Karl Popper noticed that there were two different ways science was done, and that not all science was equal. Sigmund Freud, a famous psychologist, might predict someone’s emotional issues by their childhood or by a past traumatic event. Albert Einstein would make a prediction about his general theory of relativity and wait for an eclipse to prove if it was wrong. Popper noticed that the difference between these two ways of predicting was how they proved their theories. Freud could find evidence to support his theories wherever he wanted because he used the past to predict the present. Einstein didn’t do that, instead he used his ideas to predict the future. When you predict from the past, it’s really hard to be wrong. The things Freud predicted were things that were currently true, and since emotional problems happen for a reason, the past always matched his predictions because he could interpret the past however he wanted.

Albert Einstein was being risky, if his predictions about the eclipse were wrong, his entire theory would be disproven. He called what Einstein did as science and what Freud did as pseudo-science. Popper believed that pseudo-science only served to confirm beliefs while real science served to disprove, which is the only real way to prove anything. Something that I find problematic about people is when they try to prove that something they said was correct by looking at a random article online. It’s easy to prove or support almost any theory. If I want to prove that the world will end in five years, I could probably find some evidence to support that claim. I could just ignore and pretend I didn’t notice any other source that disagreed with me, and doing something like that has no scientific claim. The scientific method is to observe without preconceived notions, but no matter what, people bring in some preconceived notions, and this is probably how Freud became a pseudo-scientist.

So basically, pseudo-science confirms beliefs and science disconfirms them. Popper thought that real confirmation only counts if the predictions were risky, if they could disprove your entire belief. He said all good scientific theories leave things out, they don’t explain everything. He believed that every false belief gets us one step closer to understanding solely true things. He also thought that a good way to prove something is to attempt to prove that it’s wrong. So if I wanted to prove that the world is ending in five years, I'd wait five years to see if the world still exists. This is an example of a risky prediction because if I’m wrong and the world still exists after five years, my whole theory is blown. Since the only way to prove something is to attempt to disprove it, theories that can’t be proven wrong aren’t scientific. I could say that there’s a planet we haven’t discovered yet where pelicans worship a turtle king and no one could prove me wrong. Because they can’t prove me wrong, I can’t claim my theory is scientific or certain. In fact, no one can be certain of anything in science, theories just become increasingly more likely.

The hardest and maybe most difficult part of Popper’s theory was being willing to give up a belief. If you believed something and it turned out to not be true, if you’re a scientist or claiming a theory to be scientific, you have to be willing to stop believing that theory. You have to accept the evidence and simply just move on. Many people have a very hard time with this, people really hate being wrong. But for Popper, knowledge was probability and contingency. We are justified in believing whatever seems most probable but we should be willing to change and let go of our beliefs if new data arises (that’s the contingency part). In that way, knowledge is a constant search for truth and Popper suggests that we should stay open minded about everything, because we may just be wrong.

This is the last blog post I’ll be writing about philosophy for a while. I chose to end the discussion with Karl Popper because I think what philosophy is all about is trying to understand more about the world. That’s why I started the blog posts off with philosophy, I think it makes people question their beliefs and question why they believe what they do. I hope you stick around with The World We Live In so you can read me talking/teaching about different subjects. Philosophy has taught us that the world isn’t simple, but every time we learn something new, we get closer to the truth.



See you in two weeks with another subject (sorry if this was more bleak than the other blog posts, it is the last in this specific series, after all)!