In Our Time - Popper

Episode Date: February 8, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Karl Popper whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientists' theories could be proved true.Popper wrote: “The more we learn about the world and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance”. He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead it had simply not proved false, yet! This became known as the theory of falsification.He called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called “pseudo sciences” which couldn't be tested. His debunking of such ideologies led some to describe him as the “murderer of Freud and Marx”. He went on to apply his ideas to politics, advocating an Open Society. His ideas influenced a wide range of politicians, from those close to Margaret Thatcher, to thinkers in the Eastern Communist bloc and South America.So how did Karl Popper change our approach to the philosophy of science? How have scientists and philosophers made use of his ideas? And how are his theories viewed today? Are we any closer to proving scientific principles are “true”?With John Worrall, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics; Anthony O'Hear, Weston Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University; Nancy Cartwright, Professor of Philosophy at the LSE and the University of California

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, today we're discussing Carl Popper, one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century, whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientist's theories could be proved true. Popper wrote, the more we learn about the world and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific and articulate will be our knowledge

of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead, it had simply not proved false yet. This became known as the theory of falsification. He called for a clear demarcation between good science in which theories are constantly challenged

and what he called pseudosciences, which couldn't be tested. His debunking of such ideologies led some to describe him as the murderer of Freud and Marx. He went on to apply his ideas to politics, advocating an open society. His ideas influenced a wide range of politicians from those close to Margaret Thatcher

to thinkers in the Eastern Communist bloc and South America. So how did Carl Popper change our approach to the philosophy of science? How have scientists and philosophers made use of his ideas? And how are his theories viewed today? Are we any closer to proving scientific principles at true? True. Joining me to discuss Carl Popper at John Wohl, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics. Nancy Cartwright, Professor of Philosophy, also at the LSE, and the University of California, and Anthony here, Western Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University. John Wohl, what do we know about Carl Popper's early life and upbringing?

Well, he was born in 1902 in Vienna, into a comfortable middle-class family. His father was an eminent lawyer in the city, with a very cultured man with a very large library of very many interests principally in classics. His mother was a gifted amateur musician. They were, as Popper liked to say, later of Jewish descent, though both had converted to Lutheranism before Popper was born. He went to school rather unhappily, I think,

and then eventually to the University of Vienna where he graduated eventually with a PhD. Vienna was an extraordinary place when he was a young man, wasn't it? Can you tell us, give us some indications of who was there and who mattered? And he was on the edges of or part of influential intellectual life there, as I understand it. Absolutely, yes. It was really, it was a fascinating place, perhaps the cultural centre at the time. In philosophy, of course, Wittgenstein was born there just 10 or 11 years before Popper.

There was some connection between the families, I think. Morris Schlicht came to the University of Vienna to be professor of the philosophy of the inductive sciences in 1922, and immediately set up the Friene Ernst Mac, which became world-famous as the Vienna Circle. Lots of very interesting philosophers of science like Carnap, Feigl, Neurat, were involved with that circle. And Popper was, although never a member, was very much on the fringes of that. In terms of, of course, it's also the birthplace of psychoanalysis.

Freud studied at the University of Vienna and was called to a chair there in the early 20th century, 1901, 1902. Young and Adler, other people who were initially as acolytes whom he then ostracized were around and Popper actually worked for Adler for a while. Music, of course, fantastic, all very wonderful. Of course, if you had the money to enjoy these great pleasures and science as well, mathematics, Popper went to many eminent mathematicians' lectures

at the University of Vienna. He seemed also to have been struck by the immense poverty and inequality that was around him also in Vienna. And you mentioned music, but he was, a pianist who composed music and played a little in public, and this was his great passion in life. I think he thought of himself as rather poor. I don't think he played in public,

but it was certainly an abiding, passionate hobby that he had. He actually wrote a fugue which was performed several times in classical concerts. I don't think he thought to himself, his mother, he said, played the piano wonderfully, but he always played it rather badly. So, Anthony here we have almost a perfect context for an intellectual, as good as it gets, really. John Warrle has described the people who were there and where they came from, philosophy, psychoanalysis.

