Science and the Open Society : The Future of Karl Popper's Philosophy [Hardcover]

Mark Notturno (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 2000

A Clearly argued and easy to read defense of Karl Popper's philosophy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"It is the best introduction to Popper's work that I have ever read... given the recent deaths of Popper, Gellner and Feyerabend, the time is ripe for a text that shows the future relevance of the Popperian legacy. It's hard to imagine a better book than Notturno's in that respect." -- Professor Steve Fuller, University of Warwick, 1999

Product Details

• Hardcover: 287 pages
• Publisher: Central European University Press (April 20, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9639116696
• ISBN-13: 978-9639116696
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,918,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Free up your thinking with this book, May 31, 2000

By 

Kent Myers (Alexandria, Virginia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Science and the Open Society : The Future of Karl Popper's Philosophy (Paperback)

There are many excellent critiques of contemporary discourse, but few disclose the problem in its broader range. Of those that do, fewer still identify principles by which we could extricate ourselves. Popper would seem an unlikely starting point. In the opinion of many, Popper had his day along with the authoritarianism he opposed. Indeed, the main impetus for revival of Popper's open society concept has been George Soros's effort to help polities in the former Soviet block rid themselves of the vestiges of communism. What worries Soros is that former Soviet citizens will retain a utopian thought structure and simply plug in different parts, notably markets and democracy. Visiting Americans don't always help. Russians who receive lectures from Americans complain of condescension, but it is often worse than that -- the lecturers don't understand the underpinnings of the institutions they recommend. The lecturer may assume that markets and democracy will, by themselves and of necessity, create a non-authoritarian social field. They don't. It is one of Notturno's aims to explain this disturbing possibility that many Western elites fail to grasp.

The author has applied remarkable energy to running open society seminars through the post-Soviet world. Some of the chapters of the book are based on these seminars, and the talks are honed through frequent delivery before groups that are receptive yet skeptical. It would be a terrible mistake to assume that the presence of this audience means that the book is not relevant to the American experience. Notturno understands that Popper's intention was to promote openness in all modern societies, not just Communist ones, and he has admirably brought Popper's program up to date. He efficiently critiques the primacy given to consensus in science. He also addresses dangers outside the scientific institution proper by taking on tolerance, relativism, therapy, and bureaucracy.

In several cases his starting point is biographical, and he offers some revealing letters and contemporary accounts that most of us will not be familiar with. These materials give his philosophical arguments freshness and motivation not often found in academic works. Wittgenstein, Carnap, Freud, Bohr, Kuhn, and several other heroes are indicted for various offenses against open science. Popper isn't spared either, though he certainly comes out ahead on crucial matters.

The best feature of the book is that the reader has a sense of where to begin and what to do. I found myself wanting to stand up, ask a question, and engage somebody in authentic discussion. You are propelled forward toward problems, in your own voice, not backward toward anything that Popper might have said. I can image that this would be a very useful book in almost any public affairs course that reflects on ground rules for debate and investigation. Better yet, the book can help adult learners free themselves from the stifling rhetoric of ideologists.

I was curious and asked Notturno where his program is headed. I was pleased to find that he has plans for workshops, international academic contacts, dissertation support, and other collaborations that offer practical results, or at least a fuller sense of what rational discussion entails. I recommend that you get in touch with him, especially if you have ideas on how to institutionalize these activities. ......................

Disputing disputation. I accept what Notturno extracts from Popper as good logic, but I wonder whether something more needs to be said about the social side of argument. Popper was relentless in finding the contradictions in others. Students who tried to fend him off using self-protective rhetoric often felt ridiculed when his persistent questions eventually forced them to admit their errors. But it is probably the case that students who adhered to good logic were also humiliated. The assumption behind such intellectual conflict is that contradictions are not voluntarily displayed. More generally, one defends tidy statements that brook no problem. Is that the kind of statement we must have at the ready before speaking to each other, and is that process ideal?

I wonder about such things, and suffer for it. Last week, I drafted a report and offered examples of how software could be used. I mentioned an operation that would be useful to execute in the software, but cautioned that the operation might be too difficult to implement. I figured that it would be useful to retain the idea as a possibility rather than to discard it. The project manager, adhering to conventional practice, did not want this or any problem mentioned in our report, and the idea was discarded. The motivation, I suppose, is to give the client nothing that can be questioned, nothing incomplete. Is that good?

