Karl Popper is a philosopher of science who has argued that science is not about certainty, but about testing hypotheses and theories. He distinguished between what he called “critical rationalism” and “evolutionary epistemology.”
Philosopher had a great influence on economics, especially on the school known as Institutional Economics. He criticized the idea that human knowledge could be complete or certain. He argued against the idea that there was one true theory to explain all phenomena in the world.
Popper’s main contribution to philosophy of science was his criticism of inductivism, which assumes that scientific theories are derived from experience by means of induction. Popper argued that no amount of observations could ever confirm or verify a scientific hypothesis because it can always be falsified by an observation that does not match predictions made by the hypothesis. For example: If we see a swan and reason from this single observation that all swans are white, then we will have made an error if we see another swan that is not white. Inductivism is flawed because it ignores this possibility of falsification; it assumes that all swans are white until proven otherwise by an observation.
Although his ideas have been extremely influential in the field of philosophy of science, many scientists have criticized them as not being realistic enough. This is because Popper believed that all theories could be falsified at any time, which means they are never confirmed as true theories until they are dead and buried!
