From Dikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Surrealism

is an artistic movement and an aesthetic

Surrealism is an artistic movement and an aesthetic philosophy that aims for the liberation of the mind by emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the unconscious. Surrealism originated in early-20th century European avant-garde art and literary circles, and many early surrealists were associated with the earlier Dada movement. Surrealism was an expressly revolutionary movement, encompassing actions intended to advance radical political, social, cultural and personal change. While surrealism's most important center was in Paris, it spread throughout Europe and to North America during the course of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

The term "surreal" is also applied more generally to describe the juxtaposition of ordinary events, actions or objects in a manner where the totality does not comport with the ordinary "sense" or social decorum. In this sense it is the successor to the idea of the "fantastic" in Victorian art and literature.

Contents [showhide]

1 History of surrealism 1.1 Surrealism's founding 1.2 Interwar surrealism: Centrality of Breton 1.3 Surrealism during World War II 1.4 The end of surrealism 2 Surrealism as an artistic movement 2.1 Early surrealist visual arts 2.2 1930s 2.3 World War II and beyond 3 Impact of surrealism 3.1 Surrealist music 3.2 Surrealist film 3.3 Surrealist television 4 See also 5 Sources 6 External links

History of surrealism

The term surrealism was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe the Jean Cocteau/Erik Satie/Pablo Picasso/Léonide Massine collaboration Parade (1917) in the program notes: "From this new alliance, for until now stage sets and costumes on one side and choreography on the other had only a sham bond between them, there has come about, in Parade, a kind of super-realism (sur-réalisme), in which I see the starting point of a series of manifestations of this new spirit (esprit nouveau)."

Surrealism's founding

André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 and the publication of the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution) marked the beginning of the movement as a public agitation. In the manifesto of 1924 Breton defines surrealism as "pure psychic automatism" with automatism being spontaneous creative production without conscious moral or aesthetic self-censorship. By Breton's admission, however, as well as by the subsequent development of the movement, this was a definition capable of considerable expansion. Breton also wrote the following dictionary and encyclopedia definitions:

SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, or in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.

ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life."

René Magritte's "The Betrayal of Images" (1928-9)

Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote the first automatic book, Les Champs Magnetiques, in 1919. Later, automatic drawing was developed by André Masson, and automatic drawing and painting, as well as other automatist methods, such as decalcomania, frottage, fumage, grattage and parsemage became significant parts of surrealist practice. (automatism was later adapted to the computer.) By December of 1924, the publication La Revolution Surrealiste edited by Pierre Naville and Benjamin Peret and later by Breton, was started. Also, a Bureau of Surrealist Research began in Paris and was at one time, under the direction of Antonin Artaud. In 1926, Louis Aragon wrote Le Paysan de Paris, following the appearance of many surrealist books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical works published by the surrealists, including those by Rene Crevel. Many of the popular artists in Paris throughout the 1920s and 1930s were surrealists, including René Magritte, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy. Games such as the exquisite corpse also assumed a great importance in surrealism. Although sometimes considered exclusively French, surrealism was in fact international from the beginning, with both the Belgian and Czech groups developing early; the Czech group continues uninterrupted to this day. In fact, some of what have been described as the most significant surrealist theorists such as Karel Teige from Czechoslovakia, Shuzo Takiguchi from Japan, Octavio Paz from Mexico, also Aime Cesaire and Rene Menil from Martinique, who both started the surrealist journal Tropiques in 1940, have hailed from other countries. The most radical of surrealist methods have also hailed from countries other than France, for example, the technique of cubomania was invented by Romanian surrealist Gherasim Luca.

While related to Dada, from which many of its initial members came, surrealism is significantly broader in scope. Dada was based primarily on the rejection of categories and labels, and rooted in negative response to the First World War, surrealism advocated the idea that the ordinary and depictive were still vital and important, but that the sense of arrangement should, and indeed must, be open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic. The surrealists believed life can be changed and transformed into a fertile crescent of freedom, love, and poetry. Andre Breton who proclaimed that the true aim of surrealism was: "long live the social revolution, and it alone!".

Surrealism was connected with the theories of Sigmund Freud and with primitivism more generally. Its political agenda was striving towards communism as well as being influenced by anarchism. As with many movements of the period, including expressionism, its diagnosis of the "problem" of the realism and capitalist civilisation is the restrictive overlay of false rationality, including social and academic convention, on the free functioning of the instinctual urges within the mind. But this dry connection does not get at the root of surrealism's broader appeal: according to Dalí, it was that surrealism did not reject the sense of beauty and aesthetic appeal of the past, merely the confines of it (however, this analysis may have been criticised by many surrealists, who considered the movement extra-aesthetic). It also embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of underlying madness and darkness of the mind. Dalí's famous quote is, "The only difference between myself and a madman is I am not MAD!"

Interwar surrealism: Centrality of Breton

Breton, as the central figure of the surrealist movement, not only published its most thorough explanations of its techniques, aims and ideas, but was the individual who drew in, and occasionally expelled, writers, artists and thinkers. Through the interwar period he formed the focus of surrealist activity in Paris, his writings would be enormously influential in spreading surrealism as a body of thought, in such works Nadja (1928), the Second Surrealist Manifesto (1930), Communicating Vessels (1932), and Mad Love (1937).

In the late 1920s there was a turbulent period, as several individuals closely associated with Breton left the movement, and several prominent artists entered. However, surrealism continued to expand in public visibility, in Breton's own estimation the high water mark being the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition. In 1937, Breton and Leon Trotsky co-authored a Manifesto for an independent revolutionary art on the need for a permanent revolution, and attacked Stalinism and Socialist realism, as "the negation of freedom".

Surrealism also attracted to Paris writers from the United Kingdom, one of these would be David Gascoyne, who would become friends with Paul Eluard and Max Ernst, and translate Andre Breton and Salvador Dalí into English. In 1935 he authored A Short Study of Surrealism, and then returned to England during the war, where he roomed with Lucian Freud, and continued to write in the surrealist style during the rest of his lifetime.

Surrealism during World War II

The rise of Adolf Hitler and the events of 1939-1945 in Europe, for a time, overshadowed almost all else, However, after the war, Breton continued to write and espouse the importance of the liberation of the human mind. For example in The Tower of Light in (1952). Breton's critiques of rationalism and dualism, would find a new audience after the Second World War, as his argument that return to old patterns of behavior was to insure a repeated cycle of conflict seemed increasingly prophethetic to French intellectuals as the Cold War mounted. Breton's insistence that surrealism was not an aesthetic movement, nor a series of techniques and tools, but instead the means to an on going revolt against the reduction of humanity to market relationships, religious gestures and misery, would mean his ideas and stances taken up by many, even those who had never specifically heard of Breton, or read any of his work. The importance of living surrealism was repeated by Breton and by those writing about him.

In 1941, Breton went to the United States, where he founded the short lived magazine VVV, which boasted high production values and a great deal of content, however, its that content was increasingly in French, not English. It was American poet Charles Henri Ford and his magazine View which offered Breton a channel for promoting surrealism in the United States. Ford and Breton would have an on again, off again relationship, Breton felt that Ford should work more specifically for surrealism, and Ford, for his part, resented what he felt to be Breton's attempts to make him "toe the line". Nevertheless, View would publish an interview between Breton and Nicolas Calas, as well as special issues on Tanguy and Ernst, and in 1945, on Marcel Duchamp.

The special issue on Duchamp was crucial for the public understanding of surrealism in America, it stressed his connections to surrealist methods, offered interpretations of his work by Breton, as well as Breton's view that Duchamp represented the bridge between early modern movements such as futurism and cubism with surrealism.

According to Martica Sawin, this Second World War represents "Surrealism in Exile", and he traces the connections to the founding of the "New York School" focused on abstract expressionism, and the increasing influence of Existentialism as competing with, and in many cases displacing, surrealism's place in the American avant-garde. This view, that surrealism would be submerged by later movements, is held particularly by American art historians, many of whom link the end of the Second World War with the end of surrealism as an organized movement.

However, with Breton's return to France after the Second World War, a new phase in activity began in Paris, one which attracted considerable attention; Breton's idea of the Phoenix came to symbolize the new effort, and for a time it appeared that surrealism's ability to combine older perspectives and techniques with new insights (for example, the deemphasis on Marxism) might bolster the argument for its continued importance in the context of 20th century philosophy, art and literature. One episode in particular stands in need of a new examination, that of the appearance of the Da Costas. The Da Costas were a splinter group from surrealism proper, comprised of some of those disaffected by Breton's increasing rigidity, and they published a curious document meant to coincide with the 1947 surrealist exhibition in Paris, the Da Costa Encyclopedia. (Due to printing delays, the Encyclopedia didn't see the light of day until some months after the exhibition ended.) This little booklet raised the art of invective to new heights. Ironically modelled after the format of the conventional encyclopedia, it lambasted social and individual conventions with a fervor seldom seen before or since, as well as perpetrating more recondite clusters of ideas. Perhaps its most insolent entry was the "License to Live", a faux-(French) governmental form which requested certain vital statistics from the bearer in order to be able to enforce its legal fiat; failure to keep the document "in order" made the individual in question liable to capital punishment. It is, no doubt, another of those relentlessly unsparing ejaculations issuing from the mind of Marcel Duchamp, who was the typographer for the Da Costa Encyclopedia project, a gesture that, in keeping with the best of surrealism, had no obvious relationship to the "art object" as it is commonly known. It has a precursor which appears in a much earlier note from Duchamp's Green Box, published in 1934 but written 20 years earlier, where he imagines a society in which one must pay for the air one breathes. All in all, this little book constitutes one of the most important chapters in the history of surrealism, and it is all but unknown today. Little wonder; those who participated in its creation actively discouraged interested parties from procuring copies. For a reprint of the Fascicule VII, volume II publication of the encyclopedia, as well as information on the Da Costa phenomenon, see Encyclopedia Acephalica, Arkhive Three, Atlas Press, 1995.

The end of surrealism

There is no clear consensus about the end of the surrealist movement: some historians suggest that the movement was effectively disbanded by WWII, others treat the movement as extending through the 1950s; art historian Sarane Alexandrian (1970) states that "the death of André Breton in 1966 marked the end of surrealism as an organized movement." However, some who knew Breton, and were part of groups he founded or approved continued to be active until well after his death. For example, Czech Surrealism Group in Prague, though driven underground in 1968, re-emerged in the 1990s. Still other groups and artists, not directly connected to Breton, have claimed the surrealist label. In addition, surrealism, as a prominent critique of rationalism and capitalism, and a theory of integrated aesthetics and ethics had influence on later movements, including many aspects of postmodernism.

