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Biography:

Sir Karl Raimund Popper

The Austrian philosopher Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) offered an original analysis of scientific research that he also applied to research in history and philosophy.

Karl Popper was born in Vienna on July 28, 1902, the son of a barrister. He studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Vienna. Though not a member of the Vienna Circle, he was in sympathy with some, if not all, of its aims. His first book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935), was published in a series sponsored by the Circle. In 1937 Popper accepted a post in New Zealand as senior lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College in Christchurch.

At the end of World War II, Popper was invited to the London School of Economics as a reader, and in 1949 he was made professor of logic and scientific method. Popper then made numerous visits to the United States as visiting professor and guest lecturer. In 1950 he gave the William James Lectures at Harvard University. In 1965 Popper was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Foundations of Popper's Theory

Popper's first book laid the foundations for all the rest of his work. It offered an analysis of the procedure to be used in scientific work and a criterion for the meaning of the statements produced in such work. According to Popper, the researcher should begin by proposing hypotheses. The collection of data is guided by a theoretical preconception concerning what is relevant or important. The examination of causal connections between phenomena is also guided by leading hypotheses. Such a hypothesis is scientific only if one can derive from it particular observation statements that, if falsified by the facts, would refute the hypothesis. A statement is meaningful, therefore, if and only if there is a way it can be falsified. Hence the researcher should strive to refute rather than to confirm his hypotheses. Refutation is real advancement because it clears the field of a likely hypothesis.

Understanding History and Society

Popper later applied his analysis of knowledge to theories of society and history. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) he attacked Plato, G. W. F. Hegel, and Karl Marx as offering untenable totalitarian theories that are easily falsifiable. The Open Society is often considered one of Popper's most influential books of this century. It also was responsible for the prevalent use of the term "open society." Critics argue that Popper succeeded in this book and in its sequel, The Poverty of Historicism (1957), in formulating a deterministic theory about general laws of historical development and then refuting it. A lively controversy ensued on the issue of which philosophers, if any, held the doctrine Popper refuted. Popper found himself embroiled in a decade of polemics, particularly with partisans of Plato. Popper was thus credited with a convincing logical refutation but one misdirected in its targets.

Popper's later works Objective Knowledge (1972) and The Self and Its Brain (1977) combined his scientific theory with a theory of evolution. In the 1980s, Popper continued to lecture, focusing mainly on questions of evolution and the role of consciousness. Karl Popper died of complications from cancer, pneumonia, and kidney failure on September 17, 1994 at the age of 92.

Further Reading

A work in progress edited by Paul A. Schilpp, The Philosophy of Karl Popper, will contain a biographical sketch, critical essays, and Popper's replies and should become the definitive work. In the interim the best study is Mario Bunge, ed., The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy (1964), a Festschrift for Popper's sixtieth birthday containing essays by distinguished scholars and a bibliography complete to 1964.

Additional Sources

O'Mear, Anthony, Karl Popper, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Popper, Karl Raimund, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, Open Court, 1978.

Honderich, Ted, ed., Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1995.

The New York Times, September 18, 1994.

 
 
Political Dictionary: Karl Popper

(1902-94) Philosopher of the social sciences. Born in Vienna, Popper was influenced by the intellectual debates around psychoanalysis, Marxism, and logical positivism; and inspired by a lecture given by Einstein on relativity theory. He sought to integrate scientific method with social inquiry by developing his criterion of falsifiability; which distinguishes between testable hypotheses and other ‘metaphysical’ statements. In the Open Society and its Enemies (1945) Popper attacked philosophers, including Plato, Hegel, and Marx, who sought to constrain the development of social thought; be it through adherence to custom, religion, or moral absolutism. Both utopianism and historicism, Popper argues, are based on insubstantial assertions of abstract truths, which were not appropriate bases for political activity. Rather, he suggests, human development would thrive in societies which were open to self-criticism and which encouraged and sustained the free interaction of ideas. In the light of this, Popper presented a social theory which embraced limited government, the free market, and reform through gradual change.

