1) Biographic data
Karl Raimund Popper was born in Austria in 1902. Son of Jews, he emigrated to New Zealand in 1937, where he published, in 1945, the work of political philosophy“The Open Society and Its Enemies”. Before that, in 1935, he published the work "Logic of Scientific Research", considered one of the most important works of philosophy of science. He died in 1994, in England, a country that welcomed him from 1946 onwards, giving him the title of Sir. In England, Popper published many of his writings and developed a teaching career in London School of Economics. Although his political thinking is well known, what made him famous was his thinking about science that impacted philosophers and scientists.
2) The Vienna Circle
Karl Popper had, at the beginning of his training, the influence of the discussions held in the vienna circle, an association founded in the late 1920s by a group of scientists, logicians and philosophers who focused their efforts around an intellectual project. This project was the development of a philosophy of science based on a logical language and from logical procedures with high scientific rigor.
The priority theme of the studies of this group was the formulation of a criterion that allowed to distinguish between propositions with or without meaning based on the criterion of "verifiability". Thus, what could not be verified should be removed from scientific knowledge, such as the statements metaphysical. Physics was the model they proposed for all scientific statements, that is, only what was said based on observations could be considered true. Statements that could not be examined from empirical verification were meaningless and, therefore, should be disregarded from science.
The verification can be done in yet another way beyond the empirical method: through the application of logic to find out if there is consistency in the statement. In this case, the verification is done by demonstration. Dependent on empirical findings or logical-mathematical demonstration, scientific laws for the thinkers of the Vienna Circle could only be a posteriori, that is, scientific statements are findings.
Thus, the proposition "There is oil in my backyard", for example, is possible to be verified and it can be true or false based on the observation made, for example, by an excavation in the ground. The proposition “The soul is immortal”, on the contrary, is not verifiable, despite being a grammatically correct construction and independent of the arguments used to prove it. According to the thinkers of the Vienna Circle, the first proposition has cognitive significance and value because it is verifiable; the second, no.
By the criterion of verifiability, it was possible to make a distinction between Philosophy and Science. The purpose of Philosophy was, to Rudolf Carnap, one of the main representatives of the Circle, to study the nature of scientific language, a study that would comprise three processes: a syntactic, by which she would establish theories about the formal relations between signs; a semantic, by which it would establish theories about the interpretations; and a pragmatist, by which he would establish theories about the relationships between language, speaker and listener.
Other important thinkers of the Vienna Circle were Otto Neurath, Moritz Schilick and Ernest Nagel. The rise of Nazism had an impact on the formation of the Circle: Carnap and other members moved to the United States; Hahn, Schilick and Neurath died. The intellectual movement has since dispersed.
3) The principle of falsifiability
O verifiability principle of the thinkers of the Vienna Circle was one of the main points fought by Popper. For him, a proposition could be considered true or false not based on its verifiability, but on its refutability (or falsifiability).
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Scientific observation, according to him, is always guided in advance by a theory to be proven, that is, the science that is based on in the inductive method selects the phenomena that will be investigated to prove something that is already assumed. For this reason, the verifiability criterion will not always be valid.
The principle proposed by Popper, instead of seeking verification of empirical experiences that confirmed a theory, sought particular facts that, after being verified, would refute the hypothesis. So, instead of worrying about proving a theory true, he worried about proving it false. When the theory resists refutation by experience, it can be considered proven.
With the principle of falsifiability, Popper established the moment of criticism of a theory as the point at which it is possible to consider it scientific. Theories that are unlikely to be refuted through experience must be regarded as myths, not science. To say that a scientific theory must be empirically falsifiable means to say that a scientific theory must offer the possibility of refutation – and, if refuted, should not be considered.
4) The concept of science for Karl Popper
The notion of science for Karl Popper can be thought of from two fundamental points: the rational character of science it's the hypothetical character of scientific theories.
Science, as a human project, is not impassible for transformation, which enabled the emergence of several theories. What is in common between these varied ways of doing science, he himself answers in his work Conjectures and Rebuttals (1972): the rational character of science. He says:
One of the most important ingredients of Western civilization is what you might call 'tradition rationalist', which we inherited from the Greeks: the tradition of free debate – not discussion per se, but in the search for the truth. Hellenic science and philosophy were products of this tradition, of the effort to understand the world in which we live; and the tradition established by Galileo corresponded to his rebirth. Within this rationalist tradition, science is recognisably esteemed for its practical achievements, but even more so for its informative content. and the ability to rid our minds of old beliefs and prejudices, old certainties, offering us in their place new conjectures and hypotheses bold. Science is valued for the liberalizing influence it exerts – one of the most powerful forces that has contributed to human freedom. (POPPER, 1972, p. 129)¹
Rationality is also related to two other important characteristics of science: the search for truth and the progress of knowledge. This progress in scientific knowledge, in the Popperian conception, cannot be thought of from a “law history", but something that happens due to human reason itself from the possibility of discussion critical. Thus, we can see that his project consists of an attempt to preserve free and critical debate and the constant evaluation of ideas so that they can be improved. Thus, this improvement will echo on the social plane.
Free and critical debate also points to the hypothetical character of scientific theories, as they are always subject to being falsified – or they cannot be considered scientific theories. His method was known as hypothetical-deductive.
Grades
¹POPPER, K. A. Conjectures and rebuttals. Brasília: UNB, 1972.
By Wigvan Pereira
Graduated in Philosophy
