Philosophy of Law Course: https://hotm.art/popper-fdireito History of Philosophy Course: https://hotm.art/popper-historiadafil... Friedrich Nietzsche Course: https://hotm.art/popper-nietzsche -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Karl Popper - The Logic of Scientific Research -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Karl Popper, born in Vienna in 1902, died in England in 1994. In the Austrian capital he studied philosophy, mathematics and physics. In 1928, he graduated in philosophy and in 1929, he was qualified to teach mathematics and physics in high schools. His main works are: 1 - Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935); 2 - The Poverty of Historicism (1944-1945); 3 - The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945); His contributions to numerous seminar and symposium proceedings are notable and always insightful. A member of the Royal Society, he was made a Sir in 1965. He is a visiting professor at many foreign universities, and his works have been translated into more than twenty languages. Research begins with problems. To solve problems, hypotheses must be developed as tentative solutions. Once proposed, the hypotheses must be proven. This is done by drawing consequences from the hypotheses and seeing whether or not these consequences are confirmed. If they are, we say that, for the time being, the hypotheses are confirmed. If, on the contrary, at least one consequence does not occur, then we say that the hypothesis is falsified. From this we can see that, in order to be proven in fact, a theory must be probable or verifiable in principle. In other words, it must be falsifiable, that is, it must be such that consequences can be drawn from it that can be refuted, that is, falsified by the facts. In fact, if it is not possible to draw consequences from a theory that can be factually verified, it is not scientific. However, it should be noted here that a metaphysical hypothesis today may become scientific tomorrow (as was the case with the ancient atomist theory, metaphysical in the time of Democritus and scientific in the time of Fermi). The deductive method of controls consists of this extraction of consequences from the theory under control and its comparison with the basic assertions (or protocols) that, as far as we know, describe the “facts”. Controls that, from a logical perspective, will never find an end, since, no matter how many confirmations a theory may have obtained, it will never be right, because the next control may disprove it. This logical fact is consistent with the history of science, where we see theories that resisted for decades and then ended up collapsing under the weight of contrary facts. In reality, there is a logical asymmetry between verification and falsification: billions and billions of confirmations do not make a theory true (such as, for example, that “all pieces of wood float in water”), whereas a single negative fact (“this piece of ebony does not float in water”) falsifies the theory, from a logical point of view. It is on the basis of this asymmetry that Karl Popper establishes the methodological order of falsification; since a theory always remains refutable, no matter how confirmed it is, it is necessary to try to falsify it, because the sooner an error is found, the sooner we can eliminate it, by formulating and testing a better theory than the previous one. In this way, Karl Popper’s epistemology reflects the power of error. As Oscar Wilde said, “experience is the name each of us gives to our own errors.” From all this, one can understand very well the centrality of the idea of ​​falsifiability in Karl Popper's epistemology: "I will not demand that a scientific system be capable of being chosen, in a positive sense, once and for all, but I will demand that its logical form be such that it can be put to the test, by means of empirical verifications, in a negative sense: an empirical system must be capable of being refuted by experience." One can see the adequacy of this criterion when we think of metaphysical systems, which are always verifiable (what fact does not confirm one of the many philosophies of history?) and never refutable (what fact could refute a philosophy of history or a religious vision of the world?)