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The Poverty of Historicism - Karl Popper

Dec 21, 202410 min read

πŸš€ The Book in 3 Sentences

Unusual book, not the type I am used to reading. Dense with unknown concepts and ideas about how sociology works and explanation why future can be predicted. In detail, methodological description of complicated social-historical approaches.

🎨 Impressions

How I Discovered it

Taleb mentioned in Antifragile Things that gain form disorder

Who Should read it?

Not sure.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I regard social sciences and history from another vantage point, and view any prediction as nonexistent until it will have happened.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

Civilizations are not static conditions of society, but dynamic movements of an evolutionary kind. They not only cannot stand still, but they cannot reverse their direction without breaking their own law of motion … – Professor Toynbee.

πŸ“’ Ideas

Interpretation

  • Philosopher only interpreted the world, but they missed the key feature of any interpretation.
    • Changing the world is why we are here.
    • Are we? Not to live in accord with it, not to be synchronized?

Problem of Sociology

  • Truly valuable experiments are impossible.

    • This is because anything we do in sociology is not experimental in the strictest sense of the word.
    • Social experimentation differs fundamentally from experiments in physics.
    • Sociology does not serve as a means to produce knowledge on a large scale but often operates for political purposes.
      • I believe Ariely might disagree with this, but these ideas contain a kernel of truth.
    • Experimentation has been extracted from sociology due to the way such studies are conducted.
      • Rather than working with isolated variables, the elements interact freely in the external world, altering it through their own actions.
    • New points of tension introduce a degree of novelty at the heart of the experiment.
      • Consequently, new conditions emerge. While in physics, the rearrangement of established elements leads to different outcomes, we cannot claim that newly arranged elements in social experiments can genuinely be considered the same as their previous forms.
      • Interaction transforms them irrevocably.
      • In a scenario where nothing can be replicated exactly, the term β€œisolated conditions” loses its meaning, and genuine novelty arises.
      • So, how do we experiment under such conditions? The brief answer is, we can’t. Yet humanity endures regardless.
    • Since the true isolation of sociological elements is unattainable, we are confronted with a dual complexity:
      • A complexity stemming from the inability to truly isolate participants in the experiment.
      • The inherent origin of social phenomena. These phenomena emerge from social life, which presupposes mental life, which, in turn, is grounded in biology, chemistry, and ultimately, physics.
      • So many intricate underlying processes shape social interaction. It’s extraordinarily complex.
    • Any prediction beyond this point becomes virtually impossible, yet humanity persists. ^84b945
      • The interconnected complexity of the system disrupts any initial predictions.
      • Simply put, prediction alters what is predicted.
      • The introduction of new information influences the situation, modifying the conditions it seeks to describe.
        • Whether this new information brings about the expected outcome or prevents it.
        • Popper termed this the β€œOedipus Effect.”

  • Prediction is a social event.

    • It may intersect with other social occurrences, and the predicted event might be among them.
    • When social scientists announce a prediction, they open up a realm of possibilities with diverse potential outcomes.
    • Some of these outcomes may not have been anticipated, and their impact on future developments remains unknown.

  • The holism of historical prediction.

    • The social group is far more than the simple sum of its parts.
    • A+B differs from B+C, and A+B+C is distinct from both.

Future is intuitive

  • Future is mostly intuitive.
    • Sociology operates in the premises of sympathetic imagination.
    • Which helps us understand historical developments in qualitative terms. We describe certain historical events without understanding them in full, we are not able to cut to the bone of the event.
    • Thus, phrases like β€œin the spirit of age”, β€œnational character” are used.
    • Novelty in such context can’t be casually explained but intuitively grasped.
      • What is novelty in historical events?
    • Qualitative terms are the terms, explaining conflicting tendencies and aims of various social groups that leas to specific results.

Why the problem of universals in philosophy is the most profound and fundamental?

The problem of universals is an ancient question from metaphysics that has inspired a range of philosophical topics and disputes:Β Should the properties an object has in common with other objects, such as color and shape, be considered to exist beyond those objects?

