The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Karl Raimund Popper  ## Metadata - Author: **Karl Raimund Popper** - Full Title: The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Category: #books - Tags: #epistemology ## Highlights - The problem of induction consists in asking for a logical justification of universal statements about reality. . . We recognize, with Hume, that there is no such logical justification: there can be none, simply because they are not genuine statements. This shows how the inductivist criterion of demarcation fails to draw a dividing line between scientific and metaphysical systems - We must distinguish between, on the one hand, our subjective experiences or our feelings of conviction, which can never justify any statement (though they can be made the subject of psychological investigation) and, on the other hand, the objective logical relations subsisting among the various systems of scientific statements, and within each of them. - Tags: #rationality #epistemology - My use of the terms 'objective' and 'subjective' is not unlike Kant's. He uses the word 'objective' to indicate that scientific knowledge should be justifiable, independently of anybody's whim: a justification is 'objective' if in principle it can be tested and understood by anybody. 'If something is valid', he writes, 'for anybody in possession of his reason, then its grounds are objective and sufficient.' - We must clearly distinguish between falsifiability and falsification. We have introduced falsifiability solely as a criterion for the empirical character of a system of statements. As to falsification, special rules must be introduced which will determine under what conditions a system is to be regarded as falsified. We say that a theory is falsified only if we have accepted basic statements which contradict it. This condition is necessary, but not sufficient; for we have seen that non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science. Thus a few stray basic statements contradicting a theory will hardly induce us to reject it as falsified. We shall take it as falsified only if we discover a reproducible effect which refutes the theory. In other words, we only accept the falsification if a low-level empirical hypothesis which describes such an effect is proposed and corroborated.