Philosophy via Karl Popper Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem

There are such truths as are self evident. That all men are created equal. But that does not mean equality need be imposed at each and every turn. Equality does not exclude growth. Neither does it exclude love. And with growth and love, things become un equal. Equality does not lead to equality. To maintain equality after bad decisions, self serving ones are made, is patently unfair. And this is how Popper teaches us to argue gainfully.
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“What I call 'the myth of the framework' is a view, widely held and often even unconsciously accepted, that all rational argument must always proceed within a framework of assumptions – so that the framework itself is always beyond rational argument. One could also call this view 'relativism', for it implies that every assertion is to be taken as relative to a framework of assumptions.
A fairly common form of the myth of the framework also holds that all discussions or confrontations between people who have adopted different frameworks are vain and pointless, since every rational discussion can operate only within some given framework of assumptions.
I regard the prevalence of this myth as one of the great intellectual evils of our time. It undermines the unity of mankind, since it dogmatically asserts that there can, in general, be no rational or critical discussion except between men who hold almost identical views. And it sees all men, so far as they try to be rational, as caught in a prison of beliefs that are irrational, because they are, in principle, not subject to critical discussion. There can be few myths that are more destructive. For the alternative to critical discussion is violence and war – just as the only alternative to violence and war is critical discussion.
The main point, however, is that the myth of the framework is simply mistaken. Admittedly, a discussion between people who hold identical, or almost identical, views is bound to proceed more easily than a discussion between people who hold strongly opposed, or vastly different, views. But only in the latter case is the discussion likely to produce something interesting. The discussion will be difficult, but all that is needed is patience, time, and good will on both sides. And even if no agreement is reached, both sides will emerge from the discussion wiser than they entered it. By 'good will' I mean here the admission, to start with, that we may be wrong, and that we may learn something from the other fellow.”
Karl Popper, 'Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem'.

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Comparing two quotes

“Goering, after the Nazis had come to power by a majority vote, declared that he would personally back any stormtrooper who was using violence against anybody; even if he made a little mistake and got the wrong person.”

Karl Popper, ‘After The Open Society’.

“…If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, ok. Just knock the hell — I promise you I will pay for the legal fees, I promise.”

Donald Trump

 

 

There is a large disparity between those statements. I see the similarity too. Trump is telling peace officers to be thorough in defending against bullies. That is very different to calling on Brownshirt stormtroopers to be thorough.

 

I'm reminded of Scott Adams 2015 appraisal of candidate Trump which has born out throughout Trump's Presidency. Scott is a left wing supporter, but speaks truth to power. At the time, Scott pointed out there were broadly two camps, those that supported Trump and those who did not. They are told the same things as each other, but hear them very differently. So Trump saying to punch on the nose a reckless law breaker is heard by pro Trump peoples as Trump saying what Theodore Rooseveldt may have. Standing up to the bully. But those who oppose Trump hear the same words as a call for violence. I don't approve of violence, and I shamefully have people on my pages that are awful, and inarticulate. I don't always block them. For me, what puts Trumps above comments into perspective is things like Hillary Clinton calling for the lynching of a Coptic Film maker following Benghazi. Hillary knew him as innocent of the circumstance, but she named him and pointed the finger so as to get extremists to target him, to hide what she had done. Or, Biden profiting from Ukraine in a sting that had Russian backed separatists shooting down a Ukrainian space Malaysian airliner. In the months leading up to the tragedy, Ukraine were 'painting' with radio identifiers, their military aircraft as civilian, inviting the tragedy. Followed by the US signal corps intercepting Russian transmitters as they discovered their mistake. That is a different class of 'violence'

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Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind’.

In defense of open society:

“People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted, and that the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by ‘culturism’. There is no such word, but it’s about time we coined it. Among today’s elites, assertions about the contrasting merits of diverse human groups are almost always couched in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races. We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’

Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine Le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of the Front National go on television to declare that ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode democracy and liberalism.

Such culturist arguments are fed by scientific studies in the humanities and social sciences that highlight the so-called clash of civilisations and the fundamental differences between different cultures. Not all historians and anthropologists accept these theories or support their political usages. But whereas biologists today have an easy time disavowing racism, simply explaining that the biological differences between present-day human populations are trivial, it is harder for historians and anthropologists to disavow culturism. After all, if the differences between cultures are trivial, why should we pay historians and anthropologists to study them?”


Karl Popper, ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’.

