Karl Raimund Popper was born July 28,
1902 in Vienna and died in London on September 17, 1994. He was an
Austrian-British philosopher. Karl
The son of a lawyer, Karl Raimund
Popper was raised in an intellectual family where philosophy, music,
and politics were a part of his everyday life. He was raised
Protestant as both his parents had converted from Judaism to
Protestantism. Popper started off at a traditional Gymnasium, but
dropped out of school by the age of sixteen in order to attend
lectures at the University of Vienna. In 1919, he joined the
“Association of Socialist School Students” and became a Marxist,
though only for a short period of time. Soon he abandoned Marxism in
favour of social liberalism, which he remained aligned with for the
rest of his life.
In 1925, Karl Raimund Popper received
a teaching diploma for elementary school from the University of
Vienna. He then went on to obtain a Ph.D in philosophy in 1928. The
following year he attained the qualifications to teach both
mathematics and physics in secondary school. Karl Raimund Popper then
taught at the university for six years, between 1930 and 1936. Popper
was quite critical against the then dominant positivist school Wiener
Kreis (Vienna Circle), amongst whose members were Rudolf Carnap and
Victor Kraft. Likewise he opposed Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s
interpretation of quantum mechanics, instead supporting Einstein,
whose lecture in Vienna he had attended.
Popper’s first published book was
Logik der Forschung (translated by Popper himself twenty-five years
later under the title The Logic of Scientific Discovery) in 1934,
which gained him an enormous reputation and had a tremendous impact
on the scientific community. Although published in a series of the
positivist Vienna Circle, the book is to be read as a counter
reaction to logical positivism. It is here where Popper for the first
time uses critical rationalism as a philosophical approach:
“In point of fact, no conclusive
disproof of a theory can ever be produced; for it is always possible
to say that the experimental results are not reliable or that the
discrepancies which are asserted to exist between the experimental
results and the theory are only apparent and that they will disappear
with the advance of our understanding. If you insist on strict proof
(or strict disproof) in the empirical sciences, you will never
benefit from experience, and never learn from it how wrong you are.”
Karl Raimund Popper breaks with the
traditional scientific method and distinguishes between empirical and
non-empirical sciences such as logic, psychoanalysis and Marxism. He
argues in favor of a scientific methodology based on falsification:
only if scientific hypotheses can be shown to be false, that is, if
they cannot be observed empirically, can they claim to be scientific,
for experiments do not necessarily "prove" a theory. To the
contrary, a single experiment can falsify a theory.
Karl Raimund Popper clearly rejects
the method of induction and replaces it by a method of deductive
falsifiability. To test a theory is to try to falsify it, as truth
cannot be verified, but only falsified. Falsifiability, therefore, is
the sole criterion to distinguish between science (empirical) and
“non-science” (non-empirical). Such differentiation, in general
one of Popper’s main aims, is possible only by means of
“problem-solving”. He elaborates on this in one of his last
books, All Life is Problem Solving, where he argues in favour of an
evolutionary progress as far as knowledge is concerned.
Due to the rise of (Austro) fascism
and the constant threat of the Anschluss (annexation to Germany),
Popper was forced to leave Austria, leaving behind his family, many
of whose members were murdered by the Nazis. In 1937, he went to New
Zealand and taught philosophy as a senior lecturer at the University
of Canterbury. After the Second World War, he went to London, first
as reader in logic and scientific method, then in 1949 became a
professor of logic and scientific method at the London School of
Economics, a post which he held until 1969. Many visits as a guest
professor in the United States followed, amongst them the William
James Lectures at Harvard in 1950.
Popper received many accolades and
honors. In 1958 Popper became a fellow of the British Academy and in
1958/59 he was named president of the Aristotelian Society. Popper
was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965 and became a Royal Society
fellow in 1976. In 1982, Popper received the insignia of the Order of
the Companions of Honour.1961 was an important year for Popper when
the so-called “positivism dispute” began—a debate between
critical rationalism (Popper and Hans Albert) and the Frankfurt
School (Adorno, Habermas, and Marcuse). Its origin dates back to a
conference in Tübingen in the social sciences, where both Popper and
Theodor W. Adorno were in attendance. Although the debate dominated
the discussion within German sociology until 1969, Popper remained
outside of it as he had, after all, written his Logic against
positivism.
Though greatly known as a philosopher
of science, Karl Popper also wrote social, political, and historical
works. Arguably his most famous treatise is The Open Society and Its
Enemies (1945), written during the Second World War. The text coins
the term “open society” and stands for a pluralistic society with
little governmental influence and a free market. In this book Popper,
defending his concept of a liberal open democratic society, accuses
Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx of propagating
totalitarian systems (i.e. closed societies) and criticizes both
utopianism and historicism because of their reference to abstract
truths. In 1947, Popper was amongst the founders of the “Mont
Pelerin Society,” which aimed to defend liberalism and work towards
a free “open” society. Popper criticizes the idea of historicism
(that is, the idea of historical prediction or general laws), in The
Poverty of Historicism (1957), arguing in favour of “piecemeal
social engineering”—small changes to society.
In the collection Conjectures and
Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963), Popper
develops the concept of verisimilitude. All scientific theories (and
knowledge in general) are to be understood as mere approximations or
conjectures. A theory possesses verisimilitude the more refutations
it has to face. “Ultimately, the idea of verisimilitude is most
important in cases where we know that we have to work with theories
which are at best approximations—that is to say, theories of which
we know that they cannot be true.” This idea is not limited to
science for Popper, as he applies it to all sorts of problems,
amongst them history and language.
In Objective Knowledge: An
Evolutionary Approach (1972) Popper elaborates on Alfred Tarski’s
“semantic theory of truth” and the impact it had on him. It is
here where he made his famous statement: “Whenever a theory appears
to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have
neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended
to solve.” In this book Popper also develops a theory of reality
that differentiates between three worlds, thereby intending to
develop a new approach to the mind-body dualism:
World 1 is the world of physical
objects/states.
World 2 is the world of mental states,
such as feelings or experiences.
World 3 is the world of theories,
institutions, language and so on - in short, everything that stems
from the human mind.
The objects of World 3 are abstract and
do not need a physical object as in World 1. In contrast to World 2,
whose objects are subjective, World 3 objects are objective. Yet, for
any “object” in these two worlds, World 2 and 3 have to be real
and World 2 and 3 have to interact with World 1.
Furthering his interest in the duality
between mind and body, Popper worked with together with the
neurophysiologist John Eccles Popper co-publishing the text, The Self
and its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (1977), as a mutual
exchange on the traditionally long-standing duality.
His later publications include:
Unended Quest; An Intellectual Autobiography (1976), The Open
Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism (1982), In Search of a Better
World (1984), Realism and the Aim of Science (1983), The Myth of the
Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality (1994), and
Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem: In Defence of Interactionism
(1994).
It was also due to Popper that the
philosophy of science was established as its own discipline. Among
his students at the London School of Economics were Paul Feyerabend
and the billionaire George Soros, who named his think-tank after
Popper´s “open society.” Friedrich Hayek was among his closest
friends.
Karl Popper died at the age of 92 in
Croydon, south London. He was buried in Vienna next to his wife.
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