Ian C. Jarvie has suggested that “All that there is the flux of experience, bewildering and incoherent as it presents itself to us, and there is our yearning to give it order and thus to be able to enjoy it, to no longer be afraid of and threatened by it” (Jarvie 1981, p. 234). “I take it that all human encounter is self-making, and human encounter with the ideas and attitudes of others can be self-transcending. But this is an arduous and precarious endeavor that can leave us disillusioned or mad, as easily as enlightened and renewed” (Ibid., p. 254).
Jarvie is one of the leading philosophers of the social sciences of our age. In the early 1980s, while engaged in an ascending career, he described himself as a professional in an unresolved identity crisis. He seems to have experienced the crisis ever since he underwent two adjacent constitutive experiences. Maurice Freedman, the late chair of the Department of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, rejected his proposal for a dissertation in the PhD program in that department. And the philosophers, Sir Karl Popper and John Watkins, approved of that same proposal for a dissertation in the PhD program in the philosophy department. He wrote his dissertation under their tutelage—in Scientific Method. Since this volume is presented to him on the occasion of his 80th birthday, at the height of a long and extremely fruitful lifework, and since he found this identity crisis important enough to be aired in an intellectual-cum-autobiographical essay on anthropology and the irrational, it is befitting that we ask in an introductory mode what was the crisis about and what impact it had on his rich output. Did it have a pivotal driving force in the development of his philosophical world of individual and social problem-solving and of the engagement with ideas in general?
The essays in the present volume grapple with a tour de force, namely, the ideas of a methodologist who accomplished two simultaneous feats: first, turning his personal crisis into a professional tool, and second, introducing Popperian insights in the philosophy of science writ large into particular studies in the social sciences (and of necessity in aesthetics too, as he was studying art as a social phenomenon). It is very beneficial to apply openly and critically the social domain and to the world of culture Popper’s proposals, including the one to consider all activity as problem-solving (and not searching for justifications). This invites improvable explanations and ongoing rethinking. Possibly, this is why Jarvie has focused since his early studies on social and intellectual ideas also in aesthetics and practices in flux (e.g., theories of cargo cults) that are in crisis and always changing. He viewed them as challenging to and therefore offered his own criticism of the (structural-functionalist and symbolist) homeostatic theories of society as either Polanyi-style or Kuhn-style authoritarian and traditionalist theories of intellectual activity and their social organization. In doing so, he was able to challenge the orthodoxy of his day and critically examine the dynamic nature and internal logics of such mysterious, mystical, or even magical cultural phenomena. The ideas of relativism and idealism loom behind all these professional stances, and in this regard Jarvie is the champion of universalism and realism as part and parcel of any critical philosophy. From this perspective he ventured to offer a theory of social change.
Jarvie discusses the intellectual environment that rests on dogmatism and that demands conversion to these dogmas as conditions for entry into it. In Popper’s view this is what renders these societies more closed than open. They both find these ideological environments hindrance to intellectual curiosity, to critical examination, and to the development of the rational spirit of scholarship and of policy-making. Hence, contrary to the prevalent trend of the day, and contrary to Popper’s proposals, Jarvie entertains an unusual, dual stance vis-à-vis magic, both in his anthropological studies and in his studies of rationality. He recognizes the place of magic in all human societies and applies to it his method of study: he does not equate the admission of its very existence with the admission of its claim to be the right way to solve problems or as the only way to understand human thought, behavior, and social relations. Rather, in the spirit of the expansion of the notion of rationality, he proposes (with Agassi) to consider rationality a matter of degrees, as a spectrum that ranges from the very strict to the somewhat lax, but still within the realm of rational discourse.
Has Jarvie met his own challenge to offer a theory of social change? Our answer is in the affirmative: Jarvie improves on Popper’s theory of social change. The question is, are new social problems and solutions negotiated on the way to implementing social change. While Popper focuses on problem-solving within given problem situations, he allows for but does not explain how these emerge. Jarvie does: he offers recommendations for gradual implementation (piecemeal social engineering is the phrase commonly used) of new social ideas with a careful attention to their interactions with the problem situations that give rise to them. Popper underscores the inevitability of unintended (positive or negative) consequence of such processes and therefore insists on the trial-and-error approach, acknowledging human fallibility. Jarvie, in his turn, explains how, within the framework of Popper’s methodological individualism, various individuals negotiate—clash, criticize, and tentatively agree upon—a plan for social action, given the different maps that they have outlined as cognitive representations of society as a whole and the social relationships that they embody. According to Jarvie, the unintended consequences are the very subject matter of the social sciences; unlike the natural sciences where we study inanimate objects or objects with no autonomous volitions, the social sciences deal with beliefs and anxieties, feedback loops, and mirroring effects. Within Jarvie’s account of the workshop rationality (2005), very much the way he encountered it in Popper’s seminar. (Jarvie describes the workshop mentality practiced there not as a personal experience but as a theoretical framework.) Jarvie’s accounts of social process present them as capable of being thoroughly and inherently democratic. In doing so, he offers generations of scholars and educators a method of individual behavior (and social modeling) that is at once also a central constituent of the open society Popper-style.