— Alistair McMillan

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Sir Karl Raimund Popper

(born July 28, 1902, Vienna, Austria — died Sept. 17, 1994, Croydon, Greater London, Eng.) Austrian-British philosopher of natural and social science. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), he rejected the traditional conception of induction, which held that a scientific hypothesis may be verified through the accumulation of confirming observations, arguing instead that scientific hypotheses can at best only be falsified. His later works include The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), The Poverty of Historicism (1957), and Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery (3 vol., 1981 – 82).

For more information on Sir Karl Raimund Popper, visit Britannica.com.

 
Philosophy Dictionary: Karl Raimund Popper

Popper, Karl Raimund (1902-1994) Philosopher of science. Born and educated in Vienna, Popper shared with the logical positivists an interest in the foundations and the methodology of the natural sciences. After a period in New Zealand he moved to the London School of Economics where he became professor of logic and scientific method in 1949. Popper came to fame with his first book, Logik der Forschung (1935, trs. as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959). In it he overturns the traditional attempts to found scientific method in the support that experience gives to suitably formed generalizations and theories. Stressing the difficulty the problem of induction puts in front of any such method, Popper substitutes an epistemology that starts with the bold, imaginative formation of hypotheses. These face the tribunal of experience, which has the power to falsify them, but not to confirm them (see falsifiability, falsification). A hypothesis that survives the ordeal of attempted refutation can be provisionally accepted as ‘corroborated’, but never assigned a probability.

The approach was extremely popular amongst working scientists, who recognized the value it puts upon imaginative theorizing and patient refutation, and who responded gladly to the liberating thought that it was not a sin but a mark of virtue to put forward a theory that is subsequently refuted. Philosophers have been more cautious, pointing out that something like induction seems to be involved when we rely upon well-corroborated theories. Nobody flies in an aeroplane purely because it is a bold, imaginative conjecture that it will stay in the air. However, many thinkers accept in essence his solution to the problem of demarcating proper science from its imitators, namely that the former results in genuinely falsifiable theories whereas the latter do not. Although falsification is more complex than Popper initially allowed, the idea encapsulates many people's objections to such ideologies as psychoanalysis and Marxism.

Popper's social and historical writings include the influential The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957), attacking the view that there are fundamental laws of history that render its progress inevitable. In the first work Popper attacks this belief, which he associates with the illiberal totalitarianism that he finds in Plato, Hegel, and Marx, although it is unclear that his readings of these thinkers do justice to the stringent ethical conditions they place upon the rational political systems that they explore. Popper associates political virtue, like scientific virtue, with the possibility of free enquiry subject to constraints that minimize the chance of accepting bad systems.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Popper, Sir Karl Raimund,
1902–94, Anglo-Austrian philosopher, b. Vienna. He became familiar with the Vienna circle of logical positivists (see logical positivism) while a student at the Univ. of Vienna (Ph.D., 1928). He taught at Canterbury Univ., New Zealand (1937–45), and then at the London School of Economics, retiring in 1969. Popper's thought develops from his view of knowing as an individual, unpredictable act of genius, not acquired by induction, as empiricists hold, nor limited to verifiable statements, as the logical positivists hold. Like the logical positivists, Popper worked with the distinction between scientific knowledge and pseudoscience, but he understood the two to be related as well as distinct: pseudoscience or “myth,” as he sometimes termed it, can inspire or grow into science, or overlap with it (as in the case of psychology). He rejected the certainty of knowledge, whether secured on empiricist or rationalist ground.

Popper also questioned historicism (the doctrine that there are general laws of history) because history, as he saw it, is influenced by the growth of knowledge, and, since knowing is a matter of unpredictable insight, neither the growth of knowledge nor its historical consequences can be systematized. In the political arena he was perhaps best known for his contention, set forth in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), that communism and fascism were philosophically linked, and his works, along with those of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, provided the theoretical underpinnings for the conservative program of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Popper was knighted in 1965. His other works include The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935), The Poverty of Historicism (1957), Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972), The Self and Its Brain (rev. ed. 1978), and Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery (3 vol., 1981–82).

