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Does Popper Explain Historical Explanation?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
It is one of Karl Popper's great distinctions that he has an intense—some would say too intense—awareness of the history of philosophy within which he works. He knows not only its patterns, but also its comedies, and sometimes he plays rhetorically against their grain. He knows, for example, that the drive to consistency tends to turn philosophy into compositions of related doctrines, each seeming to involve the others. Religious belief, for example, tends to go with idealism and free will, religious scepticism with materialism and determinism. Popper does not believe in a religion, was for long some kind of a socialist, and takes his bearings from the philosophy of science. Aha! it seems we have located him. Here is a positivist, a materialist, probably a determinist. But of course he denies he is any of these things. Again, like many modern thinkers, he wants to extend scientific method not only to the social sciences but also to history. So far so familiar, until we discover that he regards nature as no less ‘cloudy’ than human societies.
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References
1 ‘On the Theory of the Objective Mind’, OK, p. 185.
2 It is odd that Popper should choose this principle as the way of distinguishing himself from Collingwood, since in PH, p. 138, he had stressed the affinity between social and natural science by suggesting that the physicist ‘quite often uses some kind of sympathetic imagination or intuition which may easily make him feel that he is intimately acquainted with even the “inside of the atoms”—with even their whims and prejudices.’ He adds, of course, that this intuition is the physicist's private affair.
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24 What account might one give, for example, of the recent case of a Maori woman who was hired as a contract killer, and who, after doing the job, returned to New Zealand, was overcome by religious conversion, and confessed, involving her principals in her downfall. Was her action rational, or irrational?
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