We know it applied to music, it applied to literature, it was extraordinary. But how did they impinge on Popper himself? What did he take from that? You can be born in this sort of context and take very little from it. He took a great deal from him, but what more precisely did he take from it? The music actually is quite important, which we may come back to later, because, of course, Schernberg was in Vienna at the time and was well known to Popper,

promulgating the idea that there had to be a new spirit of music, a new type of music, Popper all the time resisted that completely and actually composed in the style of Bach, against the spirit of the age. On the science side of it, as John has already said, he was an associate of both Adler and Freud,

and he was also very interested in physics, and particularly the work of Einstein. And Popper himself says that in 1919, he had a kind of moment of enlightenment. When he was 17, yes. Yes, well, yes, when he was 17, where he saw that the psychoanalysts and also the Marxists, he was also actually in touch with Marxists at the time,

so all this ferment was going on, that they treated their theories completely differently from, in Popper's view, a true scientist like Einstein. And the specific difference was that in 1990, there was a very severe test which most people thought it would fail of the general theory of relativity which involved observing light,

passing the sun during a total eclipse of the sun. That wasn't the sort of test that could be done very often. It was done in 1919 and it was crucial for the general theory of relativity. If it failed, that would show, according to Popper, that the general theory of relativity was false, first of all. And secondly, if it had failed,

according to Popper, Einstein and the true scientists would have given up the theory. Contrast that with the way that the Marxists treated their theory of history, which according to Popper had been falsified many, many times since Marx promulgated it. I mean, for example, the poor hadn't become more immiscerated, class structure hadn't polarized into two classes. Marx completely didn't foresee the middle class, etc., etc. The psychoanalysts didn't even produce, according to Popper, forciviable, theories in the first place. So those systems of thought were to be put, according to Popper, into what John has just called pseudoscience, and they were intellectually disreputable for that reason, in contrast to the efforts

of the true scientists. And one other point that's very important here is that at that time Einstein was, or Einstein's theories, were replacing Newton's. Newton's theories, as Popper observed, had been confirmed over and over and over again,

for maybe 200 years or so, and yet, when there came a crucial test between Newton and Einstein, the scientists dropped Newton and went for Einstein. That was the idea of true science, and it's from that that his criterion of demarcation arises. Well, that was very good, encompassing of a great deal there, but it's while he's still in Austria

that he publishes his first book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery in the 1930s, can you tell us about the centre of that book? How does it describe the difference between good and bad signs. Is this a continuation, I presume, of what you've just been saying? Yes. Well, of course, actually, Popper wasn't the only person who was trying to demarcate between science and other activities. The Vienna Circle were too. But they wanted to say that science was a discipline that was proved in which the statements could be proved by

observation and experiment. Popper thought that you couldn't ever prove a scientific theory because there were lots of observations that we couldn't make and the future might be different from the past and reasons of that sort. So the Vienna Circle, according to Popper, was completely on the wrong track there. What distinguished science from other activities was the point we've just mentioned that scientific theories put themselves up for test,

they were falsifiable, and if they were falsified, then you abandoned that theory. So that was the criterion of demarcation that he proposed in the logic for scientific discovery. Can I take this on when that's a card right? still in Vienna as it were, trying to get as much of the jigsaw in place as we can. Where do the logical positivists come in to this?

How do they play in Popper's accumulation of information and his attitude towards knowledge? As John said, Popper never was part of the Vienna Circle, though he was part of the discourse and was actually opposed to the doctrines of the Vienna Circle. But there was much in common between the two points. of view. And from, I think, from our contemporary point of view where there's a lot of postmodern thought and post-structuralist thought, it's hard to distinguish between Popper and the positivists. But at the time, there was a very strong disagreement between them about the issue that Anthony mentioned about whether you could confirm scientific theories or not. But they

agreed on a number of central issues that have had a terrific influence in the sciences and particularly in the biological and social sciences. The things they agreed on were, first of all, that proper science should be value neutral, that what scientists should do is they should collect and state the facts. They should state true general hypotheses or as true as one could make them, but they should always be about the way the world is and not about the way the world should be or about what's desirable.

