Critical rationalism

Acknowledgments


I thank the editors of this volume, Ilhan Inan, Faik Kurtulmuş, and especially David Miller for helpful comments. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Turkish Academy of Sciences.


See also Confirmation; Epistemology of science after Quine; The historical turn in the philosophy of science; Logical empiricism; Metaphysics; Scientific method; Truthlikeness.
References


Bartley, W. W. (1984) The Retreat to Commitment, Chicago: Open Court.
Miller, D. (1994) Critical Rationalism, Chicago: Open Court.
Miller, D. (2006) Out of Error, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Musgrave, A. (1999) Essays on Realism and Rationalism, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
O’Hear, A. (1980) Karl Popper, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Popper, K. (1968a) Conjectures and Refutations, New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Popper, K. (1968b) The Logic of Scientific Discovery, New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Popper, K. (1971) The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume 2, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Popper, K. (1972) Objective Knowledge, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Popper, K. (1974) “Replies to My Critics”, in P. A. Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Karl Popper, La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Post, J. (1993) “A Gödelian Theorem for Theories of Rationality”, in G. Radnitzky and W. W. Bartley (eds) Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge, Chicago: Open Court.
Watkins, J. (1993) “Comprehensively Critical rationalism: A Retrospect”, in G. Radnitzky and W. W. Bartley (eds) Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge, Chicago: Open Court.
Further reading

Popper’s major works are listed above. To these may be added his Realism and the Aim of Science, which is volume 1 of The Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, ed. W. W. Bartley (London: Hutchinson, 1983). The Philosophy of Karl Popper (ed. P. A. Schilpp) contains both critical essays by many of the leading philosophers of science of the 20^th century and Popper's replies to them. Miller (1994) and (2006) are arguably the best and most consistent defenses of critical rationalism. John Wettersten’s The Roots of Critical Rationalism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992) uncovers the historical background to critical rationalism. O’Hear (1980) provides an overall critical exposition of Popper’s philosophy. Adolf Grünbaum’s “Is Falsifiability the Touchstone of Scientific Rationality? Karl Popper versus Inductivism,” in R. S. Cohen, P. K. Feyerabend, and M. W. Wartofsky (eds) Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976) is an incisive criticism of Popper’s view that rationality of science can be characterized in terms of falsifiability, to the exclusion of inductive supportability. For the application of Popper’s falsificationism to the social sciences see Noretta Koertge’s “Popper’s Metaphysical Research Program for the Human Sciences,” Inquiry 18 (1975): 437-62. Radnitzky and Bartley’s Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Science contains, among other things, a number of important articles on the limits of rationality and critical rationalism, including Watkins’s and Post’s criticisms of Bartley’s pancritical rationalism and his reply to them.