Changes

Popper was uncompromising in his rejection of any attempt to take confirming instances as increasing the legitimacy, likelihood, reasonableness or probability of the universal statement.  No matter how many white swans you see you are no more able to assume that all swans are white than if you had seen just the one white swan.    The ease with which “confirming” instances can be found lead Popper to the conclusion that an attempted verification of a universal law is worse than useless: to be science universal laws must be capable of being put to the test, to be falsifiable.

Popper was uncompromising in his rejection of any attempt to take confirming instances as increasing the legitimacy, likelihood, reasonableness or probability of the universal statement.  No matter how many white swans you see you are no more able to assume that all swans are white than if you had seen just the one white swan.    The ease with which “confirming” instances can be found lead Popper to the conclusion that an attempted verification of a universal law is worse than useless: to be science universal laws must be capable of being put to the test, to be falsifiable.

 

==Politics==

 

Politics

 

A refugee from Austria after the rise of Nazism, Popper dedicated the war years to the study of the roots of totalitarian thought.  The “Open Society and its Enemies” analysed the contribution, as he saw it, of Plato, Hegel and Marx to an anti-rational tribalistic “closed society”.  The close society was, for Popper, marked by a lack of criticism of established ideas (established societal norms being treated not as societal norms but as “taboo” or “the natural order”) together with a collectivism that subjected the individual to the group goal.   

A refugee from Austria after the rise of Nazism, Popper dedicated the war years to the study of the roots of totalitarian thought.  The “Open Society and its Enemies” analysed the contribution, as he saw it, of Plato, Hegel and Marx to an anti-rational tribalistic “closed society”.  The close society was, for Popper, marked by a lack of criticism of established ideas (established societal norms being treated not as societal norms but as “taboo” or “the natural order”) together with a collectivism that subjected the individual to the group goal.   

<ref>http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html</ref>

<ref>http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html</ref>

 

 

 

<references/>

<references/>