Wednesday Wisdom

WHO?

Perhaps, one of the least-known philosophers, but one of the most influential to the scientific community was Karl Popper. He was born in Vienna  Austria in 1902 but moved to London and eventually worked at the prestigious London School of Economics. As Popper worked during the time of Freud and Einstein, he had the opportunity to observe the contrast between their works.

Popper’s principal contribution to the philosophy of science rests on his rejection of the inductive method in the empirical sciences. Inductive reasoning or logic is the process where observations lead to general theories. Deductive reasoning or logic is where theory or assumption is empirically tested and retested toward a probable outcome.

According to this traditional view, a scientific hypothesis may be tested and verified by obtaining the repeated outcome of observations. As the Scottish empiricist David Hume had shown, however, only an infinite number of such confirming results could prove the theory correct. Popper argued instead that hypotheses are deductively validated by what he called the "falsifiability criterion” Under this method, a scientist seeks to discover an observed exception to his postulated rule. The absence of contradictory evidence thereby becomes a corroboration of his theory. In other words, rather than testing for confirmation, test for falsification.

What he produced

Popper’s later works included The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), The Poverty of Historicism (1957), and Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, 3 vol. (1981–82). He was knighted in 1965.

He is most commonly known for his "White Swan Analogy" as a way to test a belief.  Suppose a theory proposes that all swans are white. The obvious way to prove the theory is to check that every swan really is white – but there’s a problem. No matter how many white swans you find, you can never be sure there isn’t a black swan lurking somewhere. So you can never prove the theory is true. In contrast, finding one solitary black swan guarantees that the theory is false. This is the unique power of falsification: the ability to disprove a universal statement with just a single example – an ability, Popper pointed out, that flows directly from the theorems of deductive logic.

Popper went on to promote falsification as the essence of the scientific process, with the search for falsifiable predictions being the distinguishing feature between science and pseudoscience. 

2022- why do we care?

Poppers' work in understanding Freud and psychoanalysis while delving into Einstein's theory of relativity led to his thinking on how knowledge and truth are found. He found that psychoanalysis cannot be proven wrong so, therefore, is characterized as unscientific. Whereas parts of Einstein's theory of relativity can be proven false and are subject to empirical data. Karl Popper believed that scientific knowledge is provisional, there is no way of knowing everything, so answers are the best we can do at the moment. The Falsification Principle, proposed by Karl Popper, is a way of demarcating science from non-science. It suggests that for a theory to be considered scientific it must be able to be tested and conceivably proven false. For Popper, science should attempt to disprove a theory, rather than attempt to continually support theoretical hypotheses. According to Popper, such pseudoscience as astrology, metaphysics, Marxist history, and Freudian psychoanalysis are not empirical sciences, because of their failure to be falsified.

Essentially, Popper's philosophy of logic, is that beliefs are probable and contingent. A true understanding can only be attained by keeping an open mind and being willing to change one's mind as new information is uncovered.

While this may seem obvious today, this is most likely due to Popper's influence over scientists, economists, technology, and legal scholars over the last 100 years. 

Prove it to be false, and you are one step closer to the truth......

Philosophy is the art of thinking, the building block of progress that shapes critical thinking across economics, ethics, religion, and science.