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Karl Popper's Philosophy Of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Paul M. Churchland
Paul M. Churchland*
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba
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Extract

Proper recognition came belatedly to the work of Karl Popper. The novelty and power of his comprehensive philosophy went largely unnoticed for decades, his views being misapprehended, to the extent they were apprehended at all, as an uncompelling variation on the dominant Positivist theme. In the past two decades, however, recognition has become widespread. He can lay claim to being the initial figure in a vital and flourishing tradition in the contemporary literature; his views find expression even in undergraduate curricula; and he finds himself the welcome subject of a two-volume issue in the Schilpp series, The Library of Living Philosophers. The appearance of this collection is the occasion of this notice.

Unfortunately, the spectre of misapprehension surrounds Popper still, and haunts what should have been some of the most interesting pages in this collection. At issue here is Popper's conception of rational scientific methodology, a conception which has received substantial criticism from inductivist and anti-inductivist quarters alike. Partly from conviction, and partly for the sake of argument (Popper is an anti-inductivist), I shall adopt the latter viewpoint in this essay. My sympathies, however, will be with his critics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , September 1975 , pp. 145 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1975

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References

1 The Philosophy of Karl Popper, books I and II , edited by Schilpp, Paul A. (Open Court, 1974).Google Scholar

2 cf. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper, Karl (Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 85Google Scholar (including the prominent footnote) and 86; also, p. 112, lines 11-19; cf. also “On the Status of Science and of Metaphysics,” in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Popper, Karl (Harper and Row, 1968), p. 195, lines 31-34Google Scholar; also p. 256, lines 16-18; cf. also Objective Knowledge, Popper, Karl (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar, the footnote on page 12.

3 See L.Sc.D., chapter V, esp. section 28; also, Conjectures and Refutations, pp. 386–88.

4 “ … The empirical content of a theory is determined by (and equal to) the class of those observational statements, or basic statements, which contradict the theory.” (Conjectures and Refutations, p. 385). We may note here the same difficulty discussed above. Does “contradict” here mean “formally contradict,“ period, or “formally contradict in the context of unproblematic background knowledge?” The natural reading is the former, but on the reasonable assumption that Tis falsifiable if and only if the empirical content ofT is not empty, this leads us back to definition (A). But (A) renders Popper's position incoherent. My conclusion is that Popper's use of “contradict” conforms to the latter reading.

5 “The ‘Corroboration’ of Theories,” Hilary Putnam (the Schilpp volume, pp. 221–240).

6 “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” Lakatos, Imre in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Lakatos, and Musgrave, eds. (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 91–196CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although this paper does not appear in the Schilpp volume, it receives substantial discussion in Popper's “Replies.“

7 See especially pp. 1004–5 in the Schilpp volume.

8 Objective Knowledge, pp. 106–152.