Saturday, December 17, 2016

Book Review | All life is problem solving – Karl Popper

The author takes a different approach towards understanding, accepting and using criticism among many other related themes in his book. Using occasional mathematical language, he beautifully showcases how when you are proven wrong in any context, it’s not actually you who is wrong, but it is your hypothesis (the starting point of your statement/argument made on the basis of limited knowledge available at that point of time). You are not your hypothesis!

You add to your knowledge from the result of the hypothesis. A hypothesis once formed can be either proven right or wrong, that doesn’t validate or invalidate you as a whole. He remembers the Greek saying, ‘Only Gods have Certain knowledge (undisputable), men have only opinions’.

Below are some extracts from the book to grab your interest.

“Let your hypothesis die for you, you don't.”

“Science emerged through the invention of critical discussion.”

“A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right, someone who is willing to learn from others, critical discussion. He doesn't think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth, but he does think that, in sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us separate wheat from chaff.”

“Critical discussion can give us the necessary maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it."

“Perhaps I am wrong and you are right; anyway, we can both hope that after our discussion we will both see things more clearly than before, just so long as we remember that our drawing closer to the truth is more important than the question of who is right.”

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