Popper’s Philosophy and Learning

This short article introduces the connection between Popper’s philosophy on scientific discoveries and Bayesian learning. 1 Popper Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902−1994), was an Austrian-born British philosopher of science. He was educated at the University of Vienna. His first book, Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) (Popper 1959) has become a classics in philosophy of science, in which he criticized psychologism, naturalism, inductionism, and logical positivism, and put forth his theory of potential falsifiability being the criterion for what should be considered science. Popper argued strongly against the observationalist-inductivist account of science. That makes him agreed with Hume on the Problem of Induction. He also pointed out the importance of falsification as the demarcation of science and non-science and the asymmetry of falsification and verification. His points of views are actually supporting Bayesian probability rather than frequentists’ view towards probability. His belief in Evolutionary Epistemology may guide the future direction of the research of learning and inductive reasoning. He is counted among the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. Popper is perhaps best known for repudiating the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science; by advancing empirical falsifiability as the criterion for distinguishing scientific theory from non-science; and for his vigorous defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism which he took to make the flourishing of the “open society” possible. In his The Open Society and Its Enemies, he wrote: Man has created new worlds − of language, of music, of poetry, of science; and the most important of these is the world of the moral demands, for equality, for freedom, and for helping the weak. Here in this article we are not trying to discuss his philosophy on social science and humanity. We will only discuss his philosophy in scientific discovery. 2 Problem of Induction The method of basing general statements on accumulated observations of specific instances is know as induction, and it seen as the criterion of demarcation between science and non-science. Scientific 1This section is basically based on the second chapter of (Magee 1973)