevent the rise of overbearing powers. So, here markets are designed to secure the existence of such countervailing powers. (There is a thought like this in Milton Friedman, too.) Obviously, this gives rise to new challenges of preventing monopoly and rent-seeking behavior which may require an executive that opens the door toward more malice (and so the cycle continues). 

Second, within neoliberalism there is an internal dynamic (which is the theme of Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics) such that a focus on the market and the technologies of generating the right sort of agents (with human capital, entrepreneurial, productive etc.) in it start to predominate over other streams of thought that focus on how to develop such adaptive institutions that simultaneously give us the fruits of decent enough government and do not open the door to the generation of tyranny. Once the market is viewed as the antonym of the state in neoliberal thought, this disastrous forgetting of Popper's key insight seems almost inevitable.

Third, and in some sense entirely unrelated, and in another sense absolutely central, Popper concludes his argument on this point with what he calls a "result of some importance:"

Institutions for the selection of the outstanding can hardly be devised. Institutional selection may work quite well for such purposes as Plato had in mind, namely for arresting change. But it will never work well if we demand more than that, for it will always tend to eliminate initiative and originality, and, more generally, qualities which are unusual and unexpected. This is not a criticism of political institutionalism. It only reaffirms what has been said before, that we should always prepare for the worst leaders, although we should try, of course, to get the best. But it is a criticism of the tendency to burden institutions, especially educational institutions, with the impossible task of selecting the best. This should never be made their task. This tendency transforms our educational system into a race-course, and turns a course of studies into a hurdle-race. Instead of encouraging the student to devote himself to his studies for the sake of studying, instead of encouraging in him a real love for his subject and for inquiry, he is encouraged to study for the sake of his personal career; he is led to acquire only such knowledge as is serviceable in getting him over the hurdles which he must clear for the sake of his advancement. In other words, even in the field of science, our methods of selection are based upon an appeal to personal ambition of a somewhat crude form. (It is a natural reaction to this appeal if the eager student is looked upon with suspicion by his colleagues.) The impossible demand for an institutional selection of intellectual leaders endangers the very life not only of science, but of intelligence. Open Society, 128

For those who followed my recent exchange with Zena Hitz (see here for her fascinating twitter response), it will not surprised that I point out that Hitz's concerns are themselves not new. Even if we wince, perhaps, at Popper's gendered way of expressing the point that the very institutions of education are corrupted by worldly advancement (and Popper argues this goes back to Plato). 

Quentin Skinner, Paley, Tocqueville, and the Charge of Utopianism (III)

A number of critics [of neo-roman liberty] argued that, even if this contention is not actually incoherent, the suggestion that an equal right to participate in government is indispensable to the maintenance of civil liberty is so Utopian as to make it irrelevant to the political world in which we live. This objection was widely canvassed at the time of the American and French revolutions, with William Paley coming forward in his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy in 1785 as perhaps the most influential spokesman for what became the classical liberal case. As Paley urges in minatory tones, 'those definitions of liberty ought to be rejected, which by making that essential to civil freedom which is unattainable in experience, inflame expectations that can never be gratified, and disturb the public content with complaints'. warning takes on an added significance in the light of the fact that his Principles became for the teaching of political theory throughout the nineteenth century.
I shall not attempt to counter Paley's criticism, save by observing that I have never understood why the charge of utopianism is necessarily thought to be an objection to a theory of politics. One legitimate aspiration of moral and political theory is surely to show us what lines of action we are committed to undertaking by the values we profess to accept. It may well be massively inconvenient to suggest that, if we truly value individual freedom, this commits us to establishing political equality as a substantive ideal. If this is true, however, what this insight offers us is not a critique of our principles as unduly demanding in practice; rather it offers us a critique of our practice as insufficiently attentive to our principles.--Quentin Skinner (1998) Liberty before Liberalism, 77-79

The quoted passage is just before Skinner takes on the main, "more knock-down objection commonly levelled against the [neo-Roman] theory I have been laying out." (79) So the quoted material is easy to miss also because Skinner admits that he is not attempting "to counter Paley's criticism." As promised (recall here; here; here; here), I shall take on Skinner's response to the "more knock-down objection" in a future post, but I hope readers find dwelling on the quoted passage instructive anyway.

One reason to think it might be instructive is that in the second paragraph, Skinner enunciates a principle -- "One legitimate aspiration of moral and political theory is surely to show us what lines of action we are committed to undertaking by the values we profess to accept' -- that is central (recall) to his  defense of his methodology; near the end of the argument of his  lecture, when he is defending his methodology, he claims that "professed principles...will nevertheless help to shape and limit what lines of action you can successfully pursue." (p. 105) I won't repeat my criticism of this claim here, but I think it is fair to say that while this part of Skinner's response to Paley (yes that Paley) may not be central to his own refutation of liberal liberty, it does represent an important strain in Skinner's thought.

So, it is a peculiar fact that Skinner misunderstands Paley's objection. For, the charge against the neo-roman definition of liberty here is not that it is utopian, but that is dangerous. The charge of "utopianism" is a charge of feasibility (e.g., "unduly demanding"). Admittedly, Skinner himself clearly need not understand the charge of utopianism as a charge of feasibility (despite "utopianism;" "unduly demanding"). For he also losses it, as a charge of massive inconvenience. This is indeed much closer to Paley's sense, and so I treat this as Skinner's objection. But even this misunderstands the nature of Paley's position.

Now Paley is clearly a consequentialist and, as Skinner suggest, one of the early utilitarians.* So, it is not surprising, even consistent, that Paley would evaluate the "propriety" (see Paley) of a definition or a principle in terms of its foreseeable effects. The key part of Paley's is criticism is not the feasibility claim, although it is present in his argument ("unattainable in experience"). That is not a problem. If accepting unfeasible principle would produce good consequences, Paley might (if it does not offend other features of morality and religion) well have to embrace it. But rather that in virtue of its infeasibility, people's expectations will be raised and denied. This is bad enough in its own right given that for Paley the "final" aim of "all rational politics" is to "produce the greatest quantity of happiness in a given tract of country." Let's call this Paley's internal objection to the neo-roman definition. It is internal to Paley's system and may well be unsatisfying to those who reject his other commitments.

But, Paley is also offering a political objection against the neo-roman definition in the passage quoted by Skinner at the top of this post. For, the political objection to neo-roman liberty is that it makes minimal civic concord impossible.

To see what this is about it is important to remember that there are roughly two models of the causes of political revolution. First, there is (recall) the Platonic model that in an unequal/class/hierarchical society disunified elites cause revolutions (Republic 545d). Second, there is the model commonly associated with Tocqueville that revolutions occur when things start to improve:

Revolutions are not always brought about by a gradual decline from bad to worse. Nations that have endured patiently and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming oppression, often burst into rebellion against the yoke the moment it begins to grow lighter. The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.--Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution**

One of the possible mechanisms behind this second model is anticipated in Paley's idea that inflamed desires that are frustrated are dangerous. (I take it this is the significance of Paley's use of inflamed.) These cannot (remember infeasibility) be removed by "wisdom or the benevolence of government."  

Now, if one thinks a revolution is warranted then perhaps thinking then, perhaps, it is natural to treat a warning about not facilitating the conditions of revolution as menacing ('minatory'). But if one thinks that even the most welcome revolutions are also dangerous/harmful to many innocent bystanders -- as they nearly always are --, then Paley's stance may well be thought humane, even moral.