Surrealism as an artistic movement

Early surrealist visual arts

In general usage, the term surrealism is more often applied to the movement in visual arts than the original cultural and philosophical movement. As with many terms, the relationship between the two usages is a matter of some debate outside the movement: other examples are romanticism and minimalism, which apply to different ideas and periods in differing contexts. The relationship between the movement in visual arts and surrealism as a political and philosophical movement is complex. Many surrealist artists regarded their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, and André Breton was explicit in his belief that surrealism was first and foremost a revolutionary movement.

Since so many of the artists involved in surrealism came from the Dada movement, the demarcation between surrealism and Dadaist art, as with the demarcation between surrealism and Dada in general is a drawn differently by different scholars, however, Masson's automatic drawings of 1923, are often used as a convenient point of difference, since these reflect the influence of the idea of the subconscious. In 1924, Miro and Masson would apply surrealism to painting explicitly leading to the La Peinture Surrealiste Exposition at Gallerie Pierre in 1925, which included work by Man Ray, Masson, Klee and Miro among others. It confirmed that surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), even if it would use techniques from Dada, such as photomontage. In 1926, on March 26 the Galerie Surrealiste opened, with an exhibition by Man Ray. In 1928, Breton would publish Surrealism and Painting, which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s.

The roots of surrealism in the visual arts run to both Dada and cubism as well as the abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky and expressionism, as well as post-impressionism. However, it was not the particulars of technique which marked the surrealist movement in the visual arts, but an the creation of objects from the imagination, from automatism, or from a number of surrealist techniques. One example is Alberto Giacometti's 1925 "Torso", which marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from pre-classical sculpture. However, a striking example of the line used to divide Dada and surrealism among art experts is the pairing of 1925's Von minimax dadamax selbst konstruiertes maschinchen (http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/images/lists/work/45_6_lg.jpg) with Le Basier (http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/images/lists/work/45_4_lg.jpg) from 1927 by Max Ernst. The first is generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, where as the second presents an erotic act openly and directly. In the second the influence of Miro and Picasso's drawing style is visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and colour, where as the first takes a directness that would later be influential in movements such as pop art.

But it was Giorgio de Chirico who would be one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he would adopt a very primary colour palette, and unornamented epictional style whose surface would be adopted by others later. One can see in La tour rouge from 1913 the stark colour contrasts and illustrative style which would be adopted by later surrealist painters. His 1914 La Nostalgie du poete has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief which defies conventional realistic explanation.

But he was also a writer: his novel Hebdomeros presents a series of dreamscapes, with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax and grammar, designed to create a particular atmosphere and frame around its images. His images, including set designs for the Ballet Russe, would create a decorative form of visual surrealism, and he would be an influence on the two that would be even more closely associated with surrealism in the public mind: Dalí and Magritte.

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí.

1930s

These two painters would create the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dali joined the group in 1929, and joined in what would be a rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935. Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.

1931 marked a year where several surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's La Voix des airs
(http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/images/lists/work/92_2_lg.jpg) is an example of this process, where three large spheres representing bells hanging above a landscape. Another surrealist landscape from this same year is Tanguy's Palais promontoire (http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/images/lists/work/152_2_lg.jpg), with its molten forms and liquid shapes. But liquid shapes would become the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his famous The Persistence of Memory, which features the famous image of clocks that sag as if they are made out of cloth.

The characteristics of this style: a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological, came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be made whole with ones individuality. Long after personal, political and professional tensions broke up the surrealist group, Magritte and Dali would continue to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as can be seen from this Man Ray self portrait (http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/s/images/surreal_manra.selfp.lg.jpg) whose use of assemblage would influence Robert Rauschenberg's collage boxes.

During the 1930s Peggy Guggenheim, an important art collector would marry Max Ernst and begin promoting work by other surrealists such as Yves Tanguy. However, by the outbreak of the Second World War, the taste of the avant-garde would swing decisively towards abstract expressionism with the support of key taste makers, including Guggenheim. According to Micheal Bell, it was at this point that the two sides of surrealistic art, what he labels automatism and veristic surrealism became more pronounced, and, according to his interpretation of events "only automatism was accepted after the war" because of its relationship to abstraction. In his writings he expresses a sympathy for the "creative" path of Dalí as the "Veristic Surrealist" over the "automatist" approach.

World War II and beyond

As with many artistic movements in Europe, the coming of the Second World War proved disruptive: both because of the rift between Breton and Dali over Dali's support for Francisco Franco, and because of a diaspora of the members of the surrealist movement itself. Dali said to remain a surrealist forever was like "painting only eyes and noses", and declared he had embarked on a "classic" period; Max Ernst in 1962 said "I feel more affinity for some German Romantics". Magritte began painting what he called his "solar" or "renoir" style.

However the works continued, many surrealist artists continued to explore their vocabularies, including Magritte. Many members of the surrealist movement continued to correspond and meet; in 1960, René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Man Ray met in Paris. And while Dali may have been excommunicated by Breton, he neither abandoned the themes from the 1930s, including references to the "persistence of time" in a later painting, nor did he become a depictive "pompier". His classic period (http://www.kalymnos-isl.gr/dimitri/dali-cla.htm) did not represent so sharp a break with the past as some descriptions of his work might lead one to believe.

During the 1940s surrealism's influence was also felt in England and America, Mark Rothko took an interest in bimorphic figures, and in England Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Paul Nash would be use or experiment with surrealist techniques. However, Conroy Maddox, one of the first British surrealists, beginning in 1935, would remain within the movement, organizing an exhibition of current surrealist work in 1978, in response to an exhibition which infuriated him because it did not properly represent surrealism. The exhibition, entilted Surrealism Unlimited was in Paris, and attracted international attention. He held his his last one man show in 2002, just before his death in 2005.

Magritte's work became more realistic in its depiction of actual objects, while maintaining the element of juxtaposition, such as in 1951's Personal Values (http://www.atara.net/magritte/50s/personal-values.html) and 1954's Empire of Light (http://www.atara.net/magritte/50s/empire-of-light.jpg). Magritte continued to produce works which have entered artistic vocabulary, such as Castle in the Pyrenees (http://www.atara.net/magritte/50s/castle-pyrenees.html) which refers back to Voix from 1931, in its suspension over a landscape.

Other figures from the surrealist movement were "expelled", for example Roberto Matta, but by their own description, "remained close to surrealism." Moreover, many new artists explicitly took up the surrealist banner for themselves, some following what they saw as the path of Dalí, others holding to views they derived from Breton. Duchamp continued to produce sculpture and, at his death, was working on an installation with the realistic depiction of a woman viewable only through a peephole. Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois continued to work, for example with Tanning's Rainy Day Canape from 1970.

With the 1970s, surrealism's desire to be understandable became a point of departure for many artists. These including Mark Tansey, who regard abstraction as fragmented, and incomplete as a tool of artistic conversation. Surrealism also remains enormously popular with museum patrons; the Tate Modern in 2001 held an exhibition of surrealist art that attracted over 170,000 vistors in its run. Having been one of the most important of movements in the Modern period, surrealism proceded to inspire a new generation seeking to expand the vocabulary of art.

Since surrealism ceased to have as much cachet in the world of modern art criticism, there has been an explosion of self-identified surrealists, having no more connection to the original surrealist movement than an admiration for one or more aspects of it. A sampling of current working artists who identify in one way or another might include Howard Newman, Quentin Shih, Kunihiro Shinohara and Alan Turner.

That surrealism has remained commercially successful and popularly recognized has lead many people associated with the Breton's surrealist group to criticise more general uses of the term. They argue that many self-identified surrealists are not grounded in Breton's work and the techniques of the movement.

The 1960s saw an expansion of surrealism with the founding of The West Coast Surrealist Group as recognized by Andre Breton's personal assistant Jose Pierre and also The Surrealist Movement in the United States.

Impact of surrealism

While surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has been said to transcend them; surrealism has had an impact in many other fields. In this sense, surrealism does not specifically refer only to self-identified "surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton, rather, it refers to a range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate the imagination.

In addition to surrealist ideas that are grounded in the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Freud, surrealism is seen by its advocates as being inherently dynamic and is dialectic in its thought. surrealist groups have also drawn on sources as seemingly diverse as Clark Ashton Smith, Bugs Bunny, comic strips, the obscure poet Samuel Greenberg and the hobo writer and humourist T-Bone Slim. One might say that surrealist strands may be found in movements such as Free Jazz (Don Cherry, Sun Ra, etc.) and even in the daily lives of people in confrontation with limiting social conditions. Thought of as the effort of humanity to liberate the imagination as an act of insurrection against society, surrealism dates back to, or finds precedents in, the alchemists, possibly Dante, various heretical groups, Hieronymus Bosch, Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, Comte de Lautreamont and Arthur Rimbaud. Surrealists believe that "non-Western" cultures also provide a continued source of inspiration for surrealist activity because some may strike up a better balance between instrumental reason and the imagination in flight than Western culture.

Some artists, such as H.R. Giger in Europe, who won an Academy Award for his stage set, and who also designed the "creature," in the movie Alien, have been popularly called "surrealists," though Giger is a visionary artist and it is speculated the he doesn't claim to be surrealist. The Society for the Art of Imagination has come in for particularly bitter criticism from a self-characterised surrealist movement (although this criticism has been characterized by at least one anonymous individual as coming from "the Marxists [sic] surrealist groups, who maintain small contingents worldwide;" he has also pointed out what he considers the hypocrisy of any surrealist criticism of the Society for the Art of Imagination given that Kathleen Fox designed the cover of issue 4 of the bulletin of the Groupe de Paris du Mouvement Surrealiste and also participated in the 2003 Brave Destiny[1]  (http://wahcenter.net/exhibits/2003/surreal/index.html) show at the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center." Though some presented Brave Destiny as the largest-ever exhibit of surrealist artists, the show was officially billed as exhibiting "Surrealism, Surreal/Conceptual, Visionary, Fantastic, Symbolism, Magic Realism, the Vienna School, Neuve Invention, Outsider, Naïve, the Macabre, Grotesque and Singulier Art.")

Surrealist music

In the 1920s several composers were influenced by surrealism, or by individuals in the surrealist movment. Notably Bohuslav Martinu, Andre Souris and Edgar Varese who stated that his work Arcana was drawn from a dream sequence. Souris in particular was associated with the movement, he had a long, if sometimes spotty, relationship with Magritte, and worked on Paul Nouge's publication Adieu Marie.

Even though Breton by 1946 responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay Silence is Golden, later surrealists have been interested in, and found parallels to surrealism in, the improvisation of jazz (as alluded to above), and the blues (surrealists such as Paul Garon have written articles and full-length books on the subject). Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest; for example, the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included such performances by Honeyboy Edwards.