Bibliography

See studies by I. C. Jarvie (1972), B. Magee (1973), W. Berkson and J. Wetterman (1984), N. DeMarchi (1988), and M. H. Hacohen (2000).

 
Quotes By: Karl Popper

Quotes:

"Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell."

"Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle -- the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative."

"Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification."

"Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again."

 
Wikipedia: Karl Popper
Western Philosophy
20th century philosophy
Karl_Popper.jpg

Name

Karl Raimund Popper

Birth

July 28, 1902 (Vienna, Austria)

Death

September 17 1994 (aged 92)
(London, England)

School/tradition

Critical rationalism
Fallibilism
Evolutionary epistemology

Main interests

Epistemology
Philosophy of science
Social and political philosophy

Notable ideas

Falsifiability
Hypothetico-deductive method
Open society

Influences

Socrates (via Plato), Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Einstein, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Vienna Circle, Tarski, Selz, Russell, Campbell

Influenced

Hayek, Friedman, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Soros, Miller, Agassi, Bartley, Gombrich, Jarvie, Levinson, Schmidt, Munz, Magee, Lorenz, Shearmur, Medawar, Dimitrakos, Albert, Soroush

Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA (July 28, 1902 – September 17, 1994) was an Austrian and British[1] philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is counted among the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. Popper is perhaps best known for repudiating the classical observationalist / inductivist account of scientific method by advancing empirical falsification instead; for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced by critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy"[2] and for his vigorous defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism which he took to make the flourishing of the "open society" possible.

Life

Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902 to middle-class parents of Jewish origins, both of whom had converted to Christianity.[3] Popper received a Lutheran upbringing and was educated at the University of Vienna.[4] His father was a bibliophile who had 12,000-14,000 volumes in his personal library.[5] Popper inherited from him both the library and the disposition.[6] He took a PhD in philosophy in 1928, and taught secondary school from 1930 to 1936.

In 1934 he published his first book, Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery), in which he criticised psychologism, naturalism, inductionism, and logical positivism, and put forth his theory of potential falsifiability as the criterion demarcating science from non-science.

In 1937, the rise of Nazism and the threat of the Anschluss led Popper to emigrate to New Zealand, where he became lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College New Zealand (at Christchurch). In 1946, he moved to England to become reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics, where he was appointed professor in 1949. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1958 to 1959. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976. He retired from academic life in 1969, though he remained intellectually active until his death in 1994. He was invested with the Insignia of a Companion of Honour in 1982. Popper was a member of the Academy of Humanism and described himself as an agnostic, showing respect for the moral teachings of Judaism and Christianity.[7]

Popper won many awards and honours in his field, including the Lippincott Award of the American Political Science Association, the Sonning Prize, and fellowships in the Royal Society, British Academy, London School of Economics, King's College London, and Darwin College Cambridge. Austria awarded him the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold. He died in 1994. After cremation, Popper's ashes were taken to Vienna and buried at Lainz cemetery adjacent to the ORF Centre, where his wife - who had died in Austria several years before - had already been buried.

Popper's philosophy

Philosophy of Science

Popper coined the term critical rationalism to describe his philosophy. The term indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and of the observationalist-inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly against the latter, holding that scientific theories are abstract in nature, and can be tested only indirectly, by reference to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination in order to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings. Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. Popper's account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsifiability lies at the heart of his philosophy of science. It also inspired him to take falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation between what is and is not genuinely scientific: a theory should be considered scientific if and only if it is falsifiable. This led him to attack the claims of both psychoanalysis and contemporary Marxism to scientific status, on the basis that the theories enshrined by them are not falsifiable. Popper also wrote extensively against the famous Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. He strongly disagreed with Niels Bohr's instrumentalism and supported Albert Einstein's realist approach to scientific theories about the universe. Popper's falsifiability resembles Charles Peirce's fallibilism. In Of Clocks and Clouds (1966), Popper remarked that he wished he had known of Peirce's work earlier.

