ABSTRACT
Some of the ideas that Karl Popper set out in his Logic of Scientific Discovery may
be familiar to those with an interest in philosophy. Thus, people may readily
identify him with the idea of falsifiability as the mark of science and of the falli-
bility of even our best scientific knowledge. They may know of his emphasis on
the logical asymmetry between verification and falsification, and his thesis that
a single counter-example may show that a general theory is false while confirma-
tions cannot show that it is true. They may also know that falsifiability was
offered as a theory of demarcation – of what marks the difference between science
and non-science – rather than as a theory of what is meaningful. They may also
be aware of the fact that Popper offers a solution to the problem of induction by
way of offering a rational but non-inductive account of the growth of knowledge,
through a process of conjecture and refutation.
