Karl Popper From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Karl Popper CH FRS FBA Karl Popper.jpg Sir Karl Popper c. 1980s Born 28 July 1902 Vienna, Austria-Hungary Died 17 September 1994 (aged 92) London, England Nationality Austro-British Era 20th century philosophy Region Western philosophy Religion Lutheranism (de jure) Humanitarianism and Agnosticism (de facto) School Critical rationalism Liberalism Main interests Epistemology Rationality Philosophy of science Logic Social and political philosophy Metaphysics Philosophy of mind Origin of life Interpretation of Quantum mechanics Notable ideas Critical rationalism Falsificationism Evolutionary trial and error view of the growth of knowledge Propensity interpretation Open society Cosmological pluralism Modified essentialism Axiomatization of probability Active Darwinism Spearhead model of evolution Truthlikeness Objective hermeneutics The paradox of tolerance Critical dualism (of facts and standards) Negative utilitarism Influenced by[show] Influenced[show] Sir Karl Raimund Popper CH FRS[3] FBA (28 Jul 1902 – 17 Sep 1994), an Austrian native who emigrated to England,[4] is one of the 20th centurys greatest philosophers of science.[5][6] Quite famously, Popper stressed the illegitimacy of traditional, inductivist models of science, and developed one he termed falsificationism. Popper thus claimed to have killed logical positivism, and in any event became an icon of the era postpositivism. Professor of Logic and Scientific Method at London School of Economics, Popper was knighted in 1965.[7] Rather infamously, Popper claimed to have solved the problem of induction—then that induction is a myth. Meanwhile, Popper developed what he identified as the first fully nonjustificatory epistemology—that is, a theory of knowledge abandoning the quest to justify belief before it can be knowledge—and termed it critical rationalism,[8] which proceeds by conjectures and refutations. Throughout his public life, through books, articles, lectures, and debates, Popper tenaciously sought to disarm dogma whether in science or in society at large, and, writing extensively on social and political philosophy, vigorously defended liberal democracy and social criticism to foster an open society. Contents [hide] 1 Personal life 1.1 Family and training 1.2 Academic life 2 Honours and awards 3 Philosophy 3.1 Philosophy of science 3.1.1 Falsifiability/problem of demarcation 3.1.2 Falsification/problem of induction 3.2 Rationality 3.3 Philosophy of arithmetic 3.4 Political philosophy 3.4.1 The paradox of tolerance 3.5 Metaphysics 3.5.1 Truth 3.5.2 Cosmological pluralism 3.5.3 Origin and evolution of life 3.5.4 Free will 3.6 Religion and God 4 Influence 5 Criticism 5.1 Philosophy of science 5.2 Other criticism 6 Bibliography 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links Personal life[edit] Family and training[edit] Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902, to upper middle-class parents. All of Karl Poppers grandparents were Jewish, but the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before Karl was born,[9][10] and so he received Lutheran baptism.[11] They understood this as part of their cultural assimilation, not as an expression of devout belief.[12] Karls father Simon Siegmund Carl Popper was a lawyer from Bohemia and a doctor of law at the Vienna University, and mother Jenny Schiff was of Silesian and Hungarian descent. After establishing themselves in Vienna, the Poppers made a rapid social climb in Viennese society: Simon Siegmund Carl became a legal partner[clarification needed] of Viennas liberal mayor Raimond Grübl and, after his death in 1898, took over the firm (Karl received his middle name from the mayor).[9] His father was a bibliophile who had 12,000–14,000 volumes in his personal library.[13] Popper inherited both the library and the disposition from him.[14] Popper left school at the age of 16 and attended lectures in mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology and the history of music as a guest student at the University of Vienna. In 1919, Popper became attracted by Marxism and subsequently joined the Association of Socialist School Students. He also became a member of the Social Democratic Workers Party of Austria, which was at that time a party that fully adopted the Marxist ideology.[15] After the June 15, 1919 street battle in the Hörlgasse, when police shot eight of his unarmed party comrades, he became disillusioned by what he saw to be the pseudo-scientific historical materialism of Marx, abandoned the ideology, and remained a supporter of social liberalism throughout his life. He worked in street construction for a short amount of time, but was unable to cope with the heavy labour. Continuing to attend university as a guest student, he started an apprenticeship as cabinetmaker, which he completed as a journeyman. He was dreaming at that time of starting a daycare facility for children, for which he assumed the ability to make furniture might be useful. After that he did voluntary service in one of psychoanalyst Alfred Adlers clinics for children. In 1922, he did his matura by way of a second chance education and finally joined the University as an ordinary student. He completed his examination as an elementary teacher in 1924 and started working at an after-school care club for socially endangered children. In 1925, he went to the newly founded Pädagogisches Institut and continued studying philosophy and psychology. Around that time he started courting Josephine Anna Henninger, who later became his wife. In 1928, he earned a doctorate in psychology, under the supervision of Karl Bühler. His dissertation was entitled Die Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie (The question of method in cognitive psychology).