By the time I entered grad school, in the mid-80s, Karl Popper seemed to be largely disposed of. The zeitgeist felt against him. I wasn’t in a philosophy department, but insofar as such questions do, and most self-consciously, in those days, did bear upon the wider debates in the social sciences and humanities, there was certainly acknowledgement of Popper holding a certain place. The overall gesture of The Open Society and Its Enemies, I think, was appreciated – in that slightly weary way that it was always good to be against Nazis. But wasn’t there a certain sense that he’d carried things just a bit far. And, in any case, at the root of those arguments were the more basic ones about the character of science, evidence, knowledge and truth. And, hadn’t those debates all been carried by others: Wittgenstein and Kuhn, particularly?
By the time I was a grad student, it felt to me that the consensus verdict of the academy’s collective judgment was that Popper was a kind of noble, but failed, effort. In the end, wasn’t he upholding positivism, with its implicit devotion to the very impossible Truth that had been so thoroughly discredited by the reigning wisdom of the various relativist schools of scholarship? And didn’t that fruitless and doomed clinging to an outdated and exhausted philosophy carry in it, like secret assailants stealthily stowed away in a wooden horse, the return of the Scientist as high priest of Truth: the return, in fact, of modernity as Holocaust, the Enlightenment as domination? Wasn’t Popper in fact the fading prophet of rigid hierarchy, authoritarian science, public policy by the fiat of allegedly benevolent experts? This was certainly the impression of Popper that I absorbed at that time.
These considerations, of course, have relevance for debates over MIFO governance, dialogue and organization in more than one way. Certainly, a major driver in debates relating to MIFO has been a concern for the need to more thoroughly integrate greater diversity into decision making processes, tapping into a more fertile cross section of opinion and discussion generally. This was in large part because it has become increasingly acknowledged that public or private policy and the risks that it may entail cannot be determined by any strictly logical formula. What risks and choices are acceptable, at the end of the day, comes down to value judgments. No scientist, no expert, has any privileged insight into which of the available options are the best for any organization or community, much less for the larger society. Science can inform such decision making; it cannot determine it.
As important as that is to the debates over organizational governance generally, and organizational communication in particular, there is an even more fundamental concern here: if the effectiveness of MIFO processes, which, as will be discussed at greater length in postings to come, constitute the potential of a dramatic change in the direction, form and practice of organizational administration and management, and will inevitably present serious challenges around matters of legitimacy and transparency, how are the merits of such dramatic change to be evaluated? Scientific method may not be the only valid consideration in such an evaluation, but can it be simply dismissed? There is certainly a problem with an excessive focus, in the evaluation of organizational governance, on perhaps too narrow a concern for what is quantifiable and measurable. However, a science of some kind cannot be dismissed: any legitimate and accountable use of stockholders’ or taxpayers’ money has to demonstrate tangible benefit. Especially in the public sector, value for money may not be the highest consideration, but wanton waste and/or incompetence are surely not defendable. Again, science may not have the last word, but it must be heard.
Finally, though it may strike some involved in the workaday tangles of making contemporary organization work as a tad esoteric, if we are concerned with MIFO governance specifically as, in significant part, a kind of archipelago of fora for dialogue – among teams, departments, partners, governments, customers, NGOs, citizens, etc., depending upon the context – then, surely, in any re-evaluation of Popper we must not neglect those noble, but supposedly failed, arguments about the nature of an open society. And, while Popper’s concern was primarily directed to public policy and governance, as many second generation theorists of knowledge management, like Mark McElroy, argue, the same principles of the open society, applied to commercial organizations, invoking the ideal of the open enterprise, are just as important for the success of MIFO in the private sector. The mere existence of those fora does not, in itself, guarantee or demonstrate commercial success or the existence of democracy; it is what goes on within them that tells the tale.
Though I went right through my graduate studies and well beyond them without giving too much thought to the fate of poor old Karl, I have to admit there was always something, some inkling, which kept nagging at me. Even in my rather crude, and all too mediated, understanding of his ideas, there were a couple notions that I kept finding myself being drawn back to, despite the apparent definitiveness of the verdict on the part of my intellectual mentors. These were the ideas of falsifiability and historicism. There won’t be occasion to address the latter head-on here – though, I expect it will arise in passing.
For Popper, falsifiability marked the separation of science from other forms of knowledge. Contrary to the relativist critics I recall from my grad school days, this did not entail some privileging of science as a capital “S” science with claims to superior knowledge. Rather, it merely made the obvious point that if science were to mean something particular, if it was to be distinguished from other forms of knowledge – and if not what was the point of even using the word, ideological rhetoric aside – then something had to demarcate what was and wasn’t science.
