Text

E-book Karl Popper, Science and Enightenment

---

Penilaian

---

Karl Popper is famous for having proposed that science advances by a process of conjecture and refutation. He is also famous for defending the open society against those he saw as its arch enemies – Plato and Marx.Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings are, how it needs to be improved to over-come these failings, and what implications emerge as a result. The basic theme of the book has already been summarized in the Prologue. In what follows I spell out this theme in greater detail. The book consists of a collection of essays that dramatically develop Karl Popper’s views about natural and social science, and how we should go about trying to solve social problems. Criticism of Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of natural science leads to a new philosophy of science, which I call aim-oriented empiri-cism.1 This makes explicit metaphysical theses concerning the compre-hensibility and knowability of the universe that are an implicit part of scientific knowledge – implicit in the way science excludes all theories that are not explanatory, even those that are more successful empirically than accepted theories. Aim-oriented empiricism has major implications, not just for the academic discipline of philosophy of science, but for sci-ence itself. Popper generalized his philosophy of science of falsificationism to arrive at a new conception of rationality – critical rationalism – the key methodological idea of Popper’s profound critical exploration of politi-cal and social issues in his The Open Society and Its Enemies (1966a) and The Poverty of Historicism (1961). This path of Popper, from scientific method to rationality and social and political issues, is followed here, but the starting point is aim-oriented empiricism rather than falsifica-tionism. Aim-oriented empiricism is generalized to form a new concep-tion of rationality – aim-oriented rationalism – which has far-reaching implications for political and social issues, for the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and indeed for academic inquiry as a whole. The strategies for tackling social problems that arise from aim- oriented ratio-nalism improve on Popper’s recommended strategies of piecemeal social engineering and critical rationalism, associated with his conception of the open society. This book thus sets out to develop Popper’s philosophy in new and fruitful directions.The theme of the book, in short, is to discover what can be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress towards a better world. That there is indeed much to be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress was the big idea of the eighteenth- century Enlightenment. This was immensely influential. But the philosophes of the Enlightenment made mistakes, and these mis-takes, inherited from the Enlightenment, are built into the institutional and intellectual structure of academic inquiry today. In his two great works, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1966a), Popper corrected some of the mistakes of the Enlightenment – mistakes about the nature of scientific method and rationality. But Popper left other mistakes undetected and uncorrected. The present book seeks to push the Popperian research programme fur-ther, and correct what Popper left uncorrected.The fundamental idea that emerges is that there is an urgent need to bring about a revolution in academic inquiry so that it takes up its proper task of promoting wisdom and not just acquiring knowledge –wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know- how, but much else besides. I have devoted much of my working life to trying to get this idea across. The essays that follow provide a record of this life work.

---

Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

-

No. Panggil

146.44 MAX k

Penerbit

London : UCL Press., 2017

Deskripsi Fisik

392 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781787350397

Klasifikasi

146.44

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Empiricims

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

Komentar

---

Anda harus masuk sebelum memberikan komentar