More contextually, neo-Roman ideas were implicated in the revolution of the US then (1785) recently concluded. So Paley is clearly pointing out that neo-roman ideas generated the conditions of revolution. Now, none of us need to mourn the diminishment of British empire. But Paley's idea is simply that neo-Roman ideas are always dangerous to public order. This is why I call the 'political objection.'+

Notice that Paley takes his own political objection seriously enough to propose alternative principles that one can live by. So, while it may be true, from a neo-roman perspective that there is"a critique of our practice as insufficiently attentive to our principles," Paley is not an appropriate target of this complaint because he is changing the principles in virtue of their foreseeable effects. And Paley's stance is consistent because he embraces principles that (plausibly) are capable of delivering what he takes to be the end "rational politics." (That is compatible with noticing that labeling this 'rational' is a form of political rhetoric by making other  ends seem irrational!)

One may well charge Paley, as one may charge many utilitarians, of being too close to the perspective of authority and power here. And, perhaps, Paley, is taking too much the perspective of his students (the future clerical and political elite). And one may also wonder if the rejection of revolution is, in context, a species of admirable gradualism (of the sort I attribute to Adam Smith) or just quietism. But Paley's particular charge is that neo-republican liberty invites permanent turmoil, if not, revolution. 

Skinner could deny Paley's claim on empirical grounds. Perhaps Paley is wrong about the empirical effects of neo-roman liberty. One may also argue (on Machiavellian/Popperian grounds) that some kind of permanent tension is fruitful. But in so far as political theory is, in part, also the search of principles that lead to stable authority, and, thereby stable expectations that can generate what we may call the fruits of peace, Paley's objection instantiates responsible speech. For Paley's view is de facto (and here he echoes Hume) that on neo-roman grounds no legitimate government is possible in actuality.

Popper on Freedom and Creative Turbulence

Against the claim that an aim like this can be formulated sufficiently clearly and definitely, many objections have been raised. It has been said that once it is recognized that freedom must be limited, the whole principle of freedom breaks down, and the question what limitations are necessary and what are wanton cannot be decided rationally, but only by authority. But this objection is due to a muddle. It mixes up the fundamental question of what we want from a state with certain important technological difficulties in the way of the realization of our aims. It is certainly difficult to determine exactly the degree of freedom that can be left to the citizens without endangering that freedom whose protection is the task of the state. But that something like an approximate determination of that degree is possible is proved by experience, i.e. by the existence of democratic states. In fact, this process of approximate determination is one of the main tasks of legislation in democracies. It is a difficult process, but its difficulties are certainly not such as to force upon us a change in our fundamental demands. These are, stated very briefly, that the state should be considered as a society for the prevention of crime, i.e. of aggression. And the whole objection that it is hard to know where freedom ends and crime begins is answered, in principle, by the famous story of the hooligan who protested that, being a free citizen, he could move his fist in any direction he liked; whereupon the judge wisely replied: ‘The freedom of the movement of your fists is limited by the position of your neighbour’s nose.’

The view of the state which I have sketched here may be called ‘protectionism’. The term ‘protectionism’ has often been used to describe tendencies which are opposed to freedom. Thus the economist means by protectionism the policy of protecting certain industrial interests against competition; and the moralist means by it the demand that officers of the state shall establish a moral tutelage over the population. Although the political theory which I call protectionism is not connected with any of these tendencies, and although it is fundamentally a liberal theory, I think that the name may be used to indicate that, though liberal, it has nothing to do with the policy of strict non-intervention (often, but not quite correctly, called ‘ laissez-faire’). Liberalism and state-interference are not opposed to each other. On the contrary, any kind of freedom is clearly impossible unless it is guaranteed by the state. A certain amount of state control in education, for instance, is necessary, if the young are to be protected from a neglect which would make them unable to defend their freedom, and the state should see that all educational facilities are available to everybody. But too much state control in educational matters is a fatal danger to freedom, since it must lead to indoctrination. As already indicated, the important and difficult question of the limitations of freedom cannot be solved by a cut and dried formula. And the fact that there will always be borderline cases must be welcomed, for without the stimulus of political problems and political struggles of this kind, the citizens’ readiness to fight for their freedom would soon disappear, and with it, their freedom. (Viewed in this light, the alleged clash between freedom and security, that is, a security guaranteed by the state, turns out to be a chimera. For there is no freedom if it is not secured by the state; and conversely, only a state which is controlled by free citizens can offer them any reasonable security at all.)--Popper (1945) The Open Society & Its Enemies, 105-106

I had two motives to return to Popper. First, I wanted to use Popper's fanatically uncharitable reading of Plato (and Aristotle) to oppose Callard's literal reading and show how important and vital it is to "entangle those authors in contemporary power struggles." Second, and more important, to remind myself what Popper had to say about what he calls the "perennial revolt against freedom" (178) and "the significance of the perennial fight against" totalitarianism (xli). But I got distracted by the paragraphs above, which are a kind of lengthy aside in his diagnosis of Plato's totalitarianism, and so, if I comment on these two issues at all, it will be obliquely and indirectly (I return to this some other time).

Not unlike other liberal readers of Lippmann's (1938)  The Good Society -- Popper calls it a "most admirable book" in his first footnote (513) --, not the least the ORDOs, Popper rejects nineteenth century liberalism. The direct context of the passage is his defense of the idea that one can be a "social technologist" and "approach political problems rationally." (105; I don't mean to deny that Popper is a critic of certain other forms of social engineering.) The new form of liberalism will be one that presupposes state activity to achieve liberal ends constrained, as the first paragraph of the quoted passage shows, by the harm principle. 

But what caught my eye was Popper's claim that a free society requires creative turbulence conducive to freedom. This is an idea that is (recall) prominent in Machiavelli (who is strikingly absent in Popper's learned argument). Now, unlike Machiavelli, Popper does not claim such turbulence leads to the development of better institutions. But he does think that permanent political agonism is conducive to freedom.

The underlying idea seems to be that in a tranquil and consensual (and for Popper these seem near synonyms) polity, citizens would lose the habit of vigilance. Whereas in a state in which political challenges do not have the appearance of being permanent solved, political talents and mobilization are exercised. In particular, the citizens' capacity to resist the government's attempts to remove their freedoms and rights will then be contested. 

It is important to see that Popper's position is not Arendtian. He does not seem to think that political agonism is the highest or best form of life. Nor is he attracted to republican theories of non-domination. 

I mentioned Lippmann above, because he inherits from Lippmann the idea that politics is the working out, in the "spirit of adaptation," of differences of interests and resolving of social problems that arise from changing circumstances and the development of new technologies. But whereas Lippmann demands from legislators a juridical impartiality that is not to be expected given their incentives (and the imperfection of human nature), Popper expects a never ending "process of approximate determination." Almost alone of the great liberals  who had to confront the collapse liberalism before the Allied victory, Popper discerns that one cannot eliminate politics by some decision rule, a science of politics, or elite rule, or replacing politics by the market (or some combination thereof).

And while Popper rejects the political theory of Heraclitus’ and Empedocles' emphatically, he retains the idea that political life is one of open-ended strife. But here the strife is in the service of a system that ought to be ruled by the prevention of mutual harm. And by implication, what counts as harm is in some sense constantly contestable and contested. There is no neutral place where we have the luxury to treat each other as aliens. And while this sounds like a recipe for disaster, or a politics ground in Nietzschean will to power, Popper takes the fact that somewhat liberal states have existed as evidence for its evident possibility.

