Karl Popper Quotes About Mistakes

Quotes about: Mistakes

• Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.

  Karl Popper

  Mistake, Interesting, Objective Truth

  Karl Popper (2012). “In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years”, p.4, Routledge

• 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 most other fields of human endeavour there is change, but rarely progress ... And in most fields we do not even know how to evaluate change.

  Karl Popper

  Dream, Mistake, Learning

  1960 Conjectures and Refutations (published1963), ch.10.

• Serious rational criticism is so rare that it should be encouraged. Being too ready to defend oneself is more dangerous than being too ready to admit a mistake.

  Karl Popper

  Mistake, Criticism, Serious

• It is part of my thesis that all our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes.

  Karl Popper

  Truth, Mistake, Knowledge

  Karl Popper (2014). “Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge”, p.15, Routledge

• Psychologism is, I believe, correct only in so far as it insists upon what may be called 'methodological individualism' as opposed to 'methodological collectivism'; it rightly insists that the 'behaviour' and the 'actions' of collectives, such as states or social groups, must be reduced to the behaviour and to the actions of human individuals. But the belief that the choice of such an individualist method implies the choice of a psychological method is mistaken.

  Karl Popper

  Mistake, Believe, Science

  "The Open Society and its Enemies".

• Our aim must be to make our successive mistakes as quickly as possible. To speed up evolution.

  Karl Popper

  Mistake, Evolution, Speed

• 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 wrighteous stupidityill be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ.

  Karl Popper

  Mistake, Learning, Knowledge

  Karl Popper (2012). “In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years”, p.158, Routledge

• The fundamental thing about human languages is that they can and should be used to describe something; and this something is, somehow, the world. To be constantly and almost exclusively interested in the medium - in spectacle-cleaning - is a result of a philosophical mistake.

  Karl Popper

  Mistake, Philosophical, Fundamentals

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