And questions about what's desirable should not be, in any way influential in what comes to be counted as an acceptable scientific hypothesis. That was a terrifically influential doctrine that you hear regularly still nowadays, the sort of idea that the scientist collects the facts, and then the policymakers decide what should be done with them. So that was something they had in common. And that wasn't universally shared. For instance, I think Max Weber would have had quite,

different view of how social science should proceed. So that was one thing they had in common, and the other thing they had in Coleman, was that science should be exact, explicit, precise. The Vienna Circle stressed a lot questions of meaning, which Popper didn't think were the right way to think about it, but it's an easy way to express it. The scientific hypothesis should be so clean and clear in its meaning

that we all know exactly what it means, and we know what it means, whether you say it or I say it, whether it said in the USA or in the Ukraine, whether it should be independent of context, independent of interpretation, independent of viewpoint. They shared those doctrines. The two doctrines on which I think they disagreed were whether you could confirm scientific hypotheses. And all of this group, including Popper, were socialists. Some were Marxists. Some were lapsed Marxists. but all of them were socialists. But they did tend to disagree about what kind of socialism to pursue. And some of the Vienna Circle, in particular Neurot,

were in favor of full social planning. And it's not clear where some of the others stood, but that's a big distinction from Popper who was believed in piecemeal social planning. So those were the areas of agreement and the major areas of disagreement. Can you tell us how he came towards, let's call it the idea or the theory of falsification, how he came to that and what that is?

Well, I think he comes to it from the belief, a reasonable belief, that there isn't any kind of logic except deductive logic. The deductive logic has the advantage that what it means to be deductive logic is it's a way of reasoning such that if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. Can you give the listeners an example of that? Well, if John lives in London, then John lives in the South of England. If John lives in the South of England, then he lives in the United Kingdom. It follows absolutely that if John lives in London, he lives in the United Kingdom. So the premises cannot be true without the conclusion being true. So deductive logic is the standard, but the problem with deductive logic is that in a sense, the conclusion is, The information in the conclusion really is already contained in the premises. And in science, one wants to be able to start with your data and go somewhere new.

You either want to make a prediction about what's going to happen next, or you want to form a general hypothesis that goes beyond the actual pieces of data you have. And there's a question, how do you do that? Well, there are a lot of local methods by which we do it, but how can you defend that the methods are any good? what's the justified method for going beyond your data? And Popper pointed out that there's no method. There are methods that have justifications,

but when you look at the justifications, they depend on further assumptions about the way the world is. And how did you get those assumptions? Well, presumably you got them from data, but those assumptions must go beyond the data. and what justified you in moving beyond the data. So Popper was very, very keen on the fact that there's just no way that justified universally and from an outside position

without already making unwarranted, ungrounded assumptions. There's no way to go from the data to a more general hypothesis. Just to conclude this paragraph as it were about falsification, In a sense, one bit of his own experience that he stood on was that Einstein's fuse, Einstein's experiments, had in some way, not totally, completely, but challenged the work of Newton, Newton's mechanic, which for two or three hundred years had been accepted and worked on, and still are accepted and worked on in many eyes, but they were challenged.

So that which had seemed absolutely unchallengeable and true forever could be seen in certain areas around it as false. And that set him off on the trail that, therefore, there's nothing, that we can say in science is true. And therefore, if we find that it can be falsified, we're getting at what can eventually have a truth for a time. Is that what we're talking about? Broadly, yes.

Popper was certainly very influenced by the fact that after all its successes, Newtonian physics was in certain areas abandoned, yes. And there is, though, a difficulty about this falsification. I think the way we've been talking, we've been making it a bit too easy, a bit too easy for Popper and Popperians, because actually it isn't necessarily unscientific

to try to protect a theory from falsification. And Popper himself knew this, of course, and actually admits it even in the logic of scientific discovery. Famous example, when Uranus's orbit was shown not to follow the Newtonian predictions in the beginning of the 19th century, the scientists didn't throw their hands up in despair and say we must immediately abandon Newton.

What they did was, they tried to produce a reason why this planet wasn't going in the right direction and actually postulated a new planet, pulling Uranus out of its orbit. They then observed it, and there it was. So trying to avoid falsification was actually far from being unscientific. In that instance, it led to a great scientific triumph. And the difficulty is that you can never say when scientists precisely should stop these sort of protective maneuvers.

