Hello everyone, here is a small broadcast reading, today I want to take you to know the famous philosopher of the 20th century, the founder of critical rationalism: Carl Popper.
It has been said that in human history, the progress of science has brought three major blows to human self-esteem.
The first blow came from Copernicus, who told mankind: You are not the center of the universe, the earth is just a planet revolving around the sun, and human beings are just a grain of dust living in the vast universe;
The second blow came from Darwin, who told humans: You are not the primate of all things, no different from other animals, maybe monkeys. These two blows made humanity realize that it was only a part of nature and that there was nothing special about it.
However, human beings can at least console themselves by saying that although we are not the center of the universe, we are not very different from monkeys, but at least we are rational, we have wisdom. At this time Freud stood up and said, "You think too much, human beings are like other animals, and all our psychology and behavior are driven by primitive desires." Human beings only do two things in their lifetime, choosing who to mate with and being great people."
As the great philosopher Hume put it: Reason is only a slave to passion.
In the evolutionary history of Western thought and science, there has been a long spiritual tradition of skepticism and criticism since the beginning of Socrates, and it has never stopped attacking absolute truth and so-called scientific knowledge, as Socrates said: The only thing I know is that I know nothing. There is no doubt that it is this spirit of criticism and questioning that has promoted human cognition again and again, as well as the continuous progress of science. And the philosopher we are going to talk about today is one of them, he is hailed as one of the greatest and most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and the founder of critical rationalist thought. So what is critical idealism? What are Popper's distinctive ideas on the philosophy of science?
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Before we explain Popper's ideas, let's briefly understand his life.
Carl Popper was born in 1902 to a jewish middle-class family in Vienna, Austria. Popper was an academic genius who spent his life with the world's top scientists and thinkers. He was exposed to Marxism and Darwinian evolution at the age of 10, became a disciple of the psychology master Freud at the age of 17, and worked with the psychoanalyst Adler. In 1928 he graduated from the prestigious University of Vienna with a doctorate in philosophy. He taught at the secondary school from 1930 to 1936, but he did not sit idle during this period.
In 1932, he completed the manuscript "Two Fundamental Problems of Knowledge Theory". In 1934, on the recommendation of the German philosopher Schlicker, a condensed version of the manuscript, The Logic of Research, was published in German. In the next two years, Popper visited Britain, met famous scholars such as Hayek in economics, philosophers Russell and Berlin, and met with the famous physicist Bohr in Copenhagen. In 1936, under pressure from a wave of anti-Semitism, Popper planned to leave Austria. He applied to the Academic Grants Board for a job at an academic institution in the Commonwealth region. Among his recommenders were einstein, Bohr, Needham, Russell, Karnapp and Moore, among a number of great scientists. The committee approved his application and placed him in a temporary teaching position at cambridge university, but Popper was also granted a permanent position at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. In 1938, he went to New Zealand to teach and began writing The Poverty of Historical Determinism and Open Societies and Their Enemies, which also established his academic status.
In 1946, Popper moved to England to teach "logic and scientific methodology" at the London School of Economics, and in 1950 he was invited to visit the United States and lecture at Harvard and Princeton Universities, during which he met with Einstein and other scientists to discuss. In 1959, the English edition of "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" was published, and in 1963, "Conjecture and Rebuttal" was published. In 1969 Popper gave up a full-time job at the London School of Economics to focus on research and writing. In 1972, he published the famous book "Objective Knowledge". He was elected a fellow of the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1976. After retiring from the church in 1969, he remained intellectually active and died in 1994.
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Popper was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and he was also the founder of critical rationalism, so what is critical rationalism? Previously, human reason came from rigorous logical reasoning, believing that our scientific knowledge came from summarization and induction. Astronomers summed up the laws of celestial movement through the movement of the sun, moon, and stars; biologists summed up the laws of biological evolution through the reproduction of organisms; our ancestors summarized the farming seasons and guided agricultural production by observing weather changes. It seems that human knowledge and understanding are developed on the basis of summarizing and summarizing past experiences.
But Popper did not think so, he believed that empirical observation must be guided by certain theories, but the theories themselves are falsifiable, so they should be critical. In his view, falsifiability is an indispensable feature of science, the growth of science is developed through conjecture and rebuttal, theory can not be confirmed, can only be falsified, so its theory is also called "falsificationism".
