This day in history: Philosopher, academic and social commentator Karl Popper was born on this day in 1902. One of his greatest works was "The Open Society and Its Enemies."
"An open society is a place that has a lot of intellectual pluralism and a lot of diversity of viewpoints. Instead of trying to eliminate bias by eliminating biased people, or instead of eliminating wrong hypotheses by eliminating the people who hold those hypotheses, it instead tries to pit bias and prejudice against other biases and prejudices.
It does that by forcing contention, forcing critical argument, and forcing people to persuade each other over time. That's really what science is. It's really what journalism is. It's what all the professions that are engaged in the reality-based community are ultimately trying to do: use these tools of critical comparison and discourse to persuade each other. It takes physical coercion off the table. One way to prove that Nick Gillespie is wrong would be to shoot him, right? That's the most traditional way to do it. It gets rid of the hypothesis. It does not advance knowledge.
Karl Popper, among others, pointed out that the open society is incomparably better at producing knowledge than any other society, because it allows us to make errors and not be punished for making errors. It allows us to make errors, in fact, much more quickly. That's the secret of science. You make errors much faster.
It's also a more peaceful society, because you're settling differences of opinion without using coercion to do it. You're marginalizing bad ideas." Source
We need more of that, instead of the present day censorship and cancel culture.
Popper also criticized Hegel and Marx, knowing that their ideas led to the totalitarianism of the 20th century. He agreed with Schopenhauer's view that Hegel "was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense."
No comments:
Post a Comment