Poverty of historicism karl popper biography

Criticism of the AntiNaturalistic Doctrines. Criticism of the ProNaturalistic Doctrines. Mill kind knowledge Logic of Scientific Ludwig Wittgenstein Mannheim Mary Midgley means ment methodological methodological individualism methods of physics Mill Mill's natural sciences never nominalist objectivity observation perhaps philosophy piecemeal technology planning Plato point of view political possible practical predictions pro-naturalistic problems progress question rational reason scientific method Scientism scientist similar singular social engineering social experiments social institutions social sciences sociology statement T.

It appears your browser does not have it turned on. Please see your browser settings for this feature. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Publication date Usage Public Domain Mark 1. There are no reviews yet. II Human history is a single unique event. Knowledge of the past therefore does not necessarily help one to know the future.

Study of history may reveal trends. However, there is no guarantee that these trends will continue. In addition, given that historians are interested in the uniqueness of past events, it may be said that future events will possess a uniqueness that cannot be known in advance. Indeed, this is the element which ultimately cannot be completely controlled by institutions as Spinoza first saw ; for every attempt at controlling it completely must lead to tyranny; which means, to the omnipotence of the human factor — the whims of a few men, or even one.

IV A law, natural i. If no tests disprove the hypothesis it may become known as a law but in fact remains simply a so-far-unfalsified hypothesis. Equally, examples of where theories are correct are useless in proving the validity of the theory. V It is logically impossible to know the future course of history when that course depends in part on the future growth of scientific knowledge which is unknowable in advance.

I Historicists often require the remodelling of man to become fit for the future society or hasten the arrival of this society. Given that society is composed of mankind, remaking man for a particular society can lead to any type of society. Also, a need to remodel man suggests that without this remodelling, the new society may not come about, and is therefore not inevitable.

II Historicists are bad at imagining conditions under which an identified trend ceases. Historical generalisations may be reduced to a set of laws of higher generality i. However, in order to form predictions from these generalisations we also need specific initial conditions. To the extent that conditions change or are changing, any "law" may apply differently and trends may disappear.

III Historicism tends to mistake historical interpretations for theories. When studying history we can only examine a limited aspect of the past. In other words, we must apply a historical interpretation. It is necessary to appreciate a plurality of valid interpretations although some may be more fertile than others. IV Confusing ends with aims.

His mother inculcated in him such a passion for music that for a time he contemplated taking it up as a career; he initially chose the history of music as a second subject for his Ph. The young Karl attended the local Realgymnasiumwhere he was unhappy with the standards of the teaching, and, after an illness he left to attend the University of Vienna inmatriculating four years later.

In he became heavily involved in left-wing politics and became for a time a Marxist. However, he was quickly disillusioned with the doctrinaire character of the latter, and soon abandoned it entirely. Popper took some time to settle on a career; he trained as a cabinetmaker, obtained a primary poverty of historicism karl popper biography teaching diploma in and qualified to teach mathematics and physics in secondary school in At an early stage of their marriage they decided that they would never have children.

In he took up a position teaching philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where he was to remain for the duration of the Second World War. The annexation of Austria in became the catalyst which prompted Popper to refocus his writings on social and political philosophy. In he moved to England to teach at the London School of Economics, and became professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London in From this point on his reputation and stature as a philosopher of science and social thinker grew, and he continued to write prolifically—a number of his works, particularly The Logic of Scientific Discoveryare now widely seen as pioneering classics in the field.

However, he combined a combative personality with a zeal for self-aggrandisement that did little to endear him to professional colleagues. He was ill-at-ease in the philosophical milieu of post-war Britain which was, as he saw it, fixated with trivial linguistic concerns dictated by Wittgenstein, whom he considered his nemesis. In later years Popper came under philosophical criticism for his prescriptive approach to science and his emphasis on the logic of falsification.

This was superseded in the eyes of many by the socio-historical approach taken by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions In that work, Kuhn, who argued for the incommensurability of rival scientific paradigms, denied that science grows linearly through the accumulation of truths. Popper was knighted inand retired from the University of London inremaining active as a writer, broadcaster and lecturer until his death in His teenage flirtation with Marxism left him thoroughly familiar with the Marxian dialectical view of economics, class-war, and history.

But he was appalled by the failure of the democratic parties to stem the rising tide of fascism in Austria in the s and s, and the effective welcome extended to it by the Marxists, who regarded fascism as a necessary dialectical step towards the implosion of capitalism and the ultimate victory of communism. What is apparently the chief source of strength of psychoanalysis, he concluded, viz.

To those who would respond that psychoanalytic theory is supported by clinical observations, Popper points out that. Popper also considers that contemporary Marxism also lacks scientific status. Unlike psychoanalysis, he argues, Marxism had been initially scientific, in that it was genuinely predictive. However, when these predictions were not in fact borne out, the theory was saved from falsification by the addition of ad hoc hypotheses which made it compatible with the facts.

By this means, Popper asserts, a theory which was initially genuinely scientific degenerated into pseudo-scientific dogma. As he sees it, the Hegelian dialectic was adopted by Marxists not to oppose dogmatism but to accommodate it to their cause by eliminating the possibility of contradictory evidence. These factors combined to make Popper take falsifiability as his criterion for demarcating science from non-science: if a theory is incompatible with possible empirical observations it is scientific; conversely, a theory which is compatible with all such observations, either because, as in the case of Marxism, it has been modified solely to accommodate such observations, or because, as in the case of psychoanalytic theories, it is consistent with all possible observations, is unscientific.

However, Popper is not a positivist and acknowledges that unscientific theories may be enlightening and that even purely mythogenic explanations have performed a valuable function in the past in expediting our understanding of the nature of reality.

