“The belief in historical destiny is sheer superstition. There can be no prediction of the course of human history by scientific or any other rational methods.” –Karl Popper
The Open Society and Its Frenemies: Karl Popper’s Defense of Science and Liberalism for the 21st Century
While the world’s attention is focused on religious fundamentalism, there is a new tribalism, and a new revolt against reason, taking shape within liberalism. The name of this movement is New Atheism, but it would be more appropriate to call it Atheist Fundamentalism.
PREVIEW-Episode 82: Karl Popper on Science
On Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations (1963), the first three essays.
What is science, and how is it different than pseudo-science? From philosophy? Is philosophy just pseudo-science, or proto-science, or what? Popper thinks that all legitimate inquiry is about solving real problems, and scientific theories are those that are potentially falsifiable: they make definitely predictions about the world that, if these fail to be true, would show that the theory is false.
Episode 82: Karl Popper on Science (Citizens Only)
On Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations (1963), the first three essays. What is science, and how is it different than pseudo-science? From philosophy? Is philosophy just pseudo-science, or proto-science, or what? Popper thinks that all legitimate inquiry is about solving real problems, and scientific theories are those that are potentially falsifiable: they make definitely predictions about the world that, if these fail to be true, would show that the theory is false. Learn more.
End song: “Falsifiable,” by Mark Lint, written and recorded just for this episode. Read about it.
Precognition of Ep. 82: Popper
A summary of the first three essays in Karl Popper’s collection Conjectures and Refutations, read by Dylan Casey.
Precognition of Ep. 82: Popper
A summary of the first three essays in Karl Popper’s collection Conjectures and Refutations, read by Dylan Casey.
Topic for #82: Karl Popper on Scientific Method
Listen now to Dylan Casey introduce these essays. On 9/3/13 we’ll be discussing the first three essays in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963). The book is a retrospective in part, presenting the ideas in the philosophy of science that had established his reputation back in the 1930s. The first essay, “On the Sources of Knowledge and Continue Reading …
When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong
A research physicist friend of mine who works at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a bit of a global warming skeptic. When I brought up all the scientific research on the subject, he said, somewhat dismissively, “Yes, but anyone who gets a PhD in climate science goes into it with an agenda. No one goes into particle physics just to Continue Reading …