Karl Popper “The abandonment of the rationalist attitude, of the respect for reason and argument and the other fellow's point of view, the stress upon the 'deeper' layers of human nature, all this must lead to the view that thought is merely a somewhat superficial manifestation of what lies within these irrational depths. It must nearly always, I believe, produce an attitude which considers the person of the thinker instead of his thought. It must produce the belief that 'we think with our blood', or 'with our national heritage', or ‘with our class'. This view may be presented in a materialist form or in a highly spiritual fashion; the idea that we 'think with our race' may perhaps be replaced by the idea of elect or inspired souls who 'think by God's grace'. I refuse, on moral grounds, to be impressed by these differences; for the decisive similarity between all these intellectually immodest views is that they do not judge a thought on its own merits. By thus abandoning reason, they split mankind into friends and foes; into the few who share in reason with the gods, and the many who don't (as Plato says); into the few who stand near and the many who stand far; into those who speak the untranslatable language of our own emotions and passions and those whose tongue is not our tongue. Once we have done this, political equalitarianism becomes practically impossible.”

DDB BLM have a devastating platform of support rooted on semantics and nothing else. That is why they tear down statues of people who opposed slavery? Because they don't oppose 'slavery,' the well defined word, but the undefined bad feeling experienced by those not identifying with a tribe. And that trolls other tribalists.

JW David Daniel Ball BLM is against this culturism. There is no such thing as reverse racism

DDBI'm sorry, but their actions speak very loudly, and are different to their words

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“I have in lectures often described this interesting situation by saying: we never know what we are talking about. For when we propose a theory, or try to understand a theory, we also propose, or try to understand, its logical implications; that is, all those statements which follow from it. But this, as we have just seen, is a hopeless task : there is an infinity of unforeseeable nontrivial statements belonging to the informative content of any theory, and an exactly corresponding infinity of statements belonging to its logical content. We can therefore never know or understand all the implications of any theory, or its full significance.”

Karl Popper, 'Unended Quest', Chapter 7.

DDB Which is very different to meaning that nothing could be understood. Only that nothing can be perfectly understood. Everything falls apart, people grow old and some die early. There is anger and people, desperate, at cross purposes. Yet the world is a better place. People have better, more productive lives. Dreams can be realised. How can both worlds be the same? They cannot, unless there is grace. With grace, forgiveness and redemption, all becomes possible. Love never dies, although the loved one passes. The misunderstood becomes clarified. Errors are forgotten. People hesitate, agonising over the right choice. Sometimes, it is better to choose what seems best at the time. And pay the consequences.

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“The concept of open society is based on the recognition that our understanding of the world is inherently imperfect. Those who claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth are making a false claim, and they can enforce it only by imposing their views on those who differ. The result of such intimidation is a closed society, in which freedom of thought and expression is suppressed. By contrast, if we recognize our fallibility, we can gain a better understanding of reality without ever attaining perfect knowledge. Acting on that understanding, we can create a society that is open to never-ending improvement. Open society falls short of perfection, but it has the great merit of assuring freedom of thought and speech and giving ample scope to experimentation and creativity.”

George Soros, 'Open Society – Reforming Global Capitalism'.

"But when we examine the character traits of a thinker, instead of the truth of his thought, we open up a Pandora's box of prejudices that makes it virtually impossible for us to be rational at all. Once our prejudices are released, it makes little difference what anyone says or does. Instead of appealing to reason, we give ourselves over to emotion. We know in advance that whatever certain people say or do is right, and whatever certain others say or do is wrong. Some people equate this sort of thing with criticism because it so often leads to condemnation. But it has nothing to do with criticism in my sense. It is, on the contrary, magic.

If there is just one thing that people who want to preserve open society should learn, it is that the traits of a thinker have no implications for the truth of his thought.”

Mark Amadeus Notturno, 'Education for an Open Society'. Can be found in “Science and the Open Society – The future of Karl Popper's Philosophy”.

I'm not tribal. Anyone can have good insights. George is right in this excerpt. I feel outside of this excerpt, George gets carried away in a harmful way. It doesn't mean this is wrong. For me, there is a concept of heaven where the faithful to God are still learning, still practicing. Few, if any, die knowing it all. So is heaven, then, an open society as George would have it? We reach nub when we discuss truth. An open society is an ideal for which we should aim. But not at the destruction of truth. George seems to want to go down a side road of good intentions, and actively legislate for openness, removing truth barriers to his vision.