Karl Raimund Popper's Approach To Philosophy

NAME: VADICHERLA SATHWIKA ID NUMBER: 2013A3PS171H KARL POPPER

Karl Raimund Popper was born on 28 July 1902 in Vienna. He was a professor and philosopher of Austrian-British descent, and is regarded as one of the greatest philosopher of science in the 20th century. Popper holds a PhD in Philosophy. His approach to philosophy is platonic. Philosophy for popper is an exploratory, self-critical, hesitant and skeptical kind of inquiry. Popper being a rationalist believed that the main essence in the philosophy of science is setting apart science from non-science. In 1935, Popper published his first major work in the philosophy of science “Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Research) and translated this book to English and published it under

Popper studied published works of Freud and also attended lectures of Einstein. During this period he noticed that Freud predicted that our childhood experiences would have a heavy bearing on who we grew up to be where as Einstein waited for a solar eclipse that could disprove his entire theory of relativity. Freud used to confirm his theory by looking at the events that have occurred in the past, Einstein wasn’t looking at past data to support the events but was rather looking ahead and predicted future states. Popper finally tried to differentiate science from pseudo-science saying methods that serve to confirm beliefs are pseudo-science and they can be used to prove anything. If the existence of tooth fairy is considered, we have a filthy load of evidence in the world but Popper would argue that it’s only by seeking to disprove tooth fairy’s existence that one can demonstrate his unreality. In other words science disconfirms and pseudo-science confirms.

Popper declines induction as an applicable scientific method and is in favor of deductive reasoning. Inductive process is where single statements are used to imply universal statements. Popper mentions four steps on how the deductive process

This practice of eradicating tentative theories works similar to the way biological evolution takes place. Even if an attempt gets successful it can only be considered as a failed attempt to disprove the theory. Supporting evidence should matter only when the result is obtained from a genuine test of theory, it can be called as a failed attempt to falsify the theory. Popper believes that scientific knowledge is all about probability and contingency, we believe in a theory that is most probable with the data in hand but one should always be willing to revise the beliefs in the light of new evidence. Belief should be contingent upon the