FNU Ritika

Baruch College
PSY 4012 NETB
Prof. Dobrein
Sep 25, 2020

Sir Karl Raimund Popper was born in Vienna on 28 July 1902. His rise from a modest background as an
assistant cabinetmaker and school teacher to one of the most influential theorists and leading
philosophers was characteristically Austrian. Popper commanded international audiences and
conversation with him was an intellectual adventure - even if a little rough animated by a myriad of
philosophical problems. His intense desire to tear away at the veneer of falsity in pursuit of the truth
lead him to contribute to a field of thought encompassing (among others) political theory, quantum
mechanics, logic, scientific method and evolutionary theory.
 
Karl Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. He
was also a social and political philosopher of considerable stature, a self-professed ‘critical-rationalist’, a
dedicated opponent of all forms of scepticism, conventionalism, and relativism in science and in human
affairs generally, a committed advocate and staunch defender of the “Open Society”, and an implacable
critic of totalitarianism in all of its forms.
He argued  that there are no subject matters but only problems and our desire to solve them. He said
that scientific  theories cannot be verified but only tentatively refuted, and that the best philosophy is
about profound problems, not word meanings. Isaiah Berlin rightly said that Popper produced one of
the most devastating refutations of Marxism. Through his ideas Popper promoted a critical ethos, a
world in which the give and take of debate is highly esteemed in the precept that we are all infinitely
ignorant, that we differ only in the little bits of knowledge that we do have, and that with some co-
operative effort we may get nearer to the truth.

I would like to brief my understanding about the two concepts that Karl Popper had proposed -

1. Concept of Verification

Verificationism (also known as the Verifiability Criterion of Meaning  or the Verification Principle) is the
doctrine that a proposition is only cognitively meaningful if it can be definitively and conclusively
determined to be either true or false (i.e. verifiable or falsifiable). It has been hotly disputed amongst
Verificationists whether this must be possible in practice or merely in principle.

Verificationism is often used to rule out as meaningless much of the traditional debate in areas of
Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysics, and Ethics, because many philosophical debates are made over the
truth of unverifiable sentences. It is the concept underlying much of the doctrine of Logical Positivism,
and is an important idea in Epistemology, Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Language. 
The  problem  with Verificationism, according to some, is that some statements are  “universal” 
in the sense that they make claims about a possibly infinite set of objects. Since it is not possible to
verify that the statement is true for each of an infinite number of objects it seems that
verification is impossible.
To counter this, Karl Popper proposed the concept of Falsificationism, whereby if no cases where the
universal claim is false can be found, then the hypothesis is accepted as provisionally true A.
J. Ayer responded to the charge of unverifiability by claiming that, although almost any statement
(except a tautology) is unverifiable in the strong sense, there is a weak sense of verifiability in which a
proposition is verifiable if it is possible for experience to render it probable.

Karl Popper asserted that a hypothesis, proposition or theory is scientific only if it is falsifiable (i.e. it can
be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment) rather than verifiable, leading to the concept
of Falsificationism. However, he claimed that his demand for falsifiability was not meant as a theory of
meaning, but rather as a methodological norm for the sciences.

2. Concept of Falsification

Popper's main point is the extremely elementary logical point that if one takes the business of science as
deducing observational consequences from statements of laws and theories and initial conditions, no
amount of particular positive observational outcomes will ever prove (or verify) the truth of universal
hypotheses or laws, for all such attempted inferences commit the well-known fallacy of affirming the
consequent. However, even a single negative observational consequence allows us to validly infer that
the conjunction of laws and initial conditions from which it is deduced cannot all be true.

Good theories, according to Popper, must be testable, but "testable" means potentially falsifiable,
refutable. Therefore, in proposing theories, the more refutable, (i.e. the more "testable"), the better.
Popper expresses this point by saying that "conjectures" must be "risky" or "bold." Of course, it would
do little to advance the growth of knowledge repeatedly to propose totally off-the-wall "risky"
conjectures just to shoot them down. The occasions when science advances most are when attempts to
refute risky conjectures fail, thus corroborating bold guesses, or occasions when safe "modest"
conjectures relying mostly on accepted beliefs are, surprisingly, refuted, thus falsifying "established"
wisdom.
Karl Popper has proposed his technique for critical thinking which is trial and error theory.
Essentially, it is a principal strategy for critical thinking with changed endeavors which are continued
until success. Karl Popper's hypothesis of knowledge is used where he thought of a straightforward
three stage measure found in evolution which incorporates: The problem, the attempted solutions, the
elimination.