Really? John Warren. As Anthony quite rightly says, Adams-Liverier held onto Newton's theory in the light of an apparent difficulty with Uranus, but they didn't just accommodate the hitherto anomalous data from Uranus. They made another prediction. You can't just predict that there's another planet without that being testable. You've got to then point your telescopes in the area where, They said that this thing that you previously misstatten as a fixed star would be seen gradually to move across the sky.

Yes, but even there, you know there were other instances where the predictions weren't confirmed and the scientists still carried on trying to work other reasons. It gets more complicated, yes. And it still stands there. Now let's send to the subject of induction with Nancy Cartwright. Why was Popper so interested in that? Well, I think he had inherited Hume's problem of induction

and he thought there was no solution to it. Hume's problem of induction is essentially, since deductive logic won't take you beyond your data to a general hypothesis, how, what does? And you look for some justification and you think, well, perhaps one should just assume that the pattern one sees in the data in the past will be what will carry on in the future.

Hume invited you to defend why should, why is one justified, could one be justified in assuming that? And you can begin to think about the kinds of answers you might give. The most obvious answer is that's always worked, but that's just circular to assume that the future will resemble the past, just because past futures have resembled past pasts is to reason in a circle. Some of the examples I take would strike our listeners as rather than, they'd be puzzled that this is part of a big argument that because the sun rose yesterday, it will rise tomorrow. That is, again, not provable in this, according to the inductive theory.

Well, but that's, why isn't that perfectly reasonable? Because Newton's laws were seen to obtain again and again and again and again, we have this classic case where they're now thought to be not true. What's Popper's solution to the problem of induction? Is it a question of a theory being very stern? But the practice, people just getting on with it, working out all sorts of experiments and all sorts of life choices

on the fact that the sun will rise in most places tomorrow morning. What's Popper's solution to this? Essentially, he thinks the solution is that you don't use induction in science and in the sense that Hume was being pretty naive about how science operates, he was quite right. You don't go in science, you don't accumulate lots of data and then inductively generalise. You do speculate and then test, as Popper says.

But it seems to most people, aside from Popper himself, that there's still a big problem there that you're really hinting at here, that, all right, we've tested a theory. We've got, say, the best available theory of aerodynamics that's resisted, let's tell it in a completely Paparian way. it's been massively tested and it's resisted refutation, survived all the tests. And then we've got another theory that hasn't survived all the tests.

It's broken down in various places. But still, all the data that we have so far, all the test results we have by definition are results from the past. And so the question is still open of which theory we should use, given that we're going to be good fallowice and so on, which theory should we use? Should we use the theory that's not been falsified, so far in building the next airplane, or should we use this theory that's already been refuted?

Well, everybody would use the unrefuted theory, and indeed you would no doubt be locked up if you try to build an airplane on a refuted theory. If we use the theory that's turned out to be best on the basis of tests so far in future application, we believe that that's rational. And then we're left with the same problem that Hume had. We're all going to do it. We're all going to be inductivist in that sense, and what's the basis for it? Is it simply, as Hume believed, a bare fact about human psychology,

or does it fall within the realm of genuine rationality and the way that deductive logic does? And I think Popper just somehow wouldn't face up to that question in as direct a way as he ought to have done. I want to turn to politics in the open society, which is what Popper would be much more generally known for, and I'd like to talk about this for a little while. John Warr, can you just refresh us about the early influences on his political ideas,

briefly say, because I know it was made. mentioned at the beginning of the program, but just refresh about that, then we can move into this area. Well, I think one influence which comes out very strongly from his intellectual autobiography is the poverty and inequality that he saw around him that pushed him very early towards a socialist view. Not that there was much, not many alternatives, really, in Vienna at the time. The three parties were socialist, proto-Nazi and basically the voice of the Catholic Church.

he was obviously going to be a socialist. He had friends who were socialists and acquaintances like Norait, and a close friend, Artur, aunt, who had been born in Moscow, although he was Austrian and had been one of the student leaders in the abortive 1905 Russian attempted revolution. And he talked very much with him. He became a Marxist briefly, as he describes it, at the age of 17, again, finally in the same year of the Einstein experience.

He was on a march, which was pretty, protesting against the imprisonment of some young Marxists who were for some relatively minor offence. And the police opened fire killed some of the people that he knew. And this had a great effect on him. And his colleagues were trying to console him with saying, look, it's inevitable. The march of history is towards communism. There are going to be people who die.

