From Critical Cafe, 2 July 2008:
Despite what someone said, Popper did not appear to condone waffle. He did say that he did not believe in getting hung up over the meanings of words, and would happily agree a contrary (though undoubtedly temporary) meaning for a word if it would advance the discussion. What he preached (even if he did not practice it as thoroughly as might be expected) is that the participants in a discussion should in good faith attempt to understand each others’ meanings, as they both (presumably) expect to gain something from the discussion. One of the things you may need to do in the case of misunderstanding is to ensure that you are all using the key word(s) with the same meaning. This does not mean going back and defining all terms in an infinite regress.
I have observed over a long period that the discussions here seem often to fall short of that ideal. It must now be about a decade since I commented that the meaning of a piece of text may not only be in the individual words or sentences, but also in larger structures – in paragraphs, articles or even in whole books. So McD’s habit of atomising all texts before responding to them is not only destructive to their meaning, but actively militates against a useful discussion, and must make it just about impossible to learn anything from the other fellow you are debating with. And so it seems.
Another practice that is destructive to understanding is this nonsense about ‘worlds’ and ‘realities’. The reason for social interaction – and human conflict – is that we do all share the same world and the same reality, in the common, garden and obvious senses of those words. Using these terms in other ways seems calculated to bring about the state of affairs that is falsely claimed to be inevitable, that people or groups of people live shut out from all possibility of understanding each other.
Popper talked of ‘worlds’ 1, 2 and 3, but I hope that we all understand that this is a metaphor, and that these classifications are useful only in relation to how they help us understand our use of ideas in the real world, the one we all live in. One could raise a number of possible objections to this use of the word ‘world’. One might argue that it is meaningless. One might argue that it is not useful, that it fails to help others understand his meaning or causes unnecessary confusion (in view of what I have read in the past, I think this is a valid criticism, and I try to avoid it myself). Or one could argue that his metaphor is not true (that things and ideas just do not fall into classes in the way he claimed).
I am not, by the way, denying that some aspects of our reality are genuinely socially constructed. Marriage, for example, exists only as long as people recognise its existence and show a set of behaviours towards the married people that depends on the recognition of that construction (for example, turning up on a certain day and throwing confetti and toasting the newlyweds, inviting them out as a couple, and feeling rather differently about having sex with the husband or wife) . The same applies to governments (if everyone refused to recognise a government it would simply no longer be one) and the notion of ownership (as opposed to possession in the sense of control).
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