Karl Popper on the Paradox of Tolerance

From Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies:

“The so-called paradox of freedom is the well-known idea that freedom in the sense of absence of any restraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. This idea is, in a slightly different form, and with a very different tendency, clearly expressed by Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, 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. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right even to suppress them, for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to anything as deceptive as rational argument, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, exactly as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping; or as we should consider incitement to the revival of the slave trade.” Popper 1945: 226, n. 4).

This is a controversial and perhaps misunderstood passage.

Popper’s comments here are deeply inspired by his experiences in Austria in the 1920s and 1930s when Austria was torn apart by violent communism and then fascism of two kinds (namely, the nationalist fascism of Dollfuss and pro-Nazi Austrian fascism). (For a wonderful biography of Popper’s early life, see Hacohen 2000.)

But Popper’s point in historical context remains a powerful one: how can a liberal society tolerate violent, subversive fascists or communists or others like them who, if they gained power, would totally destroy a society’s freedom? Some balance between freedom of speech and the right of a liberal society to preserve itself has to be struck – at the very least in times of dire emergency.

Popper’s answer seems to be that when such movements become dangerous and violent – when they are directly inciting violence, sedition and the overthrow of the basic legal and political system of a democracy – a liberal society must reserve the right to ban them for the sake of preserving freedom.

Naturally, one can argue whether Popper was right about this, but his paradox of tolerance is a thought provoking concept.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hacohen, Malachi Haim. 2000. Karl Popper, The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York.

Popper, Karl. 1945. The Open Society and its Enemies. Volume I. The Spell of Plato. George Routledge & Sons, Ltd, London.

Karl Popper on the Labour Theory of Value

Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies (vol. 2) makes a very interesting point about Marx’s labour theory of value:

“The strange thing about the value theory is that it considers human labour as fundamentally different from all other processes in nature, for example, from the labour of animals. This shows clearly that the theory is based ultimately upon a moral theory, the doctrine that human suffering and a human lifetime spent is a thing fundamentally different from all natural processes. We can call this the doctrine of the holiness of human labour. Now I do not deny that this theory is right in the moral sense; that is to say, that we should act according to it. But I also think that an economic analysis should not be based upon a moral or metaphysical or religious doctrine of which the holder is unconscious. Marx who, as we shall see in chapter 22, did not consciously believe in a humanitarian morality, or who repressed such beliefs, was building upon a moralistic basis where he did not suspect it—in his abstract theory of value. This is, of course, connected with his essentialism: the essence of all social and economic relations is human labour.” (Popper 1949: 329, n. 24).

And we can go on and say: from an economic perspective the labour theory of value – if it really is meant to be an empirical concept – is empirically unsupported and untenable.

If we consider a given array of factor inputs used in a production process, what can transform those factor inputs into an output commodity that can fetch a price on a market? The following factors:

(1) some type of labour to transform the factor inputs into an output commodity, and

(2) a demand for the output commodity and a person or people willing to buy it.

But is free human wage labour the only thing that can fulfil (1)? It is clearly not.

We have a number of sources of labour power as follows:

Types of Labour Power

(1) slaves;

(2) free human wage labour;

(3) animal labour;

(4) machines powered by forces of nature (e.g., wind driving a wind-mill or water driving a water wheel) or machines and robots powered by natural forces produced by human technology (e.g., steam or electricity).

You can produce commodities that fetch money profits by methods (1), (3) and (4) and clearly Marx’s nebulous labour value and surplus labour value are not necessary conditions for either production of commodities or monetary profits.

In fact, animals are a much underrated source of labour power: right into the early 20th century animal labour power was a fundamental source of labour even in advanced capitalist economies (think here of horse power used in transportation and farming). Even today all over the developing capitalist world animal labour is very important, just as it was in the 19th century.

What is more, as production becomes more and more automated by machines, robots and artificial intelligence, we could easily imagine a world in which capitalism continues and money profits continue, but human labour falls towards zero. So where, if surplus labour value is the source of money profit, would profit come from in such a world? Of course, this is just a pseudo-problem because the labour theory of value is false and does not explain profits in the first place.

In short, the Marxist labour theory of value makes a fetish of free human labour power, and, as Popper argued, probably as a moral idea, not as a meaningful and justifiable economic concept.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Popper, Karl Raimund. 1949. The Open Society and its Enemies, Volume 2. Routledge & K. Paul, London.

John Quiggin on Apriorism in Austrian Economics

John Quiggin has an excellent post here on the apriorist method in Austrian economics:

John Quiggin, “Austrian Economics and Flat Earth Geography,” John Quiggin, July 28th, 2014.