Surrealists have also analysed reggae and, later, rap, and some rock bands such as The Psychedelic Furs. In addition to musicians who have been influenced by surrealism (including some influence in rock — the title of the 1967 psychedelic Jefferson Airplane album Surrealistic Pillow was obviously inspired by the movement, and some people claim that Frank Zappa's 1969 album Uncle Meat was a "surrealist record" — particularly hardcore), such as the experimental group Nurse With Wound (whose album title Chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and umbrella is taken from a line in Lautreamont's Maldoror), surrealist music has included such explorations as those of Hal Rammel.

Surrealist film

Surrealist films such as Un chien andalou and L'Âge d'Or by Luis Buñuel.

Surrealist and film theorist Robert Benayoun has written books on Tex Avery, Woody Allen, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers.

Some have described David Lynch as a surrealist filmmaker. He has never participated in the surrealist movement or in any surrealist activity, but there are arguably some aspects of many of his films that are of surrealist interest.

Surreal Films (http://sarahbyte.f2s.com/surreal.htm)

Surrealist television

Some have found the television series The Prisoner and Lost to be of surrealist interest.

See also

• Aerography
• Camus, Albert
• Cacophony Society
• Cut-up technique
• Dada
• Exquisite corpse game
• Fluxus
• Fumage
• Giorgio Chirico
• Hysterical realism and Maximalism
• mail art
• Paranoiac-critical method
• Post-surrealism
• Situationism
• surautomatism
• Surrealist games
• Surrealist techniques

Sources

• Guillaume Appollinaire (1917, 1991). Program Note for Parade", printed in Oeuvres en prose complètes, 2:865-866, Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin, eds. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
• André Breton. The Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, reprinted in:
  • Marguerite Bonnet, ed. (1988). Oeuvres complètes, 1:328. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
• André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism (Gallimard 1952) (Paragon House English rev. ed. 1993). ISBN 1569249709.
• What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings of André Breton (edited and with an Introduction by Franklin Rosemont). ISBN 0873488229.
• André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism containing the 1^st, 2^nd and introduction to a possible 3^rd Manifesto, and in addition the novel The Soluble Fish and political aspects of the surrealist movement. ISBN 0472179004.
• Gerard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement (translated by Alison Anderson, University of Chicago Press). ISBN 0226174115.
• Rosemont, Franklin, Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books (1980). ISBN 087286121X.
• Brotchie, Alastair and Gooding, Mel, eds. A Book of Surrealist Games Berkeley, CA: Shambhala (1995). ISBN 1570620849.
• Alexandrian, Sarane. Surrealist Art London:Thames & Hudson, 1970.
• Melly, George Paris and the Surrealists Thames & Hudson 1991
• Lewis, Helena The Politics Of Surrealism 1988
• Caws, Mary Ann Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology 2001 MIT Press

External links

• Manifesto of Surrealism by André Breton (http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm)
• "What is Surrealism?" Lecture by Breton, Brussels 1934 (http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/whatsurr.html)
• Surrealism on the Web: A collection of information on surrealism, surreal artists, and surreal websites. (http://www.surrealisms.com/)
• The surrealism server (http://www.madsci.org/~lynn/juju/surr/surrealism.html)
• Surrealist Groups
  • Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group (http://home.ti.cz/~surreal/surrealindex.html)
  • The Surrealist Movement in Serbia (http://www.serbiansurrealism.com/)
  • The Surrealist Movement in the United States (http://www.surrealistmovement-usa.org/)

Modernism
20th century - Modernity - Surrealism - Existentialism
Modernism (music): 20th century classical music - Atonality - Jazz
Modernist poetry: Modernist poetry in English
Symbolism (arts) - Impressionism - Expressionism - Cubism - Modern architecture - Modern dance
...Preceded by Romanticism	Followed by Post-modernism...

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism"

Categories: Art movements | Cultural movements 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell,

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (May 18, 1872 – February 2, 1970) was one of the most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and logicians of the modern age, working mostly in the 20th century. A prolific writer, Russell was also a populariser of philosophy and a commentator on a large variety of topics, ranging from very serious issues to the mostly mundane. Russell's elegant prose, clarity of expression, and biting wit were widely admired. Continuing a family tradition in political affairs, he was an influential libertarian activist for most of his long life. Millions looked up to Russell as a prophet of the creative and rational life; at the same time, his stances on many topics were extremely controversial. Born at the height of Britain's economic and political ascendancy, he died of influenza nearly a century later when Britain's empire had all but vanished, and her power had dissipated in two victorious, but debilitating world wars. As one of the world's most well-known intellectuals, Russell's voice carried enormous moral authority, even into his late nineties. Among his other political activities, Russell was an influential proponent of nuclear disarmament and an outspoken critic of the American war in Vietnam.

In 1950, Russell was made Nobel Laureate in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought".

Contents [showhide]

1 Russell's work on philosophy, logic, and other subjects 1.1 Analytic(al) philosophy 1.2 Epistemology 1.3 Ethics 1.4 Logical atomism 1.5 Logic and mathematics 1.6 Philosophy of language 1.7 Philosophy of science 1.8 Religion and theology 2 Influence on philosophy 3 Russell's activism 4 Russell's life 5 Russell summing up his life 6 Comments by others about Russell 6.1 As a man 6.2 As a philosopher 6.3 As a writer and his place in history 6.4 As a mathematician and logician 6.5 As an activist 6.6 From a daughter 7 Further reading 7.1 Selected bibliography of Russell's works by year of publication 7.2 Books about Russell's philosophy 7.3 Biographical books 8 External links 8.1 Online writings 8.2 Other

Russell's work on philosophy, logic, and other subjects

Analytic(al) philosophy

Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, indeed, even of its several branches. At the beginning of the 20th Century, alongside G. E. Moore, Russell was largely responsible for the British "revolt against Idealism", a philosophy greatly influenced by Georg Hegel and his British apostle, F. H. Bradley. This revolt was echoed thirty years later in Vienna by the logical positivists' "revolt against metaphysics". Russell was particularly appalled by the idealist doctrine of internal relations, which held that in order to know any particular thing, we must know all of its relations. Russell showed that this would make space, time, science and the concept of number unintelligible. Russell's logical work with Whitehead continued this project.

Russell and Moore strove to eliminate what they saw as meaningless and incoherent assertions in philosophy, and they sought clarity and precision in argument by the use of exact language and by breaking down philosophical propositions into their simplest components. Russell, in particular, saw logic and science as the principal tools of the philosopher. Indeed, unlike most philosophers who preceded him and his early contemporaries, Russell did not believe there was a separate method for philosophy. He believed that the main task of the philosopher was to illuminate the most general propositions about the world and to eliminate confusion. In particular, he wanted to end what he saw as the excesses of metaphysics. Russell adopted William of Occam's principle against multiplying unnecessary entities, Occam's Razor, as a central part of the method of analysis.

Epistemology

Russell's epistemology went through many phases. Once he shed Hegelianism in his early years, Russell remained a philosophical realist for the remainder of his life, believing that our direct experiences have primacy in the acquisition of knowledge. While some of his views have lost favor, his influence lingers on in the distinction between two ways in which we can be familiar with objects: "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description." For a time, Russell thought that we could only be acquainted with our own sense data, momentary perceptions of colours, sounds, and the like, and that everything else, including the physical objects that these were sense data of, could only be reasoned to--known by description--and not known directly. This distinction has gained much wider application, though Russell eventually rejected the idea of an intermediate sense datum.

In his later philosophy, Russell subscribed to a kind of neutral monism, maintaining that the distinctions between the material and mental worlds, in the final analysis, were arbitrary, and that both can be reduced to a neutral property, a view similar to one held by the American philosopher, William James, and one that was first formulated by Baruch Spinoza, whom Russell greatly admired. Instead of James' "pure experience," however, Russell characterized the stuff of our initial states of perception as "events."

Ethics

While Russell wrote a great deal on ethical subject matters, he did not believe that the subject belonged to philosophy or that when he wrote on ethics that he did so in his capacity as a philosopher. In his earlier years, Russell was greatly influenced by G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Along with Moore, he then believed that moral facts were objective, but only known through intuition, and that they were simple properties of objects, not equivalent (e.g., pleasure is good) to the natural objects to which they are often ascribed (see Naturalistic fallacy), and that these simple, undefinable moral properties cannot be analyzed using the non-moral properties with which they are associated. In time, however, he came to agree with his philosophical hero, David Hume, who believed that ethical terms dealt with subjective values that cannot be verified in the same way that matters of fact are. Coupled with Russell's other doctrines, this influenced the logical positivists, who formulated the theory of emotivism, which states that ethical propositions (along with those of metaphysics) were essentially meaningless and nonsensical or, at best, little more than expressions of attitudes and preferences. Notwithstanding his influence on them, Russell himself did not construe ethical propositions as narrowly as the positivists, for he believed that ethical considerations are not only meaningful, but that they are a vital subject matter for civil discourse. Indeed, though Russell was often characterized as the patron saint of rationality, he agreed with Hume, who said that reason ought to be subordinate to ethical considerations.

Logical atomism

Perhaps Russell's most systematic, metaphysical treatment of philosophical analysis and his empiricist-centric logicism is evident in what he called Logical atomism, which is explicated in a set of lectures, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," which he gave in 1918. In these lectures, Russell sets forth his concept of an ideal, isomorphic language, one that would mirror the world, whereby our knowledge can be reduced to terms of atomic propositions and their truth-functional compounds. Logical atomism is a form of radical empiricism, for Russell believed the most important requirement for such an ideal language is that every meaningful proposition must consist of terms referring directly to the objects with which we are acquainted, or that they are defined by other terms referring to objects with which we are acquainted. Russell excluded certain formal, logical terms such as all, the, is, and so forth, from his isomorphic requirement, but he was never entirely satisfied about our understanding of such terms. One of the central themes of Russell's atomism is that the world consists of logically independent facts, a plurality of facts, and that our knowledge depends on the data of our direct experience of them. In his later life, Russell came to doubt aspects of logical atomism, especially his principle of isomorphism, though he continued to believe that the process of philosophy ought to consist of breaking things down into their simplest components, even though we might not ever fully arrive at an ultimate atomic fact.

Logic and mathematics

Russell was without peer in his contributions to modern mathematical logic. The American logician, Willard Quine, said Russell's work represented the greatest influence on his own work. While subsequent systems have improved upon Russell's work in several areas (though certainly not all), modern logic rests largely on Russell's foundational work in the early part of the 20th Century.

Russell's first mathematical work, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, was published in 1897. This work was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant. Russell soon realized that the conception it laid out would have made Albert Einstein's schema of space-time impossible, which he understood to be superior to his own system. Thenceforth, he rejected the entire Kantian program as it related to mathematics and geometry, and he maintained that his own earliest work on the subject was nearly without value.

