Karl Raimund Popper Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Karl Raimund Popper (1902–1994) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers of science. Born into an intellectual Viennese family of Jewish descent, he earned a PhD in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1928.After leaving Europe to evade Nazism, Popper taught at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and subsequently at the London School of Economics, remaining an active public intellectual even after his retirement in 1969.

Popper advanced his view of science in Die Logik der Forschung (1934, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, first translated in 1959). He developed the notion of falsifiability as his demarcation criterion between science and nonscience, inspired by German physicist Albert Einstein’s revolutionary—and risky, because improbable and falsifiable—theory of relativity. According to this criterion, a theory incompatible with possible empirical observations (i.e., data derived through observation or experiment) is scientific, while theories compatible with all such observations are unscientific, if not necessarily meaningless nor irredeemable. Because all empirical observations are selective, conditional, and fallible, science cannot be distinguished from nonscience on the basis of methodology; but to use falsifiability for this purpose instead, a distinction must be made between its logic and its application. Concretely, while testing a scientific theory means attempting to refute or falsify it, in practice, no single counterexample nor even accumulating counterevidence may be enough to reject it, especially in the absence of alternatives. Thus, although it is logically impossible to conclusively prove or verify a theory, one can amass a convincing amount of corroboration for it. But at the same time, a theory can always be superseded by a better theory that explains more. Unlike traditional empiricists, Popper holds that experience cannot shape theories, but it helps to eliminate false theories and choose, among the remainder, the best available in terms of explanatory and predictive power. All human knowledge, therefore, is hypothetical and provisional.

The normative implications of Popper’s critical rationalism—the importance of academic freedom and openness to new ideas as well as the dangers of dogmatism—tie in with his argument for an open society. His works The Poverty of Historicism (1944) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) form a powerful defense of democratic liberalism against the principal philosophical presuppositions underpinning totalitarianism: holism, which posits that social groups shape their members and are subject to specific laws of development, and historicism, which, on this basis, interprets history as teleological developing to a predetermined end. Popper counters these ideas, and the resulting attempts at large-scale social engineering (e.g., under such totalitarian regimes as in China, Cambodia, and the Soviet Union), with the indeterminist view that social groups are no more or less than the sum of their members, and that history is the predominantly unplanned and unforeseeable result of individual interactions, based on the fact that an infinite number of therefore unknowable factors predates any event. His is thus not a moral, but a deeper, logical argument for liberalism.

In the ideal open society, the state progressively develops policies for actual social problems, aiming to minimize suffering—negative utilitarianism—while the creation of social and personal happiness is left to individuals who may or may not act collectively toward this end. Popper’s theory of science and his political philosophy are linked by the key idea of fallibility: just as scientific progress depends upon constant theoretical scrutiny, social progress is made possible through constant political scrutiny, both requiring an open setting that allows modification or rejection of falsified theories and faulty policies, as well as bold new ideas.

Bibliography:

Edmonds, David, and John Eidinow. Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-minute Argument between Two Great Philosophers. New York: Harper Collins, 2001.
Lakatos, Imre, and Alan Musgrove, eds. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Magee, Bryan. Popper. London: Routledge, 1974.
Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations:The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1963.
Die Logik der Forschung. Vienna: Julius Springer Verlag, 1935.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson, 1959.
The Open Society and Its Enemies. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1945.

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