I have not looked into it closely, they may or may not have their own website. My philosophy teacher claims to be a Popperian, but he sounds nothing like you or Brian, he does place a lot of emphasis on the whole ‘black swan white swan, falsification is possible but confirmation isn’t’ stuff.
Many of the people I am referring to are more casual fans than you and Brian, they may have read a few of his books or maybe just some secondary texts. They probably haven’t seriously looked into the details or underlying principles, and they definitely haven’t looked into the alternatives. When questioned about philosophy of science, Popper is their fall-back option.
FYI most people with casual knowledge of Popper have read summaries rather than Popper’s books (and, if anything, just read LScD and maybe OSE). In general secondary sources are unreliable and introduce many errors. In the case of Popper in particular the situation is much worse than usual and the secondary sources are jam packed with myths.
There are several reasons for this:
1) Popper questioned some deeply ingrained common sense cultural assumptions. People have a hard time grasping what his position even is, and that those assumptions aren’t laws of nature and are possible to be questioned.
2) Popper pissed some people off by criticizing them. In particular, Marxists. Marxists played a major role in spreading myths about Popper. Marxists are low on moral qualms about high quality scholarship.
3) Popper somewhat associated with some people he didn’t agree with. In particular the Vienna Circle. They published some of his work and took an interest in it. This encouraged the myth that Popper agreed with their main program, which he never did.
4) Some members of the Vienna Circle tried to understand on their own terms. Two major mistakes they made were:
A) they reinterpreted Popper’s criterion of demarcation between science and non-science (which is: science is stuff where empirical observations are relevant and used) as a criterion of meaningfulness. That is, they took it to mean non-science was meaningless. That is in line with their other philosophy, but Popper never thought anything like that.
B) they mistakenly took Popper’s ideas about falsification as a replacement for confirmation, instead of recognizing them as a different kind of thing.
Due to issues like these, people with a casual acquaintance with Popper aren’t really Popperians. They don’t get it. One has to study him more closely to get past issues like this, as well as the difficulty of the material (Popper solved major philosophical problems that many others failed to solve. It’s not that easy to understand.)
My friend Rafe Champion (http://www.the-rathouse.com/) has a particular interest in this. He takes new philosophy books, especially ones used by schools, and checks what they say about Popper. The answer is basically always: not much, and most of it wrong. Yudkowsky’s comments on Popper at http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes are representative of the mistakes found in most general overview philosophy books.
I have not looked into it closely, they may or may not have their own website. My philosophy teacher claims to be a Popperian, but he sounds nothing like you or Brian, he does place a lot of emphasis on the whole ‘black swan white swan, falsification is possible but confirmation isn’t’ stuff.
Many of the people I am referring to are more casual fans than you and Brian, they may have read a few of his books or maybe just some secondary texts. They probably haven’t seriously looked into the details or underlying principles, and they definitely haven’t looked into the alternatives. When questioned about philosophy of science, Popper is their fall-back option.
FYI most people with casual knowledge of Popper have read summaries rather than Popper’s books (and, if anything, just read LScD and maybe OSE). In general secondary sources are unreliable and introduce many errors. In the case of Popper in particular the situation is much worse than usual and the secondary sources are jam packed with myths.
There are several reasons for this:
1) Popper questioned some deeply ingrained common sense cultural assumptions. People have a hard time grasping what his position even is, and that those assumptions aren’t laws of nature and are possible to be questioned.
2) Popper pissed some people off by criticizing them. In particular, Marxists. Marxists played a major role in spreading myths about Popper. Marxists are low on moral qualms about high quality scholarship.
3) Popper somewhat associated with some people he didn’t agree with. In particular the Vienna Circle. They published some of his work and took an interest in it. This encouraged the myth that Popper agreed with their main program, which he never did.
4) Some members of the Vienna Circle tried to understand on their own terms. Two major mistakes they made were:
A) they reinterpreted Popper’s criterion of demarcation between science and non-science (which is: science is stuff where empirical observations are relevant and used) as a criterion of meaningfulness. That is, they took it to mean non-science was meaningless. That is in line with their other philosophy, but Popper never thought anything like that.
B) they mistakenly took Popper’s ideas about falsification as a replacement for confirmation, instead of recognizing them as a different kind of thing.
Due to issues like these, people with a casual acquaintance with Popper aren’t really Popperians. They don’t get it. One has to study him more closely to get past issues like this, as well as the difficulty of the material (Popper solved major philosophical problems that many others failed to solve. It’s not that easy to understand.)
My friend Rafe Champion (http://www.the-rathouse.com/) has a particular interest in this. He takes new philosophy books, especially ones used by schools, and checks what they say about Popper. The answer is basically always: not much, and most of it wrong. Yudkowsky’s comments on Popper at http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes are representative of the mistakes found in most general overview philosophy books.