No, he doesn’t begin unended quest with that anecdote. His book begins with a anecdote about a discussion about essentialism with his father when he was young. Though it has been a while since I read it so I might be wrong.
Wait, it’s not that totalitarianism doesn’t allow for falsifiability. In Open society he generalises falsifiability to criticisability; it isn’t just about scientific criticism, but about criticism in general, applied to ethics and everything else. Falsifiability has the form it does, because that is the form that criticism takes in general. Criticism is directed towards revealing errors and doing our best to correct them. Totalitarianism restricts this error-correction processes and directs it towards technical processes which propogate the totalitarian state in question. Popper was deeply anti-technocratic as well. Since falsification is a type of criticism, then it follows that it will itself be corrupted and curtailed to the benefit of the totalitarian state.
David Edmonds makes at least 3 errors in explaining Popper’s position. 1. The way he contrasts verifiability criterion and falsifiability criterion, people could easily go away thinking falsifiability was a criterion of meaning or significance, when it is not. Popper denied that a criterion of meaning was possible or even desirable. 2. When you have counter-evidences to a theory, it does not disprove the theory. A theory is rejected only when a decision is made to accept the counter-evidence as actually refuting the theory. The counter-evidence cannot prove that the theory is refuted. 3. When a theory is refuted that doesn’t indicate that it isn’t scientific, only that given all the evidence statements are correct, the theory is false.
No, he doesn’t begin unended quest with that anecdote. His book begins with a anecdote about a discussion about essentialism with his father when he was young.
Though it has been a while since I read it so I might be wrong.
Wait, it’s not that totalitarianism doesn’t allow for falsifiability. In Open society he generalises falsifiability to criticisability; it isn’t just about scientific criticism, but about criticism in general, applied to ethics and everything else. Falsifiability has the form it does, because that is the form that criticism takes in general. Criticism is directed towards revealing errors and doing our best to correct them. Totalitarianism restricts this error-correction processes and directs it towards technical processes which propogate the totalitarian state in question. Popper was deeply anti-technocratic as well.
Since falsification is a type of criticism, then it follows that it will itself be corrupted and curtailed to the benefit of the totalitarian state.
David Edmonds makes at least 3 errors in explaining Popper’s position.
1. The way he contrasts verifiability criterion and falsifiability criterion, people could easily go away thinking falsifiability was a criterion of meaning or significance, when it is not. Popper denied that a criterion of meaning was possible or even desirable.
2. When you have counter-evidences to a theory, it does not disprove the theory. A theory is rejected only when a decision is made to accept the counter-evidence as actually refuting the theory. The counter-evidence cannot prove that the theory is refuted.
3. When a theory is refuted that doesn’t indicate that it isn’t scientific, only that given all the evidence statements are correct, the theory is false.