Interested in the definition of number, Russell studied the work of George Boole, Georg Cantor, and Augustus de Morgan, and he became convinced that the foundations of mathematics were tied to logic. In 1900 he attended a philosophical congress in Paris where he became familiar with the work of the Italian mathematician, Giuseppe Peano. He mastered Peano's new symbolism and his set of axioms for arithmetic. Peano was able to define logically all of the terms of these axioms with the exception of 0, number, successor, and the singular term, the. Russell took it upon himself to find logical definitions for each of these. He eventually discovered that Gottlob Frege had independently arrived at equivalent definitions for 0, successor, and number, and the definition of number is now usually referred to as the Frege-Russell definition. It was largely Russell who brought Frege to the attention of the English-speaking world.

In 1903, Russell published The Principles of Mathematics, in which the concept of class is inextricably tied to the definition of number. In writing Principles, Russell came across Cantor's proof that there was no greatest cardinal number, which Russell believed was mistaken. This caused him to analyze classes, for it was known that given any number of elements, the number of classes they result in is greater than their number. In turn, this led to the discovery of a very interesting class, namely, the class of all classes, which consists of two kinds of classes: classes that are members of themselves, and classes that are not members of themselves, which led him to find that the so-called principle of extensionality, taken for granted by logicians of the time, was fatally flawed, and that it resulted in a contradiction, whereby Y is a member of Y, if and only if, Y is not a member of Y. This has become known as Russell's Paradox, the solution to which he outlined in an appendix to Principles, and which he later developed into a complete theory, the Theory of types. Aside from exposing a major inconsistency in naive set theory, Russell's work led directly to the creation of modern axiomatic set theory. It also crippled Frege's project of reducing arithmetic to logic. The Theory of Types and much of Russell's subsequent work have also found practical applications with computer science and information technology.

Russell continued to defend logicism, the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic, and along with his former teacher, Alfred North Whitehead, wrote the monumental Principia Mathematica, an axiomatic system on which all of mathematics can be built. The first volume of the Principia was published in 1910, which is largely ascribed to Russell. More than any other single work, it established the specialty of mathematical or symbolic logic. Two more volumes were published, but their original plan to incorporate geometry in a fourth volume was never realized, and Russell never felt up to improving the original works, though he referenced new developments and problems in his preface to the second edition. Upon completing the Principia, three volumes of extraordinarily abstract and complex reasoning, Russell was exhausted, and he never felt his intellectual faculties fully recovered from the effort. Although the Principia did not fall prey to the paradoxes in Frege's approach, it was later proven by Kurt Gödel that—for exactly that reason—neither Principia Mathematica nor any other consistent logical system could prove all mathematical truths; hence, Russell's project was necessarily incomplete.

Russell's last significant work in mathematics and logic, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, was written, actually, dictated to a secretary, while he was in jail for his anti-war activities during World War I. This was largely an explication of his previous work and its philosophical significance.

Philosophy of language

Russell was not the first philosopher to suggest that language had an important bearing on how we understand the world; however, more than anyone before him, Russell made language, or more specifically, how we use language, a central part of philosophy. Had there been no Russell, it seems unlikely that philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, and P. F. Strawson, among others, would have embarked upon the same course, for so much of what they did was to amplify or respond, sometimes critically, to what Russell had said before them, using many of the techniques that he originally developed. Russell, along with Moore, shared the idea that clarity of expression is a virtue, a notion that has been a touchstone for philosophers ever since, particularly among those who deal with the philosophy of language.

Perhaps Russell's most significant contribution to philosophy of language is his theory of descriptions, as presented in his seminal essay, On Denoting, first published in 1905, which the mathematician and philosopher Frank Ramsey described as "a paradigm of philosophy." The theory is normally illustrated using the phrase "the present King of France", as in "The present king of France is bald." What object is this proposition about, given that there is not, at present, a king of France? Alexius Meinong had suggested that we must posit a realm of "nonexistent entities" that we can suppose we are referring to when we use expressions such as this; but this would be a strange theory, to say the least. Frege seemed to think we could dismiss as nonsense any proposition whose words apparently referred to objects that didn't exist. Among other things, the problem with this solution is that some such propositions, such as "If the present king of France is bald, then the present king of France has no hair on his head," not only do not seem nonsensical but appear to be obviously true. Roughly the same problem would arise if there were two kings of France at present: which of them does "the king of France" denote?

The problem is general to what are called "definite descriptions." Normally this includes all terms beginning with "the", and sometimes includes names, like "Walter Scott." (This point is quite contentious: Russell sometimes thought that the latter terms shouldn't be called names at all, but only "disguised definite descriptions," but much subsequent work has treated them as altogether different things.) What is the "logical form" of definite descriptions: how, in Frege's terms, could we paraphrase them in order to show how the truth of the whole depends on the truths of the parts? Definite descriptions appear to be like names that by their very nature denote exactly one thing, neither more or less. What, then, are we to say about the proposition as a whole if one of its parts apparently isn't working right?

Russell's solution was, first of all, to analyze not the term alone but the entire proposition that contained a definite description. "The present king of France is bald," he then suggested, can be reworded to "There is an x such that x is a present king of France, nothing other than x is a present king of France, and x is bald." Russell claimed that each definite description in fact contains a claim of existence and a claim of uniqueness which give this appearance, but these can be broken apart and treated separately from the predication that is the obvious content of the proposition. The proposition as a whole then says three things about some object: the definite description contains two of them, and the rest of the sentence contains the other. If the object does not exist, or if it is not unique, then the whole sentence turns out to be false, not meaningless.

One of the major complaints against Russell's theory, due originally to Strawson, is that definite descriptions do not claim that their object exists, they merely presuppose that it does.

Wittgenstein, Russell's student, later achieved even greater prominence in the philosophy of language. Russell thought Wittgenstein's elevation of language as the only reality with which philosophy need be concerned was absurd, and he decried his influence and the influence of his followers, especially members of the so-called Oxford school, who he believed were promoting a kind of mysticism. Russell's belief that there is more to philosophy and knowing the world than simply understanding how we use language has regained prominence in philosophy and eclipsed Wittgenstein's language-centric views.

Philosophy of science

Russell frequently claimed that he was more convinced of his method of doing philosophy, the method of analysis, than of his philosophical conclusions. Science, of course, was one of the principal components of analysis, along with logic and mathematics. While Russell was a believer in the scientific method, knowledge derived from empirical research that is verified through repeated testing, he believed that science reaches only tentative answers, and that scientific progress is piecemeal, and attempts to find organic unities were largely futile. Indeed, he believed the same was true of philosophy. Another founder of modern philosophy of science, Ernst Mach, placed less reliance on method, per se, for he believed that any method that produced predictable results was satisfactory and that the principal role of the scientist was to make successful predictions. While Russell would doubtless agree with this as a practical matter, he believed that the ultimate objective of both science and philosophy was to understand reality, not simply to make predictions.

The fact that Russell made science a central part of his method and of philosophy was instrumental in making the philosophy of science a full-blooded, separate branch of philosophy and an area in which subsequent philosophers specialized. Much of Russell's thinking about science is exposed in his 1914 book, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. Among the several schools that were influenced by Russell were the logical positivists, particularly Rudolph Carnap, who maintained that the distinguishing feature of scientific propositions was their verifiability. This contrasted with the theory of Karl Popper, also greatly influenced by Russell, who believed that their importance rested in the fact that they were potentially falsifiable.

It is worth noting that outside of his strictly philosophical pursuits, Russell was always fascinated by science, particularly of physics, and he even authored several popular science books, The ABC of Atoms (1923) and The ABC of Relativity (1925).

The following quotation from Russell sums up his views concerning race and eugenics: "In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one race to another.... It seems on the whole fair to regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensible, so that their extermination (apart from questions of humanity) would be highly undesirable." (Marriage and Morals (1929), the chapter titled "Eugenics")

Religion and theology

Russell's ethical outlook and his personal courage in facing controversies were certainly informed by his religious upbringing, principally by his paternal grandmother, who instructed him with the Biblical injunction, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil" (Exodus 23:2), something he said influenced him throughout his life.

For most of his adult life, however, Russell thought it very unlikely that there was a God, and he maintained that religion is little more than superstition and, despite any positive effects that religion might have, it is largely harmful to people. He believed religion and the religious outlook (he considered communism and other systematic ideologies to be species of religion) serve to impede knowledge, foster fear and dependency, and are responsible for much of the war, oppression, and misery that have beset the world. Technically, Russell was an agnostic, though he said that he was an atheist from a practical perspective.

As a young man, Russell had a decidedly religious bent, himself, as is evident in his early Platonism. He longed for eternal truths, as he makes clear in his famous essay, A Free Man's Worship, widely regarded as a masterpiece in prose, but one that Russell came to dislike. While he rejected the supernatural, he freely admitted that he yearned for a deeper meaning to life.

Russell's views on religion can be found in his popular book, Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (ISBN 0671203231), which began as a talk given March 6, 1927 at Battersea Town Hall, under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society, England. The speech was published later that year as a pamphlet, which, along with other essays, was eventually published as a book. In the book, Russell considers a number of logical arguments for the existence of God, including the first cause argument, the natural-law argument, the argument from design, and moral arguments. He also goes into specifics about Christian theology.

His final conclusion:

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. ... A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

Influence on philosophy

It would be difficult to overstate Russell's influence on modern philosophy, especially in the English-speaking world. While others were also influential, notably, Frege, Moore, and Wittgenstein, more than any other person, Russell made analysis the dominant approach to philosophy. Moreover, he is the founder or, at the very least, the prime mover of its major branches and themes, including several versions of the philosophy of language, formal logical analysis, and the philosophy of science. The various analytic movements throughout the last century all owe something to Russell's earlier works.

Russell's influence on individual philosophers is singular, and perhaps most notably in the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was his student between 1911 and 1914. It should also be observed that Wittgenstein exerted considerable influence on Russell, especially in leading him to conclude, much to his regret, that mathematical truths were trivial, tautological truths. Evidence of Russell's influence on Wittegenstein can be seen throughout the Tractatus, which Russell was responsible for having published. Russell also helped to secure Wittgenstein's doctorate and a faculty position at Cambridge, along with several fellowships along the way. However, as previously stated, he came to disagree with Wittgenstein's later approach to philosophy, while Wittgenstein came to think of Russell as "superficial and glib," particularly in his popular writings. Russell's influence is also evident in the work of A. J. Ayer, Rudolph Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, W. V. Quine, and a number of other philosophers and logicians.

Some see Russell's influence as mostly negative, primarily those who have been critical of Russell's emphasis on science and logic, the consequent diminishment of metaphysics, and of his insistence that ethics lies outside of philosophy. Russell's admirers and detractors are often more acquainted with his pronouncements on social and political matters, or what some (e.g., Ray Monk) have called his "journalism," than they are with his technical, philosophical work. Among non-philosophers, there is a marked tendency to conflate these matters, and to judge Russell the philosopher on what he himself would certainly consider to be his non-philosophical opinions. Russell often cautioned people to make this distinction.

