Popper, Karl R. (1902–1994)

Karl R. Popper was a British-Austrian philosopher and theorist of science. He had significant influence upon 20th-century philosophy with his contributions to epistemology, philosophy of science, and social theories. His central works include The Logic of Science (1934), The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), and The Poverty of Historicism (1957). This last work contains an explication and criticism of historical scholarship as it was being practiced. Popper argued that such scholarship possessed a metaphysical determinism that assumed that time had a definable shape, such as “progress.” He rejected sociology's historical determinism that portrayed time itself as a vector of a ideological conception of history.

As the founder of critical rationalism, Popper challenged the methods of empirical science and the inductive approach of logical positivists such as the “Vienna Circle” philosophers devoted to Moritz Schlick. Because observation in itself is insufficient for establishing scientific validity, the critical rationalists proposed the “principle of falsification.” In contrast to the classical empiricism that strove for perfect validity, critical rationalists argued that science is doing its best work when it puts forward theses as statements that are capable of being proven wrong. Despite any number of arguments, assertions can never be entirely verified. The conclusion is that scientific knowledge does not improve by positive evidence. Instead, according to the principle of falsification, the point is to prove all the false hypotheses wrong by finding compelling counterexamples. “Verification” is a mistaken notion. Theories that withstand scientific scrutiny are “more valid,” according to Popper, and falsifiability is a much better criterion of demarcation between scientific and nonscientific theories. In the area of social philosophy, he likewise demonstrated the invalidity of “truth claims” for ideologies, be they socio-historical or political theories. Preferring a motif of indeterminism, his political ideas merged into a liberalistic pleading for a pluralistic, liberal, and democratic “open society.”

Popper's scholarly work focused mainly upon what scientists are doing when they are doing “science,” and his reflections on methodology mark the central starting point of his thinking. Critical rationalists argue that any scientific theory is abstract and conjectural by nature, making it difficult to identify secure knowledge. Therefore, genuine scientific theories require a specific logical structure: [Page 1028]openness to testability and revisability. By being structurally open to a trial-and-error process, that is, by being falsifiable, new conceptual theories are far more effective than dogmatic assertions of truth by an establishment. Falsifiability provides both a new approach to the challenge of ultimate justification and a method of distinguishing metaphysical statements from theories of scientific validity and reliability. In this way, we see how Popper's critique of historicists is a methodological one.

In The Poverty of Historicism, Popper's critique goes against approaches that make historical predictions their main objective and thereby attempt to grasp universally valid patterns of history. Because historicism argues that historical events underlie inexorable laws of development and advance toward an ultimate and discernable end, historicists strive to empirically establish an authoritative chronology of events. Given this position, sociology becomes a mere science of theoretical history in which time assumes an orientating function. At the same time, historicists hold that the method of universalization is not transferable to the social sciences. As a result, social laws must be structured differently from common generalizations. Thus, to be valid for all human history, such laws have to transcend the succession of time. These epoch-spanning laws of historical development now provide the basis for large-scale forecasts that can be identified as prophecies and distinguished from technological predictions. While the former refer to unchangeable events and characteristically serve forewarning purposes, technological predictions, which Popper prefers, are of constructive value, entailing useful instructions or guidelines for dealing with situations most likely to come.

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