I’ve never been able to see beyond the need for the idea of falsifiability. In an era when the stature of science has been so diminished in public esteem, it is hardly surprising that much gets away with passing itself off as science. But, again, if science means something there must be some litmus test. For Popper, that was falsifiability. To be scientific, a theory must have built into it, arising from its own internal logic, the very conditions required to prove it false. Popper was greatly influenced by Einstein; here was an immensely abstract thinker in the process of overthrowing the accepted consensus on physics for the previous two centuries and yet, notwithstanding the theoretical density of his arguments, he knew and identified the practical physical experiments that needed to be conducted to create the conditions for falsifying his theory. Indeed, if the Eddington expedition’s eclipse experiment had not resulted in the bending of the starlight passing near the sun, Einstein’s theory of relativity would indeed have been proven false.
I think of the widespread belief, today, that there’s consensus on some overarching scientific theory of global warming. There, of course, though is nothing scientific about it at all. It’s more like a rolling improv show in which any new oddity is somehow woven into the central narrative in some patchwork method that keeps the thrust of the idea moving forward. Now, none of this is to pass judgment on the truth or untruth of the claims as seen from a God’s-eye point of view. But whatever God does or doesn’t know, it’s not science because there are never any conditions for falsification. Would sudden worldwide temperature drops disprove the overall warming of the climate? No, just as overall temperature rises doesn’t prove it. In the absence of some testable conditions, the result of which, as suggested by the internal logic of the theory, could disprove that theory, it doesn’t meet the conditions of being science.
Now, of course, one can make a case for a public policy that takes seriously the prospect of global warming on the basis of work that actually is scientific. Such work, though, is much more focused and modest: dealing with the melt rate of glaciers, the reading of sediment samples from fjords, and hypotheses on the impact of sun spot activity. None of that, though, makes the widespread, vernacular, media-driven idea of a theory of global warming into something scientific.
As alluded to above, though, taking falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science does not privilege scientific knowledge nor ennoble the role of the scientist in society. In fact, quite the contrary! The principle of falsifiability requires that anything that is scientific is always open to being tested. Now, at a certain point, in Popper’s phrasing, a theory may be taken to have proved its mettle – an endless, exhaustive testing is not the point. But, at no time is any scientific proposition considered beyond testing. The testing test is that anyone can find out how to do it; can actually do it; and, if doing it, will reliably reproduce the expected results. So, anyone, any time, can test. Furthermore, new tests can always be devised. And, in the case of the eventual emergence of competing theories and propositions, a return to determined testing is required. For Popper, commitment to any proposition that does not meet these conditions of falsifiability constitutes nothing more than mere dogma.
Therefore, those who have dismissed Popper as promoting a positivist science based upon the presumption of an ultimate truth which can only be accessed by an ordained cult of master experts called scientists have completely missed his point. Indeed, in reading Popper it is completely dumbfounding how anyone could possibly read him this way.
First, the falsifiability requirement means that any scientific proposition, no matter how reliable, how thoroughly tested, is always in some long view only tentative: it’s merely waiting to be disproved. Think again of Einstein’s dethroning of Newton: for generation after generation, people were born, lived and died believing that Newton had solved the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. (Kant said that Newton had gazed into the mind of God. And, as Alexander Pope put it: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.”) There has never been a more successful scientific theory. But it too, eventually, fell. It’s not that Popper does, or needs to, conclude on the existence of absolute truth. The point is that that’s not the domain of science. Even if the historical unfolding of our scientific process did hit upon some absolute, unassailable truth, God may know it, but we never would. Any time we treated any such proposition as the absolute truth, it would no longer be a scientific proposition. In this very real sense, just as Popper dismissed the historicists (see, told you) for their delusion that there could ever be an end to history, so, for Popper, there can never be an end to science – as long of course as it remains science per se: i.e. based upon falsifiability.
So, to present Popper as some obsolete old positivist bent on the eventual transparency of an absolute Truth is a complete misrepresentation. Plus, there’s an additional point that is too easily overlooked in all of this that needs to be emphasized. In the principle of falsifiability, Popper is also rejecting any notion of science as an esoteric practice, rooted in any kind of cabalistic knowledge. Indeed, part of the reason for his rejection of induction as scientific method (besides its simple unworkability) is the degree to which it lends itself to the filtering of initiates based upon approved or disapproved experience. The principle of falsifiability, with its basic testing requirement, leaves the practice of science open to anyone. No special initiation or recondite rites are required. Any person of reasonable intelligence with a critical faculty and capable of following a logical process, is able to participate. Furthermore, that very same person, with those same qualities, not only is capable of participating in science, but is capable of assessing and judging science. There is nothing here that suggests the promotion of scientists as some secular priesthood.
