Karl Popper (1902-94)
advocated by Andrew Marr

 Listen to Andrew Marr say why you should vote for Karl Popper

'Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship.'

A British Philosopher of Austrian birth, Karl Popper is famous as a philosopher of science. He questioned traditional ideas that firm scientific laws could be established through observation and experiment and argued that absolute truth was alien to the scientific method.

For example, 'all cats are black' is a theory that can never be verified because we can never observe all cats. However, it could be falsified by the observation of one white cat.

Thus scientific theories should not be said to be true: at best they can hope not to be proven false. Indeed this is the essence of a proper scientific theory - if it is not open to being proven false then it is merely pseudo science or even myth.

This is known as Popper's falsification principle.

Popper also argued for the significance of the individual against Marxist and Hegelian ideas of the inevitable process of history.

After all, the process of history is influenced by human knowledge and the future of knowledge is unpredictable (else we'd already know it).

In the political arena he was perhaps best known for his contention, set forth in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), that communism and fascism were philosophically linked, and his works provided some of the theoretical underpinnings for Thatcherism.

Read about Karl Popper on Wikipedia

Read about Karl Popper on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Please note: the BBC accepts no responsibility for the content of external websites.

 Listen to Andrew Marr say why you should vote for Karl Popper

Andrew Marr

Andrew Marr is the BBC Political Editor and presenter of Radio 4's Start The Week. He was born on 31 July 1959, in Glasgow, Scotland. He attended Dundee High School, Craigflower School in Fife, and Loretto School, Musselburgh. He then gained a BA in English from Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He joined The Scotsman in 1981 and became editor of The Independent in 1996, before being appointed as BBC political editor in May 2000. Andrew lists his hobbies as reading, painting, cooking and remembering his children's names.