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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: August 2010
Popper and Bartley and the philosophy of classical liberalism
This is a modified version of a paper on the philosophy and economics of liberalism. The paper was first written in the 1980s in a competition for a prize awarded by the Mont Pelerin Society. It was revised recently … Continue reading
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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy vs Karl Popper
A few years John Quiggin and I locked horns over the philosophy of economics. John is a leftwing blogger and he supported the Lakatosian approach, which I contested in a prolonged exchange until I thought I had him on toast. Then … Continue reading
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Knowledge and Biology
Many people I have discussed Popper with seem confused by Popper tying together evolution and epistemology in his book Objective Knowledge and other places. Evolution, they say, is all about biology and epistemology is about what people think. I’m going to try to clear up this confusion. Continue reading
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CR Scholars 2: Ian C Jarvie
Ian Jarvie was one of the anthropology students at the London School of Economics who drifted into Popper’s orbit and decided to stay. He has done some good work in partnership with Joe Agassi and he is one of the … Continue reading
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Did Talcott Parsons muddy the waters?
In the last decade or so some bridges have been built between sociology and ecconomics. This raises the question, why did they separate? Peter Boettke explored this question in a 1998 paper “Rational Choice and Human Agency in Economics and Sociology: … Continue reading
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The Source of Justificationism?
Yesterday I discovered an interesting paper. It is “Why do Humans Reason: Arguments for an Argumentative Theory” by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. Here is the abstract: Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better … Continue reading
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Strange crit of evolutionary epistemology
Gene Callahan has posted a very strange criticism of EE, inspired by the scholarly but eccentric contrarian John Gray. “This [is] an objection to evolutionary epistemology in all of its forms—that there is no reason whatever for supposing that the … Continue reading
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