Tilley and Popper's Alleged Historicism

ion from whole societies. I comment now on Tilley’s view that Popper’s pmblem-solving schema (PI-TT-EE-P2) is a historicist law. The ’message of Popper’s later work’ he tells us is to ’engage in, precisely that historicist thinking which is fated to be unsuccessful’ (p. 65). The point, I take it, is that Pbpper’s schema licenses unconditional prophecies. But this mistakes the purpose of the schema which is explanatory not predictive, and certainly not prophetic. As a basis for prediction it is next to useless, for it only conveys that if tentative responses to problems are inadequate then there will be new emergent problems. Precisely because these problems are emergent the schema is unable to predict their content. A further complaint against Tilley is that he completely overlooks the fact that Popper’s recent evolutionary epistemology coexists with, and does not supersede, the account of prediction that he gave in The Logic of Scientific Discovery and which informed his critique of historicism. Hence, in the opening essay of Objective Knowledge,,after referring to the ’regularities which rule the universe and ... our surroundings’ (p. 11), Popper explains that the conjectures about those reguiarities whose conditional predictions ought to be preferred for practical purposes are the best-tested ones, those with the highest degree of corrobomtion (ibid., pp. 21-22; and cf. Popper 1974, pp. 1025ff.). In conclusion, Pbpper’s theory of emergence is in no way suggestive of historicism. Whatever the faults of Popper’s thinking, capitulation to historicism