Critical Rationalism is an epistemology developed for scientific inquiry. It is the inverse of justificationary rationalism.

ASSERTIONS:

  1. That justificationism tells us us nothing about truth content (you can support something as much as you want but that does not make it true.)

  2. That the means of creating an hypothesis are irrelevant. Instead, if hypothesis survives all possible criticism, it remains a truth candidate.

  3. That the evolutionary sequence: intuition, hypothesis, theory, law, and tautology applies universally, and that justificationary language is merely false.

  4. That even if we identify a very parsimonious truth candidate with broad explanatory power, we may never know if it is the most parsimonious truth candidate possible (“the truth”).

  5. That we cannot choose between the likelihood of competing theories (“critical preference”). (I see this as a guiding logical or moral principle but not an empirical one.)

SUMMARY

One’s testimony (promise of truth) can rely upon:

……..1) Justification: An Impersonal Proof of Truth;

–or–

……..2) Criticism: A Personal Warranty against imaginary content, error, bias, wishful thinking, and deception.

Since the first is impossible, we are left with the second.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev Ukraine (London)