Jarvie’s contribution has closed a circle. His idea of the workshop rationality, when implemented within a given institutional setting, allows for the democratic critical examination and change of social standards, not only of the occasional change of individual behavior. Likewise, his proposed method for anthropological study recommends viewing individual encounters with others (whether other scholars in the commonwealth of learning or the targeted groups that we observe in remote regions) as potentially challenging the very commitments with which our encounters begin; when made operationally critical, this method also serves as a meta-commitment to identity—of both actors and those who observe them. Meta-commitments (as scholarly presuppositions or as intellectual prejudices), too, may be challenged and with them, the identities of all related participants. This way, perhaps, Jarvie’s professional crisis has given rise to a philosophical-cum-anthropological extension of the methodology of anthropology: he indicates what change it requires to fall within the purview of the workshop mentality. He does this by prescribing that students of social and intellectual problems live on the edge: always ready to make a decision to endorse a hypothetical stance vis-à-vis certain descriptions and explanations, without giving up on their universalism, pluralism, and realism. (Note that Jarvie’s pluralism rests on the varieties of particular perspective of individual thinkers facing particular problems as well as on the particular social/intellectual system under study. By contrast, the pluralism of the anthropologist rests on the particular singularity of the systems they study while overlooking their universal aspects.) Jarvie’s self-professed personal and professional detachment has shown up as thoughtful humaneness and intellectual involvement, a method that transcends the standard interpretation of the Popperian methodological individualism and piecemeal social engineering in that it prescribes attending to the balance between the particular and the universal in a predicament as well as between the rational and the irrational parts of reasoning within the given system. Thus, whereas Popper proposes to shun utopianism for fear of historicism, Jarvie both recommends a utopian aspiration free of historicism and the study of historicist societies.
Jarvie reports that he has started out with a skeptical personal bent and that he found in Popper’s philosophy a proposal that could be applied as an exploratory tool. Such a transition from the social to the cognitive could be construed as a matter of conversion, Jarvie’s stress on autonomy and individual decision-making in term of his own intellectual development notwithstanding. Could one’s intellectual choices within a given social milieu transcend one’s personal bent? This question has imposed itself on Sigmund Freud. His answer to it was in the negative. He dismissed all philosophy as but a projected metapsychology. Whether a social philosophy is a projection or an excuse for anything, Jarvie suggests we ignore its origin and the intention behind it and try to take it literally, so as to judge its merits and defects as impersonally as we can. He ventures to underscore the reciprocal critical contribution of individuals and their culture. Could Jarvie have chosen a different theory of critical rational bent? In at least one essay (in collaboration with Agassi) the answer is that it boils down to the choice among various lifestyles. Jarvie’s claim is that commitments and beliefs ought to be entertained critically and thus always tentatively; but they should not be ignored by social thinkers or deemed irrelevant to their social investigations.
Let us note that the ideal of covering all options within social theory is universal. Tradition rejects all false hypotheses. Popper suggested social researchers offer hypotheses to explain social phenomena. These may fail to explain. If they do, then they may be false yet untestable; he suggests we try to render them as highly testable as possible. Refuted hypotheses have no room in classical methodology but are significant for Popper. A hypothesis that signifies in Popper’s system ascribes full rationality to individuals; however, Jarvie allows for a partial rationality. This makes his system the first inclusive system: it allows for more hypotheses than any other system, and if testable, then they count as empirical, and as such it invites social research to cover more facts than any system before it.
Jarvie’s style of intellectual and social involvement has benefitted us all, from his role as managing editor of one of the most erudite and critical journals, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, to his social commitment to the Popperian community of scholars, initiating, convening, presiding, presenting, and editing volumes of papers given in our central conferences, and in his initiating and editing Festschriften for his colleagues (Watkins, Gellner, and Agassi). In addition, Jarvie is an avid scholar who has not left to others to explore the implications of his own ideas, and his areas of interest carry their mark. Perhaps the record of Jarvie’s output explains the variety of perspectives and topics covered in the present volume. Jarvie has published 13 single-authored books, from The Revolution in Anthropology (1964), Movies and Society (1970), Concepts and Society (1972), Rationality and Relativism: In Search of a Philosophy and History of Anthropology (1984), Thinking about Society: Theory and Practice (1986), and Philosophy of the Film (1987) to The Republic of Science (2001); he has co-authored and co-edited 16 volumes, from Hong Kong: A Society in Transition (1970, with Agassi), Rationality: The Critical Approach (1987, with Agassi), and Critical Rationalist Aesthetics (2008, with Agassi) to the three-volume Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment (2006, with Miller and Milford) and The Sage Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2011, with Zamora Bonilla). In addition, Jarvie authored and co-authored some 61 essays, 52 book chapters, 28 film reviews, and 108 book reviews and essays. This level of intellectual engagement that covers everything from film and pornography to the methodology of science and the legacy of Popper testifies to a fertile mind, disciplined professional, and a collegial collaborator. No wonder that his own legacy is being acknowledged in a Festschrift of his own.
Above all, Jarvie is a creative and bold-thinker leader, modest in style and generous to colleagues and friends. His life course attests to the exemplary philosophy he has put before us. Even his critics recognize that their interlocutor is a worthy intellectual opponent, one who has left his mark on the academic landscape and the theoretical/critical appreciation of films/movies in society. And as you read the contributions to this volume, you will quickly realize how much respect Jarvie’s colleagues, collaborators, former students, and academic fellow travelers have for him. They engage his work and ideas critically (which is, of course, the Popperian mark of respect), and they credit him with keeping a tradition alive: critical rationalism. What Jarvie (together with Agassi) managed to do is transform the debates of the Vienna positivists (of the period between the Two World Wars) all the way into the twenty-first century. And as we have all observed in the past five decades, while Popper’s intellectual stock has risen, that of the others has not fared as well. The impact of this undertaking, as we have tried to explain, is not exclusively based on the merits of the methodology but has much to do with personal humility, intellectual integrity, and professional courage.
References
- Jarvie, Ian C. 1981. Anthropologists and the Irrational. Reprinted in Jarvie, Ian C. 1986. Thinking About Society: Theory and Practice, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, No. 93, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 233–256.
- ———. 2005. Workshop Rationality, Dogmatism, and Models of the Mind. In The Mind as a Scientific ...