London: Routledge. The Poverty of Historicism. Originally published as a series of three articles in Economica 42, 43, and 46 The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson. Fifth edition Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Revised edition The Philosophy of Karl Popper. La Salle, Ill: Open Court. Unended Quest.
London: Fontana. Edited by W. Bartley III. Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics. New York: Routledge. Realism and the Aim of Science. Popper Selections. Edited by David W Miller. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Edited by Mark Amadeus Notturno. All Life Is Problem Solving. Secondary Sources Ackermann, Robert John.
Amherst: University of Mass. Agassi, Joseph. New York: Springer. Blaug, Mark. New York: Cambridge University Press. Caldwell, Bruce J. Carnap, Rudolf. Continued in Philosophy of Science 4 1 : An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. New York: Dover. Originally published as Philosophical Foundations of Physics Translated by Rolf A. Catton, Philip, and Graham MacDonald, eds. Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals.
Currie, Gregory, and Alan Musgrave, eds. Popper and the Human Sciences. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Edmonds, David, and John Eidinow. Reprint edition. New York: Harper Perennial. Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. Fourth edition Fuller, Steve. Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gattei, Stefano. London; New York: Routledge. Karl Popper Versus Inductivism. Cohen, P. Feyerabend, and M. Wartofsky, — Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Hacking, Ian. Hacohen, Malachi Haim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hands, Douglas W. Harris, John H. Hausman, Daniel M. Hayek, Frederich von. Part I. Part II. Part III. Hempel, Carl G. Howson, Colin. Howson, Colin, and Peter Urbach. Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach.
Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Third edition Hudelson, Richard. Hume, David. Edited by Eric Steinberg. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Jeffrey, Richard C. Keuth, Herbert. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Popper proceeds to explicate his distinction between the subjective and objective senses of knowledge by reference to this ontology.
Knowledge in the objective sense, by contrast, consists not of thought processes but of thought contents , that is to say, the content of propositionalised theories: it is. The objective thought content is that which remains invariant in a reasonably good translation. And it is that thought content, when linguistically codified in texts, works of art, log tables, mathematical formulae, which constitutes world 3, to which objective knowledge relates.
For those who would suggest that such objects are mere abstractions from world 2 thought processes, Popper counters that world 3 objects are necessarily more than the thought processes which have led to their creation.
Moreover, what is most characteristic about such objects is that, unlike world 2 mental processes, they can stand in logical relationships to each other, such as equivalence, deducibility and compatibility, which makes them amenable to the kind of critical rational analysis and development that is one of the hallmarks of science.
As he puts it,. Criticism of world 3 objects is of the greatest importance, both in art and especially in science. Science can be said to be largely the result of the critical examination and selection of conjectures, of thought contents. Each one of these, he contends, is a world 3 object that transcends both its physical, world 1 embodiments and its world 2 cognitive origins Popper was aware that he would be accused of hypostatising abstractions in asserting the reality and objectivity of world 3 objects.
He is therefore content, if required, to express his account of objective knowledge in more familiar and perhaps more mundane terms: world 3 objects are abstract objects while their physical embodiments are concrete objects.
But that should not be allowed to disguise the fact that he saw the relationships between the three categories of his ontology as of enormous importance in understanding the role of science as an element of culture:. He understood holism as the view that human social groupings are greater than the sum of their members, that they act on their human members and shape their destinies and that they are subject to their own independent laws of development.
The link between them is that holism holds that individuals are essentially formed by the social groupings to which they belong, while historicism suggests that we can understand such a social grouping only in terms of the internal principles which determine its development. Popper thinks that this view of the social sciences is both theoretically misconceived and socially dangerous, as it can give rise to totalitarianism and authoritarianism—to centralised governmental control of the individual and the attempted imposition of large-scale social planning.
Against this, he advances the view that any human social grouping is no more or less than the sum of its individual members, that what happens in history is the largely unforeseeable result of the actions of such individuals, and that large scale social planning to an antecedently conceived blueprint is inherently misconceived—and inevitably disastrous—precisely because human actions have consequences which cannot be foreseen.
Popper, then, is an historical indeterminist , insofar as he holds that history does not evolve in accordance with intrinsic laws or principles, that in the absence of such laws and principles unconditional prediction in the social sciences is an impossibility, and that there is no such thing as historical necessity.
