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Book Info and Review: Beyond Wittgenstein's Poker: New Light on Popper and Wittgenstein Peter Munz Modern Philosophy Books.
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Beyond Wittgenstein's Poker: New Light on Popper and Wittgenstein

by Peter Munz

Buy the book: Peter Munz. Beyond Wittgenstein

Release Date: 2004-07-30

Edition: Paperback

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Reader's Review: Superstitions

Apart from its anecdotical interest (the author's personal encounters with Popper and Wittgenstein), this book is based on very shaky ground.
It explains clearly Popper's critical rationalism, his anti-essentialism and his social-economic policies (prosperity is a means to guarantee freedom).
But it misrepresents Popper's stance on meaning. The sentence 'In a Popperian world, propositions to the effect that God is triune ... can have no meaning, because they are not true', is simply not true. These propositions are not meaningless for Popper, as novels are not meaningless (he loved the novels of Selma Lagerlof). Novels are not scientifically true, because they cannot be falsified.
The fundamental question, however, is: should a community be built on propositions which are superstitions? Peter Munz's answer is: YES. For him, superstitions (e.g. 'souls are reincarnated') have a social function. More, 'superstition performs such a society-building function better than genuine knowledge.' This is a mind-boggling sentence from a pupil of Popper. Cui bono?

Peter Munz also misrepresents Hayek. The sentence 'Hayek famously denounced the attempt to soften the abrasiveness of the open-market system society by the promotion of a welfare state', is fundamentally wrong. As Hayek stated in 'The Road to Serfdom', one of the basic elements of economic policies should be 'to secure a minimum income for everybody'.

Munz shows also unintentionally Wittgenstein's disastrous influence on post-modernist nonsense (Baudrillard: there was no Gulf War; Lyotard: anthropologist interpretations are rape; Derrida: to consider that 'saying 'sheep' = refering to sheep' is a metaphysical superstition; Foucault: reason and criticism are local.)

But his main target is neo-Darwinism and more particularly John Tooby's and Leda Cosmides's Evolutionary Psychologism (E.P.), which is badly presented as a kind of Lamarckism (learning by instruction). One of his main arguments against E.P. is Quine's and Witgenstein's rejection of ostension ('ostension cannot define what we mean'), which caused Wittgenstein to establish his language theory on speech communities (Gemeinschaften).
However, the anti-ostension argument is based on a very poorly constructed experiment: one person pointing at one thing in an empty space, once.
Explanation: One walks in a foreign country with one of its inhabitants. In a field containing flowers, geese, horses, rabbits ... the inhabitant points his finger at rabbits and says 'gavegai'. A little further, there is a new field with pelicans, flamingos ... and rabbits. The inhabitant points again at rabbits and says 'gavegai'. One should be very stupid not to understand, after two ostensions, that 'gavegai' means rabbits. By the way, the inhabitant pointed also at other animals saying ...
Of course, ostension can define what people means.

Q and W's poor experiment lead to a mass of linguistic 'conceptual deliriums' (Jean Fourasti?).

This is a mind-boggling book by a pupil of Popper and Wittgenstein.

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Reader's Review: Clarity on two great philosophers

I recommend this book unreservedly to all who are interested in these two philosophers, or even to those who have never read either. It is not necessary to have read

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