Utan tvivel är man inte klok. Karl Popper som samhällsfilosof

Abstract

No reason without doubt. Karl popper as a societal philosopher. In Karl Popper's famous book The open society and its enemies appears the formulation social engineering. That is an unfortunate wording. There is nothing mechanical in Popper's political strategy. The keywords are rather piece-meal and trial and error. It is even possible to characterise Popper as—up to a point—anti-rationalistic. His warning that we should not think too much of our knowledge of the functioning of the social world and of our ability to make forecasts, reminds one of what a critic of the French Revolution like Edmund Burke had to say. We should start with the delivered institutions, diagnose what is working badly and, aware of possible error, try to improve it. That said, one is not surprised of meeting a strain of anti-politics in Popper's philosophy. Although Popper welcomes measures to clear away suffering and distress, it is uncertain how he would balance his negative utilitarianism against individual freedom. He is distrustful of political power. The idea that democracy gives the people the instrument of governing is an illusion. Democracy's point is to make it possible to dismiss a government (notice the parallel with his methodology, a government is a kind of hypothesis, the election an opportunity for falsification.) However, it is not Popper's political philosophy in a substantial meaning that makes him worth studying, but his theory of the critical discourse, a theory that is very relevant for a reformistic political strategy. The idea of the Popperian discourse is not to get the parties closer emotionally, not to reach a compromise, not even to convince, but for me to listen to and learn from the criticism of my hypotheses. People with divergent standpoints should not be kept out of the discourse, they should be welcomed. Popper admires Greek culture up to Socrates and he emphasises its openness to influences from other cultures along the shores of the Mediterranean. That is in keeping with Popper's anti-nationalism. Nationalism fattens stupidity and is often the cause of devastating violence. In his later works Popper regularly uses an evolutionary model and his theory of language is no exception. He sets forth how the development of describing, language's third function besides expressing and warning, created the possibility of story-telling. Now, stories can be true and false, and that makes language's fourth function necessary, the function of argumentation, of proving or disproving of what has been said. Lying, however, is a wonderful invention. To lie, to say what is not, but could be true, is a nursery for fantasy and creativeness.