Popper’s Paradoxical Pursuit of Natural Philosophy

Principia, 2014

In this paper I intend to thoroughly analyse Karl Popper's relation to metaphysics. I start with his first writings, where he states the differences between science, pseudoscience and metaphysics. I then describe how his thoughts on the subject evolved to culminate in his reflection on metaphysical research programmes and the need for a revival of natural philosophy. A major concern is Popper's famous testability criterion to set apart science from non-science. I point at the problems of the conception of metaphysics as non-testable theories (which are similar to the problems of the conception of metaphysics as theories involving unobservables) and, in order to avoid these problems, I propose to retain nothing but the traditional conception of metaphysics as the general theories about the nature of the world. This leads me to the conclusion that science is not only an empirical task but also, and in a very important sense, a speculative one.

Problems of scientific cosmology only rarely occur in the works of Karl Popper. Nevertheless, it was a subject that interested him and which he occasionally commented on. What is more important, his general claim of falsifiability as a criterion that demarcates science from non-science has played a significant role in periods of the development of modern physical cosmology. The paper examines the historical contexts of the interaction between cosmology and Popperian philosophy of science. Apart from covering Popper’s inspiration from Einstein and his views on questions of cosmology, it focuses on the impact of his thoughts in two periods of controversy of modern cosmology, the one related to the steady state theory and the other to the recent multiverse proposal. It turns out that the impact has been considerable, and continues to be so, but also that the versions of Popperian methodology discussed by cosmologists are sometimes far from what Popper actually thought and wrote.

IJORER : International Journal of Recent Educational Research

This article is the result of a book review of a work by Stefano Gattei. The starting point of Popper's view is that "almost every phase of our scientific development is under metaphysical rule, that is, ideas that are tested, ideas which determine not only what problems we need to explain, but also what kinds of answers we will consider to be one that is important or satisfactory or accepted, and as a remedy, or guarantee, of a previous answer". Popper's indeterminism is important because Popper's custom begins by considering an intuitive Laplacian view of determinism: "the world is like a motion picture film: or a projected image. Parts of the film have proved to be the past. And unproven people are the past. front". Popper has always been claimed to be a metaphysical realist: to him, to be a realist means to think, in covenant with common sense, that the world of his existence is independent of human beings. It means, "my existence will end wi...

ABSTRACT: It has been readily observed by many Popper scholars that there was something intensely moral about his thought, which I suggest is a moral metaphysics underpinned by a naturalism, which is in keeping with a German tradition exemplified by Schelling. The notion of freedom played a huge part in this. Any scientific or political argument which seems to challenge the existence of freedom is forcefully combated, whether the discussion concerned the discipline of logic, mathematics, physics, biology or politics. For Popper, freedom was everywhere seen at the structural level of differentiated modes of organization in the universe. It was via this discernment freedom’s embeddedness in the universe that his philosophy most closely resembles Schelling’s naturalism. Despite the advances in scientific knowledge that Popper had access to, key themes in Schelling’s thought are recurrent in Popper’s later philosophy. This suggests that we can look at Popper as someone whose thought trajectory projected his life’s philosophy along a similar path away from Kantianism as Schelling’s. It also adds to the rehabilitation of Schelling as a philosopher of science whose thought remains relevant to the current debates.

The very title of my paper may cause many eyebrows to be raised. For anyone who is familiar with Popper's philosophy of science knows well that he distinguished clearly between two types of historical processes, namely, the process of conceiving a new scientific theory or idea and the methods of examining it logically, and asserted that the task of the philosophers is not to ponder on these actual thinking processes whereby a new scientific theory comes into being. The logical analysis of scientific knowledge, instead, is restricted to an examination of contents of linguistically formulated scientific theories and of the post-generational evaluative procedures of scientists. One might naturally ask what then the point behind an inquiry like this is since Popper himself was mainly concerned with post-generational justification and bequeathed the detailed study of theory creation to the psychologists and the historians. There are two principal reasons which motivated this examination. Firstly, what is generally found as the Popperian notion of creativity and scientific discovery in the literature of philosophy of science is reasonably different from what closer readings of his earlier and later works reveal. Secondly, an analysis like this can illuminate problems of theory change and scientific progress, which undoubtedly are important to philosophy of science in general and Popper in particular. This implies a crucial point, namely, that progress of scientific knowledge, contrary to what philosophers of science generally used to believe, is not the subject matter of a single discipline. In this paper I attempt to make apparent the shortcomings that the disciplinary splitting of the topic of advancement of knowledge (in science) entails.

As the title of this article indicates, its aim is to investigate in the origins of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. In particular, find out the roots of what for him were at the time the two fundamental problems of the theory of knowledge. Thus, the fundamental questions in this work are: 1. What did Popper know of European philosophers of science that he mentions and criticizes? 2. Where does Popper's anti-inductivism and falsificationism come from? 3. Were Popper's basic positions original? 4. To what extent was Popper in his beginnings a realist philosopher? 5. How contributed Popper to the theory of scientific explanation? 6. What does contemporary scientific instrumentalism owe to Popper? Even if reading this article may cast some doubts on the solidity of Popper's basic approaches, what is indubitable is that Popper is an indispensable figure in the contemporary philosophy of science.

CENTRAL ASIAN JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE, 2022

This paper situates us within the context of an internal conflict in the Philosophy of Karl Popper. On the one hand, Popper is an ardent proponent of scientific realism-the view that science seeks to formulate true theories that depict the structure of the universe; and on the other hand, the very Karl Popper propounds Non-Justificationism in science-a negativist methodology which asserts that the logic of science seeks not the justification but the refutation of theories. This non-justificationism seems asymmetric to the realist optimistic ambition of justifying the reliability of scientific knowledge. To resolve this tension between realism and nonjustificationism in Popper's epistemology some philosophers have proceeded by revising his method of falsification (Imre Lakatos,), others have opted for a reinterpretation of his realism (Evandro Agazzi, Mario Alai,) while some have given an instrumentalist status to popper's rationality of science (Peter Godfrey-Smith, Anthony O'Hear). Our argument in this Paper is that to resolve the contradiction within Popper's rationality of science we have to situate the two conflicting theses (Realism and non-justicationism) within the general problem of Popper's epistemology. That is, the problem of the conditions necessary for the growth of scientific knowledge. Thus, after examining the basic tenets of Popper's realism and illustrating the levels of the opposition between realism and non-justificationism, we have gone beyond other solutions to defend the conflation of realism and non-justificationism as the condition for the growth of knowledge. Popper thus emerges out of our analysis as a 'critical realist' who rejects 'dogmatic optimism' and creates 'critical optimism' in his evolutionary epistemology.

2013

Abstract: The very title of my paper may cause many eyebrows to be raised. For anyone who is familiar with Popper’s philosophy of science knows well that he distinguished clearly between two types of historical processes, namely, the process of conceiving a new scientific theory or idea and the methods of examining it logically, and asserted that the task of the philosophers is not to ponder on these actual thinking processes whereby a new scientific theory comes into being. The logical analysis of scientific knowledge, instead, is restricted to an examination of contents of linguistically formulated scientific theories and of the post-generational evaluative procedures of scientists. One might naturally ask what then the point behind an inquiry like this is since Popper himself was mainly concerned with post-generational justification and bequeathed the detailed study of theory creation to the psychologists and the historians. There are two principal reasons which motivated this ex...

2023

FQXi Essay Contest 2017-2018: What Is “Fundamental”?