KARL POPPER
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Karl Popper is considered a great living philosopher of science who influenced many experimental scientists, mathematicians, and theoretical astronomers. Logical positivists at the beginning of his career saw him as concerned with the same problems as themselves. However, Popper disagreed with many of their views, in particular their view of the nature of scientific statement and its verifiability. In the text of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, he stated that the problem of philosophy was the critical analysis of the appeal to the authority of experience. He believed that knowledge never starts from firm foundations (the critical analysis of the appeal to experience) but is found only as one progresses from uncertain starting points (O'Hear, 1980; Magee, 1973). This paper focuses on Popper's falsification theory, its influence in psychology, other theories of the day, and a critique of Popper with reference to other theorists. For Popper the aim of science is to find a satisfactory explanation of whatever is in need of explanation. This is accomplished when we are able to formulate an explicans which has a consequence not only the explicandum but other, independently testable consequences. The explicandum and other consequences can be deduced. The demarcation criterion requires that for statements to be scientific, they must be capable of conflicting with possible observations. Falsifiability is viewed as the
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status. Freudian psychoanalysis was not an empirical science because it failed to adhere to the principle of falsifiability. For a theory to be corroborated it needs to be testable. Testability is the opposite of logical probability. A theory that is easily testable and falsifiable is one that is the least probable in a logical sense (Corvi, 1997; Magee, 1973; Schilpp, 1974).
Other Theories
Logical positivists of the times attempted to distinguish between metaphysical verbiage and statements which said something. They arrived at the conclusion that there were two kinds of significant propositions. Statements in logic and mathematics were true or false without reference to experience and statements which were not a formal mathematics of logic proposition and were not empirically verifiable must be meaningless. Verifiability became the criterion of demarcation between what was meaningful and meaningless (Magee, 1973).
Popper attacked this notion. He stated that the verification principle eliminated metaphysics and the whole of natural science, since scientific laws were not empirically verifiable. He also pointed out that concepts from metaphysical are not meaningless; ideas such as atomism or terrestrial motion, o
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Approximate Word count = 1413
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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