Karl Popper is one of the few contemporary intellectuals who has made a name for himself with both works on socio-political philosophy and research in the philosophy of science. “Conjectures and Refutations” is a book devoted to the theory of scientific knowledge, which takes one of the key places in his work. It not only summarizes the results of the completed work and plans the prospects for further research, but also applies the results obtained to socio-political problems.
The essays and lectures that make up this book are variations on one simple theme – variations on the thesis that we can learn from our mistakes. This essays and lectures develop a theory of knowledge and its growth. This is a theory of mind that ascribes to rational argumentation a modest but nonetheless important role in criticizing our frequent erroneous attempts to solve our problems.
It is at the same time a theory of experience that ascribes to our observations an equally modest and almost equally important role – the role of verification, which can help us detect errors. While it emphasizes our ability to make mistakes, there is no concession to skepticism, because it also emphasizes the fact that knowledge can grow and science can progress – precisely because we are able to learn from our mistakes.
Our knowledge and, in particular, scientific knowledge progresses thanks to unjustified expectations, guesses, tentative solutions to our problems, assumptions. These assumptions are controlled by criticism, that is, attempts at refutation, which include serious critical verifications. They are able to withstand these verifications, but they can never receive a positive justification: they can never be recognized as neither undoubtedly true, nor even “probable” (in the sense of the estimation of probabilities).
The book teaches the reader the most important thing. As we learn from our mistakes, our knowledge grows, although we do not know anything with complete certainty. However, here there is no reason to doubt the capabilities of mind, because our knowledge is able to grow. Moreover, since we cannot know anything with certainty, there are no place for indisputable authorities, complacency and vanity.