[16] In 1929, he obtained the authorisation to teach mathematics and physics in secondary school, which he started doing. He married in 1930. Fearing the rise of Nazism and the threat of the Anschluss, he started to use the evenings and the nights to write his first book Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie. He needed to publish one in order to get some academic position in a country that was safe for people of Jewish descent. However, he ended up not publishing the two-volume work, but a condensed version of it with some new material, Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery), in 1934. Here, 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 1935 and 1936, he took unpaid leave to go to England for a study visit. Academic life[edit] In 1937, Popper finally managed to get a position that allowed him to emigrate to New Zealand, where he became lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College of the University of New Zealand in Christchurch. It was here that he wrote his influential work The Open Society and its Enemies. In 1946, after the Second World War, he moved to England to become reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics. Three years later, in 1949, he was appointed professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London. Popper was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1958 to 1959. He retired from academic life in 1969, though he remained intellectually active for the rest of his life. In 1985, he returned to Austria to let his wife have her relatives around her during the last months of her life. She died in November that year. After the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft had failed to establish him as the director of a newly founded branch researching the philosophy of science, he went back again to the United Kingdom in 1986, settling in Kenley, Surrey.[3] Sir Karl Poppers gravesite in Lainzer Friedhof (de), near Vienna, Austria Popper died of complications of cancer, pneumonia and kidney failure in Kenley (South Croydon, London) at the age of 92 on 17 September 1994.[17][18] He had been working continuously on his philosophy until two weeks before, when he suddenly fell terminally ill.[19] After cremation, his ashes were taken to Vienna and buried at Lainzer cemetery adjacent to the ORF Centre, where his wife Josefine Anna Henninger had already been buried.[20] Poppers estate is managed by his secretary and personal assistant Melitta Mew and her husband Raymond. Poppers manuscripts went to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, partly during his lifetime and partly as supplementary material after his death. Klagenfurt University possesses Poppers library including his precious bibliophilia, as well as hard copies of the original Hoover material and microfilms of the supplementary material. The remaining parts of the estate were mostly transferred to The Karl Popper Charitable Trust.[21] In October 2008, Klagenfurt University acquired the copyrights from the estate. Together with his wife, Popper chose not to have children, because of the circumstances of war in the early years of their marriage. Popper commented that this was perhaps a cowardly but in a way a right decision.[22] Honours and awards[edit] Popper won many awards and honours in his field, including the Lippincott Award of the American Political Science Association, the Sonning Prize, the Otto Hahn Peace Medal of the United Nations Association of Germany in Berlin and fellowships in the Royal Society,[3] British Academy, London School of Economics, Kings College London, Darwin College, Cambridge, and Charles University, Prague. Austria awarded him the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria in 1996. He received the Humanist Laureate Award from the International Academy of Humanism.[23] He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965,[24] and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976.[3] He was invested with the Insignia of a Companion of Honour in 1982.[25] Other awards and recognition for Popper included the City of Vienna Prize for the Humanities (1965), Karl Renner Prize (1978), Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (1980), Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize (1981), Ring of Honour of the City of Vienna (1983) and the Premio Internazionale of the Italian Federico Nietzsche Society (1988). In 1992, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for symbolising the open spirit of the 20th century[26] and for his enormous influence on the formation of the modern intellectual climate.[26] Philosophy[edit] Main article: Critical rationalism Philosophy of science[edit] This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2010) Main article: Falsifiability Falsifiability/problem of demarcation[edit] Popper coined the term critical rationalism to describe his philosophy. Concerning the method of science, the term indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and the classical 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. The term falsifiable does not mean something is made false, but rather that, if it is false, it can be shown by observation or experiment.[27] Poppers 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 their theories are not falsifiable. Popper also wrote extensively against the famous Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. He strongly disagreed with Niels Bohrs instrumentalism and supported Albert Einsteins realist approach to scientific theories about the universe. Poppers falsifiability resembles Charles Peirces nineteenth century fallibilism. In Of Clocks and Clouds (1966), Popper remarked that he wished he had known of Peirces work earlier. In All Life is Problem Solving, Popper sought to explain the apparent progress of scientific knowledge — that is, 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. Again, in this context the word falsified does not refer to something being fake; rather, that something can be (i.e., is capable of being) shown to be false by observation or experiment. Some things simply do not lend themselves to being shown to be false, and therefore, are not falsifiable. If so, then how is it that the growth of science appears to result in a growth in knowledge? In Poppers view, the advance of scientific knowledge is an evolutionary process characterised by his formula: \mathrm{PS}_1 \rightarrow \mathrm{TT}_1 \rightarrow \mathrm{EE}_1 \rightarrow \mathrm{PS}_2. \, In response to a given problem situation (\mathrm{PS}_1), a number of competing conjectures, or tentative theories (\mathrm{TT}), are systematically subjected to the most rigorous attempts at falsification possible. This process, error elimination (\mathrm{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 (\mathrm{PS}_1). Consequently, just as a species biological fitness does not ensure 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 Poppers view, reflect a certain type of progress: toward more and more interesting problems (\mathrm{PS}_2). 