Today, I started reading a very interesting book on morality, tolerance, democracy, and totalitarianism.
It's The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper, recommended by nostr:nprofile1qqswgcxtzjagjaux5e6cc9f7hy274f2ued5ps9fagl64a08pqxa4emgpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtckww6wl
You can read or download it from here:
archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.59272
Popper is pretty based for an empiricist, although democracy is not required for freedom and actually works counter to it. Statism of all kinds are a form of tyranny.
Ruth is giving me too much credit, I just provided the “tolerance paradox” concept by Popper.
Empiricists are based by definition, meaning only those that do not deviate from Popper’s falsification method, then of course their view on statism may be just contradictions and biases.
But I very much think that Ludwig Wittgenstein actually won the famous “fire poker” argument against Popper.
Yeah, Popperian falsificationism is the best empirical approach to science, but it is insufficient when it comes to a priori reasoning. Popper really had a knack for understanding the fallibility of people, including taking any other person's assertions on faith or assuming that a definition was THE authoritative definition. But to call all a priori reasoning trivial in the sense of NEVER telling us anything directly about the real world is absurd, not to mention the argument defeats itself.
One must only be aware of the tenuousness of definitions and context, and aware of the need for independent logical verification and independent empirical uncertainty and falsification to achieve a sufficient "criticalness" to their rationalism.
I haven't read enough to know about the fire poker argument, I should like to though. Sounds intriguing!
I completely agree 😄.
Well, the fire poker argument was on absolute ethical norms: Popper said there were, LVW said that there weren’t.
So by what you’re saying you’re pretty much already aware of how it went: Popper trolled Wittgenstein, and he got (reasonably) mad and stormed away. Which is a win in my eyes, since Popper was not intending to collaborate, just doing silly nit-picking.
Knowledge (scientific or not) requires a priori assumptions, denying that not all valuable information comes from reasoning is… silly in itself... and easily falsified.
Thanks for the book
