-
Karl Popper's early life
Karl Popper was born in Vienna on 28 July 1902 to a philosopher's household of Jewish background. Popper's father was a lawyer by profession but instilled in Karl his love for philosophy. After many years of soul searching in an attempt to settle for a career, Popper earned his Ph.D. in psychology in 1928 for his dissertation “Die Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie”. He later married Josephine Anna Henninger in 1937. The couple decided to not have children. -
Birth of an ideal
Popper studies the Marxist cult and is familiarized with its views of economics, class-war, and history. He later suffered first-hand the annexation of Austria by the Nazi Third-Reich in the 1930s and is forced into permanent exile. He results disgusted by this new political atmosphere which inspires him to publish The Poverty of Historicism (1944) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), his most impassioned and brilliant works. -
The problem of Demarcation
Popper's main argument in scientific philosophy focuses on the issue of demarcation. He reasons that a clear distinction has to be made between what is science and what is not. Popper becomes an acute critic of induction and argues that it is actually never used in science. He claims that the use of pure observation in science is misguided and he believes that no one methodology is specific to science as the main goal of the discipline is problem-solving. -
Falsifiability and its Methodology
Logic: "if a single ferrous metal is unaffected by a magnetic field it cannot be the case that all ferrous metals are affected by magnetic fields. Logically speaking, a scientific law is conclusively falsifiable although it is not conclusively verifiable. Methodologically, however, the situation is much more complex: no observation is free from the possibility of error—consequently, we may question whether our experimental result was what it appeared to be." (Stephen, 2019) -
-
Conjectures and Refutations
Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Basic Books, New York, 1962.
