03.29.09
Popper’s anomalous position as ‘methodological guru’
Laws Of History And Popper On Historicism
One of the mysteries of current science culture is the way Karl Popper is taken as the methodological ‘take me to your leader’ guru.
His views, while of the greatest interest, do not square with the average sense in which science is taken. In fact, Popper appears rather uncomfortably in the series of critics of scientific methodologies, with Feyerbend and Lakatos at the start and Fuller a generation later.
Popper is famous for his critique of ‘historicism’, a term with a complex history, and this is really a critique of Marx. Now, everyone applauds this critique, but then fails to realize that Popper is essentially saying that a ‘science of history’ is highly problematical, and the next kid on the block in trouble is ‘evolution’.
In fact, Popper is ‘notorious’ for his initial swipe at Darwinism as unfalsifiable, a position he is said to have retracted, as his bio is airbrushed here.
In any case, Popper’s critique is one starting point for the eonic model, and the resolution in terms of a perspective on the antinomies of Kant is the right answer to the ‘historical inevitability’ argument against scientific determinism misapplied to social subjects, and we must suspect to biological subjects.