Karl Popper

Karl Popper was a 20th-century philosopher who argued that scientific theories must be falsifiable and defended liberal democracy against totalitarianism.

Falsifiability: The property of a claim that makes it possible for evidence to show the claim false. Popper proposed falsifiability as a criterion for distinguishing empirical science from non-science.
Conjecture and refutation: A method of proposing bold explanations and testing them through attempts at refutation. Popper described scientific progress as theories facing severe tests and being corrected or rejected.
Imre Lakatos: A philosopher of science who developed the methodology of scientific research programmes. Lakatos revised Popperian testing to account for how research programmes respond to anomalies.
Open society: A political order that permits criticism, protects individual liberty, and allows peaceful institutional change. Popper argued that open institutions make political authority answerable and reform possible.
Logical positivism: A philosophical movement that emphasized logical analysis and empirical verification as foundations of meaningful knowledge. Popper opposed verification as a criterion of science, despite overlaps with positivist concerns.
Induction: Reasoning from observed cases to general conclusions that extend beyond those cases. Popper rejected induction as a logical foundation for scientific theories.
Corroboration: The status of a theory that has survived demanding tests without thereby being proved true. Popper used corroboration to describe a theory’s tested standing without treating it as verification.
Thomas Kuhn: A historian and philosopher of science known for explaining scientific change through paradigms and revolutions. Kuhn’s account challenged Popper’s emphasis on continuous critical testing as science’s defining practice.
The Poverty of Historicism: A 1957 book by Popper criticizing claims to predict the long-term course of history. It applies his critique of unfalsifiable prediction to theories of historical development.
Verificationism: The view that a statement is meaningful or scientifically acceptable only if it can be verified by experience. Popper argued that universal scientific laws cannot be conclusively verified by finite observations.

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