Popper, Sir Karl

Popper, Sir Karl (Raimund)

(born July 28, 1902, Vienna, Austria—died Sept. 17, 1994, Croydon, Greater London, Eng.) Austrian-British philosopher of natural and social science. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), he rejected the traditional conception of induction, which held that a scientific hypothesis may be verified through the accumulation of confirming observations, arguing instead that scientific hypotheses can at best only be falsified. His later works include The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), The Poverty of Historicism (1957), and Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery (3 vol., 1981–82).