Also posted here:
John Quiggin, “Austrian Economics and Flat Earth Geography,” Out of the Crooked Timber, July 27, 2014.

One minor point here is that John Quiggin says that apriorist praxeology was “also endorsed, in a more qualified fashion, by Hayek.”

Actually, Hayek rejected Mises’ apriorism and adopted a – more or less – Popperian method for economics.

We know this because Hayek said so explicitly in a letter to Terence W. Hutchison dated 15 May, 1983. In this, Hayek stated:

“I had never accepted Mises’ a priorism. .... Certainly 1936 was the time when I first saw my distinctive approach in full clarity – but at the time I felt it that I was merely at last able to say clearly what I had always believed – and to explain gently to Mises why I could not ACCEPT HIS A PRIORISM”. (quoted in Caldwell 2009: 323–324).

In fact, in 1937 Hayek had published an article called “Economics and Knowledge” where he criticised Mises’ apriorism; Hayek also appears to have moved closer to Popperian ideas on methodology in later years:

“I became one of the early readers [sc. of Karl Popper’s Logik der Forschung, 1934]. It had just come out a few weeks before …. And to me it was so satisfactory because it confirmed this certain view I had already formed due to an experience very similar to Karl Popper’s. Karl Popper is four or five years my junior; so we did not belong to the same academic generation. But our environment in which we formed our ideas was very much the same. It was very largely dominated by discussion, on the one hand, with Marxists and, on the other hand, with Freudians. Both these groups had one very irritating attribute: they insisted that their theories were, in principle, irrefutable. Their system was so built up that there was no possibility – I remember particularly one occasion when I suddenly began to see how ridiculous it all was when I was arguing with Freudians, and they explained, ‘Oh, well, this is due to the death instinct.’ And I said, ‘But this can’t be due to the [death instinct].’ ‘Oh, then this is due to the life instinct.’ … Well, if you have these two alternatives, of course there’s no way of checking whether the theory is true or not. And that led me, already, to the understanding of what became Popper’s main systematic point: that the test of empirical science was that it could be refuted, and that any system which claimed that it was irrefutable was by definition not scientific. I was not a trained philosopher; I didn’t elaborate this. It was sufficient for me to have recognized this, but when I found this thing explicitly argued and justified in Popper, I just accepted the Popperian philosophy for spelling out what I had always felt. Ever since, I have been moving with Popper.” (Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: Friedrich A. von Hayek, pp. 18–19).

So Hayek lumped in apriorism in economics with Marxism and Freudianism!

It is also clear that Mises disliked Popper and Popper’s approach to epistemology in his seminal book Logik der Forschung (1934; later published in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959):

“Popper was familiar with the early [sc. socialist] calculation debate – Polanyi’s seminar discussed it – but not much taken by it. He knew of Mises and his circle, but it is unlikely that he read Mises closely. He strongly disliked subjectivism and libertarianism. He ‘first met Mises early in 1935 in Vienna, owing to his interest in my first book. . . . Both he and I were aware of a strong opposition between our views in the field of the theory of knowledge and methodology. Mises saw me as a dangerous opponent.’” (Hacohen 2000: 478).

So it could not be more clear: Mises saw Popper “as a dangerous opponent”; but Hayek, rejecting apriorism, essentially endorsed Popper’s views on epistemology and method.

Nevertheless, Quiggin’s point that Misesian apriorist praxeology as a method for economics is untenable is right.

Mises needed synthetic a priori knowledge and a type of Kantian epistemology to justify his praxeology, but the arguments for synthetic a priori knowledge are unconvincing and must be rejected. Misesian praxeology does not yield universally and necessarily true empirical statements about economic reality.

Furthermore, not even the human action axiom can be known a priori: it is clearly a synthetic a posteriori proposition.

In addition, the very idea that Mises in Human Action succeeded in deducing all his theories by deductive logic is manifestly untrue, and Misesians and Rothbardians have never answered the challenge of George J. Schuller to set out Human Action in a formal symbolic form in which all axioms, premises, and deductions are shown formally and proven.

Even modern Kantians have rejected Mises’ attempt to ground his praxeology on Kant’s epistemology.

There has also arisen amongst modern Austrians a feeble and ignorant belief that Mises was not really using a synthetic a priori epistemology. This is simply untrue, as I have shown here and here, and even if it were true and praxeology were simply analytic a priori, then it would follow logically that praxeology cannot give necessary truth about the real world.

Further Reading
“Limits of the Human Action Axiom,” February 28, 2011.

“Hayek on Mises’ Apriorism,” May 23, 2011.

“What is the Epistemological Status of Praxeology and the Action Axiom?,” July 27, 2013.

