What’s inside Karl Popper’s essay “In Search of a Better World”
“Knowledge is the pursuit of truth… It is not a quest for certainty.”
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson bemoaned, “I hope of a future where the truth is what influences people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.” In her insightful essay on thinking vs. knowing from nearly fifty years ago, Hannah Arendt stated that “the need of reason is not driven by the hunt for truth but by the need for meaning,” which she believed to be the root of the issue.
The need for the certainty of ready-made meaning among those unwilling to engage in the work of critical thinking necessary for arriving at truth—truth measured by its correspondence with reality and not by its correspondence with one’s personal agendas, comfort zones—makes this distinction between truth and meaning crucial, especially today as political propaganda and the “alternative facts” establishment manipulate a public that would rather know than think.
The prominent Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper (July 28, 1902-September 17, 1994) focused his final book, In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years, on this crucial skill of distinguishing between truth and certitude.
Popper claims: All living things are looking for a better world. Everyone is always active, including people, animals, plants, and unicellular organisms. They’re attempting to make their condition better, or at the very least prevent it from getting worse. Every living thing is obsessed with the work of problem-solving all the time. These issues result from the organism’s own evaluations of its state and those of its surroundings, both of which it strives to better. We can see that life, even at the level of the unicellular creature, introduces something entirely novel to the environment that did not previously exist issues and active efforts to address them; judgments and values; trial and error.
According to Popper, since the recognition of error is essential to the process of problem-solving, its correction, or truth, is a crucial element of our effort to improve.
Without a doubt, the pursuit of truth is one of life’s greatest achievements in the course of its lengthy quest for a better world.
Popper continues, recalling Carl Sagan’s conviction that science plays a crucial role in democracy. All living things make mistakes, including ourselves. In fact, it is difficult to predict every unintended consequence of our activities. Our best chance in this situation is science, whose main method is error correction.
In reflecting on the eighty-seven years of his life—”a time of two pointless global wars and of criminal dictatorships”—Popper describes how the often problematic but ultimately exponential reach for a better world had developed:
We, the people of the western democracies, live in a social system that is better (because more open to reform) and more just than any other in recorded history, despite everything and despite the fact that we have had so many mistakes. The greatest urgency is for more advancements. However, changes that give the state more authority frequently have the opposite effect of what we want.
In a lecture from 1982 that is part of the volume, Popper notes that we frequently fail to distinguish between the pursuit of truth and the declaration of certainty.
The pursuit of truth, or the hunt for demonstrably accurate, explanatory explanations, is the essence of learning.
It is not a quest for knowledge. Humans make mistakes. All of human knowledge is uncertain and subject to error. As a result, we must make a clear distinction between truth and certainty. The fact that we all make mistakes means that we must constantly fight against them and that, despite our best efforts, we can never be entirely positive that we haven’t. Therefore, to combat the wrong, the mistake, one must seek for the unvarnished truth and make every effort to identify and eradicate falsehoods. This is what scientific research aims to do. Thus, we might state that our goal as scientists is to discover more truth—objective truth, intriguing truth, and truth that is easier to understand. It is unreasonable to aim for certainty.
Since we can never be certain of anything, searching for certainty is simply not worthwhile. However, searching for truth is worthwhile, and we primarily do this by looking for errors so that we can make corrections.
Popper presents a description and rebuke of elegant sharpness in a sentiment of piercing pertinence today, as a barrage of “alternative facts” attempts to gaslight an uncritical public:
If a theory or statement matches reality, it is considered to be true. There must be a clear distinction between truth and certainty.
He issues the following warning while criticising relativistic views of truth, which see reality as “what is accepted; or what is put out by society; or by the majority; or by my interest group; or perhaps by television”.
Behind [Kant’s] “ancient and famous question” “What is truth?” lurks a philosophical relativism that could pave the way for terrible deeds like a propaganda of lies driving men to hatred.
Relativism is a betrayal of human decency and reason.
It is helpful to review Arendt’s distinction between truth and meaning in this context because meaning can be relative and is shaped by one’s subjective interpretation, which is dependent on beliefs and subject to manipulation. In contrast, truth is absolute and has a binary correspondence with reality: a premise either reflects reality or it does not. Truth is not the domain of certainty; meaning is. Therefore, the very idea of a “alternative fact,” which manipulates certainty at the expense of truth, is the kind of criminal relativism that Popper so vehemently warns against. He says it happens because “the notions of truth and certainty are mixed-up.” Though it can never influence the facts, propaganda is always in the business of manipulating certainty. The great statement by Arendt that “no matter how thick the web of untruth that an experienced liar has to produce, it can never be large enough… to cover the immensity of factuality” was made a decade earlier in her relevant book on defactualization in politics.
Salvador Dali’s artwork is featured in a special edition of Alice in Wonderland. Popper contends that no other species possesses the capacity to determine truth by comparing our theories to reality and applying critical reasoning. This capacity was referred to as “the will to question” by Bertrand Russell, who may have been the twentieth century’s greatest patron saint of reason, and who praised it as our strongest line of defence against propaganda a generation before him.
According to Popper, the need to hone that ability drove the cultural evolution of our species. We created a language that contains true and false statements, which gave rise to criticism, which in turn sparked a new stage of natural selection.
He claims: Critical, cultural selection amplifies natural selection and partially supplants it. The latter enables us to actively seek out and correct our mistakes, as well as to consciously assess one theory’s merits in comparison to another. Without logical critique that is used to advance the pursuit of truth, knowledge cannot exist.
However, Popper asserts that science itself should also be subject to this reasonable critique. He writes that scientism, a sort of certainty equally destructive to truth, is not the solution to relativism.
I am not a supporter of scientism, despite my enthusiasm for scientific understanding. Because scientism adamantly asserts the authority of scientific knowledge, I do not accept any authority, and I have always opposed dogmatism. This is especially true of science. I disagree with the idea that a scientist must have faith in his theory. As E. M. Forster famously put it, “I do not believe in believing,” and I certainly do not believe in belief in science. I think that, at most, there are a few circumstances in ethics when belief is appropriate. For instance, I think that cruelty is the worst evil and that objective truth is a value, that is, an ethical value, possibly the greatest value there is.
Complement this section of Carl Sagan’s In Search of a Better World with Adrienne Rich’s essay on what “truth” really means, Descartes’ twelve timeless principles of critical thinking, and Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit.
