Popper's Critique of Scientific Socialism, or Carnap and His Co-Workers

Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 32-61

  Notturno, Mark A ^a  

^a Central European University Foundation New York   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84997942081     PISSN: 00483931     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/004839319902900102     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. Rudolf Carnap, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, translated by Rolf A. George as The Logical Structure of the World, in The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy (1928; English translation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), xvi-xvii. This passage is in Carnap's preface to the first edition of Der Logische Aufbau der Welt.
2. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1945). Reprint by Routledge, 1998, vol. i, p. 200.
3. William Warren Bartley, III, Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1990).
4. Karl R. Popper, “Epistemology without a Knowing Subject,” in Objective Knowledge (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1972), 108.
5. See Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest (London: Routledge, 1992), 33. Popper has elsewhere described his relationship with socialism as follows.
6. Though Popper did come to question whether and to what extent Marx himself was the best representative of that vision. See, in this connection, Popper, The Open Society, vol. ii., p. 396.
7. Isaiah Berlin as quoted in Bryan Magee, Popper (London: Fontana, 1973), 9.
8. See Popper, Unended Quest, 87-90.
9. See, in this connection, my “Thomas Kuhn and the Legacy of Logical Positivism,” History of the Human Sciences 10, no 1 (February 1997): 131-4.
10. Translated into English as Logical Syntax of Language in 1937.
11. Popper, incidentally, told me that he became a university professor only because he was unable to work as a school teacher outside of Austria and had to seek employment on the basis of his published book.
12. Popper, Unended Quest, 119.
13. In what follows, all references to Popper's correspondence with Carnap, unless otherwise indicated, are to letters in The Karl Popper Archives, Box 282, file 24.
14. The superstition that Popper is referring to here is historicism-or the belief that the course of history is predetermined. Popper argued that historicism was a reaction to the problem of change, and he regarded it as implicit in any theory which, like Marx's, “aims at predicting the future course of economic and power-political developments” (Popper, The Open Society, vol. ii, p. 83).
15. Carnap to Popper, 9 February 1946.
16. Carnap to Popper, 29 January 1943.
17. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).
18. But I would imagine that even Carnap may have sensed the irony when Popper went on to say: Popper, The Open Society, vol. ii, pp. 235-6.
19. The assessment offered here corresponds with Popper's own. In his Unended Quest, for example, Popper writes:
20. Carnap to Popper, 27 May 1947. Aside from this qualitative difference, Carnap sees a “difference in emphasis” in their attitudes toward socialization, with Carnap estimating its usefulness “in a certain given situation more highly” and Popper putting “more weight… on the danger involved.” Carnap also sees a difference in their views regarding “the first aim of Socialism”:
21. Though Carnap does say that he had the impression from Neurath “that the Socialistic movement in Vienna was distinguished by being less dogmatic and based upon scientific analysis of the actual situation to a higher degree than most of the other Socialistic movements in European countries” (Carnap to Popper, 27 May 1947). And this, I think, is ironic. Carnap believes that emotional appeal and a religious attitude are necessary for the success of socialism. But he is trying to say that socialism need not be as dogmatic and unscientific as Popper suggests. Popper, however, had himself experienced the socialist movement in Vienna, and he found it too dogmatic and bureaucratic for his taste. So if socialism was really less dogmatic and more scientific in Vienna, then that only makes matters worse.
22. Correspondence between Carnap and Neurath in the University of Chicago's Archives of the Unity of Science Movement suggest that Carnap had ambivalent thoughts about democracy. While Neurath had hopes that the movement might play a role in democratizing Europe, Carnap worried “whether democracy is actually incompatible with efficient planning and regulation” (Carnap to Neurath, 24 June 1942).
23. See Troels Eggers Hansen, ed., Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1979).
24. See Popper, Unended Quest, 89. Popper also refers to this vacation in “The Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics,” in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, edited by P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1963), 183. Popper, incidentally, told me that he and Carnap constantly discussed these issues during this vacation.
25. See Rudolf Carnap, “Über Protokollsätze,” Erkenntnis 3 (1932): 215-28.
26. But I do not wish to leave the wrong impression. Carnap, for whatever reason, did not always acknowledge Popper's influence, and in the end wrote that Popper's ideas did not play “quite the central role in the development of my views which he ascribes to them” (Rudolf Carnap, “Replies and Systematic Expositions,” in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, 880).
27. See Popper, Unended Quest, 88-90.
28. “With the outbreak of the war and Neurath's death in England some year's later, the movement lost its cohesion” (A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism [New York: Free Press, 1959], 7).
29. See Rudolf Carnap, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, 23.
30. Otto Neurath, “Sociology and Physicalism,” translated by Morton Magnus and Ralph Raico, in Logical Positivism, edited by A. J. Ayer (New York: Free Press, 1959), 282. Italics in original.
31. So it is, perhaps, not too surprising that Reichenbach insists, contre Poincaré's claim that the geometry we use is a matter of convention and not of truth, that the question “Which is the true geometry” is an empirical question and is to be decided by observation and measurement-given, of course, the conventional stipulation of a coordinating definition of the metric. (See Hans Reichenbach, “The Philosophical Significance of the Theory of Relativity,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, edited by P. A. Schilpp [La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1949], 297). For what we have here is Carnap's distinction between the inside and the outside of the framework (see Rudolf Carnap, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4 [1950]: 20-40). It is, in this light, at least interesting that Einstein, in response to the question “Do you consider true what Reichenbach has here asserted?” writes: “I can answer only with Pilate's famous question: ‘What is truth?’ ” (Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, 676).
32. See the preface to the second edition of Carnap's Logical Foundations of Probability.
33. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems of Philosophy, vii.
34. The difference here pertains to their appeal to argument. Whereas Popper piled argument upon argument in his criticism of positivism, Wittgenstein preferred to remain aloof.
35. References to Neurath's correspondence with Carnap, unless otherwise indicated, are to letters collected in the University of Chicago's Archives of the Unified Science Movement.
36. Carnap makes the charge in a letter to Charles Morris regarding Neurath's Foundations of the Social Sciences. And Neurath, in his 16 June 1945 letter to Carnap, quotes from Carnap's letter to Morris as follows:
37. See Carnap, “Intellectual Autobiography,” 22-4.
38. Popper, “The Open Society and the Democratic State.” The Karl Popper Archives, Box 6, file 6.