Popper and Agassi at Odds

Ethics

Ethical disagreements are frustrating because the alternatives on offer are usually recommendations or exhortations, neither of which can be refuted. Argument has therefore to be indirect. We discuss ethics using language that mimicks that of truth and falsity, yet the only way to find falsity in ethics is to find an internal contradiction. The differences between Popper and Agassi come down to emphasis, to priorities rather than to views that are true or false. Take the issue of hard work. Both Popper and Agassi worked very hard. You have only to look at their lists of publications to see what resulted and one knows that, since they were both full time academics, writings were the tip of the iceberg of the work they did. If anything, Agassi worked even harder than Popper in the number of talks and conferences he gave/attended. Both accepted and taught graduate students. Agassi, however, insists that he does not accept the ethics of hard work, does not accept, that is, that we have a duty to work as hard as we can. He sees “hard work” as a phrase meaning “slog”, meaning work you do not enjoy but which you force yourself to do. This seems to be a willful misunderstanding. Popper was not recommending ditch-digging or toilet cleaning when he counselled hard work. The work Popper was referring to was scholarship, and scholarship can of course be immensely enjoyable to the scholar. Popper was a perfectionist and a pessimist. He was never satisfied with his final product, indeed he argued that no work is ever finished. We learn enough whilst finishing its current version to see reasons to redo any project. His pessimism shows in his view that no matter how careful one is there will always be misprints. When I talked with him he would sometimes pull off the shelf one of his own works and it was invariably obvious that there were handwritten corrections in it. A philosopher’s work is never done.

Agassi is neither a perfectionist nor a pessimist. He believes that because no work is ever finished there should be greater ease of publication, he even wrote in defense of standardized on demand publication (Agassi 1978). Underneath the semantic disagreement about “hard work” there was a serious point of dispute. Perfectionism seems to presume that certain tenets of fallibilism are mistaken. If learning is from error then publishing in an imperfect state invites the discovery of one’s errors by others. I do not know why Popper did not face this pragmatic contradiction in his philosophy: whilst we should try not to perpetrate error, it is as a cooperative social body that we should seek it out: it is not our bounden duty to go over and over our work so that we discover all the errors. According to fallibilism this is impossible, given the Robinson Crusoe argument (Popper 1945, ch. 23). There has to be some reasonable curb on the investment of effort. One institution in scholarship and in science is the prepublication circulation of a current manuscript to peers and friends with an invitation to offer criticism. Subsequent to such circulation there is the referee system, where referees both assess the work on its merits and point out typographical or grammatical infelicities. These institutions seem to me just the right ones as we are more efficient as a critical collective than we are by investing lots and lots of individual effort. At the other extreme, Agassi’s proposal of more ready publication of drafts, I for one would never look at the work published under such a program of standardized on demand publication. There isn’t enough time in a lifetime. Both Popper and Agassi already published so much that merely keeping up with them could consume all one’s time.

Agassi’s demand for standardized on demand publication was by Popper’s lights irresponsible. He already thought Agassi published too much in 1961. When I left LSE to take up my job in Hong Kong Popper asked me to take a message to Agassi: this was that he should stop publishing his first drafts. I dutifully conveyed this message, which was greeted with some incredulity. In fact almost all of Agassi’s publications had gone through draft after draft and were as carefully considered and worded as he could manage. They contained ideas and Agassi was keen to publish them and get feedback. He knew he could tinker with them endlessly but did not think that a good use of time. He did not, as Popper somehow imagined, hastily dash off things and send them out for publication. He was not irresponsible. Popper thought publishing too much was irresponsible. The result of Popper’s policy is that Popper had many ideas, many papers, and even some ideas for books that never saw the light of day. In his (Agassi 1993) Agassi tells of Popper reading a paper known to his circle as “The Problem Children”. You will search in vain for that paper in his publications.

Popper accepted the whole system of scholarly publication in its institutional form without comment. Agassi was from the start a critic of the system and many of the arguments he used were developments or congruencies of fallibilism. It is also the case that from his historical studies Agassi was acutely aware of how the institutions of scholarship came into being, including the institutionalization of standards. We are here in the area of practice and of application. Where does responsibility to take care and be serious spill over into neurotic reluctance to stop? Answer: When to stop is a practical matter. Everyone knows there are always improvements and additions that can be made. If one is lucky enough to have ideas there is a responsibility not to keep them to oneself. To do so prevents the intellectual community from taking them up, seeing how they survive criticism, and perhaps improving them. In The Open Society and Its Enemies Popper described the atmosphere of science as that of friendly-hostile cooperation (Popper 1945, ch. 22). The solitary thinker working hard is no substitute for the brain power of the scientific community. Given that there is a refereeing system that aims to comb out the half-baked or carelessly formulated, Popper’s insistence that Agassi should publish less and rewrite more is quite curious and Agassi’s resistance to it is quite understandable.