Russell left a large assortment of writing. Since adolescence, Russell wrote about 3,000 words a day, in long hand, with relatively few corrections; his first draft nearly always was his last draft, even on the most complex, technical matters. His previously unpublished work is an immense treasure trove, and scholars are continuing to gain new insights into Russell's thought.

Russell's activism

Political and social activism occupied much of Russell's time for most of his long life, which makes his prodigious and seminal writing on a wide range of technical and non-technical subjects all the more remarkable.

As a young man, Russell was a member of the Liberal Party and wrote in favor of free trade and women's suffrage. In his 1910 pamphlet, Anti-Suffragist Anxieties, Russell wrote that some men opposed suffrage because they "fear that their liberty to act in ways that are injurious to women will be curtailed." In 1907 he was nominated by the National Union of Suffrage Societies to run for Parliament in a by-election, which he lost by a wide margin.

While never a complete pacifist, Russell opposed British participation in World War I and, as a result, he was first fined, then lost his professorship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was later imprisoned for six months. Russell called his stance "Relative Pacifism"— he held that war was always a great evil, but in some particularly extreme circumstances (such as when Adolf Hitler threatened to take over Europe) it might be a lesser of multiple evils. In the years leading to World War II, he supported the policy of appeasement; but by 1941 he acknowledged that in order to preserve democracy, Hitler had to be defeated.

Russell visited the Soviet Union and met Lenin in 1920. In a tract, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (http://ia105612.us.archive.org/0/texts/ThePracticeAndTheoryOfBolshevism/TXT/), he wrote "Bolshevism deserves the gratitude and admiration of all the progressive part of mankind". The tract was reissued in a censored form in 1949. He was unimpressed with the result of the communist revolution, and said he was "infinitely unhappy in this atmosphere -- stifled by its utilitarianism, its indifference to love and beauty and the life of impulse." He believed Lenin to be similar to a religious zealot, cold and possessed of "no love of liberty."

Politically, Russell envisioned a kind of benevolent, democratic socialism, not unlike the conception promoted by the Fabian Society. He was extremely critical of the totalitarianism exhibited by Stalin's regime, and of Marxism and communism, generally.

Russell was in favor of eugenics, and together with other left-wing British intellectuals endorsed the fashionable idea with rare enthusiasm. Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child -- this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.

Russell wrote against Victorian notions of morality. His early writings expressed his opinion that sex between a man and woman who are not married to each other is not necessarily immoral if they truly love one another. This might not seem extreme by today's standards, but it was enough to raise vigorous protests and denunciations against him during his first visit to the United States. Russell's private life was even more unconventional and freewheeling than his published writings revealed, but that was not yet well known at the time. For example, philosopher Sidney Hook reports that Russell often spoke of his sexual prowess and of his various conquests.

On November 20, 1948, in a public speech at Westminster School, addressing a gathering arranged by the New Commonwealth, Russell shocked some observers by suggesting that a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union is justified. Russell argued that war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable, so it would be a humanitarian gesture to get it over with quickly and have the United States in the dominant position. Currently, Russell argued, humanity could survive such a war, whereas a full nuclear war after both sides had manufactured large stockpiles of more destructive weapons was likely to result in the extinction of the human race. Russell later relented from this stance, instead arguing for mutual disarmament by the nuclear powers.

Starting in the 1950s, Russell became a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons. With the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, he released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto with Albert Einstein and organized several conferences. In 1961, when he was in his late eighties, he was imprisoned for a week in connection with his nuclear disarmament protest at Hyde Park and for inciting civil disobedience. He opposed the Vietnam War and, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, he organized a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes; this came to be known as the Russell Tribunal.

The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation began work in 1963, in order to carry forward his work for peace, human rights and social justice.

Russell was an early critic of the official story in the John F. Kennedy assassination; his "16 Questions on the Assassination" from 1964 is still considered a good summary of the apparent inconsistencies in that case.

Russell remained politically active to the end, writing and exhorting world leaders and lending his name to various causes. Some maintain that during his last few years he gave his youthful followers too much license and that they used his name for some outlandish purposes that a more attentive Russell would not have approved. There is evidence to show that he became aware of this when he fired his private secretary, Ralph Shoenmann, then a young firebrand of the radical left.

Russell's life

A young Russell

Bertrand Russell was from an aristocratic English family. His paternal grandfather, Lord John Russell, had been Prime Minister in the 1840s, and was the second son of the 6th Duke of Bedford. The Russells had been prominent for several centuries in Britain, and were one of Britain's leading Whig / Liberal families. Russell's mother, Viscountess Amberley (who died when he was 2), was also from an aristocratic family, and was the sister of Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle. His parents were quite radical for their times. Russell's father, Viscount Amberley (who died when Bertrand was 4), was an atheist, and, among other things, consented to his wife's affair with their children's tutor, the biologist Douglas Spalding. His godfather was the Utilitarian philosopher, John Stuart Mill. His early years were spent at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park.

After his parents' premature deaths, Russell and his older brother, Frank, the future 2nd Earl, were raised by their staunchly Victorian grandparents, Lord Russell, the former Prime Minister, and his second wife, the Countess Russell, nee Lady Frances Elliot. Russell also had a sister who died when he was an infant. Russell's childhood was very lonely and he often contemplated suicide. He remarked in his autobiography that only his keen interest in mathematics and his fascination with masturbation seemed to keep him interested in living. He was educated at home by a series of tutors, and he spent countless hours in his grandfather's library. His brother Frank introduced him to Euclid, which transformed Russell's life. Russell was primarily raised by his grandmother, who was quite religious, and her influence on his outlook on social justice and standing up for principle remained with him throughout his life.

Russell first met the American Quaker, Alys Pearsall Smith, when he was seventeen years old. He fell in love with the puritanical, high-minded Alys, who was connected to several educationists and religious activists, and, contrary to his grandmother's wishes, he married her in December 1894. Their marriage was ended by separation in 1911 when Russell realized he no longer loved her. Alys pined for him for years and continued to love Russell for the rest of her life. During this period, Russell had passionate affairs with, among others, Lady Ottoline Morrell (half-sister of the 6th Duke of Portland) and the actress Lady Constance Malleson.

Russell studied philosophy and logic at Cambridge University, starting in 1890, where he became acquainted with the younger G.E. Moore, and where he later came under the influence of Alfred North Whitehead. He quickly distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy.

Russell began his published work in 1896 with German Social Democracy, a study in politics, an early indication of an interest in political and social theory, areas that would attract his attention for the rest of his life.

He became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1908. Shortly thereafter he first met the very unusual Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose genius he immediately recognized. He spent hours dealing with Wittgenstein's various phobias and his frequent bouts of despair. The latter was often a drain on Russell's energy, but he continued to be fascinated by him and encouraged his academic development. The first of three volumes of Principia Mathematica was published in 1910, which soon made Russell world famous.

During WWI, Russell engaged in pacifist activities that eventually landed him in jail (see section above on his activism), and in 1916 he was dismissed from Trinity College following his conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act. In 1920, Russell travelled to Russia and subsequently lectured in Peking on philosophy for one year. In 1921, he divorced Alys and married Dora Black. Their children were John Conrad Russell (who briefly succeeded his father as 4th Earl Russell) and Lady Katherine Russell (now Lady Katherine Tait). Russell supported himself during this time by writing popular books explaining matters of physics, ethics and education to the layman. Together with Dora, he also founded the experimental Beacon Hill School in 1927.

Upon the death of his elder brother Frank, in 1931, Russell became 3rd Earl Russell. He once said that his title was primarily useful for securing hotel rooms and the like.

An old Russell

Russell's marriage to Dora grew increasingly tenuous, and it reached a breaking point over her adultery with an American journalist. In 1936, he took as his third wife, an Oxford undergraduate named Patricia ("Peter") Spence. She had been his children's governess in the summer of 1930. Russell and Peter had one son, Conrad.

In the spring of 1939, Russell moved to Santa Barbara to lecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was appointed professor at the City College of New York shortly thereafter, but after public outcries, the appointment was annulled by the courts: his radical opinions made him "morally unfit" to teach at the college. The protest was originated by the mother of a student who would not even have been eligible for his graduate-level course in abstract, mathematical logic. Many intellectuals, led by John Dewey, protested his treatment. He soon joined the Barnes Foundation as a lecturer, whereupon he began work on The History of Western Philosophy. His relationship with the Foundation soon soured. He returned to Britain in 1944 and he rejoined the faculty of Trinity College.

In 1949, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit. The following year, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Russell's eldest son, John, suffered from serious mental illness, which was often the source of ongoing problems between Russell and John's mother, Russell's former wife, Dora.

During the 1950s, Russell participated in a series of interviews with the BBC on various topical and philosophical subjects. By this time in his life, Russell was world famous outside of academic circles, frequently the subject or author of magazine and newspaper articles, and was called upon to offer up opinions on a wide variety of subjects, even mundane ones. Along with Einstein, Russell had reached a kind of superstar status as an intellectual.

In 1952, Russell divorced Peter, with whom he had been very unhappy, and he married his fourth wife, Edith Finch. They had known each other since 1925. Edith had lectured in English at Bryn Mawr College, near Philadelphia. Edith remained with him until his death, and, by all accounts, their relationship was very close and loving throughout their marriage.

Russell spent the 1950s and 1960s engaged in various political causes, primarily related to nuclear disarmament and opposing the Vietnam War. He wrote a great many letters to world leaders during this period. He also became a hero to many of the youthful members of the New Left. During the 1960s, in particular, Russell became increasingly vocal about his disapproval of the American government's policies.

Bertrand Russell wrote his three volume autobiography in the late 1960s. While he grew increasingly frail, he remained lucid until the end, when, in 1970, he died in his home in Plas Penrhyn, Wales. His ashes were scattered over the Welsh mountains.

He was succeeded in his titles by his son John (by his marriage to Dora), and then by his younger son (by his third marriage to Peter), Conrad Russell (1936-2004), a respected historian. Conrad Russell was, in turn, succeeded by his son and Russell's grandson, Nicholas Russell (born 1968), who is now the 6th Earl Russell.

Preceded by: John Russell

Earl Russell

Succeeded by: John Russell

Russell summing up his life

Admitting to failure in helping the world to conquer war and in winning his perpetual intellectual battle for eternal truths, Russell wrote this in Reflections on my Eightieth Birthday, which also served as the last entry in the last volume of his autobiography, published in his 97th year:

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

Comments by others about Russell

As a man

"Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man." A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, NY: Viking Press, 1972.

