Interesting exchange on a blog the other day. An economist took exception to a disparaging comment that I passed on the positivists and logical empiricists and he implied that Popper was himself a positivist. He defended Kuhn against my put down, saying he was old enough to have known Kuhn personally and mycritique is not convincing.
I don’t know what to say to a person who can’t tell the differencfe between Popper and the positivists but I suppose the impression comes across that he was somehow in the same boat because he devoted so much effort to debating with them. Anyway this begs the question, again, what are people in North America told about Popper?
Three more books checked out in the Sydney University library this afternoon.1. R J Solomon, Introducing Philosophy: A text with integrated readings. Ninth edition, 2008, OUP. 660 pages.
Popper is treated in two lines, indicating that for Popper, science proceeds by disconfirmation rather than induction.
That is in a section called introduction to logic, with a discussion of deduction and induction. There is a reading list but there is no reference to Popper. In the section on knowledge there is no sub-section on the philosophy of science, and no mention of Popper in the text or the reading list.
The blurb notes that Solomon has written 40 books, several of them introductory philosophy books.
2. R J Sample, C W Mills, J S Sterba (eds) Philosophy: the Big Questions. Blackwell, 2000. 530 pages.
No mention of Popper.
3. D E Cape and O S Fosl (eds) Philosophy: The Classic Readings. Wiley-Blackwell, 1360 pages. forgot to note date, but post 2000.
No index but there is a 9 page extract from chapter 10 of The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
I think that it is fair to say that this fragment is next to useless to convey the sense of Popper’s views, even in the philosoophy of science, not to mention his contribution in other fields.
