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Beyond Wittgenstein's Poker: New Light on Popper and Wittgenstein

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This book is a sequel to "Wittgenstein's Poker" by David Edmonds and John Eidinow who vividly described the background and the events at the showdown between Wittgenstein and Popper at the meeting of the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club in 1946. On that occasion the two Viennese masterminds confronted each other in a brief exchange which ended when Wittgenstein left the room after waving a poker.

Peter Munz has unparalleled qualifications for this assignment because he is the only person who was a student with both Popper and Wittgenstein, moreover he is one of the few people still alive in recent times [he died a year or two ago] who witnessed the non-debate in 1946. Munz arrived in New Zealand with his family in 1940 as a German Jewish refugee. He attended Popper's lectures when he started an MA in History at Canterbury University College, Christchurch and they struck up a lifelong friendship which survived better than most of Popper's relationships with his students and colleagues. Munz moved on to Cambridge for further postgraduate work in history and he pursued his interest in philosophy as a member of Wittgenstein's seminar. He spent the rest of his academic career in history at Victoria University in Wellington where he wrote more than a dozen books on history and several others developing and exploring the Darwinian aspects of Popper's theory of knowledge.

Munz has radically upgraded his estimate of Wittgenstein's contribution since 1986 when he published "Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge: Popper or Wittgenstein?". That book made a strong case for Popper against Wittgenstein, and also against Kuhn and Rorty. All three were depicted as agents of relativism, promoting the balkanisation of intellectual life into self-contained, autistic specialties. Munz now argues that Wittgenstein and Popper should have stood together as colleagues to pool their ideas and produce a doctrine with the strengths of each. However this was precluded by their unyielding resistance to rival schools of thought.

The organisation of the book is complicated by Munz's larger game plan to establish Darwinian evolutionary epistemology as the pre-eminent development in modern thought. The second part of the book is devoted to a critique of Evolutionary Psychology and this gives the appearance of two separate books in one, unless the larger project is kept in mind as the framework that pulls the two pieces together. According to this framework, scientific knowledge is an evolutionary product of human activity. Knowledge itself evolves in a dialectic fashion, propelled by human ingenuity, checked by various forms of criticism including experimental and other practical tests. Contrary to classical empiricism and rationalism, neither sensations nor intuitions have foundational status. Rationality does not consist of avoiding error or achieving certainty but instead means the willingness to take on board criticism with a view to improvement. Truth is not a terminus but a regulative principle.

Behind this framework stands the giant figure of Charles Darwin and also, more immediately, the almost forgotten shade of Karl Buhler who was one of the really important pioneers of psychology and language in the twentieth century who. He also taught both Wittgenstein and Popper (so far as anyone can claim to have taught Wittgenstein). He promoted a non-reductive psychology, insisting that human behaviour cannot be reduced to the causal chains of physics and behaviourism. Both Popper and Wittgenstein took this on board, though in different ways. Wittgenstein developed his views on "forms of life" and "language games" while Popper formulated his theories of critical rationalism and conjectural objective knowledge.

According to Munz, both of them missed a vital part of the picture. Popper refused to be distracted from the quest for truth by the problem of meaning which in consequence remained something of a mystery in his scheme. Wittgenstein for his part was obsessed with meaning and did not care about the growth of knowledge or the state of science and society. Munz suggests that Wittgenstein's theory of meaning as a function of rule-following behaviour in relatively closed speech communities fills the gap in Popper's program. According to Munz that is the lesson that Popper should have learned from Wittgenstein, while the latter should have picked up from Popper the importance of critical appraisal of "forms of life" and their conventional rules in order to move from closed or tribal societies towards more open societies.