Some other time I return to Popper's analysis of the sociological preconditions of the maintenance of freedom (and also explore some of its limitations). But here I close with a thought.  There are plenty of sociological and argumentative reasons for the a peculiar fact that Popper's reputation is at a nadir among (political) philosophers today.* Even so revisiting him is to encounter the rare, adult appreciation of the political challenges of maintaining a liberal political life while being sympathetic to liberal ideals (in addition to the harm principle, he emphasizes the rule of law, and equal benefit from the law).+

There is also a good intellectual reason why his political philosophy has faded. His is also a demanding, perhaps too demanding, almost existentialist form of liberalism (hence my nod to Arendt). The politics of freedom is not an intellectual game; there is no refuge from its demands. There are no slogans -- free speech, human rights, etc.--  that can circumvent the demands of judgment. "Personal responsibility" is a phrase that is repeated repetitively throughout the Open Society. For Popper this includes (but is not exhausted by) a willingness to judge others for the uptake of their ideas, and, reciprocally, a demand to be held accountable for them by other persons. 

Kim Sterelny on Integrative Philosophy of Science

Kim Sterelny: I think philosophers do two different things. So one of the things that they do is methodological. They reflect upon the methods of the natural sciences. When someone says, I do philosophy of science, especially if they said I do philosophy of science 20 years ago or 30 years ago, what they probably would have been doing is that in the last 10 to 15 years, there’s been a different kind of philosophy of science, something that always existed, but was sort of more peripheral, has become more central and that is to see philosophy as having a kind of integrative of role. So one of the things about the sciences is a relentlessly forced specialisation and sub-specialisation and even further sub-specialisation, you know, because the literature in any one area becomes so vast, the technical demands of experimentation and so on become so intense that it becomes it becomes more and more difficult for someone who is an active practitioner of science, who’s actually kind of generating the data or building the formal models to do — to also integrate across different fields. So this integrative role is becoming more and more important in philosophy of science and that requires people like me who are prepared to kind of immerse themselves in the empirical literature of different fields and become, if not fluent in them, at least slightly more than a broken L2 speaker of them. Ah, do a little bit of pidgin biology and pidgin linguistics in order to try and put together overall pictures. You know, assemble from the different fragments that are provided by the different sciences something like an integrative overview and that both gives us an overall picture, but it also generates new questions. As you go from the micro scale to the meso scale to the macro scale, new issues and new problems emerge. So those are the two main areas in which I think philosophers have contributed historically, more the first, on the methodological issue, now increasingly I think this kind of integrative overviewing, trying to put together a synthesised story from the various bits and pieces that the different sciences provide. And my work’s been much more of the second kind than the first kind. I mean, I have done a bit on the first side, you know, but I would think of myself as working centrally in that kind of second theme.--Kim Sterelny interviewed by Rosey Billington, June 2020 [HT Walter Veit]

I encountered a reference to the interview of Sterelny in a excellent, methodological chapter of Walter Veit's dissertation on what I have been calling 'synthetic philosophy'' (see also recent post). I was immensely pleased by the interview (not least because the transcript and the video are both available). But for present purposes primarily because of the passage quoted above. In my original article I had used Sterelny as an exemplar of synthetic philosophy (check out note 15)! And so I was pleased to see him describe himself that reasonably fit what I had ascribed to him. (When I do history of philosophy my subjects do not talk balk; so it's always a bit nerve-wracking when a subject does even if they are unaware of me.)

Before I get to that I want reflect a bit on Sterelny's distinction between two kinds of philosophy of science. The second kind of philosophy of science, which I dub integrative philosophy (so as not to saddle him with what I call synthetic philosophy, and also to make a distinction between the two below) is  while not new, increasingly important. The first, more traditionally important kind of philosophy of science is focused on scientific methodology. This surprised me because while Sterelny is about a generation older than I am, I would not have expected this answer. Let me explain.

When I was a PhD student at the end of the twentieth century, the quasi-Reichenbachian distinction between context of discovery and context of justification was taught as a rejected wisdom. But in practice, the idea that there was no true genuine method or logic of scientific discovery was kind of accepted (unless you were some die-hard Popperian). This meant that if you were interested in philosophy of science, you could either (i) study norms of justification (in confirmation theory or epistemology), which rests on a quasi-transcendental assumption (QTA): if anything counts as knowledge it is fallible science, so let's now articulate how this is possible; or (ii) you could do a kind of study of messy reality of the special sciences in practice/history. The latter option led to the growth of interest in models, mechanisms, measurement, simulation, etc.; (iii) or you became a kind of speculative cosmologist at the farthest reaches of mathematical physics or contributed to theoretical biology, theoretical cognitive science, etc. A lot of us were weird mixtures. 

To put this in anecdotally and as an aside. I was familiar with a methodologist and have even co-authored with one; my then somewhat obscure undergraduate teacher, George Smith, was focused on evidential arguments in science, but (a) it was for a long time disconnected from the rest of philosophy of science, and (b) it self-consciously treated the practice of turning data into high quality evidence as a historical process extended over centuries. Since now, Smith has inspired the rise of a school (mediated through Michael Friedman and Katherine Brading) it may be worth articulating distinctive features of it. But that's for another time.

Anyway, maybe I am misremembering the state of play or maybe Sterelny and I inhabited slightly different ecological niches in the profession (related to age difference). Let me turn to his account of integrative philosophy. It is a response to the cognitive division of labor and hyperspecialization within and among the sciences. And this generates an intellectual demand for integration. The way Sterelny describes it echoes (perhaps subconsciously) the treatment of pidgin at the borders of scientific trading zones popularized by Peter Galison (which now has its own wikipedia page). But the integrative philosopher is not trading between sciences (or technology) but with the system of sciences. And rather than creating a unified language -- in the manner of Neurath's unity of science or Quine's regimented language --, the integrative philosopher can speak lots of pidgin.

The aim of the integrative philosopher is to produce synthetically an 'overall picture,' and perhaps to generate new research questions at the level of the special sciences and/or the general picture. Sterelny is a bit vague (it's a short interview) what this is a picture of, but presumably it is a part of what is known as the scientific image. I say 'part' because presumably nobody can learn a sufficient number of pidgins to present a complete overall picture. I wouldn't be surprised if, before long, we will have integrative philosophers who will offer a scientific image based on a number of such partial scientific images ground in scientific pidgins.

What is worth noting here is that Sterelny is very clear that to be an integrative philosopher is high risk! For leaving aside the fact that sciences may evolve and leave one having bet on the wrong horse (ask all the philosophers who cited underpowered, unreplicated studies), if one is not an expert in the field one may well miss key nuance or distinction (this may even be consequence of the pidgin, which may be underpowered relative to the highly mathematical underlying science). It also means that an integrative philosopher lacks what we may call, distinctive expertise. She is a hybrid persona, who is open to criticism both at the level of the special sciences and at the integrative level. 

Now in many ways Sterelny's integrative philosopher is much like what I have called a 'synthetic philosopher.'  (Recall: by synthetic philosophy I mean a style of philosophy that brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture, policy, or other philosophical projects (or both). In particular, the synthetic glue tends to be a general theory or theories.) But there is a key difference. From a synthetic philosophy perspective, generating a whole picture, the integration, requires a particular kind of language, that is a general theory (in other posts I have given examples of the kinds I have in mind). And such a theory creates constraints on the nature of integration and also reduces risk.

