Please, Link Me to George Soros
Sometimes I save little bits of this and that from my reading, thinking to write something about it. Sometimes I even get around to it, too.
The evangelical right can wallow in denial all they want about Palin being victimized by liberals or Democrats or even George Soros (some illiterate wingnut recently tried to link me to him)….
[Geoffrey Dunn, "The Real Story Behind Palin's Bombshell", Huffington Post, 4 July 2009.]
There are at least a couple of reasons why I'd like to be linked to George Soros. Or more.
It would mean doing my part to tweak the nose of wingnuttery, of course, and ironic insolence is a favorite tactic of mine. We know what a bogey man Soros is for conservatives–what power to get blamed as the force behind every other absurd wingnut conspiracy theory!
There's the obvious money angle–Soros has lots, I don't–although my needs aren't great. Perhaps he'd like to support the science literacy work of Ars Hermeneutica.
The big reason, though, is philosophical. I don't mean liberalism and such things that we mostly agree on, George and I.
I mean Karl Popper (1902–1994), the philosopher. (A nice intellectual biography.) Both George and I hold Popper's ideas very close to our own intellectual hearts, believing that they were significant developments in the history of idea.
In George's case it would be Popper's ideas about "The Open Society" (on which he wrote a two-volume work, The Open Society and its Enemies. It's no coincidence that his "Open Society Institute" is called that. Popper's ideas on democracy are significant and influential.
For my part, though, it's Popper the philosopher of science who really moves me intellectually. Early in his career he considered what he called the "Demarcation Problem", by which he meant "how can one distinguish between science and pseudo-science?" His major work on the topic was The Logic of Scientific Discovery (originally, in German, Logik der Forschung, 1935); most of his ideas are discussed somewhat less technically in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963). Not to condense it all too much, this is where the idea of "falsifiability" as the key characteristic of a "scientific theory" originated. Popper is the only philosopher of science I've read whose writing convinced me that he really understood how science gets done.
And so I have this unrequited attraction to George Soros because I feel that we must be philosophical soul mates. If you happen to see him could you let him know that I'd like to do lunch sometime?