On the other hand Agassi tells a nice story against himself (Agassi 1993). He submitted only a fragmentary draft of his PhD thesis for examination in 1956. Popper had suddenly felt an urgency to get the examination over and said the unfinished state of Agassi’s work was no matter. Agassi’s bewildered external examiner, Leon Roth, was less than pleased and spent most of the oral castigating the shortcomings of the MS. Those of us who have read the bulky bound volume in the LSE or London University libraries know just how he felt. It is so disorganized that approximately in the middle, around 600 pages of typescript, the page numbering resets to 0. Its actual page-count is roughly double the number specified in the catalogue (576). Yet here we have Agassi sheepish at being rushed, and Popper being pragmatic and insistent. Agassi says more or less plainly that Popper never actually read the dissertation. For myself I am sure that he dipped into it here and there. Such was his ferocious power of reconstruction that he could probably have delivered a better summing up of it than Agassi.

Agassi says he told Popper he was a modified hedonist, from which we can infer that all the hard work he did with writing, proofing, indexing, teaching, lecturing, administering and so on was a pleasure. So he worked hard; he knew and said that learning certain fields of physics and of mathematics was hard work. He did not like the philosophy of hard work. I am afraid we have here a classic case of disagreement without difference. The conflict was not objective. It stemmed from Popper’s irrational and neurotic working habits and his attempts to rationalize them morally. Agassi’s working habits may be equally irrational and neurotic, although I cannot affirm that. What Agassi was refusing was perfectionism and pessimism. Both are false philosophies and they issue in poor moral injunctions.

Metaphysics

To be quick about it, both philosophers appreciated rather than deplored metaphysics. Their differences are thus not sharp. Historically it is hard to discover how friendly Popper was to metaphysics when he was a young, aspiring philosopher. Agassi, by contrast, has always affirmed that metaphysics was first and foremost of his interests.

The intellectual scene where Popper matured was Vienna between the wars, the Vienna, that is, of “The Vienna Circle”, one of the most vigorous positivist movements ever. Its manifesto of 1929 saw magic and metaphysics and religion as enemies of the working class and in need of exterminating with the help of science aggressively wielded (Hahn, Carnap and Neurath 1929). Following Hume closely, the authors of the pamphlet proclaimed that the problem with metaphysics was that it sounded profound yet on closer inspection turned out to be empty. Hume had said of such philosophy that it was mere sophistry and illusion. What thought crimes did the circle have in mind? Popper said that their main target was religion (Popper 1964). Other evidence would suggest that their target was Heidegger. Carnap went to the trouble of dissecting some Heidegger text to show that there was nothing to it (Carnap 1931, 69ff); a technique that Popper applied many years later both to Hegel (Popper 1945, ch. 12) and to Adorno (Popper 1976b, 296-297). Anyway, the claim made here is that young Popper had very little truck with metaphysics, he was not a defender or advocate of it, and he tried quite strenuously to exclude it and debates about it from science. This seems to be more because he wanted a minimalist philosophy, with as few complications as possible inherited from the tangled past rather than from any clear objection to any particular metaphysics doctrines. So we find that in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper 1959) he carefully eschews discussing truth and suggests instead to focus on falsity, especially falsity revealed by contradiction. Of two contradictories one must be false, the other true. Hence the discovery of a contradiction in science implies falsity somewhere in the system and hence, the need to try to figure out its location and extent. One could also argue that his entire strategy of turning metaphysical questions into methodological ones is deployed because he thought that they could be more fruitfully argued that way. When discussing the scope of science, he says anything that can be described should be subject to explanation. This is quite a positivistic point of view. It excluded from science the vague, the ineffable and of course the intangible.

In his later work Popper tries to indicate that he did not partake wholeheartedly in the antimetaphysical program of the Vienna Circle. He says he was never a positivist. Like any such memory, this one needs to be checked against evidence. In his own case this evidence is his writings, including the early ones. He was, we know, a close student of Kant. Kant is among other things an idealist metaphysician. Although he had studied Kant, we might not want to say of Popper that he was a Kantian. What particularly interested him, in Kant, were Kant’s thoughts on the problem of how it is possible to have knowledge of the world. Kant was secure in asking this question because he considered that Newton had bequeathed such knowledge to humankind. The question then was, how was this possible? Popper came of age after Einstein had started to argue that Newton’s ideas were not secure, that in certain physical situations they gave erroneous predictions, and that better ones could be found using some new ideas that Einstein proposed.