Obviously, if one only focuses on the integrative element in synthetic philosophy there is no real difference between Sterelny's comments and synthetic philosophy. Yet, on my view, a synthetic philosopher is  an expert on a general theory (the glue of integration) in addition to pidgin competence in the special sciences. (Of course, sometimes the general theory -- e.g., game theory, bayesianism, evodevo, ANT, etc -- is already spoken in the special science.)  I don't want to overemphasize my present differences with Sterelny. He is one of the foremost philosophical Darwinian theorists of our age, and I was pleased to single him out as an exemplary synthetic philosopher in my paper. And so I don't view what I am saying as a criticism of his (first order) philosophy. (He is more a synthetic philosopher in practice than I am!) But there is a difference between being a highly skilled amateur in many domains, the integrative philosopher, and the expertise with distinctive standards of evaluation that a synthetic philosopher applies and develops. 

Models, Politics, Populations, and Public Science in times of Pandemic (V); On Marc Lipsitch and Synthetic Science

I share Medawar’s pragmatic vision of scientific reasoning. Scientists must resist the temptation to excessive skepticism: the kind that says no evidence is ever quite good enough. Instead they should keep their eyes open for any kind of information that can help them solve problems. Deciding, on principle, to reject some kinds of information outright, or to consider only particular kinds of studies, is counterproductive. Instead of succumbing to what Medawar calls “habitual disbelief,” the scientist should pursue all possible inputs that can sharpen one’s understanding, test one’s preconceptions, suggest novel hypotheses, and identify previously unrecognized inconsistencies and limitations in one’s view of a problem....If the COVID-19 crisis has revealed two “competing” ways of thinking in distinct scientific traditions, it is not between two philosophies of science or two philosophies of evidence so much as between two philosophies of action....

This is not to deny that there are different and valuable perspectives on epidemiology. Like any other field, there are many specialties and subspecialties. They have different methods for how they study the world, how they analyze data, and how they filter new information. No one person can keep up with the flood of scientific information in even one field, and specialization is necessary for progress: different scientists need to use different approaches given their skills, interests, and resources. But specialization should not lead to sects—in this case, a group of scientists who accept only certain kinds of evidence and too rigidly adhere to a philosophy of non-interventionism....

Infectious disease epidemiologists must embrace diverse forms of evidence by the very nature of their subject. We study a wide range of questions: how and under what conditions infectious diseases are transmitted, how pathogens change genetically as they spread among populations and across regions, how those changes affect our health, and how our immune systems protect us and, sometimes, make us vulnerable to severe illness when immune responses get out of control. We also seek to understand what kinds of control measures are most effective in limiting transmission. To understand these issues for even one type of disease—say, coronavirus diseases—requires drawing on a wide range of methodologies and disciplines....

The upshot is that, done well, epidemiology synthesizes many branches of science using many methods, approaches, and forms of evidence. No one can be expert in all of these specialties, and few can even be conversant in all of them. But a scientist should be open to learning about all of these kinds of evidence and more.--Marc Lipsitch (May 12, 2020) "Good Science is Good Science" The Boston Review. [HT Matt Lord]

(This is the fifth in a series of posts (see the first here inspired by Phillipe Lemoine; and, inspired by Stegenga, the second and third.)

Sometimes I notice the English heritage plaque commemorating Sir Peter Medawar on Downshire Hill, and I am reminded of the joys of reading the belles lettres of urbane scientists who, through their attention to detail, and highly specialized knowledge, open gates to inviting, untrodden paths meandering in nature's library and our location in it. The essays collected in Medawar's The Uniqueness of the Individual are among the greatest in the genre.  

Unlike Kuhn's image of scientists as unreflective puzzle solvers, Medawar developed a strong interest in philosophy, even a philosophy of science that emphasized the creativity of working science.* Because his philosophy of science seems to have been developed under the influence of a philosopher (Popper) I find this work less stimulating.** Although I take a professional interest in the way in which philosophical ideas play a role in (what I call) the image(s) of science -- (recall these posts on Hume, Williamson, Spinoza), within science and public pronouncements of scientists (and aggregators or what Polanyi called 'influentials'). An image of science is a list of characteristics that function as short-hand for representing science when these characteristics are used in debates where one side (or more) appeals to the (epistemic) authority of science to settle debate.

The passages quoted from Lipsitch, an epidemiologist, are a response to an essay by Jonathan Fuller itself a rare philosophical intervention in unfolding scientific and public policy controversy (which I discussed in the fourth post in this series). Lipsitch gives us a glimpse, from under the hood, of a species of (what in honor of Jacob Stegenga I call) policy apt, fast science. This species involves the synthesis of many different kinds of sciences and different kinds of evidence. And Lipsitch self-consciously presents his discipline as synthetic in this fashion.

As it happens, despite the increasing significance of ecology and climate science, there is not more sustained reflection, philosophical or popular, on synthetic disciplines in science.+ In addition to the integration of specialist knowledge from the special sciences it requires non-trivial judgments about the ways these hang together. When these connecting links are subject to experiment and statistical techniques, the integration may itself be a scientific discipline; when these links involve leaps of the imagination or conceptual creativity the integration may be more likened to philosophy (what I call synthetic philosophy). Of course, the dividing line between science and philosophy may be blurry or a matter of sociology of the academy.

When there is time to integrate, one aims to develop the techniques that allow one to stress test the links (models, techniques, experiments, concepts, etc.) constitutive of a synthetic science. But as Lipsitch describes, when such time is absent, a lot of the integration occurs almost heroically on the fly.++ This is so even if the underlying (special) sciences are robust and well understood. Lipsitch describes how good judgment across multiple forms of evidence is required. Presumably this also involves comparing features of COVID-19 to better understood diseases and mechanisms.

It follows from Lipsitch's account of the practice of infectious disease epidemiologists that their synthetic science involves lots of judgment calls that can generate plausible disagreements among even the most informed experts. This matters in a policy context because it means that one is not in the realm of constrained choice -- characteristic of applied ethics and decision theory ; in constrained choice areas, and as Ellsberg taught the intermediary contexts (characterized by constaints and uncertainty), experts can have considerable understanding of possible consequences of policy and one may even evaluate them in light of ends one may wish to pursue or avoid. 

But in the context of fast, synthetic science that aims to be policy apt -- "decisions are urgent and must be made with the evidence we’ve got" -- we should expect lots of controversy: legitimate second guessing of both the judgments internal to infectious disease epidemiology as well as the judgments about how to pursue policy (even if there were consensus about ends/values). From that vantage point it is to be welcomed that Lipsitch engages in critical dialogue with learned critics.

But there is a more important moral lurking here. As I noticed last week (recall this post on Ernest Nagel), it is a deeply ingrained way of thinking about the role of science in public policy that it supplies the decision-makers and public with authoritative, univocal answers to decisions. And when the scientific community does not spontaneously supplies such unicity, the impulse has been to create mechanisms of consensus generation (through surveys, panels, boards, special issues, etc.). The impulse is natural both (a) when one fears that diversity of voices will make space for political arbitrage or even to allow slick operators to sideline  knowledge altogether or (b) thinks that univocalness allows for the benefits of social coordination to materialize.  But premature (that is not stress-tested) consensus generation is also fraught with risks because it also means the authority of a particular synthetic science rests on fragile foundations.*** Thanks to Eric Winsberg I have been alert to the (reputational) risks to science as such that accompany this.

