Nnadiebube Journal of Philosophy

This paper provides a rigorous and critical engagement with Karl Popper’s doctrine of critical rationalism, a methodological stance that decisively rejects inductivism and instead foregrounds falsifiability as the demarcation criterion for scientific knowledge. Through an interrogation of Popper’s epistemological commitments, the paper elucidates how his emphasis on conjecture, refutation and the provisional status of theories underpins a non dogmatic vision of scientific progress. Further, the paper interrogates Popper’s scientific realism by advancing his conviction in an objective reality that persists beyond human observation and resisting the relativistic and instrumentalist currents that have proliferated in modern scientific discourse, especially within quantum theory. A substantial portion of the discussion is devoted to Popper’s critique of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, where he challenges its entanglement with observer-dependent epistemologies and probabilistic determinism. Popper’s counterposition is articulated through his innovative thought experiments aimed at scrutinising quantum nonlocality and the measurement problem. These are complemented by an in-depth analysis of his propensity interpretation of probability, which seeks to transcend classical and frequentist models by grounding probabilistic reasoning in the dispositional properties of physical systems. The paper concludes that objectivism, in Popper’s analyses, emerges not as a fixed epistemic state of theories but as an achievement of dialogic rationality within scientific communities.

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