We make theoretical progress in science by subjecting our theories to critical scrutiny, and abandoning those which have been falsified. So too in an open society the rights of the individual to criticise administrative policies will be safeguarded and upheld, undesirable policies will be eliminated in a manner analogous to the elimination of falsified scientific theories, and political differences will be resolved by critical discussion and argument rather than by coercion.
The open society as thus conceived of by Popper may be defined as. Levinson Such as society is not a utopian ideal, Popper argues, but an empirically realised form of social organisation which is in every respect superior to its real or potential totalitarian rivals. His strategy, however, is not merely to engage in a moral defence of the ideology of liberalism, but rather to show that totalitarianism is typically based upon historicist and holist presuppositions, and of demonstrating that these presuppositions are fundamentally incoherent.
This dream was given impetus, he suggests, by the emergence of a genuine predictive capability regarding solar and lunar eclipses at an early stage in human civilisation, which became refined with the development of the natural sciences. Why should we not conceive of a social science which would function as the theoretical natural sciences function and yield precise unconditional predictions in the appropriate sphere of application?
Popper seeks to show to show that this idea is based upon a series of misconceptions about the nature of science, and about the relationship between scientific laws and scientific prediction.
Contrary to popular belief, it is the former rather than the latter which are typical of the natural sciences, which means that typically prediction in natural science is conditional and limited in scope—it takes the form of hypothetical assertions stating that certain specified changes will come about if and only if particular specified events antecedently take place.
However, Popper argues that a these unconditional prophecies are not characteristic of the natural sciences, and b that the mechanism whereby they occur, in the very limited way in which they do, is not understood by the historicist. Given that this is the mechanism which generates unconditional scientific prophecies, Popper makes two related claims about historicism:. The first is that the historicist does not, as a matter of fact, derive his historical prophecies from conditional scientific predictions.
The second … is that he cannot possibly do so because long term prophecies can be derived from scientific conditional predictions only if they apply to systems which can be described as well isolated, stationary, and recurrent. These systems are very rare in nature; and modern society is surely not one of them.
Popper accordingly argues that it is a fundamental mistake for the historicist to take the unconditional scientific prophecies of eclipses as being typical and characteristic of the predictions of natural science; they are possible only because our solar system is a stationary and repetitive system which is isolated from other such systems by immense expanses of empty space.
Human society and human history are not isolated systems and are continually undergoing rapid, non-repetitive development. In the most fundamental sense possible, every event in human history is discrete, novel, quite unique, and ontologically distinct from every other historical event. For this reason, it is impossible in principle that unconditional scientific prophecies could be made in relation to human history—the idea that the successful unconditional prediction of eclipses provides us with reasonable grounds for the hope of successful unconditional prediction regarding the evolution of human history turns out to be based upon a gross misconception.
An additional mistake which Popper discerns in historicism is the failure of the historicist to distinguish between scientific laws and trends. This makes him think it possible to explain change by discovering trends running through past history, and to anticipate and predict future occurrences on the basis of such observations. Here Popper points out that there is a critical difference between a trend and a scientific law: the latter is universal in form, while a trend can be expressed only as a singular existential statement.
This logical difference is crucial: neither conditional nor unconditional predictions can be based upon trends, because trends may change or be reversed with a change in the conditions which gave rise to them in the first instance.
As Popper puts it, there can be no doubt that. He does not, of course, dispute the existence of trends or deny that observing them can be of practical utility value. But the essential point is that a trend is something which itself ultimately stands in need of scientific explanation, and it cannot therefore function as the frame of reference in terms of which an unconditional prediction can be based. A point which connects with this has to do with the role which the evolution of human knowledge has played in the historical development of human society.
Human history has, Popper points out, been strongly influenced by the growth of human knowledge , and it is extremely likely that this will continue to be the case—all the empirical evidence suggests that the link between the two is progressively consolidating. However, this gives rise to a further problem for the historicist: no scientific predictor, human or otherwise, can possibly predict its own future results. From this it follows, he holds, that no society can predict, scientifically, its own future states of knowledge.
