What Is the Popper Dilemma of Democratic Citizenship?
Austrian born philosopher Karl Popper is best known for his contributions to philosophical and scientific realms, yet, as with Noam Chomsky, his theories and ideas have also extended into the disciplines of linguistics and politics. His ideas are highly intellectual and complex, in the sense that they take into account a variable landscape rather than a finite domain, which is why many who read him believe his philosophy to be ripe with irony and paradox.
Other People Are Reading
-
Who is Karl Popper?
-
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) was a philosopher and professor who taught at the London School of Economics. He was born in Vienna to middle-class parents of Jewish origins. At the young age of 17, he became attracted to Marxist ideology and joined the Association of Socialist School Students and the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria. He parted with Marxism due to its suppression of basic individual liberties and was a supporter of social liberalism or liberal democracy and an advocate of social criticism for the remainder of his life.
On the Scientific Methodology of Induction
-
Popper criticized the scientific method, which is based on inductive or empirical logic, and advocated critical rationalism. He coined the concept of "falsifiability" and said that an idea or theory could only be deemed "scientific" if it could be proved to be falsifiable. If something is falsifiable, then its falsehood can be proven. For instance, the assertion that "no human lives forever" is not falsifiable and thus cannot be deemed true because it has not yet been proven that every human who is alive today will die. In Popper's opinion, truth and likelihood are two separate and distinct concepts, as are corroboration and confirmation. It is important to understand this thought process since it is consistently at the core of Popper's teachings.
-
The Paradox of Tolerance
-
Instead of saying that something is true because it has not been proven false (the logic of the sun always rises so it always will), Popper would only agree to its likelihood. He says that truth can only be measured by its relationship to falsehood, and here you can begin to see the paradox. In his best known book, "The Open Society and Its Enemies," he demonstrated the paradox of tolerance: a tolerant person could not always be tolerant; that would lead to the disappearance of tolerance. That is to say that if an intolerant person were ultimately tolerated by a tolerant person, then the latter would be subsumed by the former. He says, "If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
The Paradox of Democratic Citizenship
-
Popper's philosophy is known as "critical rationalism." He argues that scientific theories are too abstract to be proven objectively true and that therefore the likelihood of occurrences is what is most important. He draws a parallel between error elimination and Darwinism and argues that the benefit of science is that it accelerates the evolution of knowledge, similar to natural selection affecting the evolution of species. This same concept can be superimposed upon social change to elucidate Popper's political view: governance and society will evolve when mistakes are made and dealt with, and it is the responsibility of the people (the democratic majority, so to speak) to bring to light and rebel against mistakes. In Popper's view, friction and even dissension are good elements to have and are, in fact, necessary to a true democracy.
-
