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Karl Raimund Popper
By Stephen Thornton
July 28, 1902 - September 17, 1994. Austrian-born, British thinker,
widely viewed as one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers
of science. He was also a social and political philosopher of
considerable stature, a staunch defender of liberal democracy
and the principles of social criticism upon which it is based,
and an implacable opponent of authoritarianism. He is best known
for his repudiation of the classical observationalist-inductivist
account of science,1 his espousal
of falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation between science
and non-science,2 and his defence
of the 'Open Society'.
Born in Vienna in 1902 to middle-class parents of Jewish origins,
Karl Popper was educated at the University of Vienna. He took
a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1928, and taught in secondary school
from 1930-1936. In 1937, concerns about the growth of Nazism led
him to emigrate to New Zealand, where he became lecturer in philosophy
at Canterbury University College, Christchurch. In 1946, he moved
to England to become reader in logic and scientific method at
the London School of Economics, where he was appointed professor
in 1949. He was knighted in 1965, and was elected Fellow of the
Royal Society in 1976. He retired from academic life in 1969,
though he remained intellectually active until his death in 1994.
Popper coined the term 'critical rationalism' to describe his
philosophy. This designation is significant, and indicates his
rejection of classical empiricism,3
and of the observationalist-inductivist account of science that
had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly against the latter,
holding that scientific theories are universal in nature, and
can be tested only indirectly, by references 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 genuine counter-instance
is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication
is derived, to be false. Popper's account of the logical asymmetry
between verification and falsification 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 accounted 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 the theories enshrined by them are not falsifiable.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies and
The Poverty of Historicism ,
Popper developed a powerful critique of historicism and a defence
of the 'Open Society', liberal democracy. Historicism is the theory
that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to
knowable general laws towards a determinate end. Popper considered
this view to be the principal theoretical presupposition underpinning
most forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. He accordingly
attacked it, arguing that it 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',4
it follows, he argued, that there can be no predictive science
of human history. For Popper, metaphysical and historical indeterminism
go hand in hand.
Popper has a significant number of critics. On the one hand,
there are those who seek to vindicate the claims of historicism
or holism to intellectual respectability, or psychoanalysis or
Marxism to scientific status. On the other, there are those who
argue that, in principle or in point of detail, his philosophy
of science is mistaken. Few, however, would deny his influence
or importance, and there would be considerable support for the
view of Popper as 'one of the foremost critics of authoritarianism
in the twentieth century, yet also arguably the premier philosopher
of science during a century of unparalleled scientific discovery'.5
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- The theory, originating in Francis Bacon's
Novum
Organum, that scientific enquiry begins with 'raw' observation,
and moves to universal theory or law by a process of inductive
inference.
- The thesis that falsifiable hypotheses alone
should be accounted scientific.
- The view that all knowledge is derived
from experience.
- The
Poverty of Historicism, 2d. ed. (London: Routledge, 1961),
vii.
- P. N. Turner, "Remembering
Karl Popper," Hoover Digest 1 (2000): 1.
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Further reading
Feyerabend, P. Against
Method . London: New Left Books, 1975. A splendidly polemical,
iconoclastic book by a former colleague of Popper's. Vigorously
critical of Popper's rationalist view of science.
Kuhn, T. S. The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962. Central to contemporary philosophy of science
is the debate between the followers of Kuhn and Popper on the
nature of scientific enquiry. This is the book in which the views
of the former received their classical statement.
Magee, B.  Popper. London: Fontana, 1977. An elegant introductory
text. Very readable, albeit rather uncritical of its subject.
O'Hear,  Karl
Popper. London: Routledge, 1980. A critical account of Popper's
thought, viewed from the perspective of contemporary analytic
philosophy.
Schilpp, P. A., ed.  Philosophy of Karl Popper, 2 vols. La
Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1974. One of the better contributions
to the Library of Living Philosophers series. Contains Popper's
intellectual autobiography, a comprehensive range of critical
essays, and Popper's responses to them.
Stokes, G.  Popper:
Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Methods. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1998. A very comprehensive, balanced study, which focuses
largely on the social and political side of Popper's thought.
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