ABSTRACT
The symposium on the intellectual development of the young Popper signals that Popper has finally, and belatedly, become a subject of historical research. Historical scholarship on Popper was especially late in coming. His philosophy was formed in the interwar Central European milieu but became popular in the postwar trans-Atlantic world. Popper always worked alone, leaving a patchy public record. His intellectual autobiography — a rational reconstruction leading from 1919 to Logik der Forschung — obstructed as much as helped the historian. Popper’s solution found its application in a critique of the avant-garde of the philosophy of science — the Vienna Circle. His lengthy engagement of Schlick’s 1931 essay on ‘Causality in Contemporary Physics’ led him to develop a fabulous critique of conventionalism that moved falsifiability from the margins of his revolution — a crucial aspect of decidability — to the centre, the defining moment of his philosophy.
