The Grounds for Anti-Historicism

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 39:241-257 (1995)
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Abstract

In his seminal The Poverty of Historicism Sir Karl Popper deployed a number of arguments to prick the pretensions of those who thought that they were, or could come to be, in possession of knowledge of the future. These ‘historicists’ assumed that they could lay bare the law of evolution of a society, and that their possession of knowledge of such a law justified political action which had the aim of removing obstacles to the progress of history. In arguing against historicism Popper was clearly motivated by his interest in removing the intellectual backing for such revolutionary political practice. My first reading of PH was in the company of people who were extremely dismissive of the anti-revolutionary message, and who tended to argue that if that was the conclusion of Popper's theoretical argument, then obviously the argument was flawed. Within their context, that of the implementation of apartheid policy in South Africa, there was much to be said for this attitude. There is no doubt that Popper's message was insufficiently contextualised, or rather that he did not signpost very clearly whether he intended the anti-revolutionary political prescription to have limited or universal application. In this paper I want to reconsider some of these issues, particularly whether the truth of anti-historicism, in the sense intended by Popper, has such conservative consequences for political action

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Graham Frank Macdonald
University of Manchester

References found in this work

Thoughts without laws: Cognitive science with content.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 1986 - Philosophical Review 95 (January):47-80.
Historical Inevitability.ISAIAH BERLIN - 1956 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 6 (24):338-340.
Karl Popper.Anthony O'hear - 1984 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35 (1):86-90.
The Nature of Naturalism.Graham MacDonald & Philip Pettit - 1992 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 66 (1):225-266.

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