Topic Summary:
Imma follow along Karl Popper’s book Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. I’ll go over the first chapter here.
Goal:
Learn about Induction, what Karl Popper says about it, and what his philosophy is about. I also wanna find early prerequisites that I can visit to improve my prerequisite knowledge
CF Relevance:
CR is a prerequisite to CF
The first chapter is called Conjectural Knowledge: My Solution of the Problem of Induction. I know conjectural knowledge was talked about in a CF article. Conjectural knowledge is knowledge that’s fallible. That means we can always find a mistake in it in the future I think. We may find out that there’s an error in the knowledge.
I think I’m having trouble talking about the issue of how there’s going to mistakes in fallible knowledge. I kind of know how tho cuz I can describe it in CF terms. There may be a mistake in our knowledge cuz we might find out more about the goal, or get more context. An error may come up there. A mistake or error is something that results in failure at the goal. It might not always be a goal cuz we could also talk about purpose or problems.
Here’s a quote about how CR views knowledge(It’s from the article Critical Rationalism Overview):
I think CF agrees with what CR calls conjectural knowledge. That’s knowledge we have. It’s useful for a purpose or goal. What I’m unsure here is how to talk about information and how that is useful or good for a purpose. I think it would help if I use logic and grammar well to understand how “good, useful” modifies information in the following:
Now that I found the quote it says “ideas” not information. Am I making error here? It’s like im misquoting stuff in my head. It’s also like I’m remembering stuff vs. knowing it.
I only have the physical book rn so I’m gonna write the quotes by hand:
Of course, I may be mistaken; but I think that I have solved a major philosophical problem: the problem of induction.
The problem of induction is a philosophical problem. Idk why I think it’s separate from philosophy. I think sometimes why are we talking about induction? Do people use that a lot? How big of an issue was it in the past? Is it still a big issue today? I think I don’t know that much about induction or its problem, so I don’t know how important it was to solve back then.
So it seems that there’s induction. It’s an idea. But there’s also a problem associated with it. There’s something about it that has an error or is wrong with it. Maybe there’s something we can make better about it. What could be better about it?
I see that Popper says that he thinks he solved the problem. Maybe that’s in line with his philosophy. He’s saying that the solution he found is conjectural knowledge. Idk
Also, the problem of induction is equal to a major philosophical problem. It seems he was working with philosophy and he encountered the problem of induction and sought to fix it.