Karl Popper's Three Worlds Theory
Discussion
Karl Popper
"In this lecture I intend to challenge those who uphold a monist or even a dualist view of the universe; and I will propose, instead, a pluralist view.
I will propose a view of the universe that recognizes at least three different but interacting sub-universes…
There is, first, the world that consists of physical bodies: of stones and of stars; of plants and of animals; but also of radiation, and of other forms of physical energy. I will call this physical world ‘world 1’…
There is, secondly, the mental or psychological world, the world of our feelings of pain and of pleasure, of our thoughts, of our decisions, of our perceptions and our observations; in other words, the world of mental or psychological states or processes, or of subjective experiences. I will call it ‘world 2’. World 2 is immensely important, especially from a human point of view or from a moral point of view…
My main argument will be devoted to the defence of the reality of what I propose to call ‘world 3’. By world 3 I mean the world of the products of the human mind, such as languages; tales and stories and religious myths; scientific conjectures or theories, and mathematical constructions; songs and symphonies; paintings and sculptures. But also aeroplanes and airports and other feats of engineering… "
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/the-threeness-of-the-world-3)
Commentary by Jonathan Rowson
Jonathan Rowson:
"Popper had enemies and he even wrote a book about them. The Open Society and its Enemies bunches together Plato, Hegel and Marx and rails against the perils of Utopian thinking, untestable philosophies and grand theories of history that often lead to war or the gulag. Popper insists that a spirit of enduring open-ended epistemic inquiry rather than any once-and-for-all theoretical model is to key to enduring human freedom, and this idea animates many decades of intellectual output. Popper wrote the book that defined his career during the Second World War from the relative safety of New Zealand. He believed the book needed to be written and published urgently, to save the world from the totalitarianism that he felt lurked within each of these thinkers who were still shaping world events. The book had its detractors, but also a huge impact.
Fears of totalitarianism made sense in 1945 and they make sense again today, but in a lecture ostensibly about philosophy in 1978, what’s Popper’s problem? The connection between Popper’s open society political philosophy and his epistemology is quite beautiful when you see it, and it’s about the reality of World 3.
Popper’s problem is that he believes in a world that values questions, and questions answers but he can’t see how to ground it ontologically or epistemically with the prevailing intellectual fashions of his day. He can’t find it in the monism of matter - because it offers law-like answers only; nor in monism of mind which cannot escape its self-referential discourse; nor can he find it in a dualism that can’t explain how mind is derived from matter or how they continue to interact. Instead, he looks to what he values in the institutions of science and democracy and seeks to argue that their reality is no less real than matter or mind.
Popper notices that this reality he cares about is derived from both matter and mind but it has a reality that cannot be reduced to either. Einstein’s E=Mc2 is neither a physical item in the world nor a subjective experience, so what is it? The world is full of things created by humans that exist and function through collective recognition and yet, and this is crucial for Popper, they also seem to have an objective reality that does not depend on it. He refers to World 3 as an inter-objective world, which is a weird term, but very important. World 3 is ‘inter’ because humans create and uphold it together but it is ‘objective’ in the sense that it is grounded in reason, does not have subjective interiority and can exist regardless of whether we are perceiving it. World 3 is not just ‘ideas’ but the place where ideas are tested for their validity. A book for instance is a physical object made of paper in World 1, an experience of reading in World 2, but it is also part of a living culture for humans in World 3.
Moreover, at a time when many argue renewal depends on being post-human, on recognising our profound entanglement with nature and increasingly with emergent or artificial intelligence, World 3 is unique to humans and a place for humans; it is what sets us apart.
World 3 is currently under attack in the USA in attempts to undermine the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the rule of law. World 3 - the place where we collectively interrogate the truth as if the answer mattered to all of us - is what Steve Bannon was attacking when he advised his acolytes to ‘flood the zone with shit’. World 3 is the inter-objective world where we test ideas for their objective truth in World 1 and their subjective meaning in World 2. World 3 is where the battle for trustworthy information which is the lifeblood of democracy has to be continually fought and won."
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/the-threeness-of-the-world-3)
Directory
of world interpretations based on threeness, by Jonathan Rowson:
- Marvin Harris’s Threefold-Based Cultural Materialism: Infrastructure, (social) Structure, Superstructure
- Felix Guattari’s Threefold-Based Ecosophy: The environment, social relations, human subjectivity.
- Margaret Archer’s Threefold-Based Morphogenesis: Structure, Culture and Agency.
- Gregg Henriques’s Metapsychology: the tree, the coin and the garden.