The same sort of thing happens when writing definitions. The definition and examples stay well within what is safe to say, and no guidance is offered that would help decide hard cases, which is exactly when definitions are needed.

We challenge each other to find weaknesses that we are reluctant to disclose and may actually be hiding. It is a cat and mouse game, not a mutual exploration with a common object. To explore together would require a kind of trust between partners that doesn't often exist. One approach to building that trust is to create a space for imaginative thought in which a different set of rules is enforced.

DeBono has argued well for a separate imaginative effort prior the critical effort, symbolized as green hat versus black hat thinking. But consider how things actually play out in an organization that sequesters thinking in this way. 3M requires that people work on secret projects for a significant percentage of their time, and they are expected to bring a project forward when it is ready to be criticized. Whenever anything is brought before an "outsider", the presumption is that it is offered as something to be attacked. There is no possibility of wider collaboration beyond a secret cell of partners.

To put it bluntly, I'm wondering whether loose thinking should be an element of openness. The idea is not to avoid critical thinking, but to neither elevate nor extend it to the point that it suppresses options, rewards timidity, and encourages unproductive conflict. [1] In both science and business, new approaches that eventually prove to be better usually perform poorly at the beginning. An idea gains a following on an intuitive, theoretical, or emotional basis before it reaches final form. [2] Without these non-rational appeals, which are very similar to the "communal" appeals that Notturno counts as a danger, the innovation pipeline could dry up. [3] Notturno says that false theories are a dime a dozen, which is true, but new theories are in the same stack.

An open attitude, I feel, is something different from the critical attitude that is admittedly necessary to sustain both open science and an open society. An open attitude can tolerate indecision, incompleteness, and even contradiction. (Someone said that the test of a good mind is that it can hold contradictory thoughts simultaneously.) [4] The open attitude moves toward clarity, but not prematurely and not toward complete closure. That may be too much forbearance to ask for some, and offer too easy a ride for others. Yet, in our atmosphere of both heavy criticism and a communal science that avoids criticism, we tend to confine ourselves to safe science. Those who can't stand this situation may exile themselves, or claim outlandish revolutions, neither of which gains any traction. .................................

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Enduring Legacy of Karl Popper: A Review, July 2, 2001

By 

Joseph M. Firestone (Alexandria, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Science and the Open Society : The Future of Karl Popper's Philosophy (Paperback)

Karl Popper had one of the broadest ranges of any 20th Century philosopher. He wrote in Epistemology, Philosophy and History of Science, Logic, and Democratic Theory. In each area he wrote trenchantly and with great excellence and imagination. He was the greatest of 20th century philosophers. Why I feel this way can begin to be understood by reading Mark A. Notturno's "Science and the Open Society." Notturno's work is the most valuable gateway to Popper's yet. It is one of those very few books that serve as the core of one's library, that one returns to again and again.

All of the Chapters in "Science and the Open Society" are striking and contain worthwhile insights. As a whole they allow one to think about the corpus of Popper's work and the major themes he developed over the course of 60 years. In fact, Popper himself wrote no single work that would allow us to do that. Notturno, in providing that perspective here, gives us a bird's eye view that we must work much harder to get from Popper's work. If you seek an understanding of Popper, start with Notturno and then read Popper for yourself, with the context you need to actively grasp what Popper presents.

All of the book is valuable, but there are a few Chapters that stand out from my own perspective as a Knowledge Management practitioner. These are Chapter 10 on the choice between Popper and Kuhn, Chapter 7 on the meaning of world 3, Chapter 5, a brilliant account of the breakdown of foundationalism and justificationism and of how Popper's critical rationalism escapes from the problems inherent in these views and provides a basis for solving the problems of induction and demarcation, and Chapter 3 on the significance of critical rationalism for education in open societies. Here is a more detailed review of Chapters 10 and 7.

