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"One of the main tasks for human reason is to make the universe we live in understandable to ourselves. This is the task of science. There are two different components of about equal importance in this enterprise. The first is poetic inventiveness ..."
– Karl Popper
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Monthly Archives: July 2010
Things you wanted to know but were afraid to ask
About the different historical calenders. This calendar handles the change from Julian to Gregorian calendars in different countries. How a flintlock pistol works. With slow motion animation. The inventory of English royal ordinance in 1637. The formula to explain underwater … Continue reading
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On Obviousness
One criticism that I often read of Popper is that some ideas are just obvious, and so there is no need to take all this fallibilist stuff too seriously. As an example, people often say 1+1 = 2 is obvious … Continue reading
Posted in epistemology
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The David Stove Prize – call for nominations
The work of David Stove was recently raised on an email list as a corrective to Popper’s philosophy of science. This has prompted me to revive a dormant idea, along the lines of the Bent Spoon Award handed out each year by … Continue reading
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CR Scholars 1. Struan Jacobs
A new feature on the site! A roundup of CR scholars around the universe, starting with my Melbourne friend Struan Jacobs. He has wide ranging research interests from Michael Polanyi to policy issues in education and medicine. I won’t say … Continue reading
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Austrians in crisis
Pete Boettke meditating on the Austrian response to the New Deal and the same thing all over again. Re-reading these arguments one cannot help but think of the immediate application to the world today, and how the policies pursued so … Continue reading
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Why the Austrians need a better understanding of Popper
Popper has a low profile among the Austrians, although Pete Boettke often uses the slogan “think like a Misean, write like a Popperian”. The two Popperians with the best grip on economics are Larry Boland and Jack Birner but they … Continue reading
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The Perils of Paradigm Mentalities: Revisiting Kuhn, Lakatos, and Popper
Looks good. The abstract of this paper. I show how paradigm mentalities help justify rigid opposition to theoretical alternatives and limit critical insight. While paradigm mentalities may be fitting for disciplines that demonstrate Kuhn’s concrete scientific achievements, they constrain the … Continue reading
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Bill Bartley on the structure of Popper’s epistemology
The value of Bartley’s take on Popper was exemplified by my experience in a series of lectures to a group of people in Sydney who convened to discuss the Philosophy of Humanism. They met for an afternoon every two weeks over a period … Continue reading
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Colin Simkin’s great introduction to Popper
Colin Simkin became a close and lifelong friend of Karl Popper when they met in Christchurch (NZ) in 1937. Colin was a young economist, only in his 20s at the time and we met many year later, in Sydney in the 1980s. We … Continue reading
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Bill Bartley on line
Bill Bartley died in 1990 and so he did not have the opportunity to use email or put his work on line. He has an entry on Wiki but very little of his large output is on line. A website … Continue reading
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