“Barrotta’s Kantian Critique of Mises’s Epistemology,” July 28, 2013.

“David Friedman versus Robert Murphy,” August 4, 2013.

“Mises Fails Philosophy of Mathematics 101,” August 30, 2013.

“Bob Murphy All At Sea on Geometry and Economic Epistemology,” August 31, 2013.

“Mises’s Non Sequitur on synthetic a priori Knowledge,” September 2, 2013.

“Hoppe’s Caricature of Empiricism,” September 10, 2013.

“Hoppe on Euclidean Geometry,” September 11, 2013.

“Robert Murphy gets Mises’s Epistemology Wrong,” September 13, 2013.

“Hoppe on Euclidean Geometry, Part 2,” September 14, 2013.

“Mises on Kant and Praxeology,” September 15, 2013.

“Mises was Confused about the Analytic–Synthetic Distinction,” September 15, 2013.

“Schuller’s Challenge to Misesian Apriorists has never been answered,” December 7, 2013.

“Mises versus Ayer on Analytic Propositions and a priori Reasoning,” March 16, 2014.

“David Gordon on Praxeology and the Austrian Method: A Critique,” March 13, 2014.

“Why Mises’s Praxeological Theories are not Necessarily True of the Real World,” March 15, 2014.

“Mises and Empiricism,” April 17, 2014.

“Why Should we reject the Existence of Synthetic a priori Knowledge?,” May 23, 2014.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Caldwell, B. 2009. “A Skirmish in the Popper Wars: Hutchison versus Caldwell on Hayek, Popper, Mises, and methodology,” Journal of Economic Methodology 16.3: 315–324.

Hacohen, Malachi Haim. 2000. Karl Popper, The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York.

Hayek, F. A. 1937. “Economics and Knowledge,” Economica n.s. 4.13: 33–54.

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: Friedrich A. von Hayek. Interviewed by Earlene Graver, Axel Leijonhufvud, Leo Rosten, Jack High, James Buchanan, Robert Bork, Thomas Hazlett, Armen A. Alchian, Robert Chitester, Regents of the University of California, 1983.
https://archive.org/details/nobelprizewinnin00haye

More on Karl Popper’s Three World Ontology

Karl Popper’s Three Worlds system is a pluralist ontology that classifies all objects in our universe, even though it is quite different from dualism. Ultimately, all objects in Popper’s world are causally dependent on matter and energy and their relations and permutations, so that, despite being pluralist, it has a fundamental physicalist/materialist nature.

These worlds, as noted in an earlier post, can be described as follows (but should be read from the bottom at “World 1” upwards):

World 3: both (a) unembodied objects such as abstract entities (and, most probably, universals), mathematical entities, social institutions and objective knowledge, and (2) embodied entities* that are products of human design, engineering and production such as buildings, books, clothes, money, and art works;
↑World 2: the world of conscious minds with intentionality and mental states;
↑World 1: the spatiotemporal world of physical objects and events, matter and energy and even biological system considered merely as complex physical systems.

As noted before, Popper’s three world ontology – or threefold realism – avoids the fallacy of strong reductionism, makes sense of abstract objects and downwards causation, and is compatible with a methodological pluralism in the social sciences.

It is also used by Jesper Jespersen (2009) in his methodology for Post Keynesian economics, and seems compatible with the Critical Realism used by other Post Keynesians such as Tony Lawson, Philip Arestis, Victoria Chick, and Sheila Dow.

Popper’s World 2 consists of conscious minds and the mental or psychological world, with all feelings, thoughts, beliefs, perceptions and sense experiences. It can be further divided into (1) fully conscious experiences, (2) dreams or hallucinations, (3) subconscious experiences, (4) human minds and (5) animal minds (Popper 1978: 143). In contrast to eliminative materialism, Popper defends the real existence of mental states in World 2.

World 3 contains all the abstract cultural products of the human mind, from languages, texts of books, fictions, religious myths, scientific conjectures and theories, mathematical entities and theories, songs and music, art work, and feats of engineering, construction and design.

Many, though not all, World 3 objects are embodied or physically realized (or instantiated) in the physical objects of World 1. A painting by a great artist, for example, exists in one form, but in contrast books or plays can be embodied in many different physical forms. World 3 “objects themselves are abstract objects, and that their physical embodiments or realizations are concrete objects” (Popper 1978: 145).

One important point is that Popper’s argument for realism uses causality and downwards causation as arguments in favour of his view:

“what is real or what exists is whatever may, directly or indirectly, have a causal effect upon physical things, and especially upon those primitive physical things that can be easily handled.

