Popper

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Karl Popper whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientists’ theories could be proved true.Popper wrote: “The more we learn about the world and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance”. He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead it had simply not proved false, yet! This became known as the theory of falsification.He called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called “pseudo sciences” which couldn’t be tested. His debunking of such ideologies led some to describe him as the “murderer of Freud and Marx”. He went on to apply his ideas to politics, advocating an Open Society. His ideas influenced a wide range of politicians, from those close to Margaret Thatcher, to thinkers in the Eastern Communist bloc and South America.So how did Karl Popper change our approach to the philosophy of science? How have scientists and philosophers made use of his ideas? And how are his theories viewed today? Are we any closer to proving scientific principles are “true”?

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website (UK only)
→ Or listen on: Apple Podcasts

Guests

• John Worrall 2 episodes
  Professor of Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics
• Anthony O'Hear 3 episodes
  Weston Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University
• Nancy Cartwright 3 episodes
  Professor of Philosophy at the LSE and the University of California

Related episodes

• Science in the 20th century
  
  5 Nov, 1998 500 Science
• Logical Positivism
  
  2 Jul, 2009 140 Philosophical schools of thought
• The Scientific Method
  
  26 Jan, 2012 500 Science
• Wittgenstein
  
  4 Dec, 2003 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Marx
  
  14 Jul, 2005 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Empiricism
  
  10 Jun, 2004 120 Epistemology
• Bertrand Russell
  
  6 Dec, 2012 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• The Scientist
  
  24 Oct, 2002 500 Science
• Pragmatism
  
  17 Nov, 2005 140 Philosophical schools of thought
• Common Sense Philosophy
  
  21 Jun, 2007 120 Epistemology

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b00773y4

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00773y4

Auto-category: 501 (Philosophy and theory of natural sciences and mathematics)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, today we're discussing Karl Popper, one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century, whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day.