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Analytic & pragmatist · 1902–1994

Karl Popper

Viennese-born philosopher of science and defender of the open society

A theory is scientific only if it could in principle be refuted by observation; knowledge grows by conjectures and refutations, and societies, like science, flourish when they stay open to criticism.

Life and thought

Karl Popper (1902–1994) grew up in Vienna in an assimilated family of Jewish origin, trained as a cabinet-maker and a schoolteacher, and moved on the edge of the Vienna Circle without joining it. His Logik der Forschung (1934) brought him a post in New Zealand, where he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies during the Second World War; from 1946 he taught at the London School of Economics.

Popper accepted Hume’s point that no number of white swans proves that all swans are white, while one black swan refutes it. Science therefore does not prove theories by induction: it proposes bold conjectures and tries hard to refute them. A theory is scientific if it forbids something observable and so could turn out false. Popper thought that Freudian psychoanalysis and Marx’s theory of history, as their followers defended them, could explain any outcome and so tested nothing. His politics follow the same logic: an open society corrects its mistakes by criticism and piecemeal reform, whereas Plato, Hegel and Marx promised certainty and pointed toward closed societies.

Post-positivist philosophy of science
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Works

1934The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung)
1945The Open Society and Its Enemies
1963Conjectures and Refutations

Shaped by

1711–1776David HumePopper accepted Hume’s point that induction cannot be justified, and built a theory of science that does without it.1724–1804Immanuel KantKönigsberg professor whose critical philosophy redrew modern thought

Argued against

1891–1970Rudolf CarnapPopper rejected the Vienna Circle’s verification criterion of meaning, proposing falsifiability as a test of science, not of meaning.c. 428–348 BCEPlatoThe Open Society and Its Enemies attacks Plato, Hegel and Marx as forerunners of closed, totalitarian societies.1770–1831Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelGerman philosopher of spirit, history and dialectic1818–1883Karl MarxGerman philosopher, economist and revolutionary in London exile

Criticised by

1922–1996Thomas KuhnKuhn and Popper debated in London in 1965: Kuhn argued that scientists do not abandon theories at the first refutation.

Meanwhile, in other traditions

1898–1979Herbert MarcuseFrankfurt School exile who became the New Left’s philosopher1900–1990Nishitani KeijiKyoto School thinker of nihilism and emptiness1900–2002Hans-Georg GadamerHeidegger’s student, who made hermeneutics a philosophy of understanding1903–1969Theodor W. AdornoFrankfurt philosopher, music theorist and critic of the culture industry1905–1980Jean-Paul SartreParisian novelist and philosopher, the public face of existentialism1906–1995Emmanuel LevinasLithuanian-born French philosopher of ethics as first philosophy