The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality

"Yes, it is. I think quite a number of Popper’s books are collections of essays. I’ve read quite a bit of Popper, but I’m not an expert. If we jump ahead to David Deutsch, the author of the next book, he is very seriously into Karl Popper and talks about Popper quite a lot. In an interview, when he was asked what the best book to read by Karl Popper was, he said The Myth of the Framework . That’s what directed me to the book. It’s phenomenal. It’s quite accessible and it’s very readable. In the book, there’s an essay called “The Myth of the Framework” which is the second chapter. The other chapters are related but that essay is the core of the book. Popper was one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also a very significant social science commentator. People know him for promoting the scientific method and combatting the idea that truth is a social construction and that kind of argument. He has a really important role to play in the whole conversation around post-truth because he’s saying, ‘No. There is reality, and we can get at it.’ The myth of the framework is that you can’t have a useful discussion unless you’re working within the same framework as the other person. People like to say that you must agree on the same things and then you can have a useful discussion, otherwise it’s not going to work. That’s a myth. You have to have a clash of cultures, that’s the term that he uses. You won’t make any progress if you have the same framework as the other person. You don’t want agreement. You don’t want unproductive disagreement, but you want disagreement. “Popper is not as influential as he should be in this day and age” So there’s a line in the essay where he says, that if you win in a debate, you’ve gained nothing. It’s not a win at all. It’s much better to have been proven wrong, or to have been made to shift your own view, even a little, than to supposedly win in a debate. This is a theme throughout his work and in this particular book it’s very succinctly and powerfully written. He links that to the foundation of the scientific method, which is about coming up with a hypothesis of what’s happening. You have this idea in your mind: ‘I think I know what’s going on here, what’s causing this phenomenon.’ Then, what you have to do is to seek to disprove that, to prove yourself wrong. His point in The Myth of the Framework is that other people who disagree with you are very valuable in this process; you want them to be attacking you. What you also want to do is to import that mindset into your own way of thinking. I’ve recently written about how you should learn to be your own ‘red team.’ A red team is something that tech and intelligence organizations use. It’s a unit within the organization that tries to find vulnerabilities and to hack into their own systems. That’s how they find problems and they can then fix them. That’s what Popper is talking about: how to be your own red team and the fact that you really need to do that. He’s basically laying out the most important foundation of critical thinking , which is counteracting confirmation bias, consciously pushing yourself not to believe the things that you want to believe but to give yourself every possible reason not to. Only when you’ve failed can you then grudgingly move forward and accept that perhaps you have made some progress towards truth. Also important is that he says we can learn to do this and enjoy it. Absolutely. It is applicable to any situation in which you take a position. In politics , it’s a particularly egregious problem because we’re committed to a position and we do everything we can to defend it. It’s a completely non-rational thing to do. The antidote is what Popper is arguing for. You have to recognize when you are holding onto a position because you like it, because you want it to be true, because it belongs to you or identifies you in some way. You have to understand that getting at the truth is the only thing you should be doing. And the way to do that is to create this clash of cultures. It’s essential to political discourse, but it’s also essential that this clash of cultures is done well. It’s no good just to have people disagreeing. You have to have ground rules. It’s a methodological framework you have to agree on."