nc33/MultiSpan_SQUAD huggingface dataset:
Karl_Popper

Karl Popper's rejection of Marxism during his teenage years left a profound mark on his thought. He had at one point joined a socialist association, and for a few months in 1919 considered himself a communist. During this time he became familiar with the Marxist view of economics, class-war, and history. Although he quickly became disillusioned with the views expounded by Marxism, his flirtation with the ideology led him to distance himself from those who believed that spilling blood for the sake of a revolution was necessary. He came to realise that when it came to sacrificing human lives, one was to think and act with extreme prudence.

Question: What political philosophy that attracted Popper as a teenager had a profound influence on his thinking going forward?
Answer: Marxism

Question: For a time during which year did Popper consider himself a communist?
Answer: 1919

Question: At which stage of life was Popper most strongly influenced by Marxist thinking?
Answer: teenage years

Question: How did Popper feel about Marxism after only a short time associating with other Marxists?
Answer: disillusioned
Karl_Popper

The failure of democratic parties to prevent fascism from taking over Austrian politics in the 1920s and 1930s traumatised Popper. He suffered from the direct consequences of this failure, since events after the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by the German Reich in 1938, forced him into permanent exile. His most important works in the field of social science—The Poverty of Historicism (1944) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)—were inspired by his reflection on the events of his time and represented, in a sense, a reaction to the prevalent totalitarian ideologies that then dominated Central European politics. His books defended democratic liberalism as a social and political philosophy. They also represented extensive critiques of the philosophical presuppositions underpinning all forms of totalitarianism.

Question: What political ideology dominated Austrian politics in the decades before the second world war?
Answer: fascism

Question: What key event in 1938 pushed Popper into exile from Austria?
Answer: the Anschluss

Question: What political ideology do Popper's major works defend?
Answer: democratic liberalism

Question: What form of political organization do Popper's works mainly critique?
Answer: totalitarianism

Question: What was the Anschluss?
Answer: the annexation of Austria by the German Reich
Karl_Popper

Popper puzzled over the stark contrast between the non-scientific character of Freud and Adler's theories in the field of psychology and the revolution set off by Einstein's theory of relativity in physics in the early 20th century. Popper thought that Einstein's theory, as a theory properly grounded in scientific thought and method, was highly "risky", in the sense that it was possible to deduce consