Conjectures and Refutations

by Karl Popper

• Contrasts the Empiricists (the philosophers that saw truth as something stemming from natural observation) with the rationalists (those that believed truth is something to be found through intellectual intuition)
• His argument is that both of these camps are not really that different at all. They both believe truth to be something whole that can be obtained in full in one way or the other. “It is plain, just look at these facts!” vs. “It is plain, just listen to my logic!”
• Popper says, look, truth is not like this at all. Truth is only something that we can move towards and never actually achieve. The process of uncovering truths is an unending, incremental process of error reduction. Truth is never something that can be obtained, rather it is only something that we can get closer and closer to.

Chapter 1, part I

One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

Chapter 1, part II

It is a typical soothsayer’s trick to predict things so vaguely that the predictions can hardly fail: that they become irrefutable.

This is almost exactly Justin EH Smith’s critique of Girard.