Karl Popper 1902 - 1994

The Popper Project

The primary task of the Popper Project is to research, edit and publish books from the Karl Popper Archives, which the CEU has on loan from the Ianus Foundation. These 473 reels of microfilm contain the late Sir Karl Popper's unpublished manuscripts and correspondence through 1984. They represent a complete copy of the original papers currently housed in Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. The project envisions the joint publication by Routledge and CEU Press of more than ten volumes of Popper’s works, including correspondence, collected essays and complete texts.

Das Elend des Globalismus

Roland Walter Müller

Karl R. Popper's now 50 years old "Open Society" is an interesting reflection and personal account of one of the possible histories of political philosophy, but it is neither a definitive historical analysis nor a critical revision of the referred theories, although the danger is that it has been and will be taken as such. Popper's famous critique of historicism had led some social scientists to believe that there is no scientific way of dealing with the great problems of global politics or that it is meant to discourage such a line of thinking. Consequently, some of us are oblivious to the possibilities for human agency and progressive social change. In this paper, Popper's critique of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Marx is shown not to be in accord with Popper's, respectively Bartley's,  philosophy of science, specifically fallibilism and theoretical pluralism and their methodological criteria...

The Karl Popper Web

Evolution, Learning and Popper's Epistemology

Abstract:

Artificial Life algorithms are extensively used for Knowledge Acquisition tasks in Artificial Intelligence, but no theoretical justification for this fact has yet been provided.

Evolutionary Epistemology represents the ultimate development of Karl Popper's analysis of knowledge acquisition processes, and stretches to its extreme consequences his view of theory formation as a process of trial-and-error. In the most general case, Popper proved, every knowledge acquisition activity must be regarded as a sequence of casual conjectures and successive refutations, in tight analogy with evolutionary processes of mutation and natural selection.

Such analogy can even be regarded as an identity, after having blown the definition of knowledge up to include the implicit knowledge embodied in the physical structure of organisms.

Genetic Learning Systems, hence, turn out to be the straightforward implementation of a core epistemological principle, which not only connects biology to the theory of knowledge, but also provides a firm conceptual background to this technology.

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