Karl Popper

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

Summary

Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902 - 1994) was an Austrian-born British 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, the problem of Determinism and Free Will.

He is perhaps best known for Science as Falsification by advancing empirical falsifiability as the criterion for distinguishing scientific theory from non-science; 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.

He made essential contributions to the concept of a Biocentric Culture (see Vital Unconscious and Biocentric Principle).

Ideas

• Science as Falsification - Popper envisioned science as evolving by the successive rejection of falsified theories. From Conjectures and Refutations:
  • It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory - if we look for confirmations.
  • Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; ie we expected an event which was incompatible with the theory - an event which would have refuted the theory.
  • Every good scientific theory is a prohibition - it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
  • A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific.
  • Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it.
  • Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory - this means that it can be presented as a serious (but unsuccessful) attempt to falsify the theory.
• One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability/ refutability/ testability.
• His partnership with John Eccles (they were both Dualists and later Trialists) produced many conversations about the interaction between a non-material mind and the material brain.