This is very good, and very worthwhile remembering when dealing with right-wing trolls, who use definitions as methods of differentiation when as Popper points out they do not matter greatly, what matters is action:
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Popper is an elegant, suave and persuasive thinker; but when he talks about ‘false precision’, I cannot help recalling that long ago when I first read his philosophy of science, I was long caught in the dilemma created by the seductiveness of the urbane sophistication of his thought, yet the residual feeling of uneasiness I intuited but could not answer; induced by the smooth effortlessness of his solution that begged assent. Until long after, I read Feyerabend – and realised that false precision was woven into Popper’s prescriptions.
Did he develop over time?
I think so
I fear I am going to break Popper’s rule of definition here; precisely what ideas in the philosophy of science do you propose he developed, and when?
See another comment already made
It would be interesting to know what % of national income passes through a government computer system.
You can argue that you don’t need to define the difference between wants and needs, or that there is no difference between hunger and malnutrition, just shades of grey, or that people of mixed race are black in the USA but mixed race in the UK is quite a satisfactory use of the english language on both sides.
It doesn’t matter. The actions of a computer processing system have to act on inputs which are linked to a definition. Computer says no, is a well known joke in bank lending. I don’t think Karl Popper gets this, but how could he when computing was in its infancy. The late great Douglas Adams admitted in his later years that no-one he spoke to in the 1980s realised just how quickly computing would dominate out lives.
Self-driving cars are coming. They are mobile decision making computing machines. Definitions which are constantly refined from mistakes are going to be crucial for their future as they will be in other areas.
What an absurd idea – that if cannot be computer-processed it does not matter
Try computer processing love
“I don’t think Karl Popper gets this”
I am not an apologist for Popper, as my other comments here reveal; but I would suggest that perhaps you are much closer to Popper than you think: for there is nothing in your comment to suggest that you ‘get’ philosophy.
Incidentally, there is a growing body of work in the philosophy of computing (I do not claim to have explored it sufficiently to wish to comment on it); inspired by such as Turing 60+ years ago; but now much more comprehensive by such as Alama, Angius, Copeland, Piccinini etc., if you are really interested.
“self driving cars are coming”
I hope you will be happy with their decisions……
I should perhaps add that Paul Feyerabend began by studying under Popper at the LSE, became an expositor of Popper’s philosophy, translated Popper’s ‘Open Society and its Enemies’ into German, declined to become Popper’s research assistant and went on to reject Popper’s whole approach by about 1970. He appears to have considered Popper’s critical ideas in the philosophy of science were widely held in Austria (Alpbach) in the post-war 1940s. I suspect that when ‘history’ takes a long view, Feyerabend will appear to be the outstanding philosopher of science of the 20th century, albeit quixotic and even apocalyptic.
I will have to bow to you on that one
I do not know enough to comment
” Equality, Fraternity, Liberty” were central concepts for the French Revolutionaries and had ripple effects on the global population for the next, almost 250 years. Their interpretation have been contextualised in terms of cultures and time. But these words have commonalities as signposts. Thus what Karl Popper says that there is a need to be precise it is correct but signposts show the way as “Equality, Fraternity, Liberty” still do for millions.
A definition always needs a context.
Amongst the words not needing definitions I would include anti-semitism, islamaphobia, transphobia and terf. These are all used to suppress discussion.
No they are not