The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Many of Karl Popper’s philosophies can be better understood within the historical context of the first half of the 20th century, including the reactionary nature of his ideas to the political climate of World War II. When Popper wrote the draft that would later become The Logic of Scientific Discovery, he was eager to complete and publish a book that would provide his family with the opportunity to leave Austria before Nazism secured its hold. The successful publication of an academic work would make him a more viable candidate for universities in other countries. Popper was born into a Jewish family, and he recognized the ever-increasing prominence of the German Reich in Europe. Austria’s political leaders were acquiescing to many of Hitler’s demands, and Popper knew that his home country was in trouble. He finished the book just a few years before Germany annexed Austria.

Meanwhile, the early- to mid-20th century experienced a scientific boom. Popper lived in a time of automatic transmissions, televisions, and the atomic bomb. It was also the time of racist propaganda presented as a false branch of scientific study called eugenics. Positivistic methods and damaging ideologies meant that evidence could be manipulated and interpreted to justify almost anything. Popper saw a contradiction between the falsifiable methodology of Einstein’s theory of relativity and the confident and inherently false messages of racial discrimination. The public paid equal attention to science and pseudoscience and saw no distinction. Popper sought to change that.

In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper argues that science should seek to falsify through experience rather than verifiability. He utilizes the swan to explain this idea. If scientists only ever saw white swans, they might make the universal statement that all swans are white. However, Popper proposes that it only takes the existence of one black swan to falsify this statement. Scientific statements should be constructed in a way that allows for testing that may falsify the hypotheses. This emphasis on falsifiability carried over into Popper’s political philosophies. Although he embraced Marxism as a teenager, he soon felt that Marxism lacked credibility in a similar way to non-sciences. He felt that its initial construction was rooted in scientific method but popular interpretations and applications turned into something more akin to mythology. Therefore, falsifiability became the threshold for Popper’s respect and devotion. Any idea could be falsified, and any scientific approach should seek that result.

This new criterion led Popper to reject historicism and to embrace the concept of the open society. The term first coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson in 1932 represents a society in which citizens make personal decisions that contribute to the collective shifts of a community. Popper pointed to the democratic government of classical Greece as an example of how an open society could work. He recognized that open societies were prone to conflict because individuals in an open society are allowed to make decisions and change their minds. This type of system naturally creates tension. Frustrated by this tension and scared of the change that was taking place all around them, many Athenians sought to re-establish tribalism and a closed society, sending philosophers like Socrates into hiding. However, Popper was adamant that this tension was worth it. He compared the fascism and totalitarianism of Nazism with the decline of Ancient Greece.

Popper’s philosophical works on open societies, fascism, and historicism were epistemological; he saw anything short of an open society as an invitation to totalitarianism and, therefore, the enemy of original thought. For the philosopher and scientist, the beauty of an open society was that it had falsifiability. Totalitarianism presented a united and infallible front. The needs and beliefs of the state were dominant and trumped any contradictory evidence. An open society had room for falsifiability; ideas that a democracy once clung to could be altered or abandoned as experience challenged them.