[lit-ideas] Re: Popper Mistreated
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:48:59 +0000 (GMT)
________________________________
From: "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx>
>Geary will realise there _is_ a difference. McEvoy was complaining that
Popper, an Austrian philosopher who wrote in German (a dialect thereof) is
often mistreated by Anglophone academics. >
Not quite. After his Logik der Forschung, which was translated from German to
English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper's books were written in
English and translated to German. This list of books written in English
includes the two volume The Open Society, The Poverty of Historicism, the
collection Conjectures and Refutations, the three volume Postscript to The
Logic of Scientific Discovery [Realism and The Aim of Science, The Open
Universe, Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics], Objective Knowledge and
The Self and Its Brain, as well as Popper's parts of his two volume Schilpp and
his The Myth of the Framework, Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem andThe World
of Parmenides. So any idea that problems of translation explain his work being
mis-interpreted by Anglophones is hard to sustain. Nor is the explanation
Popper's lack of clarity in his English expression, as he is widely recognised
to write more clearly in English than perhaps any
other Anglophone philosopher of the last or present century (perhaps the only
other who wrote as clearly was Bertrand Russell; and unlike philosophers like
A.J. Ayer, who is also known for his clarity, Popper's clarity does not so
easily disappear as you question what exactly they are saying comes to).
So it is, at least in Popper's case, a mistake to say
>In both cases they are considering mis-treatments, in
English, about what these two 'fellows' said in a lingo other than English.>
Perhaps you are confusing Popper with Wittgenstein, where some of the
translation from the German may well leave much to be desired [the Pears and
McGuinness translation of the Tractatus for example, as I recall Chris Bruce
may have indicated some time ago]?
The kind of 'translation' Popper suffers from Anglophone academics is perhaps
more similar to the way you often translate subject headings into your own
idiosyncratic variants, though of course the consequences are more serious when
we are not merely 'translating' subject headings but ideas and theses:- in
another post on Routledge we had an entry that 'translated' Popper's thesis
that 'a statement may be regarded as scientific to the extent that it is
falsifiable by observation' into the claim that “Popper concluded that the
defining feature of
the empirical methods of science is that statements are always subject to
falsification by new data.” This is, logically, a very different claim - and a
radical mistranslation or 'idiosyncratic variant' of Popper's 'demarcation
criterion' for science. For Popper, the claim my car is now parked out in the
street may be regarded as a 'scientific' statement insofar as going out and
observing the street could falsify the claim (if the car is not observed there,
then the claim is falsified by observation) and it is scientific irrespective
of issues of "new data".
This kind of 'mis-translation' by 'Anglophones' is (I suggest) not because they
are bad at German, or because Popper is bad at writing, but because they are
bad at reading and understanding. So bad that one wonders how they achieved
their academic positions or were allowed to get into print in seemingly
authoritative works like Routledge.
Donal
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