In All Life is Problem Solving, Popper sought to explain the apparent progress of scientific knowledge—how it is that our understanding of the universe seems to improve over time. This problem arises from his position that the truth content of our theories, even the best of them, cannot be verified by scientific testing, but can only be falsified. If so, then how is it that the growth of science appears to result in a growth in knowledge? In Popper's view, the advance of scientific knowledge is an evolutionary process characterised by his formula:

PS1TT1EE1PS2

In response to a given problem situation (PS1), a number of competing conjectures, or tentative theories (TT), are systematically subjected to the most rigorous attempts at falsification possible. This process, error elimination (EE), performs a similar function for science that natural selection performs for biological evolution. Theories that better survive the process of refutation are not more true, but rather, more "fit"—in other words, more applicable to the problem situation at hand (PS1). Consequently, just as a species' "biological fit" does not predict continued survival, neither does rigorous testing protect a scientific theory from refutation in the future. Yet, as it appears that the engine of biological evolution has produced, over time, adaptive traits equipped to deal with more and more complex problems of survival, likewise, the evolution of theories through the scientific method may, in Popper's view, reflect a certain type of progress: toward more and more interesting problems (PS2). For Popper, it is in the interplay between the tentative theories (conjectures) and error elimination (refutation) that scientific knowledge advances toward greater and greater problems; in a process very much akin to the interplay between genetic variation and natural selection.

Where does "truth" fit into all this? As early as 1934 Popper wrote of the search for truth as "one of the strongest motives for scientific discovery." Still, he describes in Objective Knowledge (1972) early concerns about the much-criticised notion of truth as correspondence. Then came the semantic theory of truth formulated by the logician Alfred Tarski and published in 1933. Popper writes of learning in 1935 of the consequences of Tarski's theory, to his intense joy. The theory met critical objections to truth as correspondence and thereby rehabilitated it. The theory also seemed to Popper to support metaphysical realism and the regulative idea of a search for truth.

According to this theory, the conditions for the truth of a sentence as well as the sentences themselves are part of a metalanguage. So, for example, the sentence "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Although many philosophers have interpreted, and continue to interpret, Tarski's theory as a deflationary theory, Popper refers to it as a theory in which "is true" is replaced with "corresponds to the facts." He bases this interpretation on the fact that examples such as the one described above refer to two things: assertions and the facts to which they refer. He identifies Tarski's formulation of the truth conditions of sentences as the introduction of a "metalinguistic predicate" and distinguishes the following cases:

1) "John called" is true.
2) "It is true that John called."

The first case belongs to the metalanguage whereas the second is more likely to belong to the object language. Hence, "it is true that" possesses the logical status of a redundancy. "Is true", on the other hand, is a predicate necessary for making general observations such as "John was telling the truth about Phillip."

Upon this basis, along with that of the logical content of assertions (where logical content is inversely proportional to probability), Popper went on to develop his important notion of verisimilitude or "truthlikeness".

The intuitive idea behind verisimilitude is that the assertions or hypotheses of scientific theories can be objectively measured with respect to the amount of truth and falsity that they imply. And, in this way, one theory can be evaluated as more or less true than another on a quantitative basis which, Popper emphasizes forcefully, has nothing to do with "subjective probabilities" or other merely "epistemic" considerations.

The simplest mathematical formulation that Popper gives of this concept can be found in the tenth chapter of Conjectures and Refutations.. Here he defines it as:

Vs(a)=CT_v(a)-CT_f(a) \,

where Vs(a) is the verisimilitude of a, Ctv(a) is a measure of the content of truth of a, and CTf(a) is a measure of the content of the falsity of a.

