ABSTRACT

A seamless unfolding of the story from the amoeba to Einstein exhibits the same pattern throughout its length. 'The tentative solutions which animals and plants incorporate into their anatomy and their behaviour are biological analogues of theories; and vice versa : theories correspond (as do many exosomatic products such as honeycombs, and especially exosomatic tools, such as spiders' webs) to endosomatic organs and their ways of functioning. Just like theories, organs and their functions are tentative adaptations to the world we live in. And just like theories, or like tools, new organs and their functions, and also new kinds of behaviour, exert their influence on the first world which they may help to change.'1 Popper has characterized the underlying pattern of this continuous development in the formula

where pl is the inital problem, rs the trial solution proposed, EE the process of error elimination applied to the trial solution and P2 the resulting situation, with new problems. It is essentially a feedback process. It is not cyclic, for P2 is always different from P1: even complete failure to solve a problem teaches us something new about where its difficulties lie, and what the minimum conditions are which any solution for it must meet - and therefore alters the problem situation. Nor is it dialectical (in any Hegelian or Marxist sense) since it regards contradiction (as distinct from criticism) as something that cannot be accommodated

on any level, and still less welcomed. This formula incorporates some of the most important

of Popper's ideas. He himself has put a good strong saddle on it and ridden it into many different fields of human enquiry; and where he has not been, some follower of his often has. For most of his life he maintained that it was not applicable to mathematics or logic. He was belatedly convinced that it was by the work of Imre Lakatos - who was thus in this respect more Popperian than Popper. About the arts Popper has published little, though music in particular means a great deal to him, and it was in connection with his early studies in the history of music that his seminal idea about problem-solving came to him. However, in Ernst Gombrich's Art and Illusion the history of the visual arts is accounted for in specifically Popperian terms of an endless and 'gradual modification of the traditional schematic conventions of image making under the pressure of novel demands'. Virtually all processes of organic development (whether literal or figurative) and all learning processes can be looked at in this way, even the process by which human beings get to know each other. The psychiatrist Anthony Storr, without having read Popper, arrived at the following conclusion : 'When we enter a new situation in life and are confronted by a new person, we bring with us the prejudices of the past and our previous experiences of people. These prejudices we project upon the new person. Indeed, getting to know a person is largely a matter of withdrawing projections; of dispelling the smoke-screen of what we imagine he is like and replacing it with the reality of what he is actually like.' 2

The adoption of this approach has certain natural consequences. First of all it focuses interest on problems, not only for oneself but in one's appreciation of the efforts of others. A task does not begin with the attempt to solve a problem (the trial solution is the second term in the formu-

la, not the first). It begins with the problem itself, and with the reasons for its being a problem. One learns to work hard and long at the formulation of problems before one switches one's main attention to the search for possible solutions; and one's degree of success in the latter is often determined by one's degree of success in the former. If one studies the work of, say, a philosopher, the first question one asks oneself is: 'What problem is he trying to solve?' This may sound obvious, but in my experience most students of philosophy are not taught to ask, and do not think to ask themselves, this question. Rather they ask: 'What is he trying to say?' As a result they commonly have the experience of thinking they understand what he is saying without seeing the point of his saying it. For only by understanding his problem-situation could they do that.