The BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme on Karl Popper from 2007 makes a good introduction to his thought, both in the philosophy of science and in politics.
In the former he challenged the idea that science involved the accumulation of observations: rather, it involves making bold conjectures and then devising experiments that test their validity.
If I were studying philosophy today I would be interested in the implications of Popper's ideas for our everyday reasoning, rather than for hard science, because I believe we operate in much the same way as scientists.
Popper suggested this in his collection of papers Objective Knowledge, and he called a later collection All Life is Problem Solving.
The Popperian approach is very suitable in system engineering. You have to make decisions that have consequences you will have to live with. You need an approach that integrated evidence in a non-linear way. ("breaks") Bayesian updates alone will not cut it. The Popperian approach in The Open Society and Its Enemies is also worth a read. You can only get so far looking at shadows on a cave wall. Or social media.
ReplyDelete