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.

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.

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances. If you think the task is easy, you will be disappointed—few humans have a natural ability to

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

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