But on the other hand, more people would die if we resist and try and keep capitalism going. And he started in the light of this emotional experience to question. whether there was any real scientific basis for that. So he withdrew from Marxism with its claim to be able to scientifically predict the course of history, but remained socialist certainly throughout his period in Vienna. And then just as important, perhaps a bigger thing, is that he left Vienna because of the rise of Nazism. Nazism, of course, yeah.

And that was a big fact in his life, and went first of all to New Zealand. And where Anthony here he began to advocate what he described as an open society. Now, can you tell us what he meant by that and why it was so important at the time? Yes, I mean, and following on from what John has just said, what Popper particularly objected to about the killing of these people was that the communists said that this was inevitable and necessary,

and Popper thought that you should not ever sacrifice human life now for some uncertain future. Now, in the open society, the book he wrote in New Zealand is called The Open Society and its enemies. And I think we probably understand a bit more about what the open society is if we look first at who the enemies were. The enemies were first of all tribalists, of whom there were plenty in New Zealand, because there were the Māori's there, with taboo,

which meant that some things couldn't be questioned or even discussed. They were the primitive enemies of the open society. More sophisticated enemies of the open society were particularly Plato and Marx, rather heterogeneous bunch of course. And also, we don't need to discuss them, Hegel and Aristotle. But what all these people were supposed to have in common was that they thought that intellectuals particularly could have some universal knowledge of how society should run,

which they would then impose this blueprint on everybody else. Those are the closed societies primitive and more sophisticated. Popper thinks that any policy in political life always has unintended consequences. Some of these unintended consequences may actually be pretty unpleasant. It's not necessarily a fault of the policy, but this is part of his general method of falsification. What you need in an open society

is the ability of those who are affected by the policies to come back and criticize them against the rulers. In closed societies, rulers are impervious to criticism. They don't welcome it, they don't listen to it, they know. According to Poppet, they don't know because they're claiming to know things that can't be known, like the future course of history. And in an open society, you will engage not in large-scale, what he calls canvas cleaning or blueprints, you will engage in piecemeal policies whose effects you closely monitor.

and then you revise the policy in the light of what you've then learned and then revise them again and again. It's an endless process. So the open society is characterized by the ability of people within it to criticise the policies of the rulers and an attitude on the part of everybody in that society to take these criticisms seriously and act on them. And I think it's important to stress that for Popper, openness is very much a matter of, not of institutions alone, but of the spirit in which people operate within that society.

That they are prepared to listen to criticism. Rulers can be got rid of peacefully and regularly, and people will act on the criticisms that come in. The idea that rulers could be got rid of was extremely, obviously, important in his view and in his series. Much more important than the idea of democracy. Yes. Because Popper was well aware of the, I mean, probably an open society. be a democracy, but Popper knew better than most people that there could be an elective

dictatorship. So democracy doesn't guarantee openness. You could have a majority party that just sits there and even votes democracy out of existence, but doesn't even need to do that. It could just act in a completely unopened way. So anybody is allowed to criticise in the open society, and anybody should be listened to. Of course, it's an ideal that probably hasn't been ever fully realised, but Popper thought it was closer to being realized in New Zealand, which he loved, and then in Britain and America. So the idea, can we take this on with you, Nancy Carter?

This idea was it thought to be radical at the time? Plato was held venerated as much, the ideas of Marx are very strongly held and so on. Democracy was a fine ideal, and he's saying this is more important than democracy. How did it play into intellectual thought at the time? books, two books. Well, about the open society, I think that there was more, in both cases, both the scientific and the political views. It's not clear whether Popper was an influence or

influenced or the thing he wouldn't have liked, the spirit of the times, but a spokesperson for a movement that lots of people were having and he was a particularly good person at thinking it through and articulating the views. So I think, The idea of criticism in the open society was a fairly widespread and became popular. It was an opposition to some of his close colleagues in Vienna as in the Vienna Circle. So one of his opponents is Otto Neurot, who was in the so-called left wing of the Vienna Circle. And Otto Neurot, unlike Popper, believed in full social planning and had in fact been, there was a revolution, Bavarian Revolution, immediately after the first war

and there was a socialist government that lived for about three weeks in Bavaria. And during that time, Noirot had been appointed as the head of the commission for full social planning. So the ideas were not universal, right, of Popper's ideas. They were one camp as opposed to another very influential and important camps. and the idea of full social planning versus piecemeal social planning hooks up very closely not just with criticism because Noirat. You see, you can cross the two views. So Neurat, for instance, was very keen on criticism and openness.

