A nice quote from Popper that reminds me of Rorty: “By saying that some systems of laws can be improved, that some laws may be better than others, I rather imply that we can compare the existing normative laws (or social insitutions) with some standard norms which we have decided are worthy of being realized” (61).
Popper also makes some points that are fairly common in later, postmodern, philosophy, but makes them very quickly and without the charictaristic verbage: “All moral decisions pertain to some fact or other, especially to some fact of social life, and all (alterable) facts of social life can give rise to many different decisions. Which shows that the decisions can never be derived from these facts, or from a description of these facts” (62). Simply put, facts exist. What to do about them is never clear from their mere existance. None of this is an invitation to nihilism: Popper has a very clear idea of how he’d like to see society proceed. He also spent his career differentiating between science and pseudo-science. But here, he demostrates (as Rorty would later) how to approach knowledge without giving in to relativism while also not giving in to dogmatism (including scientific dogmatism).