ABSTRACT
In taking the growth of scientific knowledge as a basic datum we are, in Popper’s view, led to far-reaching conclusions about knowledge generally, and about language, evolution and society. These conclusions will not be open to those whose epistemology is confined to the study of common-sense knowledge (or its expression in ordinary language) or to the formalization of scientific language, because they will miss the element of growth which is so striking a feature of scientific knowledge, and from which the conclusions about criticism and rationality follow. An assumption underlying Popper’s whole philosophy, then, is that in science we do have a prime example of the growth of knowledge. This must be an assumption on his part because, as his criteria for the growth of knowledge derive from his study of science, they cannot be used to justify any claim that in science knowledge grows. I imagine that Popper would hardly be prepared to argue seriously with anyone who denied outright that scientific knowledge has grown over the centuries, because in a perfectly obvious sense it has; one pointer to this growth is the growth in the technology connected with science, though Popper would not necessarily want to rest his claim that science grows on technological achievement, for such a defence would smack of an instrumentalist attitude to knowledge. Clearly, though, scientific knowledge has grown in the sense that the number and diversity of phenomena that have been brought under scientific explanations have constantly increased. However, there might be more difficulty for the view that this obvious growth of scientific knowledge in the western tradition represents any real growth of knowledge. A cultural relativist might be sceptical that our science was in any identifiable sense an improvement on the theories of prescientific cultures. At this point we will simply note this possibility, which will be further examined in chapter VI.
