Karl Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher of science, born in Vienna in 1902 and died in London in 1994. He is best known for falsifiability, his proposed criterion for what makes a claim scientific, set out in his 1934 book Logik der Forschung. He fled Austria in 1937 as the political situation worsened for those of Jewish descent, eventually settling in Britain, where he taught at the London School of Economics from 1946 and was knighted in 1965. Carried under scientist alongside this atlas's mathematicians and physicians on the same basis: a contributor to the practice and self-understanding of science, not a laboratory researcher, whose falsifiability criterion is one of this atlas's new concept entries.
Facts
Connections
Associated With
Hypothesis, Concepts Popper's falsifiability criterion (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934) treats a testable, falsifiable hypothesis as the defining unit of a genuinely scientific claim.
Critiqued Here
Inductivism, Theories Popper argued that induction is never actually used in science: a universal statement can never be verified by any finite set of confirming observations, so he proposed falsifiability and deductive testing as the real logic of science in place of inductive confirmation.
Source The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959)Karl Popper
Founded
A pivotal modern figure through the falsifiability criterion, not the founder of the field, whose roots trace to Aristotle and the early modern philosophers of scientific method.
Source Philosophy of Science (Wikipedia)
Proposed
Source Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)Stephen Thornton
Source The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959)Karl Popper
Works In
Sources
1. Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Stephen Thornton, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1997SEP, Thornton, first pub. 1997Quote, SEP, Thornton, first pub. 1997
Popper accordingly rejects the view that induction is the characteristic method of scientific investigation and inference, substituting falsifiability in its place.
Philosophy of Science (Wikipedia)
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