Study On Popper's Knowledge Evolutionism

Popper's philosophy thought is occupying the status of forming a connecting link in the history of modern western scientific philosophy. It's an important link of carrying out the transition from historism to logicism. Popper, after finishing his argument of falsificationism in the fields of epistemology and methodology in the middle of sixty decades 20th century, has turned to the research of ontology of three worlds, evolutionary philosophy and biological philosophy. Especially, evolutionism is a very important part in his whole philosophy thought. The forming of Popper's knowledge evolutionism, is not only influenced by natural scientific revolution of the 20th century, and is set up on the basis of his falsficationism thought. The criticism and substitution to Newton's classical physics in Einstein's Theory of Relativity, make Popper realize that scientific knowledge is not eternal truth. Even those scientific theories that fully confirmed, they're still hypothesis after all. The course of theory development is actually the course of theory criticism, the course of theory evolution. Falsificationism which is built on the criticism of inductivism and verifiability principle, is the foundation of Popper's scientific philosophy. Universal statement of the scientific theory must be defined by a large number of experienced facts, but can be denied by specific experienced fact, because there's still potential possibility of falsification in the fact that has not been found yet. The competition of different theories realizes scientific development, through guess, falsification, guess again, the falsification again, close to the objective truth progressively, this is a mode of scientific development. Popper has proceeded from falsificationism and broken through a frame of regarding knowledge as static accumulation, regarded science as the dynamic course of knowledge increase. He has merged Darwin's biological evolutionism into it, and made broadly-defined explanation of such concepts as Darwin's "heredity", "variation", etc. Scientific growth is regarded as the evolution process like living beings. Popper has proposed knowledge evolutionism. Popper's theory goes against the traditional theory of knowledge, which has been trying to seek the definiteness of knowledge and proposes thatknowledge is suppositive and indefinite, and knowledge is objective. In Popper's view, there're three worlds. World one is the world of physics, world two is the world of spirit or psychology, and world three is the world of thought content, the world of objective knowledge. Objectivity, independence and actuality are the characteristics of world three. Popper has pointed out that the central issue of epistemology is the increase of knowledge. He has described the increase of knowledge especially scientific knowledge into the evolution course of Darwin's evolving type, scientific knowledge also experiences selection and elimination. Universal regulars in the field of biology such as survival struggle, natural selection, survival of the fittest, elimination of the unfittest also play a key role in the increasing process of knowledge. Tetradicschema which Popper has proposed increasing about knowledge: problem━tentative theory━elimination of error━new problem. Proceeding from problem at first, theories put forward in order to solve the problem are all tentative theories, just a kind of some suppositions, which may be wrong wholly or partially, then dispel wrong stage through examining the theory, theold problem can be solved, produces the new problem again. It moves in cycles like this. In Popper's opinion, the increase of scientific knowledge is a circulating development process that revolves around problems. Although it can not state the law of scientific knowledge increases in detail, it has still announced the course of scientific knowledge increases from a side, and has stressed the important function of "problem", "tentative theory"and "elimination of error"in this course. The appearance of Popper's knowledge evolutionism enriches content of knowledge theory, proposes a perfect scientific view for growth of knowledge. That he has combined evolutionism with the knowledge theory, regarded evolutionism as the foundation of knowledge theory is very creative. Following Popper, a lot of scholars of the west studied human knowledge in terms of evolutionism. By the seventies of the 20th century, the west formed the school of evolutionary epistemology. Generally speaking, Popper's knowledge evolutionism has established the foundation of evolutionary epistemology. The knowledge on evolutionism has already offered a new angle for probing into the scientific method,and has played an inspiring role in the development of modernscience. Proceeding from question and the spirit of suspecting andcriticizing, this is indispensable in our science explorations activity.Mistakes existing are reasonable in science, so don't be afraid tomake mistakes, so long as we can face it directly and correctly. Thefamous slogan "Learn from the mistakes", has added the new contentto scientific methodology. His thought about "mistake"makes usrealize that we should appraise the value and status of mistake inscientific activity again, which is worth of studying and drawinglessons from. But knowledge evolutionism also includes some flaws. Popperhas seen all theory have incompleteness and falsification, whichavoided turning the theory authority into an ossified dogma. Howeverhe has exaggerated the status, meaning and function of falsifiabilitymodus tollens. He has moved towards another extreme again whilecriticizing through the principle of verifiability. Because Popper'sscientific development pattern is a kind of falsificationism mode, histruth only has relativity but no absoluteness. Even so, we still admire the confrontational courage and spirit...