John Wettersten

• Adjunct Professor at University of Mannheim

Psychology of learning, philosophy of science, Karl Popper, Education

Back Cover of Learning from Error

Front Cover to Learning From Error

Research in cognitive psychology has been by and large dominated by attempts to explain how psychological processes can be explained as products of biological ones; these processes are presumed to be causal. These theories fail to account for and be integrated with theories of non-causal mental activities. In order to bridge this gap a new theory o...

Poppers Studien der Methodologie und der politischen Konsequenzen der Sozialwissenschaften begannen innerhalb des Rahmens der Österreichischen Schule der Ökonomie, deren Begründer Carl Menger war. Am Anfang von Poppers Forschung in den Sozialwissenschaften war seine Deutung des Inhalts dieser Schule vor allem von Friedrich von Hayek bestimmt. Die E...

Karl Bühler hat zur Entwicklung von Karl Poppers Forschungsgebieten drei wichtige Beiträge geleistet. Erstens hat er Popper in die laufende Forschung der Mitglieder der Würzburger Schule eingeführt, und die Richtung dieser Forschung hat in wichtigen Punkten Popper ein Leben lang beeinflusst. Dabei hatte er sich zunächst die nicht-assoziative Psycho...

Economic research is often isolated from social and political deliberations. Politicians put distinct results together in ad hoc ways. This state of affairs is explained as a result of equating rationality with coherence, system, and justification; the rationality principle, according to which social facts are to be explained as the result of coher...

In den 1980er-Jahren war Hans Alberts Lehrstuhl der Ausgangspunkt für meine Versuche, meine Forschung voranzutreiben und eine annehmbare Stelle zu finden. Mit seiner Unterstützung ist es mir gelungen, mein erstes Ziel zu erreichen; denn bis heute habe ich über hundert Veröffentlichungen gemacht, darunter vier Bücher und über siebzig Artikel. Der zw...

A description of the often neglected portrayal of the problems facing the history of science today is followed by a brief review of varying methodological approaches found in the history of the history of science, above all from William Whewell to the present. A critical appraisal of Joseph Agassi’s thesis that there have been only three methodolog...

Two sharply separated traditions in the philosophy of science and in thought psychology began with Otto Selz’s psychology. The first tradition began with Karl Popper; it has been developed by many others. The developers of the second tradition have included Julius Bahle, Adriaan de Groot, Herbert Simon, and Gerd Gigerenzer. The first tradition has...

The early research of Karl Popper both in psychology and in philosophy of science is described; its basis for his later breakthroughs in the philosophy of science is explained. His debt to Otto Selz’s thought psychology is thereby detailed. Otto Selz’s philosophy of science is then explained, and its conflict with Popper’s early as well as his late...

Theories of natural thought processes have traditionally served as foundations for philosophies of science. The source of all knowledge is passively received observations; these are combined to produce certain knowledge. After David Hume showed that this was not possible, deductivist alternatives, that is, theories that find a source of knowledge i...

The very dubious results of Der Positivismusstreit are explained as consequences of a methodological breakdown between two schools. But this debate is nevertheless relevant for today’s discussions due to its historical role in setting today’s framework. The methodological breakdown between the schools is overcome to a partial degree by presuming so...

To elucidate how differing theories of rationality lead to differing practices, their social rules must be analyzed. This is true not merely in science but also in society at large. This analysis of social thinking requires both the identification of innate cognitive social psychological processes and explanations of their relations with differing...

Standard versions of the sociology of rational practice assume justificationist theories of rationality: all rational beliefs are justified and rational individuals do not believe any non-justified statements. This theory appears to some to offer the possiblity of finding “deeper” insights into social behavior: some actions presented by actors as “...

Extremists who have been well educated in science are quite common, but nevertheless puzzling. How can individuals with high levels of scientific education fall prey to irrationalist ideologies? Implicit assumptions about rationality may lead to tremendous and conspicuous developments. When correction of social deficits is seen as a pressing proble...

Raimo Tuomola has complained that my critical review of his The Philosophy of Sociality is superficial, that I have not presented, even that I have misrepresented his work, and that I have neglected its virtues, which others have praised. I reject his complaint about the content of my review as unwarranted in an open society, as he demands that I t...

Karl Popper and Amartya Sen have developed social theories, which are very close to each other, though neither has taken notice of the other. The independent programs they propose for the development of their theories go astray, because they build on standard economic methods, albeit in different ways. A better approach for the development of each...

Popper's theory of demarcation has set the standard of falsifiability for all sciences. But not all falsifiable theories are part of science and some tests of scientific theories are better than others. Popper's theory has led to the banning of metaphysical and/or philosophical anthropological theories from science. But Joseph Agassi has supplement...

All fallibilist theories may appear to be defective, because they allegedly underestimate the security of at least some scientific knowledge and thereby leave science less defensible than it otherwise might be. When they call all scientific knowledge conjectural they may seem at first blush to underestimate the superiority of science vis a vis pseu...

Popper's theory of the attraction of closed societies conflicts with his theory of research: the former sees rational thought as contrary to man's nature, whereas the latter sees it as an innate psychological process. This conflict arose because Popper developed a theory of the movement from the closed society—Heimat—to civilized society, which see...

Tenure should not be judged on its ability to promote whistle-blowing. Because the process of getting tenure may weed out those who might later need it, reform is called for. Reform of tenure must take into account not only the Salieri-effect, but also Thomas Kuhn's popular philosophical attack on independent thought and the tendency towards the us...

I. C. Jarvie interprets Popper’s philosophy of science as a theory of the institution of science, explains how the social aspect of his theory developed, and suggests that an updated version of Popper’s social theory should be used to study both scientific and nonscientific societies today. Although (1) Jarvie’s description of the emergence of Popp...

