Karl Popper and the Social Sciences

Abstract

This chapter explores the heretofore unexplored social themes that arise and recur in Popper's writings.To begin to redress this gap in the Popperian scholarship, Popper's (2008) recently published posthumous work is of particular interest to our discussion.I pay close attention to parts IV and V of this milestone book, which contains several of Popper's unpublished materials concerned with social issues.These materials were collected from various archives preserved respectively at Stanford University (USA), University of Canterbury (New Zealand), and Klagenfurt University (Austria).In addition, Popper's correspondence with the philosopher Rudolf Carnap (see Carnap's archives at the University of Pittsburg, USA) are included.Because the scope of this project is limited, further work is necessary, especially publication aimed at unearthing Popper's materials that are housed at the London School of Economics and Political Science.Indeed, the entire catalog of Popper's archived work represents an enormous amount of unpublished materials that cannot be adequately or faithfully reproduced in a single book chapter.It is important to warn the reader that Popper's oeuvre, and in fact, all his books (perhaps with the exception of Furschung der Logic) are comprised of a mélange of papers and drafts, written in a variety of genres, including lectures, correspondences, conference presentations, and drafts.Even though the majority of his work was written in English, each text was written under different circumstances, at different times, and for different purposes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.