It's time for Popper

It’s been nearly two weeks since my last post. It’s time. Time to write a lousy quantity-over-quality post about anything, simply in order to get myself back into he habit of posting.

So what’s on my mind today? Popper. Karl Popper. I’m lucky enough to have to write a rather lengthy final paper about him for my epistemology class.

I like Sir Karl. Basically he’s a big deal because he presents a viable solution to Hume’s problem of induction. How can you make empirical predictions -- predictions about the physical world – if it doesn’t follow that, just because something is the case in one case, it will be in all cases? For example, just because every swan we’ve seen is white, how can we know all swans are white until we’ve seen every swan there is. Philosophers had tried to resolve this issue for sometime but had always assumed that by induction was the only way to gain empirical knowledge. Popper agrees with Hume’s observation but disagrees with the latter assumption. He argues that rather than obtain knowledge through induction we should do it instead by deduction. That is to say that, if something is the case or is not the case, rather than seek evidence of the case, we seek evidence of it not being the case. Thus by falsification we can make empirical claims – but never about what is, only about what isn’t. He says a bunch of other important stuff too about demarcation and corroboration, but I don’t feel like getting into them here. Maybe I’ll post part of my paper later. For the record, I don’t particularly agree with his philosophy of ethics, society and social science; I’m not sure that those things can be reduced to the same kind of methods as the physical sciences. He also has many critics.