Popper, Otto Selz, and the Rise of Evolutionary Epistemology

issue of Hume’s problem of induction and is about what would nowadays be called philosophy (or psychology) of education rather than philosophy of science or general epistemology. Admittedly, Popper provides a clue to this background in Unended Quest. The theory of “noninductive” learning, he there remarks, was initially a theory about young children. And, as he also recalls, he was inclined to consider dogmatic thinking a kind of neurotic aberration.39 The point is not elaborated upon further, but in an essay from Conjectures and Refutations a passage occurs in which he points to a similarity between his concept of dogmatic thinking and psychoanalytic accounts of neuroses. Dogmatic thinking, he argues, is the expectation to find regularities everywhere and the attempt to find them even where there are none.40 People stick to their expectations even when they are inadequate, and they ought to accept defeat. In this respect, he goes on, there is a “point of agreement” between his theory of dogmatic thinking and psychoanalytic theories, for a neurosis is a personal set pattern adopted very early in life and “maintained throughout, and every new experience is interpreted in terms of it; verifying it, as it were, and contributing to its rigidity.”41 Connecting this theory of dogmatic thinking with Hume’s theory of inductive learning, Popper, in the same retrospective essay, subsequently attributes to him the idea that the strength of a person’s beliefs, being the product of repetition, varies inversely with the degree to which he is a “primitive” person. Popper, on the other hand, observes that “dogmatic thinking, an uncontrolled wish to impose regularities, and a manifest pleasure in rites and in repetition as such are characteristic of primitives and children; and increasing experience and maturity sometimes create an attitude of caution and criticism rather than of dogmatism.”42 This discussion of psychoanalytic theories is clearly meant as an aside and not as part of the actual genesis of his ideas, yet it has its roots in