Knowledge, for Popper, was objective, both in the sense that it is objectively true (or truthlike), and also in the sense that knowledge has an ontological status (i.e., knowledge as object) independent of the knowing subject (Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972). He proposed three worlds (see Popperian cosmology): World One, being the phenomenal world, or the world of direct experience; World Two, being the world of mind, or mental states, ideas, and perceptions; and World Three, being the body of human knowledge expressed in its manifold forms, or the products of the second world made manifest in the materials of the first world (i.e.–books, papers, paintings, symphonies, and all the products of the human mind). World Three, he argued, was the product of individual human beings in exactly the same sense that an animal path is the product of individual animals, and that, as such, has an existence and evolution independent of any individual knowing subjects. The influence of World Three, in his view, on the individual human mind (World Two) is at least as strong as the influence of World One. In other words, the knowledge held by a given individual mind owes at least as much to the total accumulated wealth of human knowledge, made manifest, as to the world of direct experience. As such, the growth of human knowledge could be said to be a function of the independent evolution of World Three (compare with Memetics). Many contemporary philosophers have not embraced Popper's Three World conjecture, due mostly, it seems, to its resemblance to Cartesian dualism.

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In The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, Popper developed a critique of historicism and a defence of the 'Open Society' and liberal democracy. Historicism is the theory that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to knowable general laws towards a determinate end. Popper argued that this view is the principal theoretical presupposition underpinning most forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. He argued that historicism is founded upon mistaken assumptions regarding the nature of scientific law and prediction. Since the growth of human knowledge is a causal factor in the evolution of human history, and since "no society can predict, scientifically, its own future states of knowledge", it follows, he argued, that there can be no predictive science of human history. For Popper, metaphysical and historical indeterminism go hand in hand.

Problem of Induction

Among his contributions to philosophy is his attempt to answer the philosophical problem of induction. The problem, in basic terms, can be understood by example: just because the sun has risen every day for as long as anyone can remember, does not mean that there is any rational reason to believe it will rise tomorrow. There is no rational way to prove that a pattern will continue in the future just because it has in the past. Popper's reply is characteristic, and ties in with his criterion of falsifiability. He states that while there is no way to prove that the sun will come up, we can theorise that it will. If it does not come up, then it will be disproved, but since at this moment in time it seems to be consistent with our theory, the theory is not disproved.

This may be a true description of the pragmatic approach to theorizing adopted by the scientific method, but it does not in itself address the philosophical problem. As Stephen Hawking explains, "No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory."[8] While it may be pragmatically useful to accept a theory until it is falsified, this does not solve the philosophical problem of induction. As Bertrand Russell put it, "the general principles of science . . . are believed because mankind have found innumerable instances of their truth and no instances of their falsehood. But this affords no evidence for their truth in the future, unless the inductive principle is assumed."[9] In essence, Popper addressed justification for belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, not justification for the fact that it will, which is the crux of the philosophical problem. Said another way, Popper addressed the psychological causes of our belief in the validity of induction without trying to provide logical reasons for it. In this way, he sidesteps the traditional problem of trying to justify induction as "proof."

Influence

By all accounts, Popper has played a vital role in establishing the philosophy of science as a vigorous, autonomous discipline within analytic philosophy, through his own prolific and influential works, and also through his influence on his own contemporaries and students. Popper founded in 1946 the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and there lectured and influenced both Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, two of the foremost philosophers of science in the next generation of philosophy of science. (Lakatos significantly modified Popper's position, and Feyerabend repudiated it entirely, but the work of both is deeply influenced by Popper and engaged with many of the problems that Popper set.)

While there is some dispute as to the matter of influence, Popper had a long-standing and close friendship with economist Friedrich Hayek, who was also brought to the London School of Economics from Vienna. Each found support and similarities in each other's work, citing each other often, though not without qualification. In a letter to Hayek in 1944, Popper stated, "I think I have learnt more from you than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski." (See Hacohen, 2000). Popper dedicated his Conjectures and Refutations to Hayek. For his part, Hayek dedicated a collection of papers, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, to Popper, and in 1982 said, "...ever since his Logik der Forschung first came out in 1934, I have been a complete adherent to his general theory of methodology." (See Weimer and Palermo, 1982).

Popper also had long and mutually influential friendships with art historian Ernst Gombrich, biologist Peter Medawar, and neuro-scientist John Carew Eccles.

