Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Some of the ideas that Karl Popper set out in his Logic of Scientific Discovery may be familiar to those with an interest in philosophy. Thus, people may readily identify him with the idea of falsifiability as the mark of science and of the fallibility of even our best scientific knowledge. They may know of his emphasis on the logical asymmetry between verification and falsification, and his thesis that a single counter-example may show that a general theory is false while confirmations cannot show that it is true. They may also know that falsifiability was offered as a theory of demarcation – of what marks the difference between science and non-science – rather than as a theory of what is meaningful. They may also be aware of the fact that Popper offers a solution to the problem of induction by way of offering a rational but non-inductive account of the growth of knowledge, through a process of conjecture and refutation. However, what is perhaps most distinctive about Popper's approach to epis-temology and the philosophy of science in The Logic of Scientific Discovery may be unfamiliar. This unfamiliarity is, I suspect, in part of a product of people's initially reading works of Popper's other than The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and in part of their looking at The Logic of Scientific Discovery in a piecemeal manner, and with expectations shaped by the empiricist tradition in epistemol-ogy and the philosophy of science.