So, the moral is this. Lipsitch rightly calls for a philosophy of action in the context of fast, policy apt synthetic science. In my view, informed by Medawar's embrace of human diversity within (imaginative) science tempered by responsibility and obligations, such action will be better constrained once science and society learn to be comfortable with an image of science that permits listening to and speaking with multiplicity of informed voices. 

 

Models, Politics, Populations, and Public Science in times of Pandemic (III); on Stegenga and Philosophy of Science

What is the role, if any, of philosophy of science during this pandemic and global lockdown?...So far in the lockdown—May whatever-it-is-today—I am not aware of a systematic piece written by a philosopher of science on the pandemic or the policy response...What’s keeping me up at night, though, is this: should philosophers of science be trying to assess the merits of the various scientific arguments pertaining to SARS-CoV-2 that are now having such profound implications on policy, in a rigorous yet publicly visible manner, at a pace which accords with that of the relevant scientific work? This has been a moment of what we might call ‘fast science’. Ought philosophy of science attempt to engage with, contribute to, and criticize fast science, as it unfolds?

Both the harms (broadly construed) of SARS-CoV-2 and the effectiveness and unintended consequences of the social policies meant to mitigate those harms have been underdetermined by available evidence. At issue are the plurality of epidemiological models generating discordant predictions, the reliability of the various models, the empirical substantiation of model parameters, the evidential basis of the effectiveness of many lockdown strategies, and a complicated intertwining of social values and science. Moreover, stances on the pandemic are, obviously, politicized. The pandemic and global policy response seems, therefore, apt for analysis from the perspective of philosophy of science.

...The relevant scientific issues require technical expertise in epidemiology and economics, and up-to-date knowledge of a rapidly shifting epistemic landscape. A meta-level operative principle for any commentator on the pandemic ought to be epistemic humility, especially given the secondary pandemic of over-confidence among policymakers, armchair epidemiologists, and the scientists themselves. Moreover, because positions on the pandemic are often politicized, a philosopher of science who defends the Swedish approach (for example) might be assumed to have values and motivations aligned with, say, Trump supporters.

That said, our colleagues in philosophy of science include experts on scientific models, on methodological problems in medical science, on causal inference, on the relationship between science and values, on inductive risk, and on many other issues pertinent to the pandemic and policy response. Obviously, the stakes are high: some models are telling us that millions of people might die from the virus, while other models are telling us that millions of children might starve as a result of the global lockdowns. Should we be using our expertise to assess these scientific arguments as they unfold? There is a temporal dimension to my question....I am asking if we should be assessing the particular details and predictions of these models, now, and how they are being deployed in policy, today, in a manner that, to the extent possible, reflects the manner of presentation of the pertinent scientific arguments (namely, the speed of their articulation, their visibility, and their impact). Should philosophy of science engage with fast science?

...

So much science having so much impact, yet philosophers of science have been relatively quiet.....

In an email, Nancy Cartwright agreed that philosophers can and should weigh in on serious scientific and policy issues, though she noted that her own skills are at a meta-level rather than assessing particular data and models—I reckon that this is a diagnosis for many of us.  Jay Odenbaugh raised a number of such meta-level questions about models that are especially salient in the present context and that are worth quoting in full:

When should policymakers ignore models and when should they use them for policy guidance? What are good rules of thumb for critically thinking about models for laypeople? Do we need models for policy or can we simply get by with observational studies? How should we determine who is a good or bad modeller? How do epidemiological models compare to other types of models in other domains?

Although persuasive answers to these questions might require the sort of slow, meta-level scholarship that our discipline is accustomed to, such answers might better prepare our discipline for more rapid and impactful engagement in future episodes of fast science, which could emerge from all sorts of phenomena, such as a climate crisis, advances in artificial intelligence, or indeed, another virus.--Jacob Stegenga  "Fast Science and the Philosophy of Science"at Auxiliary Hypothesis BJPS & Dailynous

Today is the third in a series of posts (see the first here inspired by Phillipe Lempoine; and the second here). 

In his essay quoted above, which summarizes and expands on a lively facebook discussion among philosophers of science, Stegenga, distinguishes (implicitly) between fast science and slow science. He implies that slow science is the norm and fast science is the exception due to the (exceptional) "current crisis." He does not define either, but let's assume we understand what he means and accept the distinction. It is worth noting that some of the reasons given by philosophers of science why they might not have anything to contribute to the public debates over unfolding fast science have nothing to do with the fact that it is 'fast', but rather that it is policy apt. So, within the philosophy of science there is a further divide if not in kind then at least in degree between, let's call it, pure science and policy apt science (not to be confused with 'applied' science). 

Much of philosophy of science and the ruling norms within it is still shaped by the dominance of physics, math, and logic in the philosophical imagination. Of course, biology and cognitive science are huge fields in philosophy of science, but when these are studied by philosophers of science, they are not, in the first, instance treated as policy apt. Yes, philosophers of science who work on medicine, economics, engineering, and (say) decision theory, are much more aware that the sciences they study are themselves organized around epistemic norms pertaining to application and practices of justification that presuppose uptake. Even so, I cannot tell you how often, say, decision theorists will balk at the thought that how the formal apparatus is regularly applied is a legitimate form of criticism against the epistemic status of the machinery. (That's 'misuse' and so irrelevant, etc.) I mention this to suggest that thinking about uptake does not come naturally to bread and butter philosophers of science who often pay lip-service to this fact in grant applications and social media presence, but don't internalize it in their work and mutual evaluation.

Of course, the previous sentence is an exaggeration. Thanks to Heather Douglas there is a lively discussion about inductive risk in philosophy of science, and one can now assume knowledge of the concerns and arguments of feminist philosophers of science, which was not common when I was a PhD student a generation or so. Even so, it is no surprise that Eric Winsberg (who has done important work in climate science) and Alex Broadbent (who has done important work on epidemiology) have been so visible as philosophers of science. They have cut their teeth thinking, in part, about the complexities of science in public policy.* Okay, with that in place I want to offer four mutually supporting, but distinct claims.

First, the question philosophers of science should be asking is [A] how should we think about the intersection between fast and policy apt science in a crisis? It strikes me what's clearly needed is real philosophical work on that. One way to assimilate that question to familiar philosophy of science  is to think about that intersection in terms of the combination of scientific norms of controversy and inductive risk (or what in my own work I call 'responsible speech'). It is well understood since Kuhn, that the range of disagreement is constrained in scientific practice. In many ways fast, policy apt science during a crisis has features that are related to the turbulence characteristic of a possible paradigm shift and the intense disagreement familiar from a pre-paradigmatic stage. But in a crisis, these very familiar features play out with possible uptake, mediated by what Polanyi calls 'influentials' and I call 'aggregators,' in policy.

Second, in a policy apt context one can never assume what one may call a free market in ideas, or perfect communicative rationality, which is nearly always tacitly assumed by philosophers of science when discussing scientific controversy. By this I am not pointing to the barriers of entry of who counts as a relevant expert or who has access to the expensive machines. But rather that in in policy apt contexts two features tend to be structurally present: (i) some of the experts are not free to judge or free to say what they think even though they have highly salient expertise. Government scientists may well have gag orders of various kinds. This need not always be sinister--for coordination purposes, it may well be very important that government has a clear message. This is why, for example, Eric Winsberg and I noted that one should be alert to manufactured consensus. (Of course, philosophers of science should model under what conditions a unified flawed message is to be preferred over more noisy signal!) (ii) Governments always have an incentive to withhold inconvenient facts or to nudge scientists in a certain direction. So, what we really should be asking is [B] how should we think about the intersection between fast and policy apt science in a crisis with imperfect communicative rationality.

Third, the way the modern academy is organized is to incentivize and reward hyper-specialization (that is, creating barriers of entry of various kinds).  In one sense philosophy of science is no exception: our work often maps on to particular sub-disciplines in special sciences. But simultaneously, many sciences draw on generic methods and practices common to many sciences. In virtue of the foundational questions we are often free to pursue, philosophers of science often build up non-domain specific expertise about the strengths and weaknesses and features of these generic methods that can surpasse experts within a special  science. Of course, such generic knowledge is not limited to philosophers (e.g., statisticians, computer scientists, etc.) But it's the presence of such domain invariant expertise about generic instruments of science that I have claimed that synthetic philosophy is possible.

Of course, what is characteristic of the present crisis, is that we see the intermingling not just of fast and policy apt sciences, but also many policy questions that have not yet been so defined that they are what I call constrained choice. That is (to simplify) that the relevant issues have been internalized in one science and can be formulated as one kind of policy decision. Rather, the crisis is characterized by evolving recognition that many different kinds of sciences, many different kinds of policies, can have many complex social effects (psychological well-being, rates of hospitalization on incidence of non Covid-19 diseases, supply-chain limitations, public transit and social distancing, etc., etc.). I have suggested that this requires something I have called 'policy apt synthetic philosophy.' So, the question we should ask is  [c] how should policy apt synthetic philosophers of science think about the intersection among many fast and policy apt science in a crisis with imperfect communicative rationality. 

Fourth, policy apt synthetic philosophy is now housed in attenuated fashion in departments of scientific policy/advice that help coordinate decisions that involve multiple sciences and policy domains. There is a need for a class of individuals that study versions of [A; B; & C] alongside the principles of such policy coordination that are not government officials so that they can contribute alongside the scientific aggregators to public discussion in independent fashion. But what this also points to is the need for a more collaborative ethic within philosophy [of science] along the model of what I once dubbed (recall) integrated PPE (Philosophy, Politics, Economics).+ This last point suggests that some of the infrastructure for policy apt synthetic philosophy is already developing, but let me stop here, today.

Before Arthur Prior was the pioneer in intensional logic; and on the philosophical politics of Australia

Whether or not it was intended as such, this article of Professor Ryle's has functioned in fact as a blow on the side of Melbourne in a battle between Melbourne and Sydney which has, I understand, been a feature of the Australian philosophical scene for many years, and which was certainly in evidence at the 1951 congress. Professor Anderson, it would seem, has always found someone to cross swords with in the southern University. In an earlier period the Victorian Sassenachs were predominantly ' idealists ' of one sort or another; but now there is a strong representation there of the current British tendency to regard the main task of philosophy as the unravelling of mental and verbal tangles generated by the endless complexity and changefulness of ordinary language. An admirable example of this technique was given at the congress by Dr W. D. Falk, in a paper on ' Prescriptive Speech '. It is often held by those who reduce philosophical to linguistic problems that statements about what we ought to do, as well as statements about what is ' good ', are just a subtly disguised manner of ordering people about. As far as ' ought ' is concerned, this is of course the Andersonian view too. It is not Dr Falk's view; but he attacks it, as he says, 'from within'. The greater part of his paper was something that could almost have come from a good novel -an extremely polished and painstaking account of the various ways in which the speech of one person leads to action in another. The main dividing-line, he argued, is not that between utterances in the indicative mood and utterances in the imperative, but that between utterances which merely draw a person's attention to some circumstance which would have moved him to action had he known of it independently (;'If you don't go now you'll miss the last bus ') and utterances which themselves bring into being a motive for action which was not previously present (' If you don't get out now I'll throw you out'). There are of course an infinite variety of intermediary cases, and cases of the one form masquerading as the other ; and Dr Falk discussed a number of these with great insight and humour. He then went on to consider cases in which we say 'You ought to do X', and came to the conclusion that these are more like the first sort of case than the second. In the Andersonian view these exhaustive and sometimes exhausting discussions of linguistic usages are a waste of philosophical time ; what little value they have is as a prelude to the exposure of 'bulldozing'. It also seems to be the Andersonian ' line ' that philosophers who are endlessly preoccupied with linguistic conventions, and with what people mean rather than with what is the case, are generally  on the side of the conventions socially too, and have abandoned ethics for etiquette. I have concentrated on these ethical and semi-ethical issues because they are probably of most general interest, but the congress had its teeth into other things also. A paper, for example, by Professor J. J. C. Smart of Adelaide on Logical Paradoxes. These are tricky things, but it is worth while trying to outline one of them and Professor Smart's manner of dealing with it, as I am not very satisfied either with his solution or with any other that I have thought of or come across, and would be interested to see some philosophical amateur who  reads Landfall chip into the discussion. (He couldn't easily do worse than the professionals have done with this subject.)--A.N. Prior "This Quarter" The Landfall March 1952, pp. 51-2

Causing and then knowing of my recurring fascination with the 'pioneer in intensional logic,' A.N. Prior (recall), the economist, David M. Levy, has repeatedly called my attention to A.N. Prior's writings in the New Zealand periodical, The Landfall, and decided to reduce my search costs by adding a link to the archived PdF copies. Among the gems to be found there are fascinating reviews of Popper's Open Society and C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man.(I intend to return to these.) The essay from which I quote above -- a kind of impression of a "single event" (p. 49) then bi-annual Australasian Association of Psychology and Philosophy in august 1951 -- is written just at the point of Prior's first publications as a formal logician.

What caught my attention is Prior's description of the transition, at the University of Melbourne, from an Idealist-centric department to a department oriented around ordinary language philosophy (exemplified by W. D. Falk, who is, in fact, himself a fascinating thinker). Both the earlier idealists and the then dominant ordinary language philosophers are opposed by Sydney's John Anderson. (Part of the joke is that Anderson was born a Scot.) Anderson's philosophy is characterized by his fondness for a flat ontology and embrace of a certain species of atheism (and rejection of ontological hierarchy).

In almost Swiftian fashion, Prior describes the Lilliputian "battle between Melbourne and Sydney which has, I understand, been a feature of the Australian philosophical scene for many years." The battle is a product of geography and, apparently, the force of Anderson's personality. Part of the comedy of Prior's report is that Prior recognizes that he is thought by others, including the eminent J. J. C. Smart,  to belong to Anderson's school, but not by Anderson ("Professor Smart, who is of the Ryle-Melbourne faction, called me an Andersonian. Later on Professor Anderson did his best to put him right about that). Prior's thoughts on his club identity are left obscure. 

At the start of his essay, Prior grants that there are no "subtle reasons why this event should loom larger in our thoughts than the election (N.Z.), the election (U.K.), the referendum (Australia), the sedition bill (N.Z.), the armistice negotiations (Korea) and the rest." But philosophical politics clearly can be as absorbing as the great politics of states and dominions. I return to that shortly.