Popper's influence, both through his work in philosophy of science and through his political philosophy, has also extended beyond the academy. Among Popper's students and advocates at the London School of Economics is the multibillionaire investor George Soros, who says his investment strategies are modelled on Popper's understanding of the advancement of knowledge through falsification. Among Soros's philanthropic foundations is the Open Society Institute, a think-tank named in honour of Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, which Soros founded to advance the Popperian defense of the open society against authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

Popperian philosophy also inspired the creation of Taking Children Seriously, a movement arguing that children and adults should try to resolve their differences without coercion.

Former Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali stated that her ideas of liberalism had been influenced by Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies.

Critics

The Quine-Duhem thesis argues that it's impossible to test a single hypothesis on its own, since each one comes as part of an environment of theories. Thus we can only say that the whole package of relevant theories has been collectively falsified, but cannot conclusively say which element of the package must be replaced. An example of this is given by the discovery of the planet Neptune: when the motion of Uranus was found not to match the predictions of Newton's laws, the theory "There are seven planets in the solar system" was rejected, and not Newton's laws themselves. Popper discussed this critique of naïve falsificationism in Chapters 3 & 4 of The Logic of Scientific Discovery. For Popper, theories are accepted or rejected via a sort of 'natural selection'. Theories that say more about the way things appear are to be preferred over those that do not; the more generally applicable a theory is, the greater its value. Thus Newton’s laws, with their wide general application, are to be preferred over the much more specific “the solar system has seven planets”.

Thomas Kuhn’s influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that scientists work in a series of paradigms, and found little evidence of scientists actually following a falsificationist methodology. Popper's student Imre Lakatos attempted to reconcile Kuhn’s work with falsificationism by arguing that science progresses by the falsification of research programs rather than the more specific universal statements of naïve falsificationism. Another of Popper’s students Paul Feyerabend ultimately rejected any prescriptive methodology, and argued that the only universal method characterizing scientific progress was anything goes.

Popper seems to have anticipated Kuhn's observations. In his collection Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Harper & Row, 1963), Popper writes, "Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices. The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition in having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them. The theories are passed on, not as dogmas, but rather with the challenge to discuss them and improve upon them."

Another objection is that it is not always possible to demonstrate falsehood definitively, especially if one is using statistical criteria to evaluate a null hypothesis. [citation needed] More generally, it is not always clear that if evidence contradicts a hypothesis that this is a sign of flaws in the hypothesis rather than of flaws in the evidence. However, this is a misunderstanding of what Popper's philosophy of science sets out to do. Rather than proffering a set of instructions that merely need to be followed diligently to achieve science, Popper makes clear in The Logic of Scientific Discovery his belief that the resolution of conflicts between hypotheses and observations can only be a matter of the collective judgement of scientists, in each individual case.[10]

Other critics seek to vindicate the claims of historicism or holism to intellectual respectability, or psychoanalysis or Marxism to scientific status. [citation needed] It has been argued that Popper's student Imre Lakatos, for example, transformed Popper's philosophy using historicist and updated Hegelian historiographic ideas.[11]

Popper's falsificationism can be questioned logically, by asking about statements such as "There are black holes", which cannot be falsified by any possible observation, yet which seems to be a legitimately scientific claim. Similarly, it's not clear how Popper would deal with a statement like "for every metal, there is a temperature at which it will melt", which can neither be confirmed nor falsified by any possible observation, yet which seems to be a valid scientific hypothesis. These examples were pointed out by Carl Gustav Hempel. Hempel came to acknowledge that Logical Positivism's verificationism was untenable, but argued that falsificationism was equally untenable on logical grounds alone. The simplest response to this is that, because Popper describes how theories attain, maintain and lose scientific status, individual consequences of currently accepted scientific theories are scientific in the sense of being part of tentative scientific knowledge, and both of Hempel's examples fall under this category. For instance, atomic theory implies that all metals melt at some temperature. Another example is the claim that faster-than-light travel of information is possible, an unfalsifiable claim that would have been viewed as correct before relativistic physics, and is now assumed to be false because theory implies this. If this theory is later rejected, the issue may become more complex. To put it simply, on this view, falsifying a theory may lead to some of its implications being temporarily of uncertain scientific status, not even supported in a hypothetico-deductive sense.

