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Freedom And Plastic Control1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Alastair Hannay
Alastair Hannay*
Affiliation:
University of Oslo
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Extract

In his Arthur Holly Compton Memorial Lecture Sir Karl Popper tackles a problem raised by Compton himself in an earlier lecture. The problem is to understand how such abstract things as aims, purposes, rules, or agreements can influence or control the movements of men, and perhaps also of animals (p. 15). To illustrate the problem Compton had remarked on the amazing faith and confidence shown by his audience and the lecture's organizer that he should arrive on the agreed date to give the lecture, considering ‘the great physical improbability that their confidence was justified’. For

In the meanwhile my work called me to the Rocky Mountains and across the ocean to sunny Italy. A phototropic organism [such as I happen to be, would not easily] . . . tear himself away from there to go to chilly New Haven. Considered as a physical event, the probability of meeting my engagement would have been fantastically small.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , December 1972 , pp. 277 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1972

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Footnotes

1

This is a slightly modified version of a paper given to Professor Imre Lakatos’s and Professor J. W. N. Watkins’s seminar at the London School of Economics, March 9,1971.

References

2 Of Goods and Clocks: An Approach lo the Problem of Rationality and the Freedom of Man, published by Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, 19S6. Page numbers are given in parentheses. Also forthcoming in Popper, K. R. Objective Knowledge: An evolutionary Approach (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972).Google Scholar

3 The Freedom of Man, Terry Lectures 1932, 3rd ed. 1939, pp 53ff.