Journal of the History of Ideas 66.4 (2005) 603-631 Seven essays that Popper wrote from 1925 to 1932–33 show Popper's transition from a fresh student of pedagogy into a serious philosopher of science ten years later. His first essay was published in 1925, and in 1934–35 he presented a revolutionary philosophy. These essays led first to Die beiden G...

Whether Popper’s philosophy will be used widely enough to shape the philosophy of science in the future will determine what his role in the history of the philosophy of science will be. The choice is that between the quest for deeper understanding of science and society, on the one hand, and the maintenance of old and comfortable views, on the othe...

Bernard Lavor and John Kadvany argue that Lakatos’s Hegelian approach to the philosophy of mathematics and science enabled him to overcome all competing philosophies. His use of the approach Hegel developed in his Phenomenology enabled him to show how mathematics and science develop, how they are open-ended, and that they are not subject to rules,...

Philosophers have tried to explain how science finds the truth by using new developments in logic to study scientific language and inference. R. G. Collingwood argued that only a logic of problems could take context into account. He was ignored, but the need to reconcile secure meanings with changes in context and meanings was seen by Karl Popper,...

Presentation du huitieme volume de l'ouvrage de M. Schmid intitule «Rationalite et formation de la theorie», consacre a «La philosophie de K. R. Popper et au rationalisme critique» (1996). Se proposant d'augmenter l'efficacite de l'individualisme methodologique de Popper pour les sciences sociales, l'A. defend quatre theses: 1) que celui-ci ne doit...

This article discusses the following: (i) The acceptability of diverse styles of rationality suggests replacing concern for uniqueness with that for coordination, (ii) Popper's lowering of the standard of rationality increases its scope insufficiently, (iii) Bartley's making the standard comprehensive increases its scope excessively, (iv) the plura...

In his path-breaking Towards a Rational Philosophical Anthropology Joseph Agassi has led the way in the quest for an alternative to reductionist theories in metaphysics, in science and in methodology. These theories, he has effectively argued, are based in an all-or-nothing view of rationality which we need to overcome. They lead us to explain away...

The question whether attempts to vindicate induction should be abandoned in favor of (other) problems of rationality is pressing and difficult. How may we decide rationally when standards for rationality are at issue? It may be useful to first know how we have decided in the past. Whewell's philosophy of science and the reaction to it are discussed...

The nineteenth-century appraisal of Whewell's philosophy as confused, eclectic, and metaphysical is still dominant today. Yet he keeps reappearing on the agenda of the historians and philosophers of science. Why? Whewell continues to be a puzzle. Historians evade the puzzle by deeming him to have had no serious philosophy but some interesting ideas...

Analyse du role de la methodologie dans l'apprehension des problemes sociologiques et plus generalement dans le perfectionnement de la sociologie de la science. Principe du developpement necessaire d'une relation reciproque entre methodologie et sociologie de la science pour le benefice de chacune. Approche de la division qui existe entre les metho...

The problem of how to handle interesting but ignored thinkers of the past is discussed through an analysis of the case of Ludwik Fleck. Fleck was totally ignored in the ‘30s and declared an important thinker in the 70s and ‘80s. In the first case fashion ignored him and in the second it praised him. The praise has been as poor as the silence was un...

The importance of the problem of how to integrate psychology and methodology was rediscovered by Oswald Klpe. He noted that Wundt's psychology was inadequate and that a new methodology was needed to construct an alternative. Klpe made real progress but his program turned out to be quite difficult: he had no appropriate method for integrating the tw...

The psychological and methodological bases of the Agassi teaching method are described to provide a context for evaluating the theory. A brief history of Selzian psychology and Popper's methodology is given. The Agassi method, which stresses learning through questioning, is detailed. (JL)

Agassi's elaboration of some aspects of his views on teaching gives reason to review further the historical development of the ideas of Selz, Popper, and Agassi. We may thereby take stock of some of the differences between the three theorists and make some provisional appraisals as to how we might carry this discussion further. Although Selz develo...

The problem of rational choice is as old as philosophical ethics. Indeed these two problems are (nearly) identified since the problems of philosophical ethics are viewed as one variant of the problem of rational choice. Whereas moral codes offer directions for proper choices under given common conditions or at least criteria for such choices, philo...

Non-justificationism or fallibilism is now generally thought of as merely the view that no theory can be shown to be true, yet we can progress. It is a new and somewhat optimistic skepticism. The development of theories of this type has lead to new standards of argument, problem solving, and success which have ofttimes been obscured in the ongoing...

Without Abstract

The name of Mario Bunge conjures unease amongst those who are in the know. He is today one of the most well known of living philosophers, his numerous publications are well known, and his positions leave sharp impressions; nevertheless, there has been relatively little critical appraisal of his work. This seems a pity, since his work is quite intri...

Wolfgang Stegmüller, the leading German philosopher of science, considers the status of scientific revolutions the central issue in the field ever since “the famous Popper-Lakatos-Kuhn discussion” of a decade and a half ago, comments on “almost all contributions to this problem”, and offers his alternative solutions in a series of papers culminatin...

Without Abstract

This essay points out that Popper's theory of the objectivity of science is ambiguous: it is not clear whether it provides a guarantee of correct evaluations of theories or only a means of uncovering errors in such evaluations. The latter approach seems to be a more natural extension of Popper's fallibilist theory and is needed if his learning theo...

In order to make the outline of my essay as clear as I can, I will summarize my essay on psychology three times. Abstract 1 Psychological research has aimed for stability and cumulative advance. Psychologists have attempted to achieve these goals through a combined use of two methodologies — inductivism and conventionalism. The attempts to achieve...