Charles Taylor accuses Popper of exploiting his worldwide fame as an epistemologist to diminish the importance of philosophers of the 20th century continental tradition. According to Taylor, Popper's criticisms are completely baseless, but they are received with an attention and respect that Popper's "intrinsic worth hardly merits".[12] William W. Bartley defended Popper against such jealous allegations: "Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over has wasted or is wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology."[13]

In 2004 philosopher and psychologist Michel ter Hark (Groningen, The Netherlands) published a book, called Popper, Otto Selz and the rise of evolutionary epistemology, in which he claimed that Popper took some of his ideas from his tutor, the German-Jewish psychologist Otto Selz. Selz himself never published his ideas, partly because of the rise of Nazism which forced him to quit his work in 1933, and the prohibition of referencing to Selz' work.

See also

References

  1. ^ Watkins, J. Obituary of Karl Popper, 1902-1994. Proceedings of the British Academy, 94, pp. 645–684
  2. ^ William W. Bartley: Rationality versus the Theory of Rationality, In Mario Bunge: The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy (The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), section IX.
  3. ^ Magee, Bryan. The Story of Philosophy. New York: DK Publishing, 2001. p. 221.
  4. ^ Magee, Bryan. The Story of Philosophy. New York: DK Publishing, 2001. p. 221.
  5. ^ Raphael, F. The Great Philosophers London: Phoenix, p. 447
  6. ^ Manfred Lube: Karl R. Popper – Die Bibliothek des Philosophen als Spiegel seines Lebens. Imprimatur. Ein Jahrbuch für Bücherfreunde. Neue Folge Band 18 (2003), S. 207–238, ISBN 3-447-04723-2.
  7. ^ www.wonderfulatheistsofcfl.org/Quotes.htm.
  8. ^ A Brief History of Time, p. 11.
  9. ^ "On Induction" in The Problems of Philosophy', ch. 6.
  10. ^ Popper, Karl, (1934) Logik der Forschung, Springer. Vienna. Amplified English edition, Popper (1959).
  11. ^ Hacking, Ian (1979). "Imre Lakatos' Philosophy of Science". British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (30): 381-410. 
  12. ^ Taylor, Charles, "Overcoming Epistemology", in Philosophical Arguments, Harvard University Press, 1995.
  13. ^ William W. Bartley: The Philosophy of Karl Popper I. Philosophia 6 (1976), pp. 463–494.


Bibliography

  • The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, 1930–33 (as a a typescript circulating as Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie; as a German book 1979, as English translation 2008)
  • The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934 (as Logik der Forschung, English translation 1959)
  • The Poverty of Historicism, 1936 (private reading at a meeting in Brussels, 1944/45 as a series of journal articles in Econometrica, 1957 a book)
  • The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945
  • Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 1963
  • Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972, Rev. ed., 1979
  • Unended Quest; An Intellectual Autobiography, 1976
  • The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (with Sir John C. Eccles), 1977
  • Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, 1982
  • The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism, 1982
  • Realism and the Aim of Science, 1983
  • In Search of a Better World, 1984, a collection of Popper’s essays and lectures covering a range of subjects from the beginning of scientific speculation in classical Greece to the need for a new professional ethic based on the ideas of tolerance and intellectual responsibility; "All things living are in search of a better world."; Karl Popper, from the Preface of the book.
  • Die Zukunft ist Offen (The Future is Open) (with Konrad Lorenz), 1985 (in German)
  • A World of Propensities, 1990
  • The Lesson of this Century, Interviewer: Giancarlo Bosetti, English translation: Patrick Camiller), 1992
  • All life is Problem Solving, 1994
  • The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality, 1994
  • Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem: In Defence of Interactionism, 1994
  • The World of Parmenides, Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment, 1998, (Edited by Arne F. Petersen with the assistance of Jørgen Mejer)
  • After the Open Society, 2007