Popper took an interest in the history of science but seldom used historical arguments to make his methodological points. Most of his historical energy went into classical studies (the Presocratics and Plato) and perhaps there we see clearly his warm appreciation of speculative metaphysical ideas. He puts them front and centre in The Open Society and Its Enemies when he traces to Hercalitus the idea that change, or flux, is universal and he posits that Plato accepted this and used it as a premiss: change may be pervasive and unstoppable, but it is undesirable, since things that change always get worse, so at the very least we should try to arrest change. The change in question was social change. Plato looked back to a Golden Age in the past when social life was perfect. The further away we get in time from that Golden Age the worse things are, so all our efforts in social engineering should go into freezing change.

To my argument that Popper was discussing metaphysics all along it could be objected that in a substantial work published before The Open Society and Its Enemies, his series of articles on “The Poverty of Historicism” (1957 [1944-1945]), Popper was less friendly towards metaphysics. In that work Popper explicitly said that if there were not empirical checks on the social sciences they could degenerate into futile metaphysical speculation. To avoid that, he proposed to focus on the methodological counterparts of such discussions, which could be rationally discussed. In section 20 of that work, entitled “The Technological Approach to Sociology”, he wrote:

…it is one of my main points that the technological approach is likely to prove fruitful in giving rise to significant problems of a purely theoretical kind. But besides helping us in the fundamental task of selecting problems, the technological approach imposes a discipline on our speculative inclinations (which, especially in the field of sociology proper, are liable to lead us into the region of metaphysics); for it forces us to submit our theories to definite standards, such as standards of clarity and practical testability. (Popper 1957, p. 59).

What Popper is intimating here is that our speculative inclinations can lead us into barren and futile disputes. Metaphysics, as he warned in a later footnote (n.2, 115) is unscientific. Is this a trace of the positivism of his times? It is unclear. He did not think unscientific assertions were meaningless, but he certainly thought a lot of idealist philosophy was irrationalist.

Popper steadfastly maintained that he was never a positivist. He had, however, at the end of his paper in Mind, “What is Dialectic?”, written the following:

The whole development of dialectic should be a warning against speculative philosophy. It should remind us that philosophy must not be made the basis for any sort of scientific system and that philosophers should be much more modest in their claims. For their task, which they can fulfil quite usefully, is the study of the methods of science. (Popper 1940, p.426).

When the paper was reprinted in Conjectures and Refutation (1963) Popper very slightly toned down this passage:

The whole development of dialectic should be a warning against the dangers inherent in philosophical system-building. It should remind us that philosophy must not be made the basis for any sort of scientific system and that philosophers should be much more modest in their claims. One task which they can fulfil quite usefully is the study of the critical methods of science (Popper 1963, p. 335).

So speculative philosophy is weakened to “philosophical system-building” and “their task” has become “One task”, while “the methods of science” has become “the critical methods of science”. The tone of the earlier was much more that of the Vienna Circle manifesto, the tone of the latter is much more that of the Popper of 1963 who had generalized his philosophy into a version of Socratic critical fallibilism. Yet it still seems to insist that some fishy philosophical system should not be a basis for any kind of scientific system. In connection with ethics, it is to be noted that in both versions Popper enjoins philosophers to be “much more” modest in their claims. Much more modest than what? Than those metaphysicians who see philosophy as the master science?

By the time of his “Back to the Presocratics” Popper was ready to allow that these purely speculative Ancient Greek thinkers had laid the basis for both atomism and for the idea of a block universe, ideas which underlay conflicts in contemporary physics (Popper 1958). Agassi had started to study with Popper in 1953, and in 1956, as we have seen, he submitted his PhD dissertation, “The Function of Interpretation in Physics”. That word “Interpretation” always puzzled me and I do not remember finding any sharp discussion of it in the bulky text. (I cannot swear to having read the whole thing.) For all intents and purposes I translated it to mean “metaphysics”. The gist of the dissertation finally appeared in 2014, rewritten and with up to date scholarship (Agassi 2014). Of its four epigraphs three (by Einstein, Maxwell and Faraday) aggressively promote speculation and imagination. Only the first epigraph, from Bacon, is against. The most straightforward way out of this history is to assume that Agassi discussed with Popper his findings as he read the literature on early science, working his way from Bacon and Boyle to Faraday. That reading was itself an anti-positivist gesture in that all kinds of intellectual output was mixed into the works of those men. They were not inventing and demarcating science, they were trying to set up its methods and the institutions to house those methods. Popper, who had never done historical research of this kind, undoubtedly drank it all in. There is no trace in Agassi’s Apprentice (Agassi 1993) of Popper saying to him, stop filling your mind with all this barren speculation and metaphysics, concentrate on the scientific, the testable. Had there been any such injunction, there can be little doubt Agassi would have told us about it.

