Philosophy of science
Karl Popper
1902 – 1994
Ask what evidence would change your mind before the evidence arrives. It is the cheapest available discipline against premature certainty.
Read alongside: Sense
- Start with
- Conjectures and Refutations (1963)
- Where they resist the book
- Strict falsification describes little of how organisations actually learn; most claims here are too entangled to be cleanly refuted.
Works worth the time
Conjectures and Refutations · 1963
More approachable than the Logic. The opening essay is enough for the discipline the book borrows.
Publisher: Routledge ↗Read further
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Karl Popper ↗
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Where Popper appears
Urgency is the most common defeater of judgement.
Speed is not the enemy; unexamined speed is. Toulmin's anatomy of an argument — claim, grounds, warrant, rebuttal — is a way of slowing a decision by exactly one useful step. Popper's contribution is the habit of asking what evidence would change your mind, before the evidence arrives.
Keep the account of why you were wrong.
Forecast, record, review. Tetlock's work shows that calibration improves only when predictions are written down before the outcome and revisited afterwards. The organisational version is a decision log that survives reorganisation.