JLS writes: >A great admirer of Moore "as a realist and a defender of common
sense",
Popper describes himself as. And I wonder if his implicature is that this is
not like "p & q".>
Popper writes simply or as simply as he thinks viable. His praise of Moore is
genuine.
To draw "implicatures" correctly from this expression of admiration, requires a
wider survey of Popper's writings. In this wider context, we might draw several
implicatures.
JLS subsequently posts: >Actually, on p. 102 of the essay by Popper cited by
McEvoy, realism is defined, more or less as the view according to which
"the world around us is, more or less, as common sense, refined by science,
tells us what it is."
and we know that he (Popper) greatly admired Moore as a 'realist and
defender of common sense'. The implicature being that Moore lacked a perception
of this refining that science brings.>
Whether we crowbar in the term "implicature" here (or instead use more common
expressions like "The inference being.." or "The implication being...), this is
right on two grounds (1) it is Popper's view that Moore lacked this
science-refined perception (2) Moore did lack this science-refined perception.
[JLS is, however, wrong in taking the words at p.102 as offering a definition
of "realism".]
Moore's adherence to realism and commonsense are of a fairly naive and
intellectually low-level kind: whereas Popper's defence of commonsense and
realism is neither naive nor intellectually low-level but is the product of a
very brilliant, original and detailed theory of knowledge that fully engages
modern science and its methods as well as having application to "knowledge" in
its widest sense.
A great deal of wasted argument - wasted because at cross-purposes as to what
version of commonsense we are defending - might be avoided by bearing the
following kind of distinction in mind. We can posit a version of commonsense
which is antithetical to science and vice versa (the 'emptiness' of the atom
and 'natural selection' are just two examples where science overturns what most
people of commonsense would otherwise believe); but Popper is defending not
this version but a version where commonsense is "essentially self-critical",
and so it is part of commonsense to accept the results of well-tested science,
and in this way commonsense easily accomodates science. [Popper is essentially
a Kantian for whom the proper explanation of the value of "commonsense" would
not be commonsensical.]
In contrast, Moore's approach to commonsense is much closer to the version
where commonsense is not "essentially self-critical" and where commonsense is
unalloyed by any refining by science.
But though an intellectual giant compared to Moore, Popper is an intellectual
who believes that intellectuals have too often betrayed their fellow men with
high-blown theories and generally letting their intellect carry them (and
others) away. Against this background (which, for Popper, stretches at least
from Plato to Heidegger), Popper admires the way people of commonsense swim
oblivious to tides of intellectual fashion that may drown some of their
intellectual superiors. Popper thinks Moore is one of these commonsense people
and admires him for his unpretentious stance and gut-level realist tendencies,
without endorsing Moore's somewhat naive philosophising (Wittgenstein, btw,
held a somewhat similar view of Moore as a person and as philosopher).
So, gut-level, Popper admires Moore in contrast to philosophers who are
ill-disposed to commonsense or who are ill-disposed to realism, or who
challenge commonsense and realism with charlatanism [e.g. Hegel]. But Popper
completely exempts philosophers who bring serious, worthy challenges to
commonsense and to realism; and Popper is aware that nearly all the great
philosophers were brought by serious reflection to conclusions that go beyond
and even against "commonsense" and also naive forms of realism. Among those
exempted philosophers the foremost is Kant, but Popper would also exempt
Schopenhauer and Hume.
Moore is nowhere in the same league as figures like Kant, Schopenhauer or Hume
(or Russell for that matter). And Popper is not an admirer of Moore's intellect
or intellectual ability. This is borne out by a highly critical footnote in
"Realism and the Aim of Science" [p.272], from which JLS "for the record"
abstracts the words "I greatly admire Moore as a realist and as a defender of
commonsense". JLS fails to mention "for the record" that Popper's very next
sentence is "But I cannot admire him as an analyst". In that footnote (which is
more to bury Moore than to praise him), Popper goes on to suggest that Moore's
essay on Russell's 'Theory of Descriptions' is "now famous as a paradigm of
analysis" ["with its various little criticisms and improvements of Russell's
theory"] and has had "devastating influence". By which Popper (with or without
"implicature") means 'devastatingly bad influence': for it encouaged others to
emulate its nit-picking at a theory whose worth it did not understand and where
the nit-picking fundamentally missed the point, and "thus contributed to a
lowering of the all too precarious standards of philosophical discussion."*
Donal
*This may chime with anyone sane who has read philosophy in books and journals
and thought the writer is simply nit-picking at a theory whose worth they do
not understand and where the nit-picking fundamentally misses the point.
