CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

INTRODUCTION

On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance

CONJECTURES

1 Science: Conjectures and Refutations

Appendix: Some Problems in the Philosophy of Science

2 The Nature of Philosophical Problems and their Roots in Science

3 Three Views Concerning Human Knowledge

1 The Science of Galileo and Its Most Recent Betrayal

2 The Issue at Stake

3 The First View: Ultimate Explanation by Essences

4 The Second View: Theories as Instruments

5 Criticism of the Instrumentalist View

6 The Third View: Conjectures, Truth, and Reality

4 Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition

5 Back to the Presocratics

Appendix: Historical Conjectures and Heraclitus on Change

6 A Note on Berkeley as Precursor of Mach and Einstein

7 Kant’s Critique and Cosmology

1 Kant and the Enlightenment

2 Kant’s Newtonian Cosmology

3 The Critique and the Cosmological Problem

4 Space and Time

5 Kant’s Copernican Revolution

6 The Doctrine of Autonomy

8 On the Status of Science and of Metaphysics

1 Kant and the Logic of Experience

2 The Problem of the Irrefutability of Philosophical Theories

9 Why are the Calculi of Logic and Arithmetic Applicable to Reality?

10 Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge

1 The Growth of Knowledge: Theories and Problems

2 The Theory of Objective Truth: Correspondence to the Facts

3 Truth and Content: Verisimilitude versus Probability

4 Background Knowledge and Scientific Growth

5 Three Requirements for the Growth of Knowledge

Appendix: A Presumably False yet Formally Highly Probable Non-Empirical Statement

REFUTATIONS

11 The Demarcation Between Science and Metaphysics

1 Introduction

2 My Own View of the Problem

3 Carnap’s First Theory of Meaninglessness

4 Carnap and the Language of Science

5 Testability and Meaning

6 Probability and Induction

12 Language and the Body-Mind Problem

1 Introduction

2 Four Major Functions of Language

3 A Group of Theses

4 The Machine Argument

5 The Causal Theory of Naming

6 Interaction

13 A Note on the Body-Mind Problem

14 Self-Reference and Meaning in Ordinary Language

15 What is Dialectic?

1 Dialectic Explained

2 Hegelian Dialectic

3 Dialectic After Hegel

16 Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Sciences

17 Public Opinion and Liberal Principles

1 The Myth of Public Opinion

2 The Dangers of Public Opinion

3 Liberal Principles: A Group of Theses

4 The Liberal Theory of Free Discussion

5 The Forms of Public Opinion

6 Some Practical Problems: Censorship and Monopolies of Publicity

7 A Short List of Political Illustrations

18 Utopia and Violence

19 The History of Our Time: An Optimist’s View

20 Humanism and Reason

Addenda: Some Technical Notes

1 Empirical Content

2 Probability and the Severity of Tests

3 Verisimilitude

4 Numerical Examples

5 Artificial vs. Formalized Languages

6 A Historical Note on Verisimilitude (1964)

7 Some Further Hints on Verisimilitude (1968)

8 Further Remarks on the Presocratics, especially on Parmenides (1968)

9 The Presocratics: Unity or Novelty? (1968)

10 An Argument, due to Mark Twain, against Naïve Empiricism (1989)

INDEX OF MOTTOES

INDEX OF SUBJECTS