As a philosopher

"It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Russell's thought dominated twentieth century analytic philosophy: virtually every strand in its development either originated with him or was transformed by being transmitted through him. Analytic philosophy itself owes its existence more to Russell than to any other philosopher." Nicholas Griffen, The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

As a writer and his place in history

"Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical writings." Sidney Hook, Out of Step, An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century, NY: Carol & Graff, 1988.

As a mathematician and logician

Of the Principia: "...its enduring value was simply a deeper understanding of the central concepts of mathematics and their basic laws and interrelationships. Their total translatability into just elementary logic and a simple familiar two-place predicate, membership, is of itself a philosophical sensation." W.V. Quine, From Stimulus to Science, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Also regarding the Principia: "This is the book that has meant the most to me." from a blurb by Quine on Principia Mathematica to *56, an abridged version of the Principia, A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.

As an activist

"Oh, Bertrand Russell! Oh, Hewlett Johnson! Where, oh where, was your flaming conscience at that time?" Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipeligo, Harper & Row, 1974

From a daughter

"He was the most fascinating man I have ever known, the only man I ever loved, the greatest man I shall ever meet, the wittiest, the gayest, the most charming. It was a privilege to know him and I thank God he was my father." Katherine Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Further reading

Selected bibliography of Russell's

works by year of publication

• 1896 German Social Democracy, London: Longmans, Green.
• 1897 An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, Cambridge: At the University Press.
• 1903 The Principles of Mathematics, Cambridge: At the University Press.
• 1910 Philosophical Essays, London: Logmans, Green.
• 1910-1913 Principia Mathematica (with Alfred North Whitehead), Cambridge: At the University Press.
• 1912 The Problems of Philosophy, London: William and Norgate.
• 1914 Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, London: The Open Court Publishing Company.
• 1916 Principles of Social Reconstruction, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1918 Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, London: Longmans, Green.
• 1918 Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1919 Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1920 The Analysis of Mind, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1923 The ABC of Relativity, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
• 1926 On Education, Especially in Early Childhood, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1927 The Analysis of Matter, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
• 1927 An Outline of Philosophy, London, George Allen & Unwin.
• 1927 Why I Am Not A Christian, London: Watts.
• 1929 Marriage and Morals, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1930 The Conquest of Happiness, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1931 The Scientific Outlook, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1935 Religion and Science, London: Thornton Butterworth.
• 1938 Power: A New Social Analysis, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1940 An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1945 A History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, New York: Simon and Schuster.
• 1948 Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1950 Unpopular Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1954 Human Society in Ethics and Politics, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1956 Portraits from Memory and Other Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1967 War Crimes in Vietnam, London: George Allen & Unwin.
• 1967-1969 The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Volumes 1, 2 & 3, London: George Allen & Unwin.

Note: this is a mere sampling, for Russell authored many more books and articles, even some fiction. His works also can be found in any number of anthologies and collections, perhaps most notably, the Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, which McMaster University began publishing in 1980. This collection of his shorter and previously unpublished works is now up to 14 volumes, and many more are forthcoming. An additional 3 volumes catalogue just his bibliography. The Russell Archives at McMaster also has more than 40,000 letters that he wrote.

Books about Russell's philosophy

• Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments, edited by A.D. Irvine, consisting of essays on Russell's work by many distinguished philosophers, 4 vols, London: Routledge, 1999.
• Theories of Truth, by Richard L. Kirkham (1992). Chapter 4 includes a detailed discussion of Russell's theory of truth.
• Bertrand Russell, John Slater, Thoemmes Press, 1994.
• The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, edited by P.A. Schlipp, Chicago, 1944.

Biographical books

• Bertrand Russell: 1872-1920 The Spirit of Solitude by Ray Monk (1997) ISBN 0099731312
• Bertrand Russell: 1921-70 The Ghost of Madness by Ray Monk (2001) ISBN 009927275X
• Bertrand Russell: Philosopher and Humanist, by John Lewis (1968)
• Russell, by A. J. Ayer (1972) ISBN 0

Falsifiability

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This page discusses how a theory or assertion is "falsifiable" ("disprovable" opp: "verifiable"), rather than the non-philosophical use of "falsification", meaning "counterfeiting." The idea comes from the work of the philosophers Sir Karl Popper and Ernest Gellner.

Falsifiability is an important concept in the philosophy of science that amounts to the apparently paradoxical idea that a proposition or theory cannot be scientific if it does not admit consideration of the possibility of its being false.

"Falsifiable" does not mean "false". For a proposition to be falsifiable, it must be possible in principle to make an observation that would show the proposition to be false, even if that observation has not been made. For example, the proposition "All crows are black" would be falsified by observing one white crow.

Any theory that is not falsifiable is said to be unscientific. Psychoanalytic theory, for example, is held up by followers of Popper as an example of an ideology rather than a science. A patient regarded by his psychoanalyst as "in denial" about his sexual orientation may be viewed as confirming he is homosexual simply by denying that he is; and if he has sex with women, he may be accused of trying to buttress his denials. In other words, there is no way the patient could convincingly demonstrate his heterosexuality to his analyst. This is an example of what Popper called a "closed circle". The proposition that the patient is homosexual is not falsifiable.

Contents [showhide]

1 Naïve falsification 2 Popper's swan argument 3 Formal logical arguments 3.1 Theory-dependence of observation 3.2 Indeterminacy of theory by evidence 4 The criterion of demarcation 5 Criticism 6 Some examples 6.1 Mathematics 6.2 Ethics 6.3 Theism 6.4 Conspiracy theories 6.5 Economics 6.6 Historicism 6.7 Solipsism 6.8 Physical laws 7 External Links 8 See also

Naïve falsification

Falsifiability was first developed by Karl Popper in the 1930s. Popper noticed that two types of statements are of particular value to scientists. The first are statements of observations, such as 'this is a white swan'. Logicians call these statements singular existential statements, since they assert the existence of some particular thing. They can be parsed in the form: There is an x which is a swan and is white.

The second type of statement of interest to scientists categorizes all instances of something, for example "All swans are white". Logicians call these statements universal. They are usually parsed in the form For all x, if x is a swan then x is white.

Scientific laws are commonly supposed to be of this form. Perhaps the most difficult question in the methodology of science is: how does one move from observations to laws? How can one validly infer a universal statement from any number of existential statements?

Inductivist methodology supposed that one can somehow move from a series of singular existential statements to a universal statement. That is, that one can move from ‘this is a white swan', “that is a white swan”, and so on, to a universal statement such as 'all swans are white'. This method is clearly logically invalid, since it is always possible that there may be a non-white swan that has somehow avoided observation. Yet some philosophers of science claim that science is based on such an inductive method.

Popper held that science could not be grounded on such an invalid inference. He proposed falsification as a solution to the problem of induction. Popper noticed that although a singular existential statement such as 'there is a white swan' cannot be used to affirm a universal statement, it can be used to show that one is false: the singular existential observation of a black swan serves to show that the universal statement 'all swans are white' is false. In logic this is modus tollens. 'There is a black swan' implies 'there is a non-white swan' which in turn implies 'there is something which is a swan and which is not white'.

Although the logic of naïve falsification is valid, it is rather limited. Popper drew attention to these limitations in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, in response to anticipated criticism from Duhem and Carnap. W. V. Quine is also well-known for his observation in his influential essay, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (which is reprinted in From a Logical Point of View), that nearly any statement can be made to fit with the data, so long as one makes the requisite "compensatory adjustments". In order to logically falsify a universal, one must find a true falsifying singular statement. But Popper pointed out that it is always possible to change the universal statement or the existential statement so that falsification does not occur. On hearing that a black swan has been observed in Australia, one might introduce ad hoc hypothesis, 'all swans are white except those found in Australia'; or one might adopt another, more cynical view about some observers, 'Australian ornithologists are incompetent'. As Popper put it, a decision is required on the part of the scientist to accept or reject the statements that go to make up a theory or that might falsify it. At some point, the weight of the ad hoc hypotheses and disregarded falsifying observations will become so great that it becomes unreasonable to support the base theory any longer, and a decision will be made to reject it.

In place of naïve falsification, Popper envisioned science as evolving by the successive rejection of falsified theories, rather than falsified statements. Falsified theories are to be replaced by theories which can account for the phenomena which falsified the prior theory, that is, with greater explanatory power. Thus, Aristotelian mechanics explained observations of objects in everyday situations, but was falsified by Galileo’s experiments, and was itself replaced by Newtonian which accounted for the phenomena noted by Galileo (and others). Newtonian mechanics' reach included the observed motion of the planets and the mechanics of gases. Or at least most of them; the motion of Mercury wasn't predicted by Newtonian mechanics, but was by Einstein's general relativity. The Youngian wave theory of light (i.e., waves carried by the luminiferous ether) replaced Newton's (and many of the Classical Greeks') particles of light but in its turn was falsified by the Michelson-Morley experiment, whose results were eventually understood as incompatible with an ether and was superseded by Maxwell's electrodynamics and Einstein's special relativity, which did account for the new phenomena. At each stage, experimental observation made a theory untenable (i.e., falsified it) and a new theory was found which had greater 'explanatory power' (i.e., could account for the previously unexplained phenomena), and as a result provided greater opportunity for its own falsification.

Naïve falsificationism is an unsuccessful attempt to prescribe a rationally unavoidable method for science. Falsificationism proper, on the other hand, is a prescription of a way in which scientists ought to behave as a matter of choice.

Popper's swan argument

A white mute swan, common to Eurasia and North America

One notices a white swan, from this one can conclude:

Some swans are white.

From this, one may wish to infer that:

All swans are white.

However, to prove this, one must find all the swans in the world and verify that they are white. This is nigh impossible, and extensions such as, All swans have always been white would require a time machine as would all swans will always be white. Therefore, this cannot be proven.

Two black swans, native to Australia

As it turns out, not all swans are white. By finding a black swan, one has falsified the statement all swans are white; it is not true. We have to refine our paradigm to a more specific statement, thus

All swans except Cygnus atratus are white; C. atratus is black.

Formal logical arguments

The explication of falsification by Popper perhaps is responsible for the formulation of the two main objections to empirical positivism. Falsification of some theory occurs through Modus tollens, via some observation. Suppose some theory T, implies an observation O:

But the required observation is not made, so

So by Modus Tollens,

Theory-dependence of observation

All observations make use of prior assumptions; so

and so,

but

by De Morgan's law.

In words, failure to make some observation only implies the failure of at least one of the prior assumptions that went into making the observation. It is always possible to reject an apparently falsifying observation by claiming that some one of its underlying assumptions is false; since there are an indeterminate number of such assumptions, any observation can potentially be made compatible with any theory. So it is quite valid to use a theory to reject an observation.