Poverty of historicism karl popper biography

For Popper the central problem in the philosophy of science is that of demarcation, i. Popper is unusual amongst contemporary philosophers in that he accepts the validity of the Humean critique of induction, and indeed, goes beyond it in arguing that induction is never actually used in science. In this way he destabilises the traditional view that science can be distinguished from non-science on the basis of its inductive methodology.

In contradistinction to this, Popper holds that there is no unique methodology specific to science; rather, science, like virtually every other organic activity, consists largely of problem-solving. Popper accordingly rejects the view that induction is the characteristic method of scientific investigation and inference, substituting falsifiability in its place.

However, the universality of such laws, he argues, does rule out the possibility of their verification. Thus, a theory that has withstood rigorous testing should be deemed to have received a high measure of corroboration. Popper stresses in particular that there is no unique way, no single method such as induction, which functions as the route to scientific theory, and approvingly cites Einstein on that point:.

There is no logical path leading to [the highly universal laws of science]. They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love of the objects of experience. On this criterion of demarcation physics, chemistry, and non-introspective psychology, amongst others, are classified as sciences, psychoanalysis is a pre-science and astrology and phrenology are pseudo-sciences.

Popper draws a clear distinction between the logic of falsifiability and its applied methodology. The logic of his theory is utterly simple: a universal statement is falsified by a single genuine counter-instance. Methodologically, however, the situation is complex: decisions about whether to accept an apparently falsifying observation as an actual falsification can be problematic, as observational bias and measurement error, for example, can yield results which are only apparently incompatible with the theory under scrutiny.

Thus, while advocating falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation for science, Popper explicitly allows for the fact that in practice a single conflicting or counter-instance is never sufficient methodologically for poverty of historicism karl popper biography, and that scientific theories are often retained even though much of the available evidence conflicts with them, or is anomalous with respect to them.

Basic statements are important because they can formally contradict universal statements, and accordingly play the role of potential falsifiers. Accordingly, Popper holds that basic statements are objective and are governed by two requirements: a the formal, that they must be both singular and existential and b the material, that they must be intersubjectively testable.

Popper therefore argues that there are no statements in science which cannot be interrogated: basic statements, which are used to test the universal theories of science, must themselves be inter-subjectively testable and are therefore open to the possibility of refutation. He acknowledges that this seems to present a practical difficulty, in that it appears to suggest that testability must occur ad infinitumwhich he acknowledges is an operational absurdity: sooner or later all testing must come to an end.

Where testing ends, he argues, is in a convention-based decision to accept a basic statement or statements; it is at that point that convention and intersubjective human agreement play an indispensable role in science:. Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its corroboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept.

If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere. However, Popper contends that while such a decision is usually causally related to perceptual experience, it is not and cannot be justified by such experience; basic statements are experientially underdetermined.

Experiences can motivate a decision, and hence an acceptance or a rejection of a statement, but a basic statement cannot be justified by them—no more than by thumping the table. Statements can be justified only by other statements, and therefore testing comes to an end, not in the establishment of a correlation between propositional content and observable reality, as empiricism would hold, but by means of the conventional, inter-subjective acceptance of the truth of certain basic statements by the research community.

The acceptance of basic statements is compared by Popper to trial by jury: the verdict of the jury will be an agreement in accordance with the prevailing legal code and on the basis of the evidence presented, and is analogous to the acceptance of a basic statement by the research community:. By its decision, the jury accepts, by agreement, a statement about a factual occurrence—a basic statement, as it were.

The verdict is accordingly represented as a true statement of fact, but, as miscarriages of justice demonstrate all too clearly. This … is acknowledged in the rule allowing a verdict to be quashed or revised. This is comparable, he argues, to the case of basic statements: their acceptance-as-true is also by agreement and, as such, it also constitutes an application of a theoretical system, and.

However, the agreed acceptance of basic statements, like that of judicial verdicts, remain perennially susceptible to the requirement for further interrogation. Science does not, he maintains, rest upon any foundational bedrock. Rather, the theoretical systems of science are akin to buildings in swampy ground constructed with the support of piles:.

We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being. For Popper, the growth of human knowledge proceeds from our problems and from our attempts to solve them. These attempts involve the formulation of theories which must go beyond existing knowledge and therefore require a leap of the imagination.

For this reason, he places special emphasis on the role played by the creative imagination in theory formulation. In this deductive procedure conclusions are inferred from a tentative hypothesis and are then compared with one another and with other relevant statements to determine whether they falsify or corroborate the hypothesis.

Popper eliminates the contradiction by removing the demand for empirical verification in favour of empirical falsification or corroboration. Scientific theories, for him, are not inductively inferred from experience, nor is scientific experimentation carried out with a view to verifying or finally establishing the truth of theories; rather, all knowledge is provisional, conjectural, hypothetical —the universal theories of science can never be conclusively established.

For it is only by critical thought that we can eliminate false theories and determine which of the remaining theories is the best available one, in the sense of possessing the highest level of explanatory force and predictive power. In the view of many social scientists, the more probable a theory is, the better it is, and if we have to choose between two theories which differ only in that one is probable and the other is improbable, then we should choose the former.

Popper rejects this. Science values theories with a high informative content, because they possess a high predictive power and are consequently highly testable. For that reason, the more improbable a theory is the better it is scientifically, because the probability and informative content of a theory vary inversely—the higher the informative content of a theory the lower will be its probability.

Thus, the statements which are of special interest to science are those with a high informative content and consequentially a low probability, which nevertheless come close to the truth. Informative content, which is in inverse proportion to probability, is in direct proportion to testability. As a result, the severity of the test to which a theory can be subjected, and by means of which it is falsified or corroborated, is of fundamental importance.

Popper also argues that all scientific criticism must be piecemeal, i.