Background
POPPER, Karl Raimund was born on July 28, 1902 in Vienna, Austria. Son of Doctor Simon Siegmund Carl and Jenny (nee Schiff) Popper.
(Science - empirical science - aims at true explanatory th...)
Science - empirical science - aims at true explanatory theories, yet it can never prove, or finally establish, or justify, any of its theories as true, not even if it is in fact a true theory. In this volume, the author formulates and explains his non-justificationist theory of knowledge.
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( Realism and the Aim of Science is one of the three volu...)
Realism and the Aim of Science is one of the three volumes of Karl Popper’s Postscript to the Logic of scientific Discovery. The Postscript is the culmination of Popper’s work in the philosophy of physics and a new famous attack on subjectivist approaches to philosophy of science. Realism and the Aim of Science is the first volume of the Postcript. Popper here formulates and explains his non-justificationist theory of knowledge: science aims at true explanatory theories, yet it can never prove, or justify, any theory to be true, not even if is a true theory. Science must continue to question and criticise all its theories, even those that happen to be true. Realism and the Aim of Science presents Popper’s mature statement on scientific knowledge and offers important insights into his thinking on problems of method within science.
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POPPER, Karl Raimund was born on July 28, 1902 in Vienna, Austria. Son of Doctor Simon Siegmund Carl and Jenny (nee Schiff) Popper.
Doctor of Philosophy, University Vienna, 1928. Doctor of Letters (honorary), University London, 1948. Doctor of Laws (honorary), University Chicago, 1962.
Doctor of Laws (honorary), University Denver, 1966. Doctor of Letters (honorary), University Warwick, England, 1971. Doctor of Letters (honorary), University Canterbury, New Zealand, 1973.
Doctor of Letters (honorary), City University London, 1976. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Salford University, England, 1976. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Oxford, England, 1982.
Doctor (honorary), University Mannheim, Federal Republic Germany, 1978. Doctor rer. national (honorary), University Vienna, 1978. Doctor of Letters (honorary), University Guelph, Canada, 1978.
Doctor rer. policy (honorary), University Frankfurt, Canada, 1979. Doctor of Philosophy (honorary), University Salzburg, Austria, 1979. Doctor of Letters (honorary), University Cambridge, England, 1980.
Doctor of Letters (honorary), University Oxford, 1982. Doctor of Science (honorary), Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota, 1982. Doctor of Science (honorary), University London, 1986.
Doctor of Philosophy (honorary), University Eichstatt, 1991. Doctor of Philosophy (honorary), University Madrid, 1991. Doctor of Philosophy (honorary), University Athens, 1992.
Lecturer in Philosophy. Canterbury University College, Christchurch, New Zealand 1937-1945. Reader in Logic, London University 1945-1949, Professor, of Logic and Scientific Method 1949-1969.
Emeritus since 1969; Head, Department Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics 66. William James Lecturer, Harvard University 1950. Fellow, Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences 1956-1957.
Eleanor Rathbone Memorial Lecturer, Bristol University 1956. Annual Philosophical Lecturer, British Academy 1960. Shearman Lecturer, University College London 1961.
Herbert Spencer Lecturer, Oxford University 1961. Visiting Professor Calif and Minnesota Universities 1962, Indiana 1963, University of Denver 1966. Farnum Lecturer, Princeton University 1963, Institute of Advanced Studies, Canberra 1963, Institute of Advanced Study, Vienna 1964, Arthur Holly Compton Memorial Lecturer, Washington University 1965.
Henry D. Broadhead Memorial Lecturer, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand 1973. Visiting Fellow, Salk Institute for Biological Studies 1966-1967. Kenan University Professor, Emory University 1969.
Ziskind Professor, Brandeis University 1969. James Scott Lecturer, R.S.E. 1971. Romanes Lecturer, Oxford 1972.
William Evans Professor, University of Otago 1973. Visiting Erskine Fellow, University of Canterbury 1973. Herbert Spencer Lecturer, Oxford 1973.
Darwin Lecturer, Cambridge 1977. Tanner Lecturer, University of Michigan 1978. First J.B. Morrell Memorial Lecturer, University of York.
Doubleday Lecturer, Smithsonian Institute Washington D.C. 1979. First Peter Medawar Lecturer, Royal Society, London 1986. Honorary Professor University of Vienna 1986.
Director Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the Theory of Science, Vienna 1986. Fellow, British Academy since 1958, Royal Society since 1976. Association Acaddmie Royale de Belgique since 1976.
Foreign; President Aristotelian Society 1958-1959, British Society for the Philosophy of Science 61. Honorary Doctor of Laws (Chicago, Denver). Honorary D.Lit. (Warwick).
Honorary Litt.D. (Canterbury, New Zealand, Salford, City University of London, Guelph Ontario, Cambridge, Oxford). Doctor Rer. National honorary degree (Vienna), Doctor Phil. honorary degree (Mannheim, Salzburg). Doctor rer. pol. honorary degree (Frankfurt).
Honorary Se.D. (Gustavus Adolphus College, London University). Honorary Fellow, London School of Economics 1972, Darwin College, Cambridge 1980. Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold (Austria) 1976.
Ehrenzeiehen fiir Wissenschaft und Kunst (Austria) 1980. Pour le Merite (Federation Republic of Germany) 1980. Grand Cross of the.
(Science - empirical science - aims at true explanatory th...)
( Realism and the Aim of Science is one of the three volu...)
