| Philosopher Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) at his home in Croydon, London, August 31 1992. Photograph: David Levenson |
Karl Popper, the enemy of certainty, part 1: a rejection of empiricism
The effects of Karl Popper's work are still being felt today both within and beyond the philosophy of science
Liz Williams
10 September 2012
You might ask why we should care what an Austrian philosopher of science who has been dead for 18 years thought about the nature of scientific inquiry. Yet much of what Karl Popper contributed to the philosophy of science has now passed into mainstream thought, into the currency of that nebulous, tricky ontology known as "common sense". In the case of philosophers such as Popper, their work is, in a sense, too recent to be able to evaluate with the level of hindsight that we might apply to more distant thinkers, such as David Hume, and yet it is worth attempting to unpack.