That, at any rate, is the most straightforward hypothesis. No longer living in a philosophical atmosphere actively hostile to certain strands of metaphysics (idealism, religion) Popper heard from the sources that all sorts of curious ideas were abroad among the early scientists Agassi was reading. And of course, in the most detailed study he conducted, that of Faraday, Agassi found the man’s whole project driven by a somewhat speculative idea to the effect that matter was fields of force and fields of force were polarizations of empty space (Agassi 1971). These ideas were bold and they informed Faraday’s research and his writings. Alas, his biographers, like his contemporaries, persisted in viewing him as an experimenter and a discoverer. He himself wanted to be known as a theoretician. Agassi has even described how Popper to an extent identified with the misunderstood Faraday, since he also was convinced he was misunderstood. He craved a different reputation from the one he could see developing in his own lifetime. In an extraordinary gesture when writing his autobiography he set out to formulate and to dismantle what he called “the Popper legend” (Popper 1976a).

So the story is hard to bring together. The Open Society and Its Enemies of 1945 delves deeply into Ancient Greek metaphysics to explain why Plato, in particular, was a great reactionary. Popper accepts as a graduate student someone who wants to explore the origins of modern science and in particular the way speculative and untestable ideas can drive scientific research. By both their accounts they interacted intensely. After their encounter Popper discusses metaphysics and its interaction with science in a much less cautious and prudish way. He does not tell us that our speculative inclinations have seeds of danger. On the contrary he starts stressing his appreciation of bold conjectures and vigorous refutations. He generalizes his highly focused refutationism into a philosophy that appreciates all critical discussion, even that which does not lead to decisive, empirical tests.

Methodological Individualism

The dispute over methodological individualism was a sharp one and also one in which Agassi offered genuine criticisms of Popper’s ideas. Although Popper developed his methodological ideas around physical science, when writing “The Poverty of Historicism” and its offspring The Open Society and Its Enemies, his problems meant engaging with the social sciences of history, political science, sociology and, of course, economics. As a student and a social worker and someone who kept tabs on the Vienna Circle he certainly had acquaintance early on with the social sciences. Otto Neurath, one of the leaders of the circle, was a social scientist. Popper had read his Marx and also, perhaps, his Hayek, the specialist on Trade Cycles. With help from Colin Simkin, an economist colleague in New Zealand, Popper attempted to delineate the differences between methodology of the social sciences and methodology of the natural sciences. Without detailing these, let me here focus on his attempts to prescribe in advance the sorts of results the social sciences should aim for. His central concern was to contest the kind of holistic thinking he called “historicism”, that is, “Inexorable Laws of Human Destiny”. He was strenuously contesting such notions because he believed they had captured some of the greatest minds ever and undergirded their reactionary tendencies. In the name of individual freedom and responsibility he thought that all attempts to explain using such holistic material should be ruled out, on methodological grounds. Hence the “poverty” of “historicism”. In place of historicism Popper argued that both ethical and methodological considerations meant that explanations of things social must needs be formulated in terms of the aims and actions of individuals. That way the explanations could be approached rationally, argued about and tested. What was to be avoided was to envisage the social realm as one in which there were large-scale and abstract actors such as the spirit of the nation, the spirit of the times, the forces of history, the destiny of nations at work. These banal phrases were arrows in the quiver of those peddling a false view of human society in which people were buffeted this way and that by forces beyond their control. Popper argued that human society was a product of human action and hence the responsibility of human actors, including and especially those social phenomena that were unintended consequences of intentional actions.

When I read a typescript of one of Agassi’s talks, “Methodological Individualism” (Agassi 1960) I interpreted it as an exegesis of the doctrine as Popper had stated it and noted only that between the lines it criticized Watkins’ prior attempt at exegesis in “Ideal Types and Historical Explanation” (Watkins 1952) by showing that it was psychologistic and that was certainly out of line with Popper’s idea. It was only much later that the penny dropped: the paper was a first approximation to what Agassi later labelled “Institutional Individualism” (Agassi 1975) which emphasized one doctrine of Popper’s, namely that institutions are central to social and historical explanation, and downplayed others, such as that all social explanation must in principle be reducible to statements about individuals. Part of the realization came in long discussions between us about Ernest Gellner’s ideas, including his critique of Watkins which, we both agreed, was decisive (Gellner 1956).

