Sublime

The central insight of Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, is that science is not a collection of verifiable propositions; rather, it is a set of theories that, at best, can be wholly falsified.

Karl Popper wrote “A theory is part of empirical science if and only if it conflicts with possible experiences

Learning to think is all about what another 20th-century philosopher, Karl Popper, came later to call ‘conjectures and refutations’. Everyday problem solving, suggested Dewey (and Popper), comprises a process a bit like going into a coconut shy: you put ideas up and you do your best to knock them down again; you shouldn’t just accept the first idea

Popper called the algorithm used by science conjecture and refutation,

According to Popper, our solutions will always lead to new problems,

This is where we use examples from the past to make definite conclusions about what is going to happen in the future. Popper considered this kind of thinking pseudoscience, or worse—a dangerous ideology that tempts wannabe state planners and utopians to control society. He did not consider such historicist doctrines falsifiable.

The German philosopher Karl Popper described a parallel process in human history. He argued that the fundamental driver of all human progress is the growth of knowledge. We obviously can’t predict what we don’t know yet, and we can’t know how, in what directions, or at what speed, human knowledge will develop. And therefore, Popper concludes, histo