One would assume that Austrian-Jewish philosopher Karl Popper’s 1945 book, “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” would be teeming with anti-fascism. However, his highly influential work instead took aim at three philosophers: Plato, Hegel, and Marx, the most recent of whom had been dead for over six decades. Why these targets? Was Popper simply a spineless capitalist shill, penning criticisms from an ivory tower? No, far from it. In fact, Popper believed that even if some theory or belief about the world was true, we would never be able to definitively know it as such (obviously, this would invalidate a dogmatic belief in capitalism’s superiority). Rather, for him, the strongest theories were those that made falsifiable claims yet repeatedly and consistently resisted attempts at falsification. These ideas may sound familiar to those in the sciences; falsifiability is typically required of any scientific hypothesis, and scientists are famous for speaking in terms of likelihood rather than certainty. Though this may seem detached from politics, understanding the core tenets of Popper’s epistemology (philosophy of knowledge) is necessary to making sense of his politics and the enduring incisiveness of his political thought.
Though Popper is famous for fallibilism, he is no postmodernist. He believes in objective truth, seeing it as consisting in a correspondence between some proposition and reality. The issue then is that we are simply not capable of conclusively determining which propositions correspond. He calls the position that demands objective truth for knowledge acquisition uncritical rationalism, and, in his 1945 essay “The Defence of Rationalism,” presents the following claim as capturing the essence of this belief system: “I am not prepared to accept anything which cannot be proven through argument or experience.” He is sharply critical of this approach.
To see why, take deductive arguments, which allow us to derive true conclusions from true premises so long as the argument’s structure obeys certain rules. A classic example would be:
Premise 1: If A is true, then B is true
Premise 2: A is true
Conclusion: B is true
This argument is valid, meaning it obeys the rules that render conclusions necessarily true so long as the preceding premises are. Something interesting happens, however, when we try to prove its premises true. Deductively, that would require an argument like this:
Premise 1: If D is true, then it is true that if A is true, then B is true
Premise 2: If E is true, then A is true
Premise 3: D is true
Premise 4: E is true
Conclusion 1: If A is true, then B is true
Conclusion 2: A is true
Notice the pattern? To justify the truth of any premise deductively requires another deductive argument whose conclusion(s) are the premise(s) of the original argument, and to justify the premises of the justifying argument, you need yet another argument, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, deductive reasoning cannot be relied on alone as a source of truth, as such a role would demand that at least one statement, principle, or proposition be indubitably true without justification, to serve as a starting point for any subsequent chain(s) of justification. Similarly, the very rules utilized in deductive reasoning, such as the law of non-contradiction (the principle that a proposition cannot be both true and false simultaneously), are themselves propositions taken to be true without justification. Thus, the uncritical rationalist must find some way to create truth, rather than simply preserve it.
Perhaps the key lies in the second component of their statement, experience. Unfortunately, this also fails. The reason is that no observation or set of observations can be used to justify the claim that one should use observation as a means of assessing truth. This is because observations mean nothing without the unjustified acceptance of certain rules, like the principle of non-contradiction mentioned above. For example, to say one observed a white swan is to say that said swan was not not-white (i.e., that it was not purple, blue, pink, etc.). Thus, the meaningfulness of empirical observations also relies on unsubstantiated assumptions, so according to the uncritical rationalist, they must also be rejected.
If the only two methods of knowledge acquisition for the uncritical rationalist were proven insufficient by their own standards, what are they to do? They can either hold onto their principle and reject the prospect of knowledge acquisition entirely — a position known as skepticism — or they can revise it. Popper suggested they do the latter, as do I.
Popper calls his preferred epistemological doctrine “critical rationalism” and believes that accepting it is a moral choice. For him, it is the only approach that forces people to confront two crucial realities: the fact that they could always be wrong, and the fact that our beliefs and decisions have consequences.
Regarding the first point, our potential wrongness is what compels us to make falsifiable claims. Crucially, these types of claims prevent people from making harmful assertions that cannot be challenged. For example, a common unfalsifiable tendency that Popper criticized, particularly in its Hegelian and Marxian formulation, was what he called “historicism.” Popper used this term to describe claims that asserted that history inevitably progressed according to certain forces, necessarily tending towards a specific state. For Hegel (according to Popper’s assessment), history progressed in stages whereby, through “reason”, people recognized, sought to, and eventually did alter their states of affairs towards a greater realization of freedom. Marx’s conception of history was similar in Popper’s eyes, though he held that Marx specifically envisioned the realization of freedom as being driven by class struggle between workers and owners, ultimately culminating in full collective ownership and a dissolution of the worker vs. owner paradigm of production.
The problem with both of these ideas is their unfalsifiability. A lack of falsifiability prevents derivative normative claims like “some people must be purged for the sake of the revolution” or “the starvation caused by this policy is a necessary step towards the realization of total freedom” from being challenged. It is impossible to test a claim of historical inevitability, as history encompasses an infinite timescale. Any failure to achieve total freedom in one’s lifetime can be deemed unimportant, as the future holds limitless possibilities. Any instance of or resembling total freedom will be taken as evidence of its inevitability, while instances to the contrary are held to be temporary pauses in the inevitable cycle. For Popper, thinking like this allows megalomaniacal leaders to gamble citizens’ lives on grand ideological dice-rolls, and eliminates the possibility for rational objection. After all, how could anyone challenge the prospect of a thousand consecutive snake eyes if the dice can be rolled forever?
Regarding the second component of critical rationalism, Popper reasons that when we dwell on the potential consequences of our claims, giving them the requisite moral attention, we will naturally utilize empirical observation and deductive argument to justify and challenge them. Of course, he recognizes that our use of these tools is often flawed, resulting in faulty claims; however, he argues that if our claims are falsifiable, challengers will at least be able to point out where they fail to correspond to reality. In doing this, they can help strengthen and modify claims to become more accurate, likely, or truth-approximating. For example, if a Marxists instead hypothesized that a certain set of policies will lead to communism, recognized that such policies may lead to a certain amount of deaths, provided some death threshold past which the implementation of such policies will cease, and devised some procedure by which we can causally assess which deaths are the result of said policies, this would be a significant step in the right direction. It may seem odd or even macabre to consider death thresholds a step in the right direction, but that unease is precisely the point. If the criteria by which we could test a proposal seem objectionable in themselves, then pursuing that proposal is almost certainly also objectionable. When we are forced to think about the moral consequences our claims would actually entail, oppressive and instrumentalizing ideas seem likely to be abandoned.
Interestingly, thinking through such an experiment seems to presuppose certain civic principles, namely freedom of speech and Democracy. In fact, Popper held that these are a necessary foundation for a proper political system, one which unfolds in a manner resembling how knowledge and consensus are formed through critical rationalism. Freedom of speech ensures that no idea can be immune from criticism, reflecting the attitude that we can never know if we have attained objective knowledge. Instead of censorship or dogmatic acceptance, all of our claims are instead subject to augmentation through criticism. Democracy can be seen as ensuring that no idea is held to be true upon expression, as it subjects ideas to tests of approval from those who may face their consequences, those who have ideally contemplated them rationally. If being a critical rationalist is a moral obligation, then so too is the choice to uphold these norms and institutions. I, as well as Popper, see this not as an ideological assertion, but a necessary consequence of committing to common sense morality. A morality that does not endorse a claim without first examining its consequences requires a political system that does the same.
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