July 28th is reserved to Karl Popper
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve."
Today is the birthday of the philosopher of science Karl Popper, born in Vienna, Austria in 1902. Popper set out to explain what distinguishes scientific theories from nonscientific ones—essentially, science from pseudoscience. Yes there's the scientific method, but that didn't satisfy him; plenty of theories (Popper cited Marx's theory of history and Freud's psychoanalysis as examples) are supported by observation and empirical evidence but not necessarily scientific.
Focusing on Einstein's general theory of relativity, Popper proposed that scientific theories must be falsifiable—they must make "risky" predictions that, if they don't show up in observations, refute the theory. "The scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability," he wrote. Popper is considered one of the greatest modern scientific philosophers.
Read The Logic of Scientific Discovery:
http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/popper-logic-scientific-discovery.pdf
Bio:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
#history #KarlPopper #philosophy #science
Frustré de n'avoir rien de bien inspirant sur quoi réagir, j'ai remonté mon fil tout-à-l'heure dans le tram -- et subséquemment mon moral avec ce prétexte d'aujourd'hui de nous en référer à Popper... Merci, Corina.
ReplyDeleteEntre-temps, comme une heure d'écoulée, retenu à autre chose. A l'issue de cette heure,
a flash of fresh understanding for the polysemy of "to falsify" that Popper's translators allowed to form in French and English.
I've been hating that collision of meanings of "to falsify" for ages, but I suddenly just saw how it admits useful interpretation in the context of persistent faith in the likes of frozen sacred text affirming something that later observation disproved.
Faith'd be like money, except that money is made either true or fake, while faith that wasn't fake, what's by Popper called a prediction, can become fake, what's by Popper's translators called falsified.
Fits:)
:-)
ReplyDelete