Thus we may replace our central problem of whether abstract world 3 objects such as Newton’s or Einstein’s theories of gravitation have a real existence, by the following problem: can scientific conjectures or theories exert, in a direct or indirect way, a causal effect upon the physical things of world 1? My reply to this question will be: yes, they can indeed. ....

My fundamental argument in support of world 3 realism is very simple. We all know that we live in a physical world 1 which has been greatly changed by making use of science; that is to say, by using world 3 conjectures or theories as instruments of change. Therefore, scientific conjectures or theories can exert a causal or an instrumental effect upon physical things; far more so than, say, screwdrivers or scissors.” (Popper 1978: 153–154).

Popper’s view of mathematics is also interesting:

“Children learn to count. This is a skill, a man-made invention. We learn so to count that we can construct to any given number its successor number, without end. So we come to understand the infinite sequence of natural numbers. But since it is infinite, there is no physical realization, no embodiment of this sequence. Nevertheless the sequence of natural numbers is a world 3 object about which we can make many discoveries. Thus we discover that all numbers (and ‘all numbers’ means infinitely many) are either odd or even. And we discover that certain numbers, such as 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, are prime numbers, that is to say, not divisible. (Of course, all numbers are either divisible or prime.) And we even discover Euclid’s theorem, according to which, although prime numbers become rarer and rarer when we proceed in the sequence of natural numbers, they never peter out completely: Euclid’s theorem says that there are infinitely many prime numbers within the infinite sequence of natural numbers.

It is of course perfectly true that all these discoveries are the results or products of thought processes: what I call world 3 is, indeed, the world of the products of the human mind; that is, the products of world 2. But the infinite sequence of natural numbers is, clearly, an abstract world 3 object; and it is an object that we can investigate, and about which we can make quite unexpected discoveries. In fact, there are many open problems about this object, problems of number theory which mathematicians have failed to solve so far.
....

I have stressed that the sequence of the natural numbers, since it is infinite, cannot be physically realized, or embodied. It is an unembodied, an abstract world 3 object. The same holds for every conjecture or theory, if we identify a conjecture or theory – that is, its logical content – with the system of all the theorems that can be derived in it; that is to say, with the corresponding deductive system. Such a theory, or such a system, is infinite, and may be full of surprises. Thus it must have been a surprise for Einstein when he found, shortly after writing his first paper on Special Relativity, that the now-famous formula E = mc2 could be deduced from it as a theorem.” (Popper 1978: 161–162).

Finally, Popper sums up his ontology as follows:

“To sum up, we arrive at the following picture of the universe.

There is the physical universe, world 1, with its most important sub-universe, that of the living organisms.

World 2, the world of conscious experience, emerges as an evolutionary product from the world of organisms.

World 3, the world of the products of the human mind, emerges as an evolutionary product from world 2.

In each of these cases, the emerging product has a tremendous feedback effect upon the world from which it emerged. For example, the physico-chemical composition of our atmosphere which contains so much oxygen is a product of life – a feedback effect of the life of plants. And, especially, the emergence of world 3 has a tremendous feedback effect upon world 2 and, through its intervention, upon world 1.

The feedback effect between world 3 and world 2 is of particular importance. Our minds are the creators of world 3; but world 3 in its turn not only informs our minds, but largely creates them. The very idea of a self depends on world 3 theories, especially upon a theory of time which underlies the identity of the self, the self of yesterday, of today, and of tomorrow. The learning of a language, which is a world 3 object, is itself partly a creative act and partly a feedback effect; and the full consciousness of self is anchored in our human language.

Our relationship to our work is a feedback relationship: our work grows through us, and we grow through our work.

This growth, this self-transcendence, has a rational side and a non-rational side. The creation of new ideas, of new theories, is partly non-rational. It is a matter of what is called ‘intuition’ or ‘imagination’. But intuition is fallible, as is everything human. Intuition must be controlled through rational criticism, which is the most important product of human language. This control through criticism is the rational aspect of the growth of knowledge and of our personal growth. It is one of the three most important things that make us human. The other two are compassion, and the consciousness of our fallibility.” (Popper 1978: 166–167).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jespersen, Jesper. 2009. Macroeconomic Methodology: A Post-Keynesian Perspective. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, Glos. and Northampton, MA.

Popper, Karl R. 1978. “Three Worlds,” The Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Delivered at the University of Michigan, April 7, 1978.
www.thee-online.com/Documents/Popper-3Worlds.pdf‎

Karl Popper’s Three World Ontology

Karl Popper had a fascinating view of ontology in which he divided our universe into three levels of reality: World 1, World 2, and World 3 (Popper 1978; 1979), a view which has precedents in Rudolf Carnap’s ontology (Niiniluoto 2006: 61).