Further reading

Gravesite of Sir Karl Popper in Lainzer Friedhof, Vienna, Austria.
Enlarge
Gravesite of Sir Karl Popper in Lainzer Friedhof, Vienna, Austria.
  • David Miller. Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence. 1994.
  • David Miller (Ed.). Popper Selections.
  • John W. N. Watkins. Science and Skepticism. 1984.
  • Bartley, William Warren III. Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth. La Salle, IL: Open Court Press 1990. A look at Popper and his influence by one of his students.
  • Edmonds, D., Eidinow, J. Wittgenstein's Poker. New York: Ecco 2001. A review of the origin of the conflict between Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein, focused on events leading up to their volatile first encounter at 1946 Cambridge meeting.
  • Feyerabend, Paul Against Method. London: New Left Books, 1975. A polemical, iconoclastic book by a former colleague of Popper's. Vigorously critical of Popper's rationalist view of science.
  • Hacohen, M. Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902 – 1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Hickey, J. Thomas. History of the Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science Book V, Karl Popper And Falsificationist Criticism. www.philsci.com . 1995* Kadvany, John Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8223-2659-0. Explains how Imre Lakatos developed Popper's philosophy into a historicist and critical theory of scientific method.
  • Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Central to contemporary philosophy of science is the debate between the followers of Kuhn and Popper on the nature of scientific enquiry. This is the book in which Kuhn's views received their classical statement.
  • Levinson, Paul, ed. In Pursuit of Truth: Essays on the Philosophy of Karl Popper on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982. A collection of essays on Popper's thought and legacy by a wide range of his followers. Includes an interview with Sir Ernst Gombrich.
  • Magee, Bryan. Popper. London: Fontana, 1977. An elegant introductory text. Very readable, albeit rather uncritical of its subject, by a former Member of Parliament.
  • Magee, Bryan. Confessions of a Philosopher, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997. Magee's philosophical autobiography, with a chapter on his relations with Popper. More critical of Popper than in the previous reference.
  • Munz, Peter. Beyond Wittgenstein's Poker: New Light on Popper and Wittgenstein Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004. ISBN 0-7546-4016-7. Written by the only living student of both Wittgenstein and Popper, an eyewitness to the famous "poker" incident described above (Edmunds & Eidinow). Attempts to synthesize and reconcile the differences between these two philosophers.
  • Notturno, Mark. On Popper. Wadsworth Philosophers Series. 2003. A very comprehensive book on Popper’s philosophy by an accomplished Popperian.
  • O'Hear, Anthony. Karl Popper. London: Routledge, 1980. A critical account of Popper's thought, viewed from the perspective of contemporary analytic philosophy.
  • Radnitzky, Gerard, Bartley, W. W., III eds. Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge. La Salle, IL: Open Court Press 1987. ISBN 0-8126-9039-7. A strong collection of essays by Popper, Campbell, Munz, Flew, et al, on Popper's epistemology and critical rationalism. Includes a particularly vigorous answer to Rorty's criticisms.
  • Richmond, Sheldon. Aesthetic Criteria: Gombrich and the Philosophies of Science of Popper and Polanyi. Rodopi, Amsterdam/Atlanta, 1994, 152 pp. ISBN 90-5183-618-X.
  • Schilpp, Paul A., ed. The Philosophy of Karl Popper, 2 vols. La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1974. One of the better contributions to the Library of Living Philosophers series. Contains Popper's intellectual autobiography, a comprehensive range of critical essays, and Popper's responses to them.
  • Stokes, G. Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. A very comprehensive, balanced study, which focuses largely on the social and political side of Popper's thought.
  • Weimer, W., Palermo, D., eds. Cognition and the Symbolic Processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1982. See Hayek's essay, "The Sensory Order after 25 Years", and "Discussion".

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Persondata
NAME Popper, Karl Rapist
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Austrian-British philosopher of science
DATE OF BIRTH 28 July 1902(1902--)
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 17 September 1994
PLACE OF DEATH London