popper

[Antid Oto]

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Heerlijk, die polemieken tussen North en Steiner/Brenner. Hieronder
een stukje over Popper's anti-historicisme. Voor de Popperaars.

Antid, anti-Popper, pro-Hegel.

...
North’s comments on the anti-historicist Karl Popper are revealing of
his own approach to history and science. He introduces his remarks by
noting that Popper was, “Among the fiercest critics of the possibility
of a science of society which can make meaningful predictions about
the future…” He noted that Popper, “… rejected what he called
“historicism,” by which he meant “an approach to the social sciences
which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and
which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’
or the ‘patterns,’ the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the
evolution of history.” Popper wrote that he was ‘convinced that such
historicist doctrines of method are at bottom responsible for the
unsatisfactory state of the theoretical social sciences...’ (22)

In his lecture, North does present a number of valid objections to
Popper’s anti-historicism, but in the process he misses the central
problem with Popper’s attack on Marxism. The central issue is that
Popper’s depiction of what he called “historicism” is a vulgar
caricature of Marxism or what Marxists have meant by the term
“historicism”.
For Popper “historicism” is the attempt to apply a positivist model of
the natural sciences onto the social sciences.

Here is the gist of Popper’s argument, …we must reject the possibility
of a theoretical history; that is to say, of a historical social
science that would correspond to theoretical physics. There can
be no scientific theory of historical development serving as a basis
for historical prediction. The fundamental aim of historicist methods
is therefore misconceived, and historicism collapses. (23)
In his lecture North quotes these statements and correctly disputes
Popper’s contention that “there can be no scientific theory of
historical development.” But he lets pass completely Popper’s litmus
test for historical science, namely that a historical science
must correspond to (i.e. follow the model of) theoretical physics and
match its predictive capacity.

Popper’s contention is that history is too complex, contains too many
factors to be amenable to any law-governed process. In rebuttal, North
correctly cites meteorology as an enterprise which is considered a
science despite the fact that it cannot produce the kind of exact
predictions that are possible in physics. Instead, meteorology is
characterized by tentative predictions that have only a statistical
degree of accuracy. Indeed it is even the case that with quantum
mechanics, physics itself exhibits laws that are only expressed
through statistical norms. Yet no thinking person would object to
calling meteorology, let alone modern physics, a real science.
Therefore, argues North, Popper’s rejection of historical science on
the basis that it cannot exhibit the kind of exact predictability that
is accomplished in physics is a false argument.
North’s arguments against Popper are correct, but for all that they
entirely miss the mark. All they demonstrate is that Popper’s line of
reasoning against historical science is false. But they tell us
nothing about what historical science is. Worse than that, North’s
line of argument reinforces Popper’s belief that the model of science
is the natural sciences, where predictability is the sine qua non of
the genuine article even if predictability is not always exact. But
historical science in the Marxist sense is not at all like meteorology.
What North entirely leaves out of account is that whereas
predictability is characteristic of a certain form of science, namely
the natural sciences, there is another criteria by which we may judge
whether a discipline is a true science. What about the ability to
provide an explanation of a phenomenon in terms that bring together a
particular with a universal? (24)
When it comes to historical science, we are looking to the explanatory
value of a theory more than its ability to make predictions. And it is
this explanatory value that is critical for Marxism.

Popper’s anti-historicism must be rejected because it denies the
possibility of finding what had been called meaning in history – i.e.
the discovery of the rationality behind the multifarious contingent
events that comprise history. And without ‘meaning in history’
universal projects are off the table, and no project is more universal
than that of the revolutionary transformation of society. At best we
are left with pragmatic experiments that may alleviate pain a bit but
can never overcome existing social relations. That in a nutshell is
Popper’s formula for what he called the “Open Society”.[24]

[22] Lecture four: “Marxism, history and the science of perspective”,
by David North, 14 September 2005
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/le4-all.shtml
[23] Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London and New York:
Routledge, 2002), pp. xi-xii.
[24] Although we must reject the conservative implications of the
notion that World History as it is ‘is the image and enactment of
reason’, no one has presented the case for the explanatory power of
historical science more eloquently than Hegel:
  ‘We are compelled to ask whether, beneath the superficial din and
clamor of history, there is not perhaps a silent and mysterious inner
process at work whereby the energy of all phenomena is conserved. What
may well perplex us however is the great variety and even
inconsistency of the content of history. We see complete opposites
venerated as equally sacred, capturing the attention of different ages
and nations. We feel the need to find a justification in the realm of
ideas for all this destruction. This reflection leads us to the third
category [of historical science], to the question of whether there is
such a thing as an ultimate end in itself. This is the category of
reason proper; it is present in our consciousness as a belief that the
world is governed by reason. Its proof is to be found in the study of
world history itself, which is the image and enactment of reason.’
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction,
Translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge), p 33.

http://www.permanent-revolution.org/

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