Knowledge Without Foundations
How Karl Popper turned infinite regress into infinite progress
One of the most startling things I learnt when I worked through the writings of Karl Popper is that it is utterly impossible to justify any piece of knowledge. This will, no doubt, strike anyone as an odd thing to say, perhaps even nonsensical. For if one needs one’s knowledge to be effective, it has to be true and justified in some way, no?
The idea that knowledge, for it to be counted as knowledge, has to be a) true, b) believed, and c) justified, is a very old idea indeed, going back millennia. For something to be knowledge, it is said that there first need to be good reasons for it to be taken as true.
But then what justifies those very reasons as good ones? And what, in turn, justifies these justifications? There is no final answer to this, because the need for a justification of a justification never ends. This is why Popper said it is impossible to justify any piece of knowledge. So far as claiming some belief to be true and justified, there is irony in that the absurdity of the infinite regress is a dead end.
Can we apply the claim to itself? Let’s take another look at it again: knowledge is true, justified belief. What justifies this claim? If one comes across a justification, then what justifies the justification? Again, the infinite regress appears. The claim that knowledge is true, justified belief cannot live up to its own hype. This alone renders the traditional view of knowledge as false. Like any other claim in search of an argument for justifying itself, it falls into never-ending darkness.
But the effects of objective knowledge are unmistakeable. Planes, trains, automobiles, GPS, antibiotics, vaccines, cooking and so on, are non-trivial embodiments of real, objective knowledge in all of our lives. So objective knowledge is real, it does exist, so why does the traditional view of knowledge, when we take its implications seriously, unravel into nonsense?
Because it is not true. As we have seen, for knowledge to be real knowledge, proof or justification are not even possible, let alone necessary. Popper saw this problem, and realised that real knowledge did not have to be true, justified, or believed as was previously taken for granted.
More importantly, Popper refuted and replaced the ancient view by putting forward a new theory of how knowledge is created and grown. His explanation was that the infinite regress can be reversed into infinite progress only when one takes seriously the idea that arguments are negative criticisms of conjectured ideas, not positive justifications of them.
When we conjecture an idea, we are inventing a conclusion about how to solve a problem. One then asks what the consequences are of taking this conjecture seriously? Does it solve the problem better than the best ideas we know, or is there a problem with the conjecture itself? The role of arguments is therefore not to furnish excuses as to why the conjectured idea should be true, but to test and break conjectured ideas to see if they stand up to reality of the problem or not. An idea does not have to be true or justified, it simply has to solve the problem better than its rivals.
Over time, conjectures are created anew, and in turn, criticisms are levelled at them to see if any survive or die. Any idea that fails the criticism is removed altogether from the pool of candidate ideas. As this cycle continues, surviving conjectures become sharper and more effective over time at solving the problem for which they were proposed as solutions. This is what allows for infinite progress: an idea that solves a problem better than its rivals, not how true or justified it is. Nor is belief necessary, because knowledge is also represented outside of minds in things such as books and telescopes.
So if knowledge grows through conjectures being created anew, followed by criticisms to remove conjectures that have a problem in favour of conjectures that solve the problem, then can this process be applied to itself? Yes, because this claim about how knowledge is created and grown is itself a conjectured idea that is not immune to any criticism. Unlike the traditional view of knowledge, Popper’s claim about how knowledge grows is a claim that takes itself seriously.
As startling as it may be, Popper’s theory of how knowledge really progresses does not run into the same problems that have bedevilled the ancient view of knowledge needing to be true, justified, and believed. And Popper’s theory survives its own scrutiny because there is no rival theory of knowledge that bests it. As of this moment, the theory is the only theory we know of that genuinely explains what knowledge is and how it grows. I therefore take it as true, until it toppled by a better theory.
Even though The Enlightenment began to take shape a few hundred years ago, and Karl Popper died in 1994, I nonetheless think of him as the last of the great Enlightenment philosophers. As David Deutsch says, the Enlightenment is an example of a beginning of infinity, and so it should be of no surprise that the many problems that were first taken seriously back then are still seeing progress even to this day, hundreds of years later, and I can only hope and imagine that such progress will continue to take place forever.