Popper has linked his “methodological individualism” with another idea about the social sciences, the idea, namely, that their main method is one he labelled “the logic of the situation”. This was a general model of how individual action was to be reconstructed. The typical individual is in a given physical and social situation, about which he or she may be well or not so well informed. In face of that situation the individual tries to find ways to accomplish their aims by taking advantage of what the situation affords and avoiding the obstacles it presents. In a later paper he offered a very simple concrete example (Popper 1994). Suppose the individual wishes to cross the road (aim). The road presents a physical distance that must be crossed. It also presents a number of social obstacles such as traffic and other people. This can explain why the individual does not just make a bee line from one curb to the other but goes part of the way, pauses, follows a diagonal path, swerves, and so on. The individual is doing the best they can in the situation as it exists.

Curbs, traffic signals, cars, bicycles and other people are physical manifestations of social institutions, in the same way university buildings are physical manifestations of the social institution of the university. The situation faced by the acting individual is always a mixture of things beyond control, such as distance, weather, gravitational force, and things that are not physical although they may have physical manifestations. Take the institution of right of way. Whether pedestrians or traffic has right of way should be laid down in statutory or customary law. Whether traffic and pedestrians conform to statutory or customary law in the matter may be a matter of local culture. So in some places when traffic approaches a jay walker trying to cross the road, it slows down or otherwise hesitates. In other places it does not. Knowledge of such differences can affect decisions. In some places there are marks on the roadway to indicate where pedestrians should cross. Again there are differences between places as to whether those marked areas are respected. In this very small example we see how the physical world and the social world form one situation which constitutes the scene of action.

One notable thing about this abstract model of social action is how it is objective, not in any way psychological. If the pedestrian zig zags across the road it is the physical and social obstacles that can be discerned to help explain it. Popper labelled one chapter in The Open Society “The Autonomy of Sociology” and proceeded to discuss how he had learned from Marx to see social institutions as crucial parts of our equipment as humans, both enabling and shackling, and sufficient in themselves to explain much social behaviour.

The question arises, are Popper’s strong affirmations of methodological individualism compatible with his equally forceful arguments that social institutions and the unintended consequences of action in situations are central to explanation? In expounding methodological individualism, Popper stressed that it is not to be confused with psychologism, Mill’s doctrine that explanations in social science draw upon laws of human nature. It is also not to be confused with individualism tout court, that is, the idea that the only reality in society is people. Yet Popper’s critics tried very hard to show that these two were consequences whether he liked it or not.

Agassi’s intervention in the two papers of 1960 and 1975 were attempts to bring logical clarity to the debate by pin pointing just where disagreement lay, and partly, especially in notes, to show the historical roots of the disagreements in the history of the emergence of social science. In a naïve way, I took them to be exegetical, clarifying and elaborating on Popper’s idea about methodological individualism. As I said above, something that Agassi regularly did was to insist on getting right the position of another philosopher and then arguing with what he or she actually said rather than against a straw man. I knew that he was criticizing Watkins partly because he told me so: each successive draft of the paper had been more critical although Watkins had not apparently seen what was coming. However, with hindsight I can see that Agassi was also moving to put distance between himself and Popper, if not to repudiate methodological individualism then at least to subordinate it to the preeminence of institutions. Both he and I were much impressed by Gellner’s paper of 1956 and its vigorous but non-holistic advocacy of social institutions. Gellner had also shown that there were elements of the social situation - the unintended outcomes - that were opaque to the actors and so could not be handled by an actor-centred depiction of the situation. What structured the situation were institutions, including institutions utterly opaque to the actors. In so far as methodological individualism counselled centreing explanation on the individual actor, to that extent it was unwise and unhelpful methodological counsel.

Agassi devised the name “institutional individualism” perhaps as a way to reconcile Popper’s hope to preserve some responsibility for the way things are in as much as it is individual actions that keep things going or change them. However, Gellner had pointed to features such as kinship reckoning systems that are sustained despite there being no individuals to take responsibility for that or even understand what is being talked about. Not every feature of the social set up is one of which people are or even can be aware. This means some of it is beyond their control. Like the causes of the weather, some things that happen to us in society are invisible and out of reach. It would be very difficult, for example, to apply methodological individualism to a phenomenon like an adverse turn of the terms of trade. In principle it might seem feasible but in practice it would be pointless and fruitless. At all events that is my analysis of Agassi’s work: he showed, willy nilly, that one of Popper’s most famous slogans was in conflict with other elements of his work and ripe for modification and relabelling. By the time the 1975 paper appeared their rift was entrenched and I know of no occasion when they discussed this.