| Phi 272 Fall 2013 |
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Karl Popper (1902-1994) shared many of the interests and commitments of Russell and the logical positivists but also differed from them in important ways. Much of the general understanding of the philosophy of science from WWII until the late 1960s (when attention turned to Kuhn’s work and its implications) consisted in negotiating the differences between the logical positivists on the one hand and Popper and his followers on the other. You will find Kuhn and some other later figures referring to logical positivism and “falsificationism” (as Popper’s position came to be labeled) as alternative views, both of which they see as inadequate in some ways.
In the lecture on JSTOR, Popper explains his views to a broad philosophical audience by using examples from the early history of Greek philosophy (one or two centuries before Aristotle). I’ve assigned two parts of the lecture, one where he focuses on the philosopher Anaximander and the final two sections where he speaks of the broader implications of falsificationism (which he preferred to refer to as “critical rationalism”). Together, they provide an overview of the core of his thinking.
The selections on the handout (which is only on the Canvas site) provide some further useful ways of approaching his thought and add some ideas that don’t appear in the lecture. In the handout, look for:
• two ways of thinking about the difference between inductivism and falsificationism:
• the contrast between instruction by the environment and selection by the environment,
• the images of the bucket and the searchlight.
• the idea of corroboration—although this plays something like the role that confirmation plays for inductivists, notice that Popper insists that the better corroborated of two hypotheses need not be the more certain of the two
• a second added idea that is the focus of the selections from The Logic of Scientific Discovery: Popper holds that, since the evidence that leads to the falsification of a hypothesis is itself falsifiable, we cannot count this evidence as certain but instead must simply decide to accept it (and thus to reject the hypothesis).
(The “conventionalists” Popper mentions when discussing the last idea are a group of French thinkers from the early 20th century, most notably Henri Poincaré, 1854-1912, a very important mathematician with interests in physics, and Pierre Duhem, 1861-1916, a physicist who also wrote extensively about the history and philosophy of science.)