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. Falsification/problem of induction[edit] Among his contributions to philosophy is his claim to have solved the philosophical problem of induction. He states that while there is no way to prove that the sun will rise, it is possible to formulate the theory that every day the sun will rise; if it does not rise on some particular day, the theory will be falsified and will have to be replaced by a different one. Until that day, there is no need to reject the assumption that the theory is true. Nor is it rational according to Popper to make instead the more complex assumption that the sun will rise until a given day, but will stop doing so the day after, or similar statements with additional conditions. Such a theory would be true with higher probability, because it cannot be attacked so easily: to falsify the first one, it is sufficient to find that the sun has stopped rising; to falsify the second one, one additionally needs the assumption that the given day has not yet been reached. Popper held that it is the least likely, or most easily falsifiable, or simplest theory (attributes which he identified as all the same thing) that explains known facts that one should rationally prefer. His opposition to positivism, which held that it is the theory most likely to be true that one should prefer, here becomes very apparent. It is impossible, Popper argues, to ensure a theory to be true; it is more important that its falsity can be detected as easily as possible. Popper and David Hume agreed that there is often a psychological belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, but both denied that there is logical justification for the supposition that it will, simply because it always has in the past. Popper writes, I approached the problem of induction through Hume. Hume, I felt, was perfectly right in pointing out that induction cannot be logically justified. (Conjectures and Refutations, p. 55) Rationality[edit] Popper held that rationality is not restricted to the realm of empirical or scientific theories, but that it is merely a special case of the general method of criticism, the method of finding and eliminating contradictions in knowledge without ad-hoc-measures. According to this view, rational discussion about metaphysical ideas, about moral values and even about purposes is possible. Poppers student Bartley tried to radicalise this idea and made the controversial claim that not only can criticism go beyond empirical knowledge, but that everything can be rationally criticised. To Popper, who was an anti-justificationist, traditional philosophy is misled by the false principle of sufficient reason. He thinks that no assumption can ever be or needs ever to be justified, so a lack of justification is not a justification for doubt. Instead, theories should be tested and scrutinised. It is not the goal to bless theories with claims of certainty or justification, but to eliminate errors in them. He writes, there are no such things as good positive reasons; nor do we need such things [...] But [philosophers] obviously cannot quite bring [themselves] to believe that this is my opinion, let alone that it is right (The Philosophy of Karl Popper, p. 1043) Philosophy of arithmetic[edit] Poppers principle of falsifiability runs into prima facie difficulties when the epistemological status of mathematics is considered. It is difficult to conceive how simple statements of arithmetic, such as 2 + 2 = 4, could ever be shown to be false. If they are not open to falsification they can not be scientific. If they are not scientific, it needs to be explained how they can be informative about real world objects and events. Poppers solution[28] was an original contribution in the philosophy of mathematics. His idea was that a number statement such as 2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples can be taken in two senses. In one sense it is irrefutable and logically true, in the second sense it is factually true and falsifiable. Concisely, the pure mathematics 2 + 2 = 4 is always true, but, when the formula is applied to real world apples, it is open to falsification.[29] Political philosophy[edit] Part of a series on Liberalism Yellow flag waving.svg Development[show] Ideas[show] Variants[show] People[show] Organizations[show] Portal icon Liberalism portal Portal icon Politics portal v t e 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. Popper considered historicism to be the theory that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to knowable general laws towards a determinate end. He 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,[citation needed] it follows, he argued, that there can be no predictive science of human history. For Popper, metaphysical and historical indeterminism go hand in hand. In After The Open Society, which was published posthumously, a large collection of his previously unpublished and uncollected essays on social and political topics was assembled. In this, one can trace his ideas from material that pre-dated The Open Society to something that was completed just as he died. In a 1992 lecture, Popper explained the connection between his political philosophy and his philosophy of science. As he stated, he was in his early years impressed by communism and also active in the Austrian Communist party. What had a profound effect on him was an event that happened in 1919: during a riot, caused by the Communists, the police shot several people, including some of Poppers friends. When Popper later told the leaders of the Communist party about this, they responded by stating that this loss of life was necessary in working towards the inevitable workers revolution. This statement did not convince Popper and he started to think about what kind of reasoning would justify such a statement. He later concluded that there could not be any justification for it, and this was the start of his later criticism of historicism. In 1947, Popper founded with Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises and others the Mont Pelerin Society to defend classical liberalism, in the spirit of the Open Society. The paradox of tolerance[edit] Main article: Paradox of tolerance Although Popper was an advocate of toleration, he said that intolerance should not be tolerated, for if tolerance allowed intolerance to succeed completely, tolerance itself would be threatened. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, he argued: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. – In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.[30][31][32][33]
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