The war of ideas is a Greek invention. It is one of the most important inventions ever made. Indeed, the possibility of fighting with words and ideas instead of fighting with swords is the very basis of our civilization, and especially of all its legal and parliamentary institutions.
conjectures And Refutations: The Growth Of Scientific Knowledgeby karl Popper
The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.
In philosophy methods are unimportant; any method is legitimate if it leads to results capable of being rationally discussed. What matters is not methods or techniques but a sensitivity to problems, and a consuming passion for them; or, as the Greeks said, the gift of wonder.
methods / Passion / philosophy / sensitivity / wonder
This false epistemology, however, has also led to disastrous consequences. The theory that truth is manifest—that it is there for everyone to see, if only he wants to see it — this theory is the basis of almost every kind of fanaticism. For only the most depraved wickedness can refuse to see the manifest truth; only those who have reason to fear truth conspire to suppress it.
epistemology / fanaticism / manifest / theory / truth
It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one’s partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will be the more fruitful the more the partner’s backgrounds differ.
discussion / language / learn / understand
The method of learning by trial and error — of learning from our mistakes — seems to be fundamentally the same whether it is practiced by lower or by higher animals, by chimpanzees or by men of science.
A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
At least some of them, I suspect, have turned to probability theory in the hope that it would give them what they had originally expected from a subjectivist or epistemological theory of the attainment of truth through verification; that is, a theory of rational and justifiable belief, based upon observed instances.
belief / subjectivist / theory / truth
There is no reason to believe that a definition necessarily determines the ontological status of the term defined.
Criticism, I said, is an attempt to find the weak spots in a theory, and these, as a rule, can be found only in the more remote logical consequences which can be derived from it. It is here that purely logical reasoning plays an important part in science.
consequences / criticism / logical / science / theory