But he believed in full social planning because unlike Popper, he believed in that we had accumulated a huge amount of positive knowledge and that we could now do the job and that the kind of unintended side effects that Anthony pointed out were it was possible to curtail them. It was possible to curtail them because we were suddenly

in a period of vast expansion of knowledge and understanding of knowledge use. So we could organise the whole of society. How did these ideas, let's call them political ideas, John Ronald, how did they fit in with these ideas about science? Certainly the idea that we're fallible comes very importantly from both sides.

I mean, if we're fallible in our best knowledge acquiring activities in science, then we sure as goodness should think of ourselves as fallible when we come with grand political ideas that are alleged to transform society. So I think the fallibilism is a very important connection between the two. How was proper regarded about this time? and we're talking about the 40s, so how did people regard him? What sort of force was he in the intellectual land? Well, he was some...

His book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, was reviewed by some major figures when it came out. The open society was... It did make quite an impact, and he knew Hayek slightly, and Hayek got him invited to the LSE as a result of the open society and its enemies. And I think that,

At that time, you could say that... Where he stayed for the lesson, he was... Yes, you could say that he was... With a small group of people, of whom Hayek would be another, I would say, George Orwell and Arthur Kersler, who were all...

I don't entirely agree with what Nancy said. I think these people were all, to some extent, against the spirit of the age. Yes, sir. Because they were against the spirit of collectivism, universal planning. And in a sense, these were lone voices, because remember that at that time in the 40s,

Britain was allied to the Soviet Union. There were huge plans for social reconstruction and things like that. Now, these people warned against the dangers inherent in these things. And there's another element to what Popper said that I think is important, which I don't find so much in the others. Popper was very much against people being intimidated by talk of the spirit of the age. and in his other book, which is actually not such a good book, but he called The Poverty of Historicism,

he invades against the idea that an age has a spirit and anybody who isn't marching along in step can just be sidelined, pushed out. It applies right the way across, and the arts and everything else. You can't really be a serious comparison unless you follow Schoenberg and so on. It goes right across everything, yeah.

This takes us back to Schoenberg, where we perhaps began. And there's a lovely story about Popper in connection with this. Among the many politicians he influenced was Mario Choirish, who saved Portugal from two communist revolutions in 1974. He was a great reader and admirer of Popper.

So Popper influenced people both on the left and the right, because Swarish was and still is a sort of socialist. But Popper was invited to Portugal, and he was taken to the palace at Cintra. And when he got the Bible, by one of Swarish's assistants. And when he got there, he wasn't allowed to go around on his own. He had to go in a group and Popper thumped the table and said,

I will not go in a collective and didn't. And I think that's the good side of Popper actually. Do you want to come back on that? Because when I asked you the question about was he sailing against the wind in the 40s, and you said, no, this was, and I'm from the bits of eyebrow, But I think what Anton is saying about the linking up with Orwell and Kussela and High Christenich... Well, there are those not insignificant figures. I don't count sailing with Orwell as not being part of a voice which is being heard.

And it's possible that I also have a different take on this because most of my personal history is until... 20 years ago was in the United States and it certainly was a more sympathetic view in the United States than in Soviet, Russia. Or as you're saying,

in Britain, during the war, Britain was alive with socialists who were still committed to openness and criticism. It's just sort of Oxford socialists, Freddie Eyre. I was thinking of people.

But large-scale planning. Oh, they wanted to put their plans down on this hall. Well, they, yeah, so I do distinguish between believing in planning and believing in criticism. And that the people like Air, Pampshire, the ones I know intimately, surely believed in both and were deeply committed to both. And Neurot was deeply committed to both. Now whether you think that that's reasonable possibility, that certainly was a widely held view.

