Prefatory Remarks

In these prefatory remarks, which are designed to locate my topic within the complex and wide-stretching field of Popper's thought and writings, I shall not say anything that those familiar with his work will not already know. Moreover, what I do say will take as understood many of the problems and theories, not to mention the terminology, that I shall later be doing my best to make understandable. My apologies are therefore due equally to those who know something about Popper's discussions of indeterminism and of the propensity interpretation of probability, and to those who know nothing.

The Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery was eventually published in three volumes (RAS, OU, QTSP) in 1982 and 1983. It had been conceived in the first half of the 1950s as a series of new addenda to the parent work, but had grown at such a pace that the decision was eventually taken to separate it from its source and prepare it for independent existence. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (LSD), the English translation of the original Logik der Forschung (LdF) of 1934, made its own way, appearing in 1959 still burdened with new addenda (twelve of them in the English edition, increasing to no fewer than twenty in the 10th German edition of 1994). But The Postscript did not follow, and was eventually withdrawn at galley-proof stage, to be subjected to a strenuous process of rewriting.