Chapter 10, "The Choice Between Popper and Kuhn: Truth, Criticism, and the Legacy of Logical Positivism," takes up again the task of proper reconstruction of the nature of science following the breakdown of logical positivism. Notturno shows that Popper and Kuhn took two contrasting roads in journeying from this crossroads of 20th century philosophy. He traces how Kuhn and the many who followed him took the road to relativism, institutionalism, and "political" science, while denying the possibility of external rational critques of governing paradigms. Popper, on the other hand, took the road to thoroughgoing fallibilistic truth-seeking, a path which rejected foundationalism and justificationism, and offered a view of scientific objectivity attained through shared criticism of alternative knowledge claims conjectured as solutions to problems. As Notturno puts it (P. 230): "The issue at base is whether science should be an open or a closed society." Notturno shows that its is Kuhn's choice that leads to the closed society, and Popper's that supports the idea that (P. 248) ". . . our scientific institutions should exist for the sake of the individual - for the sake of our freedom of thought and our right to express it - and not the other way around."

Chapter 7 is a careful account of Popper's controversial notion that there are at least three "worlds" or realms of ontological significance: (1) the material world of tables, atoms, buildings, lamps, etc., (2) the mental world of thoughts, beliefs, emotions, etc. and (3) the "world" of words and language, art, mathematics, music, and other human, non-material, but sharable and autonomous creations. Popper criticized monism, the doctrine that only the physical world exists, and dualism, the idea that there is only mind, matter, and the interaction between them, in favor of a broader interactionism among three realms. This idea has been among the most difficult of notions for people to accept.

To many (including Feyerabend and Lakatos who ridiculed it), it smacks of Platonism, even though Popper clearly distinguished his own world 3 ideas from platonic forms. But Popper's world 3 notions are critical to his ideas about the pursuit of truth, criticism and trial and error as the method of science and problem-solving, the growth of knowledge, and evolutionary epistemology. Popper's world 3 is also critical to knowledge management, because without it we can't sensibly talk about managing the interaction between subjective mental knowledge (world 2) and objective linguistic knowledge (world 3), and, one can argue, it is managing this interaction to enhance the growth of relevant knowledge that is knowledge management's greatest challenge and major preoccupation.

Of all the commentary I have seen on world 3 Chapter 7 is the best at simply stating what Popper meant by it, why the notion is important to critical rationalism and the growth of knowledge, why people have denied its importance, why world 3 is consistent with a thoroughgoing fallibilism, why world 3 is a denial of empiricist epistemology, why the notion of world 3 is not invalidated by the greatly over-rated "Ockham's Razor," why world 3 doesn't violate the principle of causality, and finally why world 3 is important in spite of the view of the Wittgensteinians that solutions to philosophical problems which world 3 is an instance of, are meaningless because such problems are themselves meaningless. And in the process of doing this commentary, Notturno presents and analyzes for us a wonderful story of an encounter between Popper and Wittgenstein (mediated by Bertrand Russell) at Cambridge on October 26, 1946, which in microcosm, illustrates the conflict between reason and authority, and the open society and the closed society. It was an encounter in which the master of the cold stare, the mystique of genius, and the pithy aphorism, found himself so frustrated by the master of critque and dialogue that he left the field of open debate in anger and disgust.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars KARL POPPER: Recent book by Notturno, May 13, 2000

By 

ROBERT HOBART (CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (USA)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Science and the Open Society : The Future of Karl Popper's Philosophy (Paperback)

For about thirty years I have been a fan of Karl Popper's writings. This recent book on Popper's philosophy (of science and of politics) is most excellent. It presents Popper's ideas more clearly than Popper himself, in my opinion. So readers can get a quick taste of this work I refer them to two pages: On p88 Notturno argues that "institutiomalism and inductivism are more closely related than one might think." Inductive conclusions do not follow from their premises. Group solidarity is used to close the gap. On p142 Notturno clarifies: Popper posited World 1 as the world of physical objects, World 2 as the world of thoughts (feelings and imagination), and World 3 as the world of imaginative artifacts (songs, theorems, laws, etc.). The creative act corresponds to taking an insight from World 2 into World 3, from where it can be shared (I have a theorem in mathematical physics named for me internationally so I know this process first hand.). IT'S A FINE READ!