All Life Is Problem Solving

Since Karl Popper’s views on objective knowledge and scientific “logic” seem to be gaining a little traction in KM these days, I think it may be a good idea to offer a clear statement about his views on fallibilism and falsificationism, especially since I agree with them. Fallibilism is the idea that no knowledge claim, even one that is true, can be proved beyond doubt. And, by the way, that includes meta-knowledge claims asserting that a particular knowledge claim is false. As Popper put it: “By ‘fallibilism’ I mean here the view, or the acceptance of the fact, that we may err, and that the quest for certainty (or even the quest for high probability) is a mistaken quest.” As a fallibilist, Popper claimed that statements about the world could neither be proved nor disproved, if by “proof” one means “justification” of a knowledge claim as certainly true.

To express the spirit of his fallibilism, Popper enjoyed quoting (p. 205) the presocratic Ionian school philosopher, Xenophanes:

“The Gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
All things to us; but in the course of time,
Through seeking, men find that which is the better.
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor will he know it; neither of the gods,
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
And even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it;
For all is but a woven web of guesses.”

Some in KM seem to confuse fallibilism with naïve falsificationism, a position sometimes incorrectly attributed to Popper, which asserts that statements can be conclusively disproved, but not conclusively proved. Apart from his fallibilism, which he shares with Peirce and American Pragmatist philosophers generally, however, Popper advocated a version of falsificationism which stated that universal generalizations or laws can be “refuted” or “falsified” by a single disconfirming instance, but cannot be verified by any number of instances consistent with the generalization. This is sometimes referred to as the asymmetry of verification and falsification. In presenting this view, Popper is careful to make clear that “the facts” do not themselves falsify or refute generalizations, or verify singular statements for that matter. He says that it is we who do that through our decisions. The most that facts and logic can tell us is whether or not our network of knowledge claims has a problem of inconsistency, and that to solve this problem we will have to decide that one or more knowledge claims in our network is false. Such a decision, not logical proof or disproof, is at the end of the falsification process.

To Be Continued