A Brief Profile of the Philosophy and Work of Karl Popper

Philosophy of Science, vol. 71, no. 4, 2004

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...

Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals

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.

Journal of Philosophy, Culture and Religion, 2016

This paper offers here some new insights into the philosophy of critical rationalism through some accounts of Popper's biography. In particular, it elaborates on the features of an enduring liberal-communitarianism in Popper that many commentators upon Popper do not see. The two important features are the individual and social aspects of Popper's critical rationalism. These are, in my view, very essential to understanding Popper's philosophy of science and Popper's political philosophy. Events of Popper's life together informed the development of his philosophy of science and his political philosophy. An essential balance in both can best be grasped by newly considering Popper's biography and its context.

2017

Karl Popper is famous for having proposed that science advances by a process of conjecture and refutation. He is also famous for defending the open society against what he saw as its arch enemies – Plato and Marx. Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings are, how it needs to be improved to overcome these failings, and what implications emerge as a result. The book dramatically develops Karl Popper’s views about natural and social science, and how we should go about trying to solve social problems. Criticism of Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of natural science leads to a new philosophy of science, which I call aim-oriented empiricism. This makes explicit metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe that are an implicit part of scientific knowledge – implicit in the way science excludes all theories that are not explanatory, even those that are more successful empirically than accepted theories. Aim-oriented empiricism has major implications, not just for the academic discipline of philosophy of science, but for science itself. Popper generalized his philosophy of science of falsificationism to arrive at a new conception of rationality – critical rationalism – the key methodological idea of Popper’s profound critical exploration of political and social issues in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism. This path of Popper, from scientific method to rationality and social and political issues is followed here, but the starting point is aim-oriented empiricism rather than falsificationism. Aim-oriented empiricism is generalized to form a new conception of rationality – aim-oriented rationalism – which has far-reaching implications for political and social issues, for the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and indeed for academic inquiry as a whole. The strategies for tackling social problems that arise from aim-oriented rationalism improve on Popper’s recommended strategies of piecemeal social engineering and critical rationalism, associated with Popper’s conception of the open society. This book thus sets out to develop Popper’s philosophy in new and fruitful directions. The theme of the book, in short, is to discover what can be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress towards a better world. That there is indeed much to be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress was the big idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. This was immensely influential. But the philosophes of the Enlightenment made mistakes, and these mistakes, inherited from the Enlightenment, are built into the institutional and intellectual structure of academic inquiry today. In his two great works, The Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper corrected some of the mistakes of the Enlightenment – mistakes about the nature of scientific method and rationality. But Popper left other mistakes undetected and uncorrected. The present book seeks to push the Popperian research programme further, and correct what Popper left uncorrected. The fundamental idea that emerges is that there is an urgent need to bring about a revolution in academic inquiry so that it takes up its proper task of promoting wisdom and not just acquiring knowledge – wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 1993

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.

British …, 2000

forthcoming in Philosophy of Science, ed. Eran Asoulin., 2021

Introduction to Karl Popper's philosophy of science.