Indeterminacy of theory by evidence

Similarly, a theory consists of some indeterminate conjunction of hypotheses,

and so,

but

In words, failure of some theory implies only failure of at least one of the underlying hypotheses of the theory. It is always possible to resurrect a falsified theory by claiming that some one of its underlying hypotheses is false; again, since there are an indeterminate number of such hypotheses, any theory can potentially be made compatible with any particular observation. So it is not possible to determine the falsity of a theory by reference to the evidence.

The criterion of demarcation

Popper proposed falsification as a way of determining if a theory is scientific or not. If a theory is falsifiable, then it is scientific; if it is not falsifiable, then it is not science. Popper uses this criterion of demarcation to draw a sharp line between scientific and unscientific theories. Some have taken this principle to an extreme to cast doubt on the scientific validity of many disciplines (such as macroevolution and Cosmology). Falsifiability was one of the criteria used by Judge William Overton to determine that 'creation science' was not scientific and should not be taught in Arkansas public schools.

In the philosophy of science, verificationism (also known as the verifiability theory of meaning) held that a statement must be in principle empirically verifiable in order to be both meaningful and scientific. This was an essential feature of the logical empiricism of the so-called Vienna Circle that featured such philosophers as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neutrath and Hans Reichenbach. After Popper, verifiability came to be replaced by falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation. In other words, in order to be scientific, a statement had to be, in principle, falsifiable. Popper noticed that the philosophers of the Vienna Circle had mixed two different problems, and had accordingly given a single solution to both of them: verificationism. In opposition to this view, Popper emphasized that a theory might well be meaningful without being scientific, and that, accordingly, a criterion of meaningfulness may not necessarily coincide with a criterion of demarcation. His own falsificationism, thus, is not only an alternative to verificationism; it is also an acknowledgment of the conceptual distinction that previous theories had ignored.

Falsifiability is a property of statements and theories, and is itself neutral. As a demarcation criterion, it seeks to take this property and make it a base for affirming the superiority of falsifiable theories over non-falsifiable ones as a part of science, in effect setting up a political position that might be called falsificationism. However, much that would be considered meaningful and useful is not falsifiable. Certainly non-falsifiable statements have a role in scientific theories themselves. The Popperian criterion provides a definition of science that excludes much that is of value; it does not provide a way to distinguish meaningful statements from meaningless ones.

It is nevertheless very useful to know if a statement or theory is falsifiable, if for no other reason than it provides us with an understanding of the ways in which one might assess the theory. One might at the least be saved from attempting to falsify a non-falsifiable theory, or come to see an unfalsifiable theory as unsupportable.

Criticism

Thomas Kuhn’s influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that scientists work within a conceptual paradigm that determines the way in which they view the world. Scientists will go to great length to defend their paradigm against falsification, by the addition of ad hoc hypotheses to existing theories. Changing one's 'paradigm' is not easy, and only through some pain and angst does science (at the level of the individual scientist) change paradigms.

Some falsificationists saw Kuhn’s work as a vindication, since it showed that science progressed by rejecting inadequate theories. More commonly, it has been seen as showing that sociological factors, rather than adherence to a strict, logically obligatory method, play the determining role in deciding which scientific theory is accepted. This was seen as a profound threat to those who seek to show that science has a special authority in virtue of the methods that it employs.

Imre Lakatos attempted to explain Kuhn’s work in falsificationist terms by arguing that science progresses by the falsification of research programs rather than the more specific universal statements of naïve falsification. In Lakatos' approach, a scientist works within a research program that corresponds roughly with Kuhn's 'paradigm'. Whereas Popper rejected the use of ad hoc hypothesis as unscientific, Lakatos accepted their place in the development of new theories.

Paul Feyerabend examined the history of science with a more critical eye, and ultimately rejected any prescriptive methodology at all. He went beyond Lakatos’ argument for ad hoc hypothesis, to say that science would not have progressed without making use of any and all available methods to support new theories. He rejected any reliance on a scientific method, along with any special authority for science that might derive from such a method. Rather, he claimed, ironically, that if one is keen to have a universally valid methodological rule, anything goes would be the only candidate. For Feyerabend, any special status that science might have derives from the social and physical value of the results of science rather than its method.

Although falsifiability does provide a way to replace invalid inductive thinking with deductive, falsifiable reasoning, it appeared to Feyerabend that doing so is neither necessary for, nor conducive to, scientific progress.

Some examples

Claims about verifiability and falsifiability have been used to criticize various controversial views. Examination of these examples shows the usefulness of falsifiability in showing us where to look when criticising a theory.

Non-falsifiable theories can usually be reduced to a simple uncircumscribed existential statement, such as there exists a green swan. It is entirely possible to verify that the theory is true, simply by producing the green swan. But since this statement does not specify when or where the green swan exists, it is simply not possible to show that the swan does not exist, and so it is impossible to falsify the statement.

That such theories are unfalsifiable says nothing about either their validity or truth. But it does assist us in determining how such statements might be evaluated. If evidence cannot be presented to support a case, and yet the case cannot be shown to be indeed false, how much credence should it be given?

Mathematics

Mathematical and logical statements are typically regarded as unfalsifiable, since they are tautologies, not existential or universal statements. For example, "all bachelors are male" and "all green things are green" are necessarily true (or given) without any knowledge of the world; given the meaning of the terms used, they are tautologies.

Proving mathematical theorems involves reducing them to tautologies, which can be mechanically proven as true given the axioms of the system or reducing the negative to a contradiction. Mathematical theorems are unfalsifiable, since this process, coupled with the notion of consistency, eliminates the possibility of counterexamples - a process that the philosophy of mathematics studies in depth as a separate matter.

How a mathematical formula might apply to the physical world, however (as a model), is a physical question, and thus testable, within certain limits. For example, the theory that "an object will follow a parabolic path when thrown into the air" is falsifiable (and, in fact, false; think of a feather).

Ethics

Many philosophers have held that claims about morality (such as "murder is evil" and "John was wrong to steal that money") are not part of scientific inquiry; their function in language is not even to state facts, but simply to express certain moral sentiments. Hence they are not falsifiable.

Theism

On the view of some, theism is not falsifiable, since the existence of God is typically asserted without sufficient conditions to allow a falsifying observation. God being a transcendental being, beyond the realm of the observable, claims about its existence can neither be supported nor undermined by observation. It is quite consistent for a theist to agree that the existence of God is unfalsifiable, and that the proposition is not scientific, but to still claim that God exists. This is, of course, a matter of interest for anyone who places stock in natural theology--the argument from design and other a posteriori arguments for the existence of God. (See non-cognitivism.) However, arguments relating to alleged actions, rather than the existence, of God may be falsifiable. See nontheism for further information.

Conspiracy theories

There are other examples of theories, however, that are much less controversial as examples of unfalsifiable claims. Some so-called "conspiracy theories," at least as defended by some people, are essentially unfalsifiable because of their logical structure. Conspiracy theories usually take the form of uncircumscribed existential statements, alleging the existence of some action or object without specifying the place or time at which it can be observed. Failure to observe the phenomenon can then always be the result of looking in the wrong place or looking at the wrong time. Conspiracy theorists can, and often do, defend their position by claiming that lying and other forms of fabrication are, in fact, a common tool of governments and other powerful players and that evidence suggesting that a conspiracy did not occur has been fabricated.

Economics

Many viewpoints in economics are often accused of not being falsifiable, mainly by sociologists and other social scientists in general.

The most common argument is made against rational expectations theories, which work under the assumption that people act to maximize their utility. However, under this viewpoint, it is impossible to disprove the fundamental theory that people are utility-maximizers. The political scientist Graham Allison, in his book Essence of Decision, attempted to both quash this theory and substitute other possible models of behavior.

Historicism

Theories of history or politics which allegedly predict the future course of history have a logical form that renders them neither falsifiable nor verifiable. They claim that for every historically significant event, there exists an historical or economic law that determines the way in which events proceeded. Failure to identify the law does not mean that it does not exist, yet an event that satisfies the law does not prove the general case. Evaluation of such claims is at best difficult. On this basis, Popper himself argued that neither Marxism nor psychoanalysis were science, although both made such claims. Again, this does not mean, that any of these types of theories are necessarily invalid. Popper considered falsifiability a test of whether theories are scientific, not of whether theories are valid.

Solipsism

In philosophy, solipsism is, in essence, non-falsifiable. Solipsism claims that the Universe exists entirely in one's own mind. This can straightforwardly be seen not to be falsifiable, because whatever evidence one might adduce that is contrary to solipsism can be, after all, dismissed as something that is "in one's mind." In other words, there is no evidence that one could possibly adduce that would be inconsistent with the proposition that everything that exists, exists in one's own mind. This view is somewhat similar to Cartesian skepticism, and indeed, Cartesian skepticism has been rejected as unfalsifiable as well by many philosophers.

Physical laws

The laws of physics are an interesting case. Occasionally it is suggested that the most fundamental laws of physics, such as "force equals mass times acceleration" (F=ma), are not falsifiable because they are definitions of basic physical concepts (in the example, of "force"). More usually, they are treated as falsifiable laws, but it is a matter of considerable controversy in the philosophy of science what to regard as evidence for or against the most fundamental laws of physics. Isaac Newton's laws of motion in their original form were falsified by experiments in the twentieth century (eg, the anomaly of the motion of Mercury, the behavior of light passing sufficiently close to a star, the behavior of particle being accelerated in a cyclotron, etc), and replaced by a theory which predicted those phenomena, General Relativity, though Newton's account of motion is still a good enough approximation for most human needs. In the case of less fundamental laws, their falsifiability is much easier to understand. If, for example, a biologist hypothesizes that, as a matter of scientific law (though practising scientists will rarely actually state it as such), only one certain gland produces a certain hormone, when someone discovers an individual with the hormone but lacking the gland, the hypothesis is falsified.

The range of available testing apparatus is also sometimes an issue - when Galileo showed Catholic Church scholars the moons of Jupiter, there was only one telescope on hand, and telescopes were a new technology, so there was some debate about whether the moons were real or possibly an artifact of the telescope or of the type of telescope. Fortunately, this type of problem can usually be resolved in a short time, as it was in Galileo's case, by the spread of technical improvements. Diversity of apparatus is quite important to concepts of falsifiability, because presumably any observer with any appropriate apparatus should be able to make the same observation and so prove a thesis false.

This article does not cite its references or sources. You can help Wikipedia by adding appropriate ones.

External Links

• Problems with Falsificationism (http://www.galilean-library.org/falsificationism.html) explained at The Galilean Library

See also

• Occam's Razor
• Philosophy of science
• Philosophy of mathematics
• Cognitive bias
• Obsolete scientific theories

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability"

Categories: Epistemology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Sir

Karl Raimund Popper (July

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Karl Popper

Sir Karl Raimund Popper (July 28, 1902 – September 17, 1994), was an Austrian-born, British philosopher of science. He is counted among the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. Popper is perhaps best known for repudiating the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science; for advancing empirical falsifiability as the criterion for distinguishing scientific theory from non-science; and for his defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism which he took to make the flourishing of the "open society" possible.