I think there's another issue as well. I mean, I've said what I think is good about the open society and its enemies, but I think that in that book there is the idea that a political system could more or less hold together just by a shared agreement to criticize, and that seems to me to be too thin a picture. and a picture, I think, to some extent, unfortunately Popper didn't develop any of these ideas much after the 1940s,

but I think it's a picture that Popper himself came to move away from a bit. He thought that, as well as the propensity to criticise and so forth, in the sort of society he advocated, you needed a tradition of openness, the rule of law, respect for the individual free speech. And these are not things that could be suddenly invented and brought out of nowhere. they had to come out of a tradition,

which is why he liked Britain and America and New Zealand. Yes. Can we conclude by asking each of you, I think people like myself are interested in know whether poets and philosophers tend to be those to really make a difference of the famous Orden line that my poetry never stopped a single Jew

going to into Auschwitz. I think that was a line or dachar, I might have said. Anyway, you get the idea. I mean, can you give me a view or give the listeners, more importantly, have you, how do you think Popper affected the thought and the way that society thought about itself and moved in the 20th century?

Is that too vaporous an idea, Nancy? My question, I mean. May I discuss his influence on science and not so much on the political scene? I think Popper and the positivists had a terrific influence on how science, particularly social science, has been conducted. and the influence has had both virtues and vices,

and the virtues are flip side of its vices. For a very, very long time, this prohibition on values in social science has been dominant and has had a huge effect and in many cases pernicious effect. For instance, Amarchis Sen says that it held back welfare theory, welfare economics for 30 decades, because when you want to think about, say, social measures,

the claim that you were able to do that and devise social measures and just count the numbers. For instance, you know, the social statistician will count for us how many people in Britain are in poverty or how many children in Britain are in poverty and then the policymakers can decide whether that's acceptable if and what could be done about it. That's just pseudo-rational to think that.

that when you get down to designing in detail the kind of thing Popper would like, which is a set procedure for measuring who's in poverty, it's not like measuring how tall I am that I'm 5'5 and a quarter inches tall. The measure itself, decisions have to be made in how it's constructed. At each point, thousands of tiny decisions that an economist, say, designing the measure will make. And at each decision point, there's no... fact of the matter about what poverty is that should drive it one way or another, the decisions imply judgments, value judgments about what we count as a decent society. So, and this gets concealed

and has gotten concealed for decades by the positivist and Paparian demand that science should be value-free and we shouldn't be making value judgments. So that's, I think, an effect it's had, but a pernicious effect. Thank you. John Morrow. Well, coming back to the political side, there's no doubt that it did have the book, Popper's ideas of the Open Society did have a big impact,

how subtly they'd read it on it as another matter, but certainly in Eastern Europe. I mean, as part of the so-called Velvet Revolution, it does seem that people in Eastern Europe were, I mean, it wasn't just that they were using the phrase Open Society, they were reading Popper's book. It was originally, of course, banned in Eastern Europe, and became very much the sort of flag,

behind which ideas of moving towards a more liberal society marched. Some people like Harville and so on all claimed to have been, admit that they were very influenced by Popper. So I think he had a very, very strong impact outside of academic philosophy and a very positive one also within it. In terms of moving philosophy, when he arrived, philosophy in the UK, at least was dominated by Oxford linguistic. philosophy which spent a lot of time analysing the way that we talk

and Popper was very much against that and wanted to bring philosophy back to what I think it should be as a partner of the sciences and informed by science I think he's had a lasting impact in that sense too finally I don't know here yes I think that Popper's philosophy of science has had in a way a good effect on scientists because leaving aside the technicalities of falsification one of the strong things he argues is that science is a bold imaginative enterprise and it isn't a matter of automatic or systematic fact collecting, that's part of it.

But what scientists should do is propose bold ideas. So he was a big spokesman for the idea that science was, or is indeed, an imaginative activity, which perhaps had not been so stressed before him, because most philosophers of science tended to be rather mechanistic in their ability. approach and not take that into account. On politics, yes, I mean, obviously, the very word open society is now a part of the common coin of political discourse. Maybe it's underdescribed in Popper himself, I think it is. But we, of course, are in the comfortable position where we can take it for granted.

I think he's had a big and a good influence on heartening people in less fortunate parts of the world who exist, under situations of closeness, and they read him with great hope and optimism. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you, Anthony here, John Worrell and Nancy Cartwright. Thank you for listening, and next week we'll be talking about the heart of darkness by Joseph Conrad. Thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.