The goal of science is to strip away everything inessential

  • Science must always strip away everything inessential and reach to the core of things. Look at the roots. ^ce998d
  • Methodological essentialists, school of thought founded by Aristotle. Or at least it is Popper who believes in this.
    • They believe that revealing the true meaning of the phenomenon is prerequisite for scientific research. Some even go further as considering it the main task.
    • The true essence of things is important it goes without saying, but in my worldview it’s not the most important. ^785c11
      • Looking for a definition of a word is a completely metaphysical exercise that has nothing to do with the real work required to make any discovery. In other words, definitions are coffins for meaning.
      • What is matter?
      • What is justice?
      • What is force?
      • They are only words on paper, nothing comes out of contemplating them, maybe something useful to machine learning or cognitive linguistic might be found, but it goes as far as that.
    • I incline more to the side of methodological nominalist, who are working with the effects and interaction. To something that has happened.
    • They speculate in different categories.
      • How does this piece of matter behave?
      • How does it move in the presence of other bodies?
  • Observation vs thinking
  • Subtraction is better than addition Negative Epistemology

The essence of things emerges through change

  • On the topic of change. ^4e5d3f
    • Historicism stresses the importance of change. Now in every change, the historicist might argue, there must be something that changes. Even if nothing remains unchanged, we must be able to identify what has changed in order to speak of change at all.
    • Change is essential to understanding the true self of an age, event, and person. ^883381
      • In order to understand that some object is the same, we have to put it through changes by applying force to it. If it’s inanimate we can hit it, bend it, cut it, break it. And see how it changes, and look at what stays the same.
      • What hasn’t changes is the object itself. Essence of it.
      • No matter what we do with the language, the alphabet stays the same, no matter how complex our math has become it is still 0 and 1, if by some chance we will witness the birth of posthuman I can easily bet that he will have DNK.
      • Thus, a person can only be understood through his biography.
  • Interesting post might be written. So why not now.

History is the narrow sense is the basis for sociology.

Fallacy of rational planning

  • What is rationality
    • Under no way social planning could be rational, because it involves many unpredictable and irrational elements, humans.
    • Rational planning is an illusion, created by those who formulated the plan. In the end it is an unstable structure, bound to topple, due to the change in force’s balance involved in implementing the plan.
    • I don’t say that not a single plan where changes in social structure won’t come to fruition, I only assume that no matter what has been planned and no matter who is involved, nothing will go according to plan.
      • My parents above all know about this fact. I don’t know if changing career, is a social change, but I will assume that it is.
      • So when I chose to shift gears and slow a bit, one of them said that if you had a plan, give it a go, but the other added, that I should remember that no plan would survive the impact with reality and I must be ready to maneuver.

Philosopher’s impact on the world

ЦСль философии ΠΈ Π²ΠΎ Ρ‡Ρ‚ΠΎ ΠΎΠ½Π° ΠΏΡ€Π΅Π²Ρ€Π°Ρ‚ΠΈΠ»Π°ΡΡŒ Π² соврСмСнном ΠΌΠΈΡ€Π΅

  • Definition of Philosophy
    • Philosophy so far only interpreted the world, though it must be ready to change it.
      • Thus, it provides the opportunity for actions.
      • Most philosophers consider themselves as thinkers, but not doers.
      • In my opinion, it leads to the faulty conclusion that philosophy is a useless science. Which is not true.
      • Бофия Π Π°ΠΏΠΏΠ΅ said during our talk that science is not about how to live, but about what it is.
      • Philosophy is not about how to live, but what action to take.

True scholars work on interesting problems

  • There are so many problems and so little time.
    • It’s important not to follow passion this demonstrates the eagerness of mind of a scholar, but it leads unavailingly to trivial problems. Which is fun to solve but they don’t propel humanity forward.
    • We are surrounded by noise.
    • The wisdom of a scholar manifests in choosing from the pool of innumerable issues the one that is critical to mankind. The subtle, curious and hard. The problem no one sees yet, though consequences of it hard to imagine.

The only reason that we can be dissatisfied with social conditions

  • Is that we don’t properly understand how they work.

    • Active intervention could lead to worsening the situation.
    • It doesn’t mean that we have to stand passively and do nothing.
    • It means that we actually don’t understand the complexity of social interaction on deep enough level, to be able to intervene with hopes of high success rate.
    • When we intervene to prevent intervention, we still intervene. So it’s a paradox.

  • There are certain sociological laws, that stem from the cause and effect.

    • You can’t introduce an increase in taxes and await increase in a quality of living.
    • In industrial society, consumers a less organized than producers. It’s impossible to organize the first group.
    • Planned economy can’t live in accord with competitive prices.
    • Exploitation is inevitable if you give power to one man over another, and the more power is given, the stronger exploitation.

Laws and social norms are not universal across centuries

  • Experiments that help us discover the social change are not universal, they change and shift as the boiling temperature changes with geographical position.
    • And social conditions vary from historical period to period.
    • Take for example Plato and his republic, the topic of slavery long ago forgotten, and we can’t fully understand what he had meant.
    • We can draw some conclusion, maybe with high degree of accuracy, but truly understand it, no. Impossible
    • The same is true to Thomas Moore.
    • It’s difficult if not impossible to shift our habits of thought and analyses to the social condition of the distant past.
  • And subsequently, if you think that social interaction that we can observe in our time universal, we are idiots. We can’t say what new norms the future might bring.

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