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Sources of Knowledge

Popper, Science & Democracy

Brian King follows Popper’s idea of the evolution of knowledge, life and society.

In an age in which both science and pseudo-science are more prominent than ever, it is useful to have a way to distinguish between them. The Austrian-British philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper (1902-94) gave us just that, in his 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery. He called it falsification. A truly scientific theory, he said, consists of statements that can be rigorously tested against the evidence and potentially found to be false. Popper claimed that falsifiability is the key feature differentiating science from all other ways of thinking.

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