GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Perhaps,
one of the finest and most fascinating phenomena that have ever greeted the
human history was the overture of the modern scientific culture and its
unmitigated growth and development. The ascendance of this strand of cultural
emancipation and spectacular civilization did not just take place ‘at the drop
of a hat or two from the leaning tower of Pisa.’ It was rather subversive and
gradual, yet impressive. It had had its shadow cast during the ancient period
exemplified more or less in the Democritian atomism and most especially in the
Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic system. Its resonance was again heard in the
thirteenth century, typified by the various posits of Robert Grosseteste and
the ‘Doctor Mirabilis’- Roger Bacon. With Copernicus’ hypothesis and
postulations as is found in his De Revolutionibus Orbium[1]–his
conservatism and his extravagances not withstanding- a jolt was given to the
hitherto extant scientific paradigms. A new scientific framework became
anticipated. This new science as it were, became inevitable when it was given a
profound impetus as Galileo turned his telescope up to the skies, which
culminated in the ‘Scientific Revolution’ popularly associated with the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries[2]
when the stage became set for the new science to flourish and blossom. It was
during this period that the world witnessed the emergence of towering
intellects in the scientific world, viz: Galileo Galilei, the Danish
astronomer-Tycho Brahe, Johaness Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton, whose scientific
trajectories consummated the scientific enunciations of Copernicus, Kepler and
Galileo; Robert Boyle, William Harvey, Albert Einstein, the Jewish brain whose
actions led to the production of the first atomic bomb which was then couched
in the garb of THE MANHATHAN PROJECT,[3]
among others. These and more laid great foundations in physics- mechanics,
hydrostatics, astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology, to mention but a
few.

Ever since then science has registered such a
reverberating and resounding success that it has enjoyed among all ranks and
files outstanding accolade and so has almost always raised its head high,
reigning supreme more or less in its general principles and methodology. In
fact the rise of the classical science of the renaissance and post renaissance
era and the progress recorded therein have been so pronounced and profound that
no less a number of people and departments of life have been influenced by it
and its method. It has exercised a handsome effect on life and thoughts of
various peoples and nations, “opening up to them new vistas of knowledge and
directing them to new interests.”[4]
In particular, it has influenced philosophers and the mode of their philosophic
analysis. For instance, the major part of Cartesian philosophical edifice was
erected on a mathematical model as well as mechanics; mechanics occupied a
position of prominence in the Hobbesian reflections[5];
Historical science relatively held sway in the Hegelian philosophical expose[6];
while Bergson drank something of Biology and the evolutionary hypothesis.[7]
More still, Kant’s criticism of metaphysics had the scientific progressive
discovery and adventure as its referential point. His defense and justification
of the synthetic a priori form of judgement seems also to be informed by this.

Science became thus, the form and prototype of all
genuine disciplines. Edmund Husserl even tried to make philosophy a science! It
is not a far reaching assertion to say that almost all the philosophical posits
without prejudice to other influential elements, at the twilight of the
renaissance period, through the modern and even extending up to the
contemporary period have been scientifically motivated and oriented. Special
note must be taken of the Logical positivists. These were so held spell bound
by the paraphernalia of successes evident in the scientific arena that they
could not recognize as the latter Wittgenstein did, that life and language are
too supple and variable to make them fit into the strait-jacket of a single
method.[8]
They rather worked for the unity of science, and making a mountain out of a
molehill, they transposed the Baconian method into a theory or criterion of
meaning in their dogma of verification principle. With this they launched an
unwholesome broadside on metaphysics, which metamorphosed into a wholesale
rejection of the later, refusing metaphysical propositions any cognitive
meaning or literal significance.

With this
the climate was set for the genius of Sir Karl Raimund Popper, who rejected the
above position of the Logical positivists, popularly known as the Vienna
Circle, to make a thorough intellectual leap into the scientific terrain.
Having distinguished between (natural) science and non-science in his demarcation
principle, a principle bereft of any tone or assignation of criterion of
meaningfulness, Popper articulated a systematic study of the nature of science,
with regards to its methods, its concepts and its presuppositions. In all his
submissions, he had the growth of science in view.

He affirms
this when he asserts:

…my problem is the growth of knowledge. In which sense
can we speak of the growth or the progress of knowledge, and how can we achieve
it?[9]

Sir Karl Raimund Popper, who became famous as a result of
his theory of scientific method and his anti-sympathetic view of determinism,
was a British philosopher of science born in Vienna- Austria in the year 1902.
He received a doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) from the University of Vienna in
1928. Popper’s major contribution to philosophy of science was his
characterization of the scientific method. The principal aim of his Logikder Forschung[10]
(1934; transl. 1959 into English) was to debunk the deficiencies of the
prevailing view that science is fundamentally inductive in nature. Proposing a
criterion of falsifiability for scientific validity, Popper highlighted the
hypothetico-deductive character of science. Popper left Vienna during the Nazi
persecution of the Jews for New Zealand where he taught at the University of
Canterbury and later for London where he became a professor in Logic and
Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. He died on September 17,
1994.

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

The unassuaged desire and quest for the progressive
growth of science enkindled in that 21stC great philosopher of science, Sir
Karl, the urge to postulate and defend a theory of science which has an
analogical relation to the structure of what is today known in the history of
Philosophy as Kantian Copernican revolution. There was in Popper a shift from
the extant explanatory paradigm, a departure from the statusquo ante.
This anti-current stand was further strengthened immediately he perceived
clearly the destructive road along which the reigning ‘ideologies’ would stir
the scientific rudder, should the man of science adopt and appropriate them.
Yet the thought that the rationality and the empirical nature of science-,
which are tantamount to the existence of the said science,[11]
are deeply dependent on its progressive advancement had earlier on fascinated
him. It thus became imperative for Popper to break the dead lock by turning the
table as it were. He thus faulted with the thesis that science is fundamentally
inductive in nature as well as with the verification principle of the Logical
Positivists and in general made a shift from the class of the exponents of that
age-long epistemological optimism which purports to assert the theory of
manifest nature of truth. He introduced in their stead, his
Hypothetico-deductive model in which he emphasized the asymmetry of
verifiability and falsifiability in their relation to empirical evidence.
Observations can falsify but not verify a given hypothesis, which he maintains,
is in all evolution of knowledge an a priori application. He saw in the history
of science, like the history of all human ideas, a history of irresponsible
dreams, of obstinacy and of error. With this verisimilitude (i.e. nearness to
the truth), instead of verification (in as much as the later entails
assignation of truth values to scientific theories), became in Popper’s scheme
the highlighted concept and the aim of science.

PURPOSE OF STUDY

How
successful was Popper in ensuring the growth of science in his account of
scientific method and procedure? Whether or not he accomplished successfully
this task in his model, and to what extent, is the major concern of the present
researcher in engaging in this worthwhile venture of expounding the Popperian
strategy for the growth of science.

SCOPE OF STUDY

Great are
the intellectual exploits of Sir Karl. He made wonderful contributions in
Epistemology, the nature of authentic polity, philosophy of science, e.t.c. It
is with the later that we are concerned. But I do not hope to explore all his
submissions in this regard, for his philosophical legacies in this area are in
no less a measure great. Only those submissions of his, which explicitly or
implicitly make assertions about the model of scientific growth, are offered
admittance into the confines of the present research.

METHODOLOGY

The
conceptual and methodological tools of exposition, analysis and critical
evaluation are the prisms through which the subject matter is viewed and
explored. The critical evaluation has both the historical and ahistorical
dimensions. Press, 1979),