Munz re-wrote history in the form of an imaginary dialogue between Popper and Wittgenstein (at the Moral Sciences Club circa 1946) to show how they might have worked through some of their differences and misunderstandings to reach a happy if grudging accommodation. Munz concluded his revised history with a flourish: "Everyone started laughing and the room was filled with a fine sense of convivial agreement". If only! That marks the end of the first part of the book. The case that Munz has provided for a creative synthesis is challenging and instructive, though not entirely convincing. The weakness of Popper on meaning is asserted without a convincing explanation and it remains to be seen whether the cohorts of the two champions will come to the party (with a fine sense of convivial agreement!) and find illumination from a source that they have previously regarded with disdain.

The second part of the book takes up some of the difficulties which need to be resolved to provide a convincing explanation for the miracle of knowledge and its growth, without recourse to the simple certainties of positivism and the mirror theory of scientific knowledge. Here Munz brings a great deal of criticism to bear upon some American scholars who are making careers out of evolutionary psychology without, on his account, taking on board the full Darwinian account of the evolutionary process. This part of the book does not really mesh smoothly with the first and the technical level of the argument is likely to strain the general reader. Munz writes clearly but the argument is dense.
Throughout the book a great deal of scholarship is on display, fortunately enlivened in the first part by some interesting and even-handed commentary on the personalities and eccentricities of the two arch rivals.

Apart from its anecdotical interest (the author's personal encounters with Popper and Wittgenstein), this book is based on very shaky ground.
It explains clearly Popper's critical rationalism, his anti-essentialism and his social-economic policies (prosperity is a means to guarantee freedom).
But it misrepresents Popper's stance on meaning. The sentence 'In a Popperian world, propositions to the effect that God is triune ... can have no meaning, because they are not true', is simply not true. These propositions are not meaningless for Popper, as novels are not meaningless (he loved the novels of Selma Lagerlof). Novels are not scientifically true, because they cannot be falsified.
The fundamental question, however, is: should a community be built on propositions which are superstitions? Peter Munz's answer is: YES. For him, superstitions (e.g. 'souls are reincarnated') have a social function. More, 'superstition performs such a society-building function better than genuine knowledge.' This is a mind-boggling sentence from a pupil of Popper. Cui bono?

Peter Munz also misrepresents Hayek. The sentence 'Hayek famously denounced the attempt to soften the abrasiveness of the open-market system society by the promotion of a welfare state', is fundamentally wrong. As Hayek stated in 'The Road to Serfdom', one of the basic elements of economic policies should be 'to secure a minimum income for everybody'.

Munz shows also unintentionally Wittgenstein's disastrous influence on post-modernist nonsense (Baudrillard: there was no Gulf War; Lyotard: anthropologist interpretations are rape; Derrida: to consider that 'saying 'sheep' = refering to sheep' is a metaphysical superstition; Foucault: reason and criticism are local.)

But his main target is neo-Darwinism and more particularly John Tooby's and Leda Cosmides's Evolutionary Psychologism (E.P.), which is badly presented as a kind of Lamarckism (learning by instruction). One of his main arguments against E.P. is Quine's and Witgenstein's rejection of ostension ('ostension cannot define what we mean'), which caused Wittgenstein to establish his language theory on speech communities (Gemeinschaften).
However, the anti-ostension argument is based on a very poorly constructed experiment: one person pointing at one thing in an empty space, once.
Explanation: One walks in a foreign country with one of its inhabitants. In a field containing flowers, geese, horses, rabbits ... the inhabitant points his finger at rabbits and says 'gavegai'. A little further, there is a new field with pelicans, flamingos ... and rabbits. The inhabitant points again at rabbits and says 'gavegai'. One should be very stupid not to understand, after two ostensions, that 'gavegai' means rabbits. By the way, the inhabitant pointed also at other animals saying ...
Of course, ostension can define what people means.

Q and W's poor experiment lead to a mass of linguistic 'conceptual deliriums' (Jean Fourastié).

This is a mind-boggling book by a pupil of Popper and Wittgenstein.

I recommend this book unreservedly to all who are interested in these two philosophers, or even to those who have never read either. It is not necessary to have read