Therefore, the core of critical rationalism is that scientific knowledge is falsifiable, which is the real difference between science and non-science. That is to say, universally valid scientific knowledge does not come from empirical induction, and scientific knowledge develops through continuous falsification, denial, and criticism. Popper's doctrine of falsification criticized and questioned the inductive method. For example, the famous "turkey example" is a typical induction method, saying that the turkey will be carefully cared for by the owner every day for a long time before Thanksgiving, and if from the perspective of the turkey, they can never summarize that on thanksgiving day, it will be slaughtered by the owner and become a delicacy on the table. In addition, the famous story of the "black swan" also points out the problem of inductive methods. Through thousands of years of observation, human beings have concluded that the world's swans are white. But until one day, human beings discover a black swan, our previous knowledge obtained through induction was completely overturned.
On the basis of falsifiability, Popper further criticized the "scientific determinism" that prevailed at the time. Influenced by the developments of astronomy and physics at the time, especially Kepler's Three Laws and Newton's astrodynamics. Scientific determinism largely dominated the scientific community in the 18th and 19th centuries. Under this kind of thinking, the scientific community generally believes that the movement of all worlds is determined by definite laws, and that the world operates precisely like clocks and watches, and this determinism is also known as mechanism. This view was even supported by many scientists at the time, including Albert Einstein. In a letter to the physicist Bohr, Einstein wrote: "You believe in god who threw dice, but I believe in perfect laws and order."
It later evolved into Einstein's famous quote: God never rolls the dice.
But Popper says the world doesn't operate like clocks, we can't predict the future, and the real root of this unpredictability lies in the growth of knowledge. He made a wonderful exposition of the unpredictability of the world. Regarding the growth of knowledge and the unpredictability of the future, Popper has a famous syllogism:
First of all, he said: Even those who firmly believe that the future of mankind has been decided will agree that human knowledge, human perception of the world, and human action will have an impact.
Secondly, he said: Human knowledge itself is growing, and there are always some things that are only known tomorrow and not known today. Otherwise, there will be no growth in knowledge, and there will always be an increase in knowledge.
Finally, he said: This increase in knowledge, which is only known tomorrow and not known today, also has an impact on human behavior, and it is unpredictable, so the future of mankind is unpredictable.
Then you may ask, why can't we predict our own knowledge growth? Popper says our new knowledge consists of two kinds. One is new knowledge that evolves from the scientific knowledge we currently know and under some conditions, such as the knowledge of different disciplines such as systematic biology and genetics on the basis of Darwin's theory of species evolution. Another new kind of knowledge that we don't yet know, some new scientific theories. For example, is there a new theory in physics other than quantum mechanics and chord theory that we have not yet discovered? Obviously we don't know. So we can't make predictions about future increases in knowledge, let alone the impact of this new knowledge on the future.
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After the 1950s, Popper put forward the famous "three worlds" theory on the basis of "epistemology" and "falsificationism". He pointed out that our world can be divided into three different worlds that are independent of each other and interconnected. Namely: the world of physics; the world of spirit; the world of knowledge.
The world of physics, the world of all objective things and the world of their various phenomena, such as matter, energy, all inorganic matter and all organic matter, such as rocks, trees, animals, human bodies and brains belong to the physical world; the world of spirit or consciousness includes our emotional personality, psychological quality, personal will, subjective experience, these spiritual things; and the third world of knowledge, or the world of human intellectual products, which includes all abstract things such as scientific theories, language and writing, culture and art, and it also includes mobile phones. The crystallization of human ingenuity such as computers, books, house buildings, airplanes and ships. Only in the third world is the growth of human knowledge infinite and unpredictable. Through our growing knowledge, we have created a whole new world that is unpredictable and completely open.
Well, that's all for today, if you like my article, please pay attention to the tabla reading or share it with your friends.
<h1 class="ql-align-justify" > Popper quote:</h1>
True ignorance is not a lack of knowledge, but a refusal to acquire it.
Infinite tolerance will inevitably lead to the disappearance of tolerance.
If we admit defeat too cheerfully, we may fail to realize that we are very close to being right.
Maybe you are right and I am wrong, but only when we work together can we get closer to the truth.
We should think of all laws or theories as hypotheses or speculations.