Scientists
Karl Popper
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Karl Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher of science, born in Vienna in 1902 and died in London in 1994. He is best known for falsifiability, his proposed criterion for what makes a claim scientific, set out in his 1934 book Logik der Forschung. He fled Austria in 1937 as the political situation worsened for those of Jewish descent, eventually settling in Britain, where he taught at the London School of Economics from 1946 and was knighted in 1965. Carried under scientist alongside this atlas's mathematicians and physicians on the same basis: a contributor to the practice and self-understanding of science, not a laboratory researcher, whose falsifiability criterion is one of this atlas's new concept entries.
Facts
Cross-Tradition Connections
Critiqued Here
Inductivism, Theories Popper argued that induction is never actually used in science: a universal statement can never be verified by any finite set of confirming observations, so he proposed falsifiability and deductive testing as the real logic of science in place of inductive confirmation.
Founded
A pivotal modern figure through the falsifiability criterion, not the founder of the field, whose roots trace to Aristotle and the early modern philosophers of scientific method.
Proposed
Works In
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.