I don't mean to suggest that the satire is devoid of seriousness (or that I can read all clues on the  Trans-Tasman relations). The essay is structured along three contraries: as the quote (midway through the essay reveals), one of these is the contrast between philosophical "professionals" and "amateurs." The other is the contrast between 'pure' and impure/applied philosophers, that is "psychologists." These had been part of the same professional association, the Australasian Association of Psychology and Philosophy, but had recently split, with the pure philosophers. ["Australasian psychologists now have, I think, a periodical and presumably an association of their own, and the association now being considered has come to cater more exclusively for ' pure ' philosophers."]

Somewhat strikingly, it's the professionals -- presumably people like Smart and Prior himself, and especially John Anderson, employed at university -- come off looking faintly ridiculous, but not without fondness. The upshot Anderson's critique of ordinary language philosophy, in particular, is spelled out: "that philosophers who are endlessly preoccupied with linguistic conventions, and with what people mean rather than with what is the case, are generally  on the side of the conventions socially too, and have abandoned ethics for etiquette." Whole uncharitable, it is not devoid of significance (and in some ways precedes Isaiah Berlin's line of attack). The third contrary is the contrast between philosophical "factions" (p. 53) and the impartial lover of truth. 

And this leads me to a closing speculative observation on the opening line of the essay. ("I PROPOSE in all shamelessness to devote these pages to the consideration of a single event, and one, moreover, which did not take place in this quarter, but rather in the one before it-a congress of philosophers which met in Sydney last August.") My interest here is in the self-identification of shamelessness. Regular readers of Landfall, had already been informed by Prior, in his review of Lewis, that he is predisposed toward a form of sentimentalism in the vein of Adam Smith ("disinterestedness should...be made the defining characteristic of ethical sentiments, as it has in fact been made by the more circumspect subjectivists from Adam Smith onwards.") In fact, in the review of Popper, Prior also embraces Smith's philosophy. (Smith plays a central role in Prior's Logic and the Basis of Ethics.)

What's odd is is that shame is a very important sentiment in Smith's moral philosophy. But, at no point, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, does Smith embrace shamelessness. Smith suggests that a "real lover a truth" even feels shame at any unintentional falsehood conveyed in careless gossiping. But,while Gulliver is often ashamed, the more rational (would be philosopher-kings) Houyhnhnms reject shame. But perhaps, the shamelessness consists in recognizing that in so far as all events are located in time by means of tenses, even belated ones, from a certain logical point of view all events are on par. The high and the low collapse into a flat plane, which is, of course, the Swiftian move par excellence. And, to add for good measure, so Smart was not all wrong in discerning the drift of Prior's philosophical leanings.

 

On the Norms of Philosophy; On Liam Kofi Bright and entering the life world of another

Because people take subjectivism to be such a wildly implausible view they make no effort to see the world from a subjectivist's point of view. Even calling the view "relativism" betrays that - because it imagines a point of view beyond any particular person's perspective, surveys all of them at once, and says "truth for the individual is just what is believed by them, and so truth per se is relative to each individual's beliefs and all beliefs are true for their believers". From this last conjunct objections are drawn out. But from a committed subjectivist's point of view that cannot be right - their point of view is the one from which truth is evaluated,  and the other points of view are not on a par with that but simply errors. The objection imagines a kind of God's-eye-perspective on truth and launches their attack from there, but the kind of person who is attracted to subjectivism (or for that matter relativism) is almost certainly the kind of person who is suspicious of the idea of such a God's eye perspective. Seen from within, these objections simply lose their force, they don't take seriously what the subjectivist is trying to do or say as a philosopher of truth.

Of course one can always make the move against the subjectivist that many philosophers now make against the sceptic. One can say that after all our job is not to find arguments that would persuade the subjectivist, our job is just to explain why they are wrong in an internally coherent manner. We wish not to help the subjectivist see their error but just ensure others do not fall into it. Well, good luck and God speed to those whose philosophical mission is explaining why they are right to their own satisfaction. But if you want philosophy to help you enter into the lifeworld of others quite different from yourself, this cannot be enough.--Liam Kofi Bright "Truth Subjectivism and Giving Implausible Views their Due"

Because I am an inconstant skeptic, perhaps, the final three sentences of Liam's essay resonated strongly with me. I cannot tell you how often I have encountered refutations of skepticism (or Hume's problem of induction) where I quietly think 'you [confident, smug X] have not even started to grapple with the problem.' Even the very best efforts that, say, offer an immanent critique of skeptical positions tend to reveal primarily that it is very difficult to be a (certain kind of) skeptic consistently. This is treated as an objection. But, duh, 'I already know sense how difficult it is to be me.' That the non-skeptic has a more satisfying life is good for her.

I often complain that in professional philosophy there is a tendency to cherry pick objections (often correlated with the perceived status of another philosopher).+ I often claim that we ought to have a norm that we seek out alternative viewpoints and the strongest possible objections from perspectives distinct from ours. When I do this, I basically tacitly embrace a partially agonistic model of philosophy. The idea being that philosophical development is enhanced when we have rival viewpoints come into combative contact with each other and are improved by their mutual agonistic albeit genuine engagement.

As others have noted (see here Michael Della Rocca), the methods of reflective equilibrium, intuition mongering, and cost-benefit analysis of theoretical virtues have enormous status quo even confirmation bias built into them. What I'd like to see is a lot more of a kind of stress testing of concepts (see this paper by Stone, which is suggestive). This would shift us from a confirming bias, to a more (ahh) Popperian ethos. (The interesting Popper, not falsificationism.) If mirabile dictu I were to get my way on this, it would only make philosophy more robust.

By contrast, Liam's post (which echoes the loveliest parts of Carnap's program with a surprisingly Husserlian/Levinasian sensibility) opens the door to a much more humanistic understanding of philosophy. The very point of the enterprise would be to facilitate mutual understanding. From the philosophical analyst's perspective the point of analysis or conceptual engineering, then, is not getting the concepts right (or to design them for ameliorative and feasible political programs), but to find ways to understand, or enter into, one's interlocutor life world. To see how radical this is, I just want to note the contrast with the other humanistic ethos of philosophy as a means to self-knowledge often inscribed (with a nod to Socrates or Descartes) with the slogan that the unexamined life is not worth living, 

To be sure, philosophical-translators (recall, when I discussed the transformative effects of entering into another's life-world) and historians of philosophy of a certain sensibility are quite practiced in developing skills to enter into the life-worlds of philosophers from different epochs. And precisely to generate some such understanding, I have argued that we (speaking briefly as a historian of philosophy) must reject actor's categories as well as the (imperialistic) application of our own categories, but must be willing to introduce or coin new concepts. (That's a creative and risky practice.) But because our subjects don't talk back, historians can pick to be interested in a very narrow range of the life-world of another. 

