Abstract

The late Sir Karl Popper supervised the editing of this collection of lectures and papers, all directed towards a general audience, whose original dates of appearance range from 1958-73. As the author notes in his introduction, many of the ideas present in this volume will be familiar to readers of his earlier works on scientific theory, and there is a certain amount of overlap among the various selections, but the volume is helpful in making clear many of the author's basic views, especially since a number of the lectures are devoted to rectifying assorted misconceptions that have arisen around his philosophy. In the essay entitled, "Reason or Revolution?" for instance, the author emphatically rejects positivism, a position that has been mistakenly attributed to him. In "Models, Instruments and Truth," he argues against a pragmatic or instrumentalist approach to science, insisting that scientists do not merely search for practical results, but actually seek objective truth, at least as an ideal goal.