Karl Popper: Getting to the Truth
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- Category: Politics: Philosophy
- Date Submitted: 03/31/2010 08:01 PM
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Karl Popper:
Getting to the Truth
Karl Popper’s ideas of how scientific theories are properly confirmed revolutionized science and the way philosophers view scientific methods. Popper’s paper, Conjectures and Refutations, is an exploration of truth by outlining a guide to proper scientific methods, drawing from the works of great thinkers like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. He creates a clear distinction between science and pseudo-science by outlining the criteria of what should be taking into consideration to determine how a scientific theory is properly confirmed.
Analyzing what should and what not should be considered support for a scientific hypothesis, Popper clearly outlines seven considerations unto how a scientific theory is properly confirmed. First, he says that it is easy to obtain verifications or confirmations of a given theory by looking for them. If you believe something is truth, you will use your own observations to verify it. This is one of the most poignant observations that Poppers makes, in my opinion: the idea that once we believe we see truth, there are manifestations of that truth everywhere, and “the world is full of verifications of [that] theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. (Bailey 216) Popper is basically saying that with theories like Marxism and Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, that once you think something is true, or is a certain way, then you are sure that it must be that way all of the time. This is true of the way most people think... And even that statement proves his idea. This reminds me of scepticism because it’s basically the opposite. People that are sceptics suspend judgment on new information until that information is well supported by argument or evidence. Popper is saying that in theories like Freud’s, the basis is so easy to apply and so easily accepted that there is an “incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which ‘verified’ the theories in question...” (Bailey 216) Second, he says...
Getting to the Truth
Karl Popper’s ideas of how scientific theories are properly confirmed revolutionized science and the way philosophers view scientific methods. Popper’s paper, Conjectures and Refutations, is an exploration of truth by outlining a guide to proper scientific methods, drawing from the works of great thinkers like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. He creates a clear distinction between science and pseudo-science by outlining the criteria of what should be taking into consideration to determine how a scientific theory is properly confirmed.
Analyzing what should and what not should be considered support for a scientific hypothesis, Popper clearly outlines seven considerations unto how a scientific theory is properly confirmed. First, he says that it is easy to obtain verifications or confirmations of a given theory by looking for them. If you believe something is truth, you will use your own observations to verify it. This is one of the most poignant observations that Poppers makes, in my opinion: the idea that once we believe we see truth, there are manifestations of that truth everywhere, and “the world is full of verifications of [that] theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. (Bailey 216) Popper is basically saying that with theories like Marxism and Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, that once you think something is true, or is a certain way, then you are sure that it must be that way all of the time. This is true of the way most people think... And even that statement proves his idea. This reminds me of scepticism because it’s basically the opposite. People that are sceptics suspend judgment on new information until that information is well supported by argument or evidence. Popper is saying that in theories like Freud’s, the basis is so easy to apply and so easily accepted that there is an “incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which ‘verified’ the theories in question...” (Bailey 216) Second, he says...