About Karl Popper and His Philosophy

Sir Karl Raimund Popper was undisputedly one of the most important philosophers born in Austria in the 20th century. Many clever thoughts have been preserved from him, which are worth quoting in conversations where appropriate. I myself adorn my "Facebook Wall" with Popper's aphorisms. My parents have consciously renounced to give me a religious education. Instead, my father already taught me in young years the philosophy of Karl Popper, in particular his considerations on the theory of knowledge and science. I appreciate Popper very much. Nevertheless, in this essay I will take a critical look at his life and work.

What led me to write this essay:

The impetus for this essay came from a discussion on Facebook. My conversation partner was an older man, an American, who acquired a lot of knowledge in the course of his life. He said that I was intelligent and "somwhat erudite", but lacking "intellectual discipline". I interpret it this way: Not everything that I say on Facebook is one hundred percent logically consistent and backed up with facts. Surely, that may be the case. Facebook as well as my weblog are a middle thing between meaningless chatter and highly scientific publication: It is a space for anecdotes, personal experiences, superificial analyses and impressions of what I have read and so on. Not at all do my postings on Facebook or my weblog claim to be scientific. It's more like a publicly accessible diary of a person who's not uneducated and has an alert mind. But I understand my acquaintance when he accuses me of occasionally implicitly making assumptions that might be true, but do not necessarily have to be true, and to make statements which are only true if these implicit assumptions are correct. The criticized behaviour can be observed in many people discussing on the Internet. I myself occasionally complained about it.

Anyway, his criticism reminded me of something I recently read in Kurt Salamun's Popper biography "Ein Jahrhundertdenker". Popper was supposed to have problems with the individual psychologist Alfred Adler. The reason for this is that this Adler often implicitly made assumptions in his analysis of patients. In doing so, Adler argued with his "experience". As Popper notes, however, it may happen that a train of thought is only logically consistent if the premise that has not been made explicit is true. If it turns out that these assumptions are wrong, a completely different logical conclusion may emerge. It is therefore intellectually dishonest of Adler that he makes these assumptions; the justification with the "experience" is a reference to an authority, something that Popper profoundly detested, as his reflections on political philosophy also showed ("The Open Society and its Enemies").

Without having studied psychology (apart from the lessons at grammar school and in my medical studies), I believe that I know enough about the essence of a human being to make the following statement about Popper:

Popper was a tragic figure. He may have found recognition by historians as a "thinker of the century", but basically he failed. Because: It is clearly recognizable that his driving force was the search for certainty. He wanted to find a method by which scientists could arrive at reliable findings. But what he only succeeded in doing was to show that scientific statements, since they are universal statements, can usually only be refuted, but not proven with absolute certainty. However, his conclusion that science should be limited to refuting hypotheses, starting with the most unlikely hypothesis of all, is not in the sense of a productive science: because refuting hypotheses, the correctness of which was extremely unlikely anyway, does not produce any real gain in knowledge. Popper had to admit that scientific knowledge always has only a provisional character. "We don't know, we guess", he is said to have said himself once.

So Popper failed to achieve his goal, namely to gain certainty about the validity of scientific findings. When you look at his photograph printed in Salamun's book, Popper actually appears to be very sad. A tragic figure, despite all successes.

I myself tried to formulate everything as comprehensibly as possible in discussions on the Internet earlier (about 15 years ago), paid attention to strict logic, provided as many sources as possible and quoted them. At that time, I was often reproached by my discussion partners for "approaching everything scientifically", which was not necessary and not wanted by these people; they were more interested in subjective opinions and individual experiences. It may be that over the years I have adapted to my partners in this respect, which of course may have had the effect of distancing myself from what my friend on Facebook would consider to be right. Had I known this man 15 years ago, I might have been happy to finally have someone who would recognize my qualities. So I have at least adapted a little to the Internet "society".

Personally, I'm glad that I have the opportunity to earn a living in the private sector, even though I'm interested in science (and still occasionally get annoyed that I didn't get a job at the university after my doctorate). Because it is obviously true that what many scientists would like to have, namely the final certainty, is not possible at all to achieve. This may also explain why many university professors seem so frustrated.

Claus Volko, cdvolko (at) gmail (dot) com