These worlds can be described as follows (though they should be read from the bottom starting at World 1, and then upwards to be meaningful):

World 3: both (i) unembodied objects such as abstract entities (and, most probably, universals), mathematical entities, social institutions and objective knowledge, and (ii) embodied entities* that are products of human design, engineering and production such as buildings, books, clothes, money, and art works;
↑World 2: the world of conscious minds with intentionality and mental states;
↑World 1: the spatiotemporal world of physical objects and events, matter and energy and their relations, and even biological systems considered merely as complex physical systems.
___________

Note
* “Embodied entities” are members of both World 3 and World 1, but in different senses: e.g., considered purely physically as spatiotemporal objects describable in scientific terms, they belong to World 1; but when considered as human cultural artefacts, they belong to World 3.

World 1 is the most basic, and Worlds 2 and Worlds 3 are higher-level worlds that emerge from World 1.

While the entities in World 2 that we call minds are causally dependent on World 1 and could not exist without World 1, they are also objectively real and new ontological entities and emergent phenomena (Niiniluoto 2006: 60).

Entities in World 3 are causally dependent on human minds (or at least some kind of conscious mind).

They are constructed by the mind and could not exist without the conscious minds of World 2 (Niiniluoto 2006: 61). But, although entities in World 3 are created by minds in World 2, they are also autonomous and objective once we have created them by thought and continue to think of them. They can also have unintended consequences and lead to downwards causation, as human minds apply or discover new ways of using World 3 entities, such as, for example, in scientific theories in changing and shaping World 1. Therefore Worlds 3 and 2 can affect World 1, so that causation runs both upwards and downwards. (For instance, free will, if humans really do have it, is a World 2 phenomenon.)

Popper’s three world ontology has the following virtues:

(1) it avoids the fallacy of strong reductionism;

(2) it is compatible with a moderate realist or conceptualist view of abstract entities and universals;

(3) it understands that human minds are an important, real entity in the universe and is consistent with John Searle’s biological naturalist theory of the mind, even though minds are a type of emergent physical property (for why Searle is not a property dualist, see Searle 2002);

(4) it is compatible with the finding of modern science that emergent properties are a fundamental phenomenon in our universe;

(5) it is compatible with downwards causation;

(6) it is ultimately consistent with the view that higher-level worlds are causally dependent for their existence on lower-level worlds.

Jesper Jespersen (2009) uses Popper’s three worlds ontology in his Critical Realist methodology for Post Keynesian economics, which is influenced by Tony Lawson, and which is also more or less adopted by other Post Keynesians such as Philip Arestis, Victoria Chick, and Sheila Dow (Jespersen 2009: 57).


Links
“Popper’s Three Worlds,” Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds

Edward Feser, “Popper’s World 3,” July 26, 2010
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/07/poppers-world-3.html

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, P. W. 1972. “More Is Different,” Science n.s. 177.4047: 393–396.

Jespersen, Jesper. 2009. Macroeconomic Methodology: A Post-Keynesian Perspective. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, Glos. and Northampton, MA.

Niiniluoto, Ilkka. 2006. “World 3: A Critical Defence,” in Ian Jarvie, Karl Milford, and David Miller (eds.), Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment. Volume II. Metaphysics and Epistemology. Ashgate, Aldershot. 59–69.

Popper, Karl R. 1978. “Three Worlds,” The Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Delivered at the University of Michigan, April 7, 1978.
www.thee-online.com/Documents/Popper-3Worlds.pdf‎

Popper, Karl R. 1979. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (rev. edn.). Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Searle, J. 2002. “Why I Am Not a Property Dualist,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 9.12: 57–64.

Karl Popper’s View of Mises

Occasionally, one reads attempts to argue that the methodology of Austrian economics is compatible with Popperian fasificationism. Now, while that might be true of Hayek’s economic method and approach to epistemology, it is most certainly not true of Misesian praxeology.

What did Popper think of Mises? The following:

“Popper was familiar with the early [sc. socialist – LK] calculation debate – Polanyi’s seminar discussed it – but not much taken by it. He knew of Mises and his circle, but it is unlikely that he read Mises closely. He strongly disliked subjectivism and libertarianism. He ‘first met Mises early in 1935 in Vienna, owing to his interest in my first book. . . . Both he and I were aware of a strong opposition between our views in the field of the theory of knowledge and methodology. Mises saw me as a dangerous opponent.’” (Hacohen 2000: 478).

And this was after Popper had published his seminal book Logik der Forschung (1934; later published in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hacohen, Malachi Haim. 2000. Karl Popper, The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York.