The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Liberal Governance and The Social Control of Technology
The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Liberal Governance and The Social Control of Technology
The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Liberal Governance and The Social Control of Technology
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psychologists, not epistemologists, who should study the processes of discovery.
The only criterion of demarcation between science and pseudoscience was, in
turn, that scientific theories could always be refuted and changed in the face of
compelling evidence. This demand confined all rationality to contexts of
justification, where criticisms or re-interpretations of the theory in light of new
results ought to lead to new conjectures. Now these are always refutable as well
and, as a result, the falsifiability criterion constitutes science as a potentially
endless enterprise.
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In response to this dilemma, Collingridge devises a fallibilist theory of decision-
making under conditions of uncertainty or ignorance. This theory is also clearly
inspired by cybernetics. Decision-making rules should be minimally intrusive in
order to make governance robust and flexible enough. In this way, errors can
always be corrected, thus helping the decision-making system to learn and
change.
Both the framing of the problem and its solution fully portrays the character
of innovation and the style of governance in globalised liberal democracies
working with market economies. In a planned economy which operates
consistently according to predefined rules or algorithms coming from a central
system, no innovation is allowed that does not suit the constraints and goals
prescribed by the rules. Innovations are taken to be rational from the beginning
precisely by virtue of their rule-like origin –thus echoing the inductivist
obsession with the rational character and the foundational power of applying
rules. By contrast, liberal governance involves a sharp division of labour between
the production of innovations and their governance, which echoes Popper’s
distinction between contexts of discovery and justification. The innovation
process is taken to be irrational, dynamic, creative, anarchic and inscrutable.
There is only one overarching goal explicitly shared by innovators and policy-
makers. This is to make economies grow in an endless, uninterrupted loop. To
this effect, liberal culture, technological entrepreneurship and market
mechanisms are taken to be a source of potential riches that, however, must be
harnessed by bureaucratic and rationalizing mechanisms of a Weberian kind
(Beniger 1986). Yet, in order to exert this control, decision-making must meet a
series of conditions. Governance must be flexible and timely. Policies and rules
should be reversible. They must be cheap, in order to grant the cost-effective
application of technologies. And they must be precise, that is, they must deal with
specific technologies or applications, and their potential consequences.
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economies –otherwise, creativity and dynamism would be deterred, and growth
endangered. The context of operation is often disregarded as well, as part of the
traditional technocratic approaches involved, for instance, in development
policies –such as the Green Revolution, as Collingridge himself reports. In this
connection, Collingridge’s work is certainly welcome because it provides us with
insights and methods to help us assess and control the consequences of specific
innovations. These, as the failure of the Green Revolution shows, may involve
unwanted effects. Yet, one must also ask whether the unconditioned commitment
to growth, coupled with the perpetual need to innovate and disrupt economies
and cultures, is not further fuel for the sort of control dilemmas that Collingridge
aims to address –thus, making them more visible but also more pressing and hard
to assess and solve, in an overall scheme that could never be robust. This critique
to the insufficiency of the present style of governance to tackle some of the most
pressing challenges of this century is not new, and I have explored in detail its
rationale somewhere else (Cañizares 2016).
The question then arises whether we can afford to continue assuming this
unconditioned and accelerating unfolding of innovation as an irrational source of
radical novelty; or rather, criticize this very assumption and start to look for ways
to innovate that, though not centrally planned, at least avoid the accelerating
concatenation of disruptions and thus the increasing demands for control,
bureaucracy and technocratic policy which societies need to implement in order
to cope with the radical and disruptive effects of these anarchic innovation
schemes.
Beniger, J. R. (1986). The control revolution: Technological and economic origins of the
Cañizares, J.
information society. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
6, unpublished . The Ecological Contradiction. A survey and critique
of two major approaches to ecological crises , in
https://www.academia.edu/29689259/The_Ecological_Contradiction._A_survey_and_critiqu
Collingridge, D. (1980). The social control of technology. New York: St. Martin's Press.
e_of_two_major_approaches_to_ecological_crises
Eccles, John C. & Popper, Karl (2014). The Self and its Brain: An Argument for
Interactionism. Routledge.
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Hooker, C. A. (1995). Reason, Regulation, and Realism: Towards a Regulatory Systems