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Popper did not become a professional philosopher until his mid-thirties, after publishing the •lrst version of the book by which he is most well known, Logik der Forschung (1934), and did not seem to think much of professional philosophers •n general, at least to judge by his thoughts round his ninetieth birthday. But he had been concerned with philosophical problems at least since the age of 17, when 116 first raised and solved the problem of demarcating science from non-science, and this and the problem of induction occupied much of his attention over the next few years. His official studies, however, were in science and mathematics and in psychology, especially child psychology. which brought him to his teacher Karl Biichler, and Alfred Adler and Heinrich Gomperz, among others. As a Jew, however, an academic, or indeed any, career in Austria was not going to be possible for him, and after being invited to lecture in England on the strength of his book he passed via New Zealand to his final academic home in London. An incidental interest lay in music, where he had interesting ideas on the genesis of polyphony, and has had music of his own performed recently. Popper’s philosophy is summed up in the title of one of his books: Conjectures and Refutations (1963). His contact with the Vienna Circle and with psychology as studied in Vienna, as well as a reading of Hume and Kant, convinced him that two basic, and connected, sins are psychologism and inductivism. The quest for justification of our theories seems to lead to either an infinite regress or a basis in pure experience, whether this is regarded as underlying all statements or as represented by epistemologically privileged statements. as with the Vienna Circle. But no such basis exists—as indeed is now widely accepted. His teacher Biichler had divided language into three functions, expressive, communicative and descriptive, but Popper added a fourth: argumentative, claiming that this showed ‘the priority of the study of logic over the study of subjective thought processes'—which incidentally convinced him that there were no such things as conditioned reflexes. Inductivism. the view that statements or theories can be given positive support inductively, raises "Hume's problem'. which Popper claimed to solve, by showing that scientific theories are indeed immune to verification, or to positive confirmation, but are open to falsification. Induction itself in fact he generally regarded as not only invalid but never actually used (although The Logic of Scientific Discovery seems to relax this latter claim). Falsifiability brings us to the hub of Popper’s philosophy. Many readers at first thought that he was simply substituting falsifiability for the verifiability of the Vienna Circle as the criterion for meaningfulness. He since emphasized time and again that this was not so. and the point was taken. Falsifiability provides, by what he admitted is ‘a proposal for an agreement or convention’, a way of distinguishng empirical scientific statements from pseudoscience like astrology, or else, as he later decided, from metaphysics, which is not necessarily meaningless, for the negation of a falsifiable universal statement will not itself be falsifiable but is hardly meaningless. Also metaphysical statements, on this criterion, can provide a useful stimulus for science, as with atomism and the corpuscular theory of light. The proper procedure for science is to set up hypotheses designed to be as falsifiable as possible, and then test them by reference to ‘basic statements’, i.e. those whose form makes them potential falsifiers of the hypothesis, as ‘There is a black swan here now' would, if accepted, falsify All swans are white’. The basic statements themselves must be falsifiable, and the regress that threatens is stopped when we reach ones we all decide to accept we should not regard them as certain or established, as verificationists regard their basic statements. The need for decision on when to stop testing opens the way to abuse by ‘conventionalist strategems’, or ‘immunization’ as he later called it, but conventionalism can be avoided. One of the most controversial features of Popper’s system is his replacement of confirmation by ‘corroboration’, which a hypothesis acquires by surviving severe tests: can he really avoid inductivism? Popper insisted at one point that an appraisal must be synthetic, not tautological, but he also insisted that we can never make any hypothesis more probable, in the sense of 'more likely to be true’. How then can saying that a hypothesis is corroborated go beyond saying simply that it has passed certain tests? Any attempt to appraise it in the light of this seems ruled out, and ‘if corroborated then appraised’ becomes tautological (see especially ibid., p. 251. n. 1, SSSS81-2. pp. 418-19, and 1972, p. 19, SSSS23-4 (answering Salmon on this—but what are we to make of‘good reason(s)’ at p. 81, line 7 up, p. 91, line 1?).) Elsewhere, though in a different context, he agreed that a fresh requirement he introduced may indeed involve ‘a whiff of verificationism'. Although for Popper we cannot show our theories to be 'likely to be true’, we can show them to have ‘likeness to the truth’ ‘verisimilitude’, a notion he introduced in Conjectures and Refutations (1963) or shortly before, encouraged by Tarski’s rehabilitation, as Popper saw it, of the notion of truth. A falsified theory can, however, still be useful, as is Newton’s. Epistemology, Popper thought, should study not subjective acts of knowing but objective things known, which belong to the third of the three ‘worlds’ he postulates, physical objects and subjective states inhabiting the other two. Somewhat analogous to falsifiability is the ‘negative utilitarianism' Popper developed in his other main work, The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), stressing the need to minimize evil rather than maximize good, which can lead to counterproductive utopianism. In this connection he strongly criticized Plato, Hegel and Marx, and with them the appeal to essentialism and definitions, provoking strong defences of Plato (1952. 1953), to which an Addendum to the 1962 edition of The Open Society and its Enemies replies. In similar vein The Poverty of Historicism (1957) attacks historicism, the view that there are laws or patterns in history that the social sciences should aim to predict, and which combines the ‘naturalistic’ approach of physical science with the ‘antinaturalistic’ Verstehen approach. Topics omitted here include: mind and body (1977), indeterminism; propensities.
Fellow Royal Society, British Academy, London School of Economics (honorary), Darwin College Cambridge University (honorary). Member l'Institute de France. Member American Academy Arts and Sciences (foreign honorary), International Academy Philosophy Science (titulaer), Academy Royale de Belgique (associate), Royal Society New Zealand (honorary), Academy International d'Histoire des Sciences (honorary), Deutsche Akadamie für Sprache und Dichtung (honorary), Academy Europeéne des Sciences, des Arts et des Lettres, Society Straniero dellé Accad.
Nazionale dei Lincei, Austrian Academy of Sciences (honorary), Phi Beta Kappa (Harvard University chapter).
Married Josefine Anna Henninger, April 11, 1930 (deceased November 1985).