Thus, while the future evolution of human history is extremely likely to be influenced by new developments in human knowledge, we cannot now scientifically determine what such knowledge will be. From this it follows that if the future holds any new discoveries or any new developments in the growth of our knowledge, then it is impossible for us to predict them now, and it is therefore impossible for us to predict the future development of human history now, given that the latter will, at least in part, be determined by the future growth of our knowledge.
Thus, once again historicism collapses—the dream of a theoretical, predictive science of history is unrealisable, because it is an impossible dream. It is, he argues, theoretically as well as practically misguided, because, again, part of what we are planning for is our future knowledge, and our future knowledge is not something which we can in principle now possess—we cannot adequately plan for unexpected advances in our future knowledge, or for the effects which such advances will have upon society as a whole.
For him, this necessitates the acceptance of historical indeterminism as the only philosophy of history which is commensurate with a proper understanding of the provisional and incomplete nature of human knowledge.
This part of his social philosophy was influenced by the economist Friedrich Hayek, who worked with him at the London School of Economics and who was a life-long friend. This, of course, parallels precisely the critical testing of theories in scientific investigation. For Popper, in a genuinely open society piecemeal social engineering goes hand-in-hand with negative utilitarianism, the attempt to minimise the amount of suffering and misery, rather than, as with positive utilitarianism, the attempt to maximise the amount of happiness.
The state, he holds, should concern itself with the task of progressively formulating and implementing policies designed to deal with the social problems which actually confront it, with the goal of mitigating human misery and suffering to the greatest possible degree. The positive task of increasing social and personal happiness, by contrast, can and should be left to individual citizens, who may, of course, act collectively to that end. The attainment of happiness should be left to our private endeavours.
Thus, for Popper, in the final analysis the activity of problem-solving is as definitive of our humanity at the level of social and political organisation as it is at the level of science, and it is this key insight which unifies and integrates the broad spectrum of his thought. While it cannot be said that Popper was modest, he took criticism of his theories very seriously, and spent much of his time in his later years in addressing them.
The following is a summary of some of the main ones which he had to address. First, Popper claims to be a realist and rejects conventionalist and instrumentalist accounts of science.
But his account in the Logic of Scientific Discovery of the role played by basic statements in the methodology of falsification seems to sit uneasily with that. He accordingly asserts that while basic statements may have a causal relationship to experience, they are neither determined nor justified by it. However, this would seem to pose a difficulty: if a theory is to be genuinely testable, it must be possible to determine, at least in principle, whether the basic statements which are its potential falsifiers are actually true or false.
But how can this be known, if basic statements cannot be justified by experience? From a logical point of view, the testing of a theory depends upon basic statements whose acceptance or rejection, in its turn, depends upon our decisions.
Thus it is decisions which settle the fate of theories. This is strongly rejected by Popper, who differentiates his position from it by arguing that it is the acceptance of basic statements, rather than that universal theory, which is determined by convention and intersubjective agreement.
For him, the acceptance or rejection of theory occurs only indirectly and at a higher investigative level, through critical tests made possible by the conventional acceptance of basic statements. Simultaneously, however, he rejects any suggestion that basic statements are justifiable by direct experience:. I differ from the positivist in holding that basic statements are not justifiable by our immediate experiences, but are, from the logical point of view, accepted by an act, by a free decision.
However many confirming instances there are for a theory, it only takes one counter observation to falsify it. Science progresses when a theory is shown to be wrong and a new theory is introduced which better explains the phenomena.
Popper does think that science can help us progressively approach the truth but we can never be certain that we have the final explanation. According to the time-honored view, science, properly so called, is distinguished by its inductive method — by its characteristic use of observation and experiment, as opposed to purely logical analysis, to establish its results. The great difficulty was that no run of favorable observational data, however long and unbroken, is logically sufficient to establish the truth of an unrestricted generalization.
Popper's astute formulations of logical procedure helped to reign in the excessive use of inductive speculation upon inductive speculation, and also helped to strengthen the conceptual foundation for today's peer review procedures.
However, the history of science gives little indication of having followed anything like a methodological falsificationist approach. Indeed, and as many studies have shown, scientists of the past and still today tended to be reluctant to give up theories that we would have to call falsified in the methodological sense; and very often it turned out that they were correct to do so seen from our later perspective.
Also, one observation does not falsify a theory. The experiment may have been badly designed, data could be incorrect. Quine states that a theory is not a single statement; it is a complex network a collection of statements.
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