Rather, Popper quite explicitly argues that as knowledge – rooted in critical and rational thought – scientific knowledge is no different than any other. Yes, its discovery has methodological qualities that make it distinctly science, but as a form of reason it’s merely an extension of reason and knowledge in the general society. The open society, for Popper, is the society in which knowledge and critical reason learn from science, not one in which science is reduced to a dogma and scientists elevated to a priesthood administering that dogma. Far from making a fetish of science and scientists, Popper’s logic of scientific discovery and his philosophy of science bring science into the domain of public scrutiny – makes it accessible, in practice and judgment, to the democratic citizen.
Popper democratizes science – a proposition that would seem pretty odd to the postmodernist types who have taken such comfort in consigning him to the dustbin of history. I won’t even make the slightest gesture toward explaining how that state of affairs came about. However, to wrap up this rather lengthy posting, I will come back to the matters of relevance for the concerns of MIFO and organizational governance and communications.
First of all, what does this suggest for the science of MIFO? At the most obvious level, a passion for constant measurement and ranking does not in itself constitute science. Indeed, it’s in some danger of lapsing precisely into inductive thinking. Evidence is always important, but whether it’s being used scientifically, where it’s leading to universally legitimate statements (however tentative all such statement must inevitably be), is quite another matter. Induction all too easily lends itself to the endless accumulation of evidence to support a tautology in the absence of falsifiability. If we’re only measuring for indicators that support our presupposed expectations we are ill-prepared for the surprises that life has a way of delivering. All such measurements, if only based upon inductive presumptions, can all too easily turn into a house of collapsing cards.
On the more positive side, though, the most dynamic expressions of MIFO put a great emphasis on the experimentalist and nimble nature of the new arrangements. In Poppers version of scientific method one finds a vision of knowledge and theory-building that lends itself (dovetails?) quite elegantly to these notions and practices of organizational governance. In Popper’s version of scientific discovery, MIFO finds both a tentative confirmation that indeed it may be moving in just the right direction at the experimentalist level, while also offering a way to rethink the inductionist tendencies that, if left unexamined, could undermine not only the new organizational governance, but the popular legitimacy of 21st century democracy itself.
Finally, that brings us to the other two points raised above for MIFO and its heavy emphasis on organizational communication, with its distinctly dialogical dimensions, which can be conveniently considered together for my purposes, here. The opportunity provided by the emerging organizational communication to elude the kind of technocratic policymaking, public and private, so romanticized in the mid-20th century, through an expansive and dynamic integration of stakeholders, including the public itself, into value-laden policy decisions – such as those related to agreeing on acceptable risk and the allocation of scarce resources – is not only based upon the opening up of that archipelago of dialogic spaces. It is equally based upon the capacity of their participants to exercise the critical reason that transforms such spaces into the enabling fora of democratic citizenship and organizational dynamism. As we’ve already seen, contrary to widespread misrepresentation, Popper’s falsifiable and testable version of science tames the authoritarian impulse. The scientists are given their rightful place as the custodians of a special form of knowledge discovery, but in the very process are also integrated into a democratizing process by which science is made transparent and accountable to the general public.
This democratization inherent in Popper’s notion of science, though, isn’t restricted to accessibility of scientific knowledge. It extends to the contours of a model for critical reason that breathes life into the very notion of the open society: a society in which decisions are made upon evidence and arguments, that invite debate and diverse contribution, and which eschew esoteric shamanistic and cabalistic tendencies in favour of rational processes open for all to examine, assess, criticize and challenge. And, as we’ve seen, the same principles apply to the open enterprise of commercial MIFO. At the core of Popper’s project for a rational science is the promise of democratic citizenship and dynamic organizational governance. Certainly Popper’s logic of scientific knowledge is no panacea for all potential obstacles posed in society or organization. However, the contribution that his legacy offers far exceeds the appalling neglect and misinformed dismissal that has characterized his treatment by trendy relativists over recent decades.
April 11th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
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By the time I entered grad school, in the mid-80s, Karl Popper seemed to be largely disposed of. The zeitgeist felt against him…..