Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902–94) was an Austrian-born British philosopher. He contributed to the philosophy of science by rejecting inductive reasoning and asserting that it was impossible to prove indisputably that something was true; the best one could do was to try every method one could devise to prove that it is not true. His work has been a significant stimulus to scientific research.
Born in Vienna, Popper studied philosophy at the University of Vienna. He taught secondary school for six years but fled the rise of Nazism by immigrating to New Zealand, where he lectured in philosophy at Canterbury University College. In 1946, he relocated to England, became a professor at the London School of Economics, and transformed it into a leading academic center for the philosophy of science.
As a student at the University of Vienna, Popper attended a lecture by Albert Einstein. He philosophized about the way Einstein’s concepts worked and recognized that what made them bona fide scientific theories was that they were concrete enough that it would have been possible to prove that they were false. In other words, scientific hypotheses can never be wholly confirmed as true, but are verified by attempts to falsify them. He used this standpoint to argue that astrology, metaphysics, Marxist history, Freudian psychoanalysis, and other theories were impossible to prove not true because there is no way they could ever be falsified.
Popper made falsifiability the key to his philosophy of science and wrote The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935.) Falsifiability developed into the most universally invoked “criterion of demarcation” of science from non-science.
Popper later applied his analysis of knowledge to theories of society and history. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945,) he criticized the historicist social theories of Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx as totalitarian models that are easily falsifiable.
Popper’s later works Objective Knowledge (1972) and The Self and Its Brain (1977) combined his scientific theory with the theory of evolution.
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Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
—Karl Popper
Topics: Knowledge
It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.
—Karl Popper
Topics: Speech
Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.
—Karl Popper
Topics: Scientists, Science
Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle—the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.
—Karl Popper
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
—Karl Popper
Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.
—Karl Popper
Topics: Theory, Assumptions
There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.
—Karl Popper
Topics: History
We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell
—Karl Popper
Topics: Religion
The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.
—Karl Popper
Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.
—Karl Popper
Topics: Promises, Hell
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