Popper's Non-dualist Theory of Objective Knowledge

In John Searle's 1998 lecture Social Ontology and the Philosophy of Society he said:

The question is: 'what is the ontology of social reality?' To begin with, I'm going to make an assumption which l won't justify today, though perhaps in tomorrow's discussion I can. The assumption is that we should abandon the traditional Western distinction between mind and body. We have in the Western intellectual tradition been cursed with this dualism, with the idea that there is a fundamental distinction between the mind and the body, between the mental and the physical. And in some respects the situation is made even worse by those philosophers who say that in addition to two worlds we also live in a third world. Philosophers such as Frege and Popper, and more recently Jürgen Habermas have said we should think of reality as dividing into three different worlds. My own view is we should never have started counting.

Popper's "three worlds" theory seems to have been misrepresented, according to Manjari Chakrabarty in this interesting chapter Karl Popper on the Evolution of Consciousness from the book Karl Popper's Science and Philosophy.

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I am interested in this question because of the connection with impredicative definitions in biology raised by Robert Rosen (see Semantic Closure and John Searle on the Logical Structure of Human Civilization).

Searle says that his definition of social ontology of, say, money, is not impredicative because money is just a word used to refer to a whole system of functions that are part of that society for which something counts as money:

“If it has to be believed to be money in order to be money, what is the content of the belief? It looks like you are going to have circularity or infinite regress, because if part of the ontology of money is believed to be money, then part of the definition of ‘money’ is believed to be money, and consequently the belief that something is money, has to be in part the belief, that it’s believed to be money. And that means, you are in trouble, because then the content of that belief is that it is believed to be believed to be money, and so on. So that’s the puzzle: how do we avoid circularity or infinite regress in the definition of ‘money’ if the concept has this self referential component? And what goes for money, also goes for property, marriage, government, and all sorts of other social and institutional
phenomena. …

“First, how can there be self-referentiality without circularity or infinite regress? Well, the answer is, you don’t have to use the word ‘money’ in order to define money. The word ‘money’ functions as a summary term or as a place holder for being a medium of exchange, a store of value, a payment for services rendered, a measure of value of other currencies and so on. And if something performs all of those functions, then it’s money.”

So why bother trying to reconcile Searle with Popper?

This is interesting because I think the same argument could apply to ontology in biology, provided we allow some epistemic basis for the belief to be represented in the biological system as a causal chain connecting the material to the form. This would then fit with Popper's theory of objective knowledge existing in his world three: the extent to which a biologist claims that cellular metabolic pathways cause the cell to have the structure it has is just the extent to which the theory we have about what pathways exist explains the theory we have about the structure the cell actually has. These theories are spread through literally millions of publications on molecular and cellular biology, biochemistry, etc. over many many decades, and they are subject to selection principles that operate within scientific communities.

See Popper's 1977 Darwin Lecture Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind:

We may speak of downward causation whenever a higher structure operates causally upon its substructure. The difficulty of understanding downward causation is this. We think we can understand how the substructures of a system cooperate to affect the whole system; that is to say, we think that we understand upward causation. But the opposite is very difficult to envisage. For the set of substructures, it seems, interacts causally in any case, and there is no room, no opening, for an action from above to interfere. It is this that leads to the heuristic demand that we explain everything in terms of molecular or other elementary particles (a demand that is sometimes called "reductionism").

I suggest that downward causation can sometimes at least be explained as selection operating on the randomly fluctuating elementary particles. The randomness of the movements of the elementary particles — often called "molecular chaos" — provides, as it were, the opening for the higher-level structure to interfere. A random movement is accepted when it fits into the higher level structure; otherwise it is rejected.

I think that these considerations tell us a lot about natural selection. While Darwin still worried that he could not explain variation, and while he felt uneasy about being forced to look at it as chancelike, we can now see that the chancelike character of mutations, which may go back to quantum indeterminacy, explains how the abstract invariances of the environment, the somewhat abstract selection pressures, can, by selection, have a downward effect on the concrete living organism — an effect that may be amplified by a long sequence of generations linked by heredity.

But you don't need a long sequence of generations linked by heredity for this, it happens on timescales of milliseconds within the cells. See Prof Denis Noble - Dance to the Tune of Life Lecture. See also William Jaworsky on Hylamorphism and this 2014 talk given at the Karolinska Institutet: