All Life Is Problem Solving

George Soros has written a number of very interesting and influential books over the past 20 years including, among others: The Alchemy of Finance, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, The Age of Fallibility, and The Crash of 2008 and What It Means. All of these present and apply a conceptual framework he has worked with since 1963, and which has served as a heuristic for him in both his business and political work. He views the framework as “a new paradigm” because it denies the determinism of mainstream economic theory and its commitment to the idea of market equilibria, and asserts instead the difficulty of economic prediction, the importance of human agency, and the existence of far from equilibrium conditions as the norm in society and economic systems. The key ideas in the framework include “fallibility,” “reflexivity,” “the human uncertainty principle,” “the enlightenment fallacy,” “fertile fallacies,” the denial of “the unity of method,” “the pursuit of truth,” “radical fallibility,” and “far-from-equilibrium states.” In this and forthcoming blogs in this series, I’ll discuss these ideas and his framework. In this blog I’ll begin with his treatment of “fallibility,” and compare it to Karl Popper’s.

George Soros studied with Karl Popper and believes that he owes much of his thinking to Popper’s influence. However, his view of fallibility is different from Popper’s. Popper advocated fallibility because he believed that no amount of evidence could confirm a general statement, and he also believed that singular statements couldn’t be confirmed with certainty either, because such statements always use concepts that presuppose commitments to general statements. So, for him all knowledge claims about the world, as well as networks of such claims are fallible. There is no distinction between claims about natural phenomena, and claims about social phenomena, in this respect. All are equally fallible, in the sense that we cannot demonstrate or justify their certainty, whether or not they are true or false.

Soros’s view of fallibility is very different from this, however. He believes (The Crash of 2008, p. 26) that “people’s understanding is inherently imperfect because they are part of reality and a part cannot fully comprehend the whole. In calling our understanding imperfect, I mean that it is incomplete and, in ways that cannot be precisely defined, distorted.”

This is different from Popper’s view of fallibility in a number of ways. First, Soros’s statement assumes that the source of our fallibility is lack of a complete understanding of reality; and that we require such an understanding for our statements, theories, conjectures, etc. about parts of reality to be infallible. But lack of a complete understanding is not the source of our fallibility, because even if our knowledge claims were certain, they still might provide an understanding of only part of the world. Our fallibility isn’t rooted in the completeness of our knowledge of the world, but in the logical relationship between general statements and particular events that might either confirm or falsify them. Specifically, there is no finite set of singular statements that can confirm a general statement; but even one singular statement about particulars can, under the right assumptions and conditions, falsify a general statement. Is the falsification certain? No. Because our falsifications, relying as they do on background knowledge, which includes generalizations, are also fallible.

Second, in calling our understanding “fallible” Popper did not mean that our theories were necessarily untrue. Nor did he mean that our understanding was either incomplete or distorted. All he meant was that the knowledge claims or beliefs comprising our understanding could not be demonstrated to be true beyond doubt. In fact, Popper believed that all our knowledge was and must be incomplete, and that our theories about the world are “nets” that can at best provide only partial understanding of reality even if they are true. Since they are “nets,” parts of reality always escape the mesh we weave with our theories and models, and those aspects of reality always leave us something to explain and to understand. For Popper, the universe is always “open” to further inquiry, further understanding, and to an increasingly wider scope for human creativity and freedom. His universe is not a deterministic universe in which the future is wholly predictable. Instead it is “a world of propensities,” in which emergence, freedom, choice, and uncertainty have a substantial role.

Third, while “distortion” seems to be an element in Soros’s concept of “fallibility,” for Popper fallibility doesn’t imply distortion or even falsity. True statements, i.e. statements that correspond to the facts, are as fallible as false statements. That is, all knowledge claims are equally “fallible” in the specific sense that they cannot be demonstrated to be true.

The differences in the meaning of “fallibility” in Soros and Popper may be summarized this way. Soros’s concept of fallibility says that all of our knowledge is fallible because it is incomplete, and due to its incompleteness is “distorted,” and, by implication, “untrue.” If our understanding were complete, Soros’s implication is that it would then be infallible. But Popper says that all of our knowledge is fallible, whether or not it is complete, and whether or not it is “distorted” or “untrue.” And this suggests that Soros has conflated “completeness of understanding” with “true understanding,” and therefore forecloses the possibility that “understanding,” however complete it is can be “false understanding.” How Soros arrived at his idea of fallibility is an interesting question. But it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t from Popper’s work, and it has a different flavor and bias from Popper’s view. Specifically, it suggests that truth is barred to us and that distortion is always our lot. Popper agrees with Soros that our knowledge must always be incomplete, but he doesn’t think that “incompleteness” implies fallibility, falsity, or distortion.