David Deutsch: evaluation

Transcript context

…But say when I read Popper, if I look at the areas I know best that he wrote on, Poverty of Historicism, Open Society & Its Enemies, I find I agree with a very high percentage of his conclusions, so I’m inclined to like him, but I don’t think those are great books. I think he’s too obsessed with rebutting crude Marxism. He’s very bad at steel-manning his opponents. On a lot of the pages, I just don’t find that much insight, even though I’m very sympathetic toward the conclusions. Maybe he’s just not that great a thinker, and that’s why most philosophers don’t fall in love with him. I would believe that, if the critiques that I read of him bore any relation to his theory. The critiques of him are extremely crude and basically misunderstand everything. It’s funny you should say — I think that he’s very good, much too good, at steel-manning opponents. This relates to your first criticism that he’s too obsessed with refuting not just Marxism, but every bad philosophical theory that has gone before: I think he puts it into its best possible form and then spends pages and pages and pages going into every possible good aspect of that theory. He often says he’s supposed to be the 20th century’s greatest critic of Marxism, but he spends pages and pages praising Marx — and the same with Plato. I think he would have done better to explain his own theory more and not spend so much time refuting others. On the other hand, it is his philosophy, it’s his philosophical position, that there is no such thing as a positive argument for something. You have conjectures and then you have criticism of their opponents, of the opposing conjectures. You don’t have positive arguments for your conjectures. It’s a bit like you said: You were criticizing me a while ago, saying something like I was only putting forward negative arguments. Well, that’s what Popper would have us do, because the position that we hold ourselves, and are putting forward or advocating, we’re ready to abandon. The thing that an argument consists of is, on the one hand, a conjecture, and another hand, a criticism. So you’re saying, “The standard way of looking at so-and-so has got these flaws? I have this conjecture which doesn’t have those flaws.” OK, that’s the beginning of an argument. Then someone can say, “Ah, but it does,” or they could say, “It may not have those flaws, but it has these other flaws.” OK, so that’s how an argument can go. It never should go along the lines of, “This must be true because so-and-so.” Because that is an appeal to authority, appeal to justification, and so on. Popper is of the opinion, and so am I, that there are no justifications and there are no authorities. Which is Popper’s best book, in your opinion?…

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