Liam's program -- conceptual engineering to enter into lifeworlds of others -- has some fascinating consequences. First, it would open the door to structural collaboration between ethnographic researchers and philosophers. Let's call that (with a nod to my colleague, Enzo Rossi) in honor of the developing interdisciplinary research community PPA+ (that is, philosophy, politics, anthropology). Second, given the increasing cosmopolitan presence of professional philosophy across the globe, and cultural diversification within philosophy, it would generate ambitious, open-ended research programs of bridging attempts among different philosophical cultures, traditions, and research programs. (In addition to Liam's work in Africana philosophy, I think Graham Priest's work are paradigmatic examples of this.)*

There is a lot more to be said about both consequences. But I just want to note two side effects of the second: (i) it would help limit the known risk of philosophy facilitating imperial and hegemonic projects in which our concepts become a form of domination (recall this post; or see the work of Serene Khader (recall).) And (ii) it would be a generative source of philosophical innovation.

To be sure, conceptual engineering to enter into lifeworlds of others is risky: one may be exposed to stuff one prefers not to hear (including for reasons of tact or respect); and one may end up in a philosophical place different from the one was satisfied to defend at all cost. 

 

On Philosophy Being Political

The elimination of conscious fraud is seldom mentioned in formal discussions of the reasons for repetition in science. The quasi-mythological view that scientists are uniformly of higher moral standards than ordinary mortals is maintained, and subconscious bias is usually depended upon to explain the importance of independent repetition. To repeat, scientists are not much better than other men, and there certainly are at least a few among them who would fake experiments if there was something to be gained therefrom. The induced researcher has something to gain if he can get away with such a fraud. His income depends largely on the reputation he can develop, and this, in turn, depends on his “discoveries.” It is obviously easier to produce an important and exciting article if one simply invents the facts reported than if one is confined to reality. This being so, the prevention of fraud depends on a detection apparatus. Part of the detection apparatus involves repetition (Tullock The organization of inquiry [1966] 2005: 124).

Tullock considers economics, as we have seen, to be a discipline in which the possibility of concealment is greater than in what he calls science. Now, we consider what differential auditing possibilities do to Polanyi’s argument that scientific opinion is uniform. Long before Polanyi the uniformity of opinion had been viewed as a necessary condition for scientific status....

[In his 1962 “Republic of Science”] Polanyi asked what scientists believe and proposed that everyone believes the same thing. How could this be? With the division of labor, scientists in one specialization have no competence in another so why the unanimity? Polanyi appealed to an overlapping neighborhood of competence by which all problems in science is connected....All Polanyi needs is transparency.
Characterizing Polanyi’s argument as a special case of Longfield’s argument shows that we can use one principle to analyze the intra-community connections. This will be enormously helpful because the machinery which has been set in motion for one community can be applied to the other. Thus, [Adam] Smith himself discussed how monopolies form and create inequality within the labor market. A group keeping others out can enrich themselves. If we can move the argument across communities, what does monopolization look like among experts? We are using “experts” because following Tullock, we do not know whether they are “scientists” until we know something about the institutional structure in which they function.
Tullock, when he rehearses Polanyi’s argument, silently provides the missing step and thus fails to impress his delightful cleverness on the reader. To make the overlapping competence argument work, there must be data audits, results must be checked. He says this over and over again. This distinguishes economics and science. As Tullock writes, economics allows concealment. Therefore economics allows factions and it doesn’t have the Polanyi efficiency properties. Sandra J. Peart & David M. Levy (2012) "Tullock on motivated inquiry: expert-induced uncertainty disguised as risk," Public Choice, 171-3

The quoted paragraphs is from a paper, even research program, methodological analytic egalitarianism, that (as regular readers know) has long influenced me. I was inspired to go back to it by Liam Kofi Bright's recent, interesting argument that "all philosophy is political is a trivial consequence of the more interesting fact that all inquiry is...united." [HT Dailynous] Drawing on Neurath, Bright argues this unity is a regulative or normative ideal, "it is an achievement to be won, not a fact to be granted." Neurath's argument is also a bit self-interested because within the division of scientific labor, it gives philosophers, a new kind of philosopher, a special role, of (linguistic/conceptual) orchestration. (See here; I link to this piece because Neurath is especially clear about the anti-totalitarian political significance of the program.) Uncharacterstically, Bright does not quite mention this, but the general gist is clear from his presentation:

The unity of science consists in the fact that we may potentially bring the results, methods, and fruits of inquiry in one field to bear on all others, providing we take the time to formulate our claims in a way that can be mutually understood, and are sufficiently clear in stating logical or evidential relations. The unity of science is thus a kind of consequence of the attitude of seeking to be clear and assist one another.*

If it is remembered that 'We' here is 'we [new] philosophers' Bright's position is echt Neurathian. If the 'we' here is all of of us engaged in science, Bright has subtly added a set of virtues some epistemic some social to the practice of all science. Notice, and Bright is very good on this, that even if one rejects some such normative unity program, the attitude is useful because "we cannot ever rule out the potential relevance of any one field of inquiry to another." Bright gives some cute historical examples. I would just add that anybody who is engaged in debates in contemporary climate science will be struck how many different,and different kinds of sciences are brought to bear on each other all the time. So far so good.

Now, here's my observation, if we think of different sciences also as reflecting different interests, then we should not automatically assume that when two sciences are brought in communication/trade with each other they will automatically agree. As Max Weber pointed out, pluralism is a consequence of the division of labor and differentiated interests. It is, thus, to be expected that when two sciences or sub-fields within a discipline/science are made to communicate some disagreement is to be expected. (Obviously, it does not follow there will always be disagreement or even most of the time.) The claim in this paragraph is strengthened, perhaps a trivial consequence, of the idea that not all sciences rely solely on epistemic commitments (see Heather Douglas' now classic book). 

Of course, if we think of the ways in which sciences are brought to bear on each other, it is quite possible to come to agreement either by creating a third new science (which may well has its task of figuring out the discrepancies between the two sciences) or by transformation of one of the sciences (in dialogue with each other). [If you think not all disciplines are science, then follow Peart/Levy and substitute expert-disciplines where necessary!] This sounds abstract, but actually happens quite a bit in the history of science. 

I put the Tullock in, in part, to show that Tullock anticipates the debates over the replication crisis (in some bits of the academy) by several decades. And that is I want to strengthen Bright's argument (in his spirit, see here) by suggesting that even if one is doubtful of the desirability or feasibility of general unity of science that he (and I, with slightly different sensibility) embraces, there are additional reasons to embrace the idea of leaving room to keeping open, '"the potential relevance of any one field of inquiry to another." It reduces the incentives and possibilities for fraud and rents for members of autonomous disciplines. As we have seen, that is not just a hypothetical possibility.

But, and here I close, the idea of intellectual even disciplinary autonomy is very much part of the DNA of philosophy, perhaps uniquely so (with exception of 'pure' math) [recall this old post on Williamson]. To be an intellectual self-legislator, to have autonomous/foundational or self-sufficient reason, is an ideal that is a permanent temptation for philosophers (in ways not so for other disciplines within the division of intellectual labor)--go read Descartes, or even Kant. I think it is some such ideal that makes some philosophers also uneasy about the very idea of (what I call) a philosophical politics within philosophy or in its relationships with other disciplines. The Neurathian offers orchestration (and its modern successors) as a consolation prize to them (if orchestration seems like the wrong way to go, then see the program of synthetic philosophy!)

Of course, the would be autonomous philosopher can refuse to allow his philosophy to be scrutinized by outsiders. (Just as not all offers to trade are accepted.) The risk of such hermeticisms, of thinking philosophy pure and untainted by politics, is, in fact, to make philosophy a hiding place for charlatans and cultists.  It is amusing to see my own ilk, analytic philosophers embracing that risk.