Contents [showhide]

1 Life 2 Popper's philosophy 3 Influence 4 Critics 5 See also 6 Bibliography 7 Further reading 8 External links

Life

Born in Vienna (then Austria-Hungary) in 1902 to middle-class parents of Jewish origins, Karl Popper was educated at the University of Vienna. He took a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1928, and taught in secondary school from 1930 to 1936. In 1937, the rise of Nazism and the threat of the Anschluss led Popper to emigrate to New Zealand, where he became lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College New Zealand (at Christchurch). In 1946, he moved to England to become reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics, where he was appointed professor in 1949. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976. He retired from academic life in 1969, though he remained intellectually active until his death in 1994. He was invested with the Insignia of a Companion of Honour in 1982.

Popper won many awards and honors in his field, including the Lippincott Award of the American Political Science Association, the Sonning Prize, and fellowships in the Royal Society, British Academy, London School of Economics, King's College London, and Darwin College Cambridge. Austria awarded him the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold.

Popper's philosophy

Popper coined the term critical rationalism to describe his philosophy. This designation is significant, and indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and of the observationalist-inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly against the latter, holding that scientific theories are universal in nature, and can be tested only indirectly, by references to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination in order to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings. Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single genuine counter-instance is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. Popper's account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsification lies at the heart of his philosophy of science. It also inspired him to take falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation between what is and is not genuinely scientific: a theory should be accounted scientific if and only if it is falsifiable. This led him to attack the claims of both psychoanalysis and contemporary Marxism to scientific status, on the basis that the theories enshrined by them are not falsifiable. His scientific work was influenced by his study of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

In The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, Popper developed a critique of historicism and a defence of the 'Open Society', liberal democracy. Historicism is the theory that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to knowable general laws towards a determinate end. Popper argued that this view is the principal theoretical presupposition underpinning most forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. He argued that historicism is founded upon mistaken assumptions regarding the nature of scientific law and prediction. Since the growth of human knowledge is a causal factor in the evolution of human history, and since "no society can predict, scientifically, its own future states of knowledge", it follows, he argued, that there can be no predictive science of human history. For Popper, metaphysical and historical indeterminism go hand in hand.

Among his contributions to philosophy is his answer to David Hume's Problem of Induction. Hume stated that just because the sun has risen every day for as long as anyone can remember, doesn't mean that there is any rational reason to believe it will come up tomorrow. There is no rational way to prove that a pattern will continue on just because it has before.

Popper's reply is characteristic, and ties in with his criterion of falsifiability. He states that while there is no way to prove that the sun will come up, we can theorize that it will. If it does not come up, then it will be disproven, but since right now it seems to be consistent with our theory, the theory is not disproven. Thus, Popper's demarcation between science and non-science serves as an answer to an old logical problem as well.

Influence

By all accounts, Popper has played a vital role in establishing the philosophy of science as a vigorous, autonomous discipline within analytic philosophy, through his own prolific and influential works, and also through his influence on his own students--chief among them, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, two of the foremost philosophers of science in the next generation of analytic philosophy. (Lakatos's work drastically modifies Popper's position, and Feyerabend's repudiates it entirely, but the work of both is deeply influenced by Popper and engaged with many of the problems that Popper set.)

Popper is also widely credited as one of the leading voices in the revolt against the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle in the middle of the 20th century; his revival of Humean skepticism toward induction and his introduction of the principle of falsifiability as a non-inductive solution to the puzzle of scientific knowledge, played a major role in the criticism of the view of science that was central to the positivist programme. Popper, not always known for his modesty, entitled a chapter of his memoirs "Who Killed Logical Positivism?" — a question which he answered by saying "I fear that I must admit responsibility". Popper may have overstated his own influence somewhat vis-a-vis fellow critics of positivism, such as W.V.O. Quine and Popper's philosophical nemesis Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Popper's influence, both through his work in philosophy of science and through his political philosophy, has also extended beyond the academy. Among Popper's students and advocates is the multibillionaire investor George Soros, who says his investment strategies are modelled on Popper's understanding of the advancement of knowledge through falsification. Among Soros's philanthropic foundations is the Open Society Institute, a think-tank named in honor of Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, which Soros founded to advance the Popperian defense of the open society against authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

Critics

The Quine-Duhem thesis argues that it is impossible to test a single hypothesis on its own, since each one comes as part of an environment of theories. Thus we can only say that the whole package of relevant theories has been collectively falsified, but cannot conclusively say which element of the package must be replaced. An example of this is given by the discovery of the planet Neptune: when the motion of Uranus was found not to match the predictions of Newton's laws, the theory "There are seven planets in the solar system" was rejected, and not Newton's laws themselves. Popper discussed this critique of naïve falsificationism in Chapters 3 & 4 of The Logic of Scientific Discovery. For Popper, theories are accepted or rejected via a sort of 'natural selection'. Theories that say more about the way things appear are to be preferred over those that do not; the more generally applicable a theory is, the greater its value. Thus Newton’s laws, with their wide general application, are to be preferred over the much more specific “the solar system has seven planets”.

Thomas Kuhn’s influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that scientists work in a series of paradigms, and found little evidence of scientists actually following a falsificationist methodology. Popper's student Imre Lakatos attempted to reconcile Kuhn’s work with falsificationism by arguing that science progresses by the falsification of research programs rather than the more specific universal statements of naïve falsificationism. Another of Popper’s students Paul Feyerabend ultimately rejected any prescriptive methodology, who argued that the only universal method characterizing scientific progress was anything goes.

Another objection is that it is not always possible to demonstrate falsehood definitively, especially if one is using statistical criteria to evaluate a null hypothesis. More generally, it is not always clear that evidence contradicting a hypothesis is a sign of flaws in the hypothesis rather than of flaws in the procedures used to test it.

Other critics seek to vindicate the claims of historicism or holism to intellectual respectability, or psychoanalysis or Marxism to scientific status. It has been argued that Popper's student Imre Lakatos transformed Popper's philosophy using historicist and updated Hegelian historiographic ideas Lakatos/Popper (http://www.johnkadvany.com).

In 2004 philosopher and psychologist Michel ter Hark (Groningen, The Netherlands) published a book, called Popper, Otto Selz and the rise of evolutionary epistemology, in which he claims that Popper got a part of his ideas from his tutor, the German-Jewish psychologist Otto Selz. Selz himself never published his ideas, partly because of the rise of nazism which ordered him to quit his work in 1933, and the prohibition of referencing to Selz' work.

See also

• Popperian cosmology
• Liberalism
• Contributions to liberal theory

Bibliography

• Logik der Forschung, 1934 (in German)
• The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945
• The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959 (Translation of Logik der Forschung)
• The Poverty of Historicism, 1961
• Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 1963
• Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972
• Unended Quest; An Intellectual Autobiography, 1976
• The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (with Sir John C. Eccles), 1977
• Die Beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie - Aufgrund von Manuskripten aus den Jahren 1930-1933 (The Two Fundamental Problems of Epistemology - Based on Manuscripts From the Period 1930-1933) (Edited by Troels Eggers Hansen), 1979 (in German)
• The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism, 1982
• Realism and the Aim of Science, 1982
• Die Zukunft ist Offen (The Future is Open)(with Konrad Lorenz), 1985 (in German)
• The Lesson of this Century, Interviewer: Giancarlo Bosetti, English translation: Patrick Camiller), 1992
• The World of Parmenides, Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment, (Edited by Arne F. Petersen with the assistance of Jørgen Mejer)
• The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality, 1994
• Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem: In Defence of Interactionism, 1994
• Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, (From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery)
• In Search of a Better World, a collection of Popper’s essays and lectures covering a range of subjects from the beginning of scientific speculation in classical Greece to the need for a new professional ethic based on the ideas of tolerance and intellectual responsibility; "All things living are in search of a better world."; Karl Popper, from the Preface

Other works and collections:

• Critical Rationalism: A Re-Statement and Defence by David Miller, 1994
• Popper Selections (Text by Popper, selected and edited by David Miller)
• All Life Is Problem Solving (Text by Popper, translation by Patrick Camiller), 1999

Further reading

• Feyerabend, P. Against Method. London: New Left Books, 1975. A splendidly polemical, iconoclastic book by a former colleague of Popper's. Vigorously critical of Popper's rationalist view of science.
• Kadvany, John Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8223-2659-0. Explains how Imre Lakatos developed Popper's philosophy into a historicist and critical theory of scientific method.
• Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Central to contemporary philosophy of science is the debate between the followers of Kuhn and Popper on the nature of scientific enquiry. This is the book in which the views of the former received their classical statement.
• Magee, B. Popper. London: Fontana, 1977. An elegant introductory text. Very readable, albeit rather uncritical of its subject.
• O'Hear, A. Karl Popper. London: Routledge, 1980. A critical account of Popper's thought, viewed from the perspective of contemporary analytic philosophy.
• Schilpp, P. A., ed. The Philosophy of Karl Popper, 2 vols. La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1974. One of the better contributions to the Library of Living Philosophers series. Contains Popper's intellectual autobiography, a comprehensive range of critical essays, and Popper's responses to them.
• Stokes, G. Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. A very comprehensive, balanced study, which focuses largely on the social and political side of Popper's thought.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Karl Popper

• Karl Popper (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/) from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/)
• The Karl Popper Web (http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/%7Etkpw/)
• Karl Popper Institute (http://www.univie.ac.at/wissenschaftstheorie/popper/) includes complete bibliography 1925-1999
• University of Canterbury (NZ) (http://www.phil.canterbury.ac.nz/haps/kiwihps.shtml#popper) brief biography of Popper
• Influence on Friesian Philosophy (http://www.friesian.com/popper.htm)
• Open Society Institute (http://www.soros.org/) George Soros foundations network
• A Skeptical Look at Karl Popper (http://web.archive.org/web/20040212023313/http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/gardner_popper.html) by Martin Gardner
• Sir Karl Popper: Science: Conjectures and Refutations (http://cla.calpoly.edu/~fotoole/321.1/popper.html)

---

An earlier version (http://www.nupedia.com/article/557/) of the above article was posted on 16 May 2001 on Nupedia; reviewed and approved by the Philosophy and Logic group; editor, Wesley Cooper; lead reviewer, Wesley Cooper; lead copyeditors, Cindy Seeley and Ruth Ifcher.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper"

Categories: 1902 births | 1994 deaths | 20th Century philosophers | Austrian philosophers | British philosophers | Atheist philosophers | Secular Jewish philosophers | Evolution

|