In conversation with David Deutsch
When one of your firm scholarly influences is Jacob Bronowski, it is hard to avoid seeing the world in large, encompassing strokes.
So David Deutsch starts early… with Us! All the way back to the beginning of our species in the Great Rift Valley. It is a history of pain, suffering and death – sheer horror in every waking and sleeping moment. These people were family. They birthed us through generations. We remain genetically alike in every way, and yet completely different in the only way that actually matters. That we escaped their horror, that we survived and can now look back upon them in disbelief from our high-water mark of progress and comfort, is something only explainable by reference to Karl Popper.
The problem was always knowledge. Through all that terror and pain, those ancestors of ours all wanted the same thing: to know! They wanted to know how to avoid large predators, how to avoid illness, how to hunt more efficiently, how to build better shelters and stay warm and dry. In every aspect they wanted to improve their lives – they were desperate to know! And yet despite this life-or-death motivation, they failed – almost universally – to do so.
From the anthropological record we can now see that change happened so rarely, that the vast majority of people died in societies that were technologically the same as those that they were born into. The world never changed. They lived lives of complete stagnation and stasis – nothing got any better, in any way: “For thousands of years at a time, the rhythm, the content of human life was unchanging”.
But it didn’t have to be this way. How hospitable any given environment is, is simply a matter of knowledge. Our ancestors had the same ability to make progress as we do today, they just didn’t know how to. So there is a mystery of sorts here that needs answering: why did this capacity to create new knowledge sit largely unused for so long, at such horrific cost? Why are we the only survivors and why did all of our cousin species die out?
That answer was cultural, it was carved into their traditions. What they inherited and lived within involved a very common idea about knowledge: that it comes from authorities such as tribal leaders, community elders, from religion or superstition. These were societies finely tuned to avoid change, and therefore also finely tuned to embrace error.
To the rescue came empiricism – the idea that knowledge instead comes from the senses and from observation. It wasn’t true, but it was incredibly helpful. By thinking about knowledge in this way it became possible for people to reject those traditional authorities that had held back progress for so long.
The next problem was predictable. The rejection of authority was a hugely important development, but it also wasn’t an altogether new thing. It was actually quite common for authorities to be challenged and removed, the trouble is they were then replaced by new, different authorities, continuing the mistakes of the previous ones. Deutsch quotes from a poem by William Butler Yeats:
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
Something else was needed, a revolution that would put knowledge at the centre of things and not people. Empiricism wasn’t going to do it, but it did have instinct on its side. It seemed to make sense. Somehow, in our bones, it feels like knowledge comes to us directly from the world we see, touch, feel and experience. To learn about something, you only need to look at it long enough, and through that observation comes knowledge. But this needs an explanation – something that describes how truth radiates outwards from objects and then into people.
And in searching for this, it doesn’t help that, as Deutsch tells us, “the vast majority of things that you see from when you open your eyes in the morning, to when you fall asleep at night, you have never seen before”. Sure, there is often familiarities about them, but that’s all there is. You may see the same sun rise each day, but it is never exactly the same.
To the salvation of empiricism came induction – the theory that the unseen resembles the seen, and that the future resembles the past. But David Hume was quick to shoot this down. Just like with empiricism, our instincts fill-out the details. It feels correct. Hume’s objection was simple: why should a sequence of propositions inform us in anyway about the next proposition? Why should the next premise be deduced from the former?
David Deutsch has a problem with the software in his phone. His voice-command program – SIRI – comes to life when you say its name (as it is intended to). Appropriate to the nature of his work, Deutsch says the word theory a lot. And perhaps due to his accent, his intonation, or errors in the design, SIRI is constantly mistaking theory for its name; then springing into action and asking David what he would like it to do. The more that SIRI makes this mistake, the more SIRI thinks that it isn’t – that when David says theory he is really saying SIRI. The program keeps confirming its error.
This is why induction doesn’t work. Just like SIRI, the only reason that we think that we are seeing or hearing the same things is because we already have a theory within our minds about what those things look like and sound like. A filter of importance that focuses on regularities to the detriment of the vast majority of other possibilities. Induction is self-confirming, and therefore also wrong.
What Karl Popper showed, was that in all cases what actually comes first is the theory, not the observation. Still people had – and often still hold – a strange attachment to empiricism and induction. Both were wrong and invalid, but scientists and philosophers continued to entertain the idea that perhaps we do them anyway, and perhaps they work regardless. So Popper would have to stretch-out toward a fairly unreasonable standard of proof. He would have to show that not only do such theories not work, but that we are not actually doing them at all; we only think that we are.
So how do we get started? How do we begin finding truth and knowledge? With two theories that conflict with each other, or with something that we want to improve (a factual theory conflicting with a moral theory). In short, we start with a problem – unjustified knowledge and a problem. What we do next is a little uncomfortable to say out loud, because it feels deeply unscientific: we guess! We hope for a solution, or in Popper’s words, a conjecture. It is only then that observation has its place, through testing our conjecture against reality.
Why does it have to be this way? “Well”, Deutsch calmly explains, “there is nothing else.”
These conjectures need explanations to go with them. It is the quality of the explanation that makes a conjecture more or less likely to be true, or even worth testing. Then occasionally, we hit epistemological gold. We produce certain conjectures that have generality – that reach into other aspects of knowledge. And it is from this that we leap forward and make rapid progress.
So much of philosophy and reason has involved the search for epistemological bedrock. That one solid foundation from which all other knowledge can be built. Again our instincts are the problem here. It feels like knowledge builds upward upon itself, and so must also start from certain key first principles – a place that constitutes the groundwork, something unchanging and true. This is a continuing mistake. It depends of course on that foundation being true (and beyond criticism), but also on it containing all other possible knowledge. It is a retrograde mindset that seeks to drag us back to religion, to tradition and to holy books. And as Deutsch explains, every existing claim to a foundation has so far proven to be false, all the way down to mathematics.
It is at this point in the process that postmodernism leaps onto the stage and declares that objective truth therefore cannot exist, that there is no way of judging one’s theory to be any more correct than any other. And they do have a very slight point. What the postmodernists call truth – “justified true belief” – really doesn’t exist. It is language again causing us problems. Knowledge is never justified by anything. We are always likely to be wrong, and “there is no limit to how misled we can be”.
But to do away with absolute truth, isn’t to do away with truth itself. Deutsch uses the example of wanting to visit a shop but being told that it is unfortunately closed. This is a claim that is capable of being true or false, the shop might be closed as you are told, or it might be open. Perhaps you then go and see for yourself and it does in fact look open. Then you get to the door and it is locked. Perhaps it is actually closed? But wait, you can see people inside. Are they customers, or perhaps just employees doing maintenance? It is easy to be misled, and you may be confused, but that doesn’t mean that there is no truth to the matter. The shop really is either open or closed.
This is where Popper made all the difference. Seeking truth boils down to correcting errors and solving problems – and there will always be new errors and new problems.
And this is one of those generality-rich conjectures, a conjecture that has reach. If someone is claiming to have authority about knowledge, then they are inevitably also claiming authority about politics. It might sound like an overstatement at first, but once it sinks-in it becomes unavoidable that “the doctrine that the truth is manifest, is the source of all tyranny”. All assertions of infallibilism lead to violence because “if you are obviously right, then someone who contradicts you is obviously wrong”. This false surety licenses the use of force – why bother to argue, debate and convince someone when you already know beyond any doubt that they are not correct?
As he did for epistemology, Karl Popper shifted everything that people thought they knew about politics and democracy. Just as we cannot predict the future growth of knowledge, we also cannot know who makes a good leader, or what makes a good policy, in advance of it happening.
In science, Popper changed the question that everyone was asking from how do we get to theories from observations? To instead how can we improve on the theories we have? In politics he changed it from who should rule? To how do we remove bad leaders and bad policies without violence? And so he starts again in the only place that we can: with a problem. And democracy – through consent of the voting public – is the best way to solve this problem.
Just as with epistemology, the way that our democratic systems work just seems to pass most people by, even those of us lucky enough to live and vote within them. Our language gets in the way again. To counter this, Deutsch thinks it would be helpful with science and philosophy to replace our common use of the word theory with misconception: the misconception of evolution, the big bang misconception… Perhaps if we did this for the official titles of our politicians we wouldn’t slip into error as much as we do: Presidential Mistake Joe Biden, the Misconceived Senatorial Candidate for New Hampshire, Congressional Blunder Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Error-prone Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. And newly minted policies would read as constant reminders of their fallibility: The Faulty Stimulus Package, The Miscalculated Climate Policy, The Flawed Defence Bill, or The Delusional Health Care Plan.
If it is all about error correction, then the best systems of government are those that error-correct the fastest and most efficiently. But with this comes an odd truism: systems that are good at correcting mistakes also make more mistakes. More small mistakes that is! They methodically seek out missteps, they loudly challenge and criticise everything, and so they also might seem a little messy, complicated and unpleasant. This is what democracy is, our best attempt – so far – at political error-correction.
Perhaps it is because most people still don’t understand this, or perhaps because they simply lack the stomach for it, that a strange adoration for authoritarianism exists within democratic populations today. It is a fad of our age and a luxury of progress. By suppressing criticism and resisting change, oppressive regimes can often appear a lot cleaner and more harmonious, with everyone pulling in the same direction. But they also entrench error. And so sooner or later a problem will arise that requires criticism to find and creativity to solve, a problem whereby everyone turns out to be pulling in the wrong direction, and then – with criticism and creativity suppressed – the whole thing falls over. As you would expect, most authoritarian regimes are incredibly short lived.
For all of this to work, however, we need something more from democracy than just its name. We need a system that makes a sharp movement from elections to governance, with the only meaningful restraint being the next election. Popular ideas like compromise and consensus belong in the dust bin. A compromise is by definition something that nobody really wants, and a consensus means that no one is ever proven wrong. Once elected our leaders need to be able to actually govern and implement the policies that they campaigned on. It is only then that we can judge their success and choose to vote them out at the next election if we deem them to have failed.
Of course on the other side of this, politicians tend to love compromise, consensus and proportional representation. It means that they can avoid being held responsible for their mistakes and evade accountability by saying, in all honesty, that “not only does the buck not stop here, but it doesn’t stop anywhere, because there was nobody who advocated that in the first place.”
It is worth taking a deep breath at this point, and avoiding the popular worry that modern democracy is – somehow – at risk. That under a wash of fake news, disinformation and polarisation, our systems of government are witnessing a unique type of stress, or otherwise completely failing. For Deutsch, this is not a crisis of democracy, but a crisis of hyperbole where fairly trivial concerns are being elevated as threats to civilization:
People seem to like the idea that they are living in a time of momentous challenge, where the stakes are exactly like, or analogous to, what the stakes were in the Second World War, where it was good against evil, where if evil wins it is the end of civilization. And therefore, fighting against that is glorious and it is worthwhile, it gives meaning to life. And so the more you can talk in terms of these hyperboles, the more life seems worthwhile. It’s as if making rapid, quiet, peaceful progress, which is what’s actually going on all the time right now, is not exciting enough for people when they are in political mode.
All of our failure, including this one, is due to lack of knowledge. And so it is only here that our species is confronted by existential crises. There is no limit (other than the laws of physics) to what we can solve, shape and create – in fact our very survival relies upon this. Enemies of civilisation really do exist, and they are out there hoping to bring everything we have to a sudden end; but they also have one important thing in common: they are wrong! They seek to supress knowledge, not to cultivate it – they try to avoid problems, rather than to solve them.
There is nothing inevitable about our continued existence. If we want to avoid the fate of our cousin species we will have to work at it, and we will have to move fast. This means making our mistakes as quickly as possible, because it is the only way to stay ahead of those bad actors, as well as new – unforeseen – problems. Rapid open-ended progress is not only possible, but necessary.
What we need is a novel type of cultural heritage, one that values only the creation of new knowledge: what Karl Popper called a tradition of criticism.
*** The Popperian Podcast #1 – David Deutsch – ‘Karl Popper and the Beginning of Infinity’ (The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #1 – David Deutsch – ‘Karl Popper and the Beginning of Infinity’ (libsyn.com)).