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"One of the main tasks for human reason is to make the universe we live in understandable to ourselves. This is the task of science. There are two different components of about equal importance in this enterprise. The first is poetic inventiveness ..."
– Karl Popper
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Author Archives: Bruce Caithness
On Strict and Numerical Universality by Flemming Steen Nielsen
Popper on Strict and Numerical Universality by Flemming Steen Nielsen I In his article, ”Evolutionistiske forklaringer og kritikken af historicismen” (Evolutionary explanations and the Critique of Historicism) (1), professor Mogens Blegvad raised a series of searching objections to Karl Popper’s … Continue reading
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Flemming Steen Nielsen: A Personal Recollection of Popper
From: Sandhedens Sider, Institute of Philosophy, Copenhagen, Autumn 1994 Happy Acquaintance With a Difficult Person In memoriam Karl Raimund Popper, 26.7.1902-17.9.1994. By Flemming Steen Nielsen One morning a few weeks ago my friend Troels Eggers Hansen (theoretical physicist, editor of … Continue reading
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More Thoughts on Critical Preference
Karl Popper held that the effort of reaching a preference of one theory against others is the key to escaping the trap of the logical error of induction. This position is not a late appendage but is clearly stated for … Continue reading
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A World of Propensities
“A World of Propensities”, a slender 51 pages, was published in 1990. It contains two lectures that Popper delivered in his 87th and 88 years, A World of Propensities: Two New Views of Causality and Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Knowledge. … Continue reading
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The Glass Bead Game
It is believed that Hermann Hesse began serious writing of what was to become “The Glass Bead Game” in 1931. It took Hesse until 1942 to complete it, during this time the world was eclipsed by the horrors of Fascism, … Continue reading
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Beyond The Outsider
In “The Popular Popper, The Guide to The Open Society and Its Enemies” (2013) Rafe Champion mentions Bryan Magee’s attendance at Popper’s 1958 address, titled “Back to the Pre-Socratics”, to the Aristotelian Society in London. Magee relates this in Chapter … Continue reading
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No reasons are needed to admit error: “Popper’s Theory of Science: An Apologia”
In this 166 page volume Dr Carlos E. Garcia (2006) articulates a systematic analysis of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. Popper’s core catechism is “I may be wrong and you may be right and by an effort we may get closer … Continue reading
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The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge
The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge (2009) was first published in German in 1979. It is a thick book comprising a collection of drafts and preliminary work from the years 1930 to 1933 for Karl Popper’s first … Continue reading
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Key Issues in The New Knowledge Management
Key Issues in The New Knowledge Management (2003), by Joe Firestone and Mark W. McElroy, is for me a welcome library addition. A strong point is the focus on the epistemological issues. The summary of various theoretical underpinnings is clearly laid out. I have … Continue reading
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Critical preference is critical!
On my revisiting “Realism and the Aim of Science: from the Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery” (1983), written around 1951-56, it is apparent that the concept of critical preference is emphasized. In considering falsifiability and falsification in isolation … Continue reading
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