Karl Popper

Austrian-British · 1902–1994

Karl Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher of science whose central contribution was the principle of falsifiability — the idea that a theory is scientific only if it makes predictions that could in principle be shown to be false. His 1934 The Logic of Scientific Discovery and the later Conjectures and Refutations reframed the growth of knowledge as a process of bold guesses tested against reality, rather than accumulation of confirming instances. His political works, The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, attacked what he saw as the closed, prophetic strands in Plato, Hegel, and Marx. David Deutsch's later work extends Popper's epistemology beyond science into a general theory of knowledge.

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