Bartley’s pancritical rationalism is seen by some as being a refinement of Popper’s critical rationalism. I contest this view and argue that pancritical rationalism is obtained from critical rationalism by removing some of its most important and useful features. The remainder consists of a restatement of some of Popper’s key ideas and an interpretation of others that I attempt to show is not entirely faithful to what Popper says.

Critical and pancritical rationalism were mainly debated in the second half of the XXth century, however a new important paper on pancritical rationalism has been published recently, and hence a critical commentary of this recent publication is required, one is offered here.

The problem of induction has long been one of the central problems of empiricist epistemology. There are two main versions of this problem: to justify a strictly universal statement on the basis of a finite set of singular statements and to justify a new singular statement on the basis of some finite set of accepted singular statements. In both cases it is assumed that we have a set of singular statements with which to begin and that these singular statements are, (...) somehow, provided by observation; neither of these assumptions will be disputed in this paper. But there is another assumption without which there might well be no problem of induction:A. Any synthetic statement which is to be accepted as known must be justified on the basis of observation.It is only because philosophers assume A that they are faced with the problem of showing how we can infer from statements which have been justified by observation to others which have not. It is this assumption which will concern us here, for if there are no adequate grounds for accepting A, the problem of induction may not arise at all. (shrink)

In order to understand consciousness one would benefit from developing a more eclectic intellectual style. Consciousness is, as proposed by almost everyone except the stubborn reductionists, a truly mysterious concept. Its study and dissection merits a multidisciplinary approach. Waving this multidisciplinary flag has positively enlarged the discussion and neurologists, psychiatrists, mathematicians, and so on, have moved to the philosophy of mind arena, first with caution and now with a more powerful voice. Identifying what we mean by consciousness is a first (...) step even when we want to deny its existence. The link between consciousness and some other mental activity is a logical next step and there is abundant literature doing this, but not all of them differentiate among associated yet different phenomena. (shrink)

No evangelistic erroneous network of ideas can guarantee the satisfaction of these two demands : (1) propagate the network without revision and (2) completely insulate itself against losses in credibility and adherents through criticism. If a network of ideas is false, or inconsistent or fails to solve its intended problem, or unfeasible, or is too costly in terms of necessarily forsaken goals, its acceptability may be undermined given only true assumptions and valid arguments. People prefer to adopt ideologies that (i) (...) are logically consistent, (ii) are more truth-like and of higher information content than their rivals, (iii) are systematically organised, (iv) solve their problems better than their rivals, (v) do not contain unfeasible demands, and (vi) do not contain uneconomic demands. Truth and validity therefore act as Darwinian-like filters on ideologies. Using Popper's notion of situational analysis and with reference to Darwinian evolution, considered as a special case of the former, and Bartley's theory of comprehensively critical rationalism I argue that a propagandist cannot guarantee his message or his movement from sound criticism. All positions are in a methodological sense open to argument. Moreover, the logic of a propagandist's situation constrains him into making his message and himself open to criticism in order to maximize its chances of being propagated through the population. But he then loses control of the message in two respects. Firstly, his audience are disposed to select from the competing ideas they encounter those that satisfy (i) to (vi) because of man's evolutionary history. Secondly, he cannot guarantee protection from criticism even a privileged section of his message because he cannot predict in a systematic way what logical repercussions each protective reformulation of the ideology will have on other sections of the ideology and what criticism the ideology will encounter. He cannot do the latter because of certain logical properties of theories that endow them with unfathomable depths. Marxism and Freudianism serve as case studies, especially for the analysis of Popper's notion of the immunizing stratagem, a methodological/logical device that is supposed to save theories from criticism. "Immunizing stratagems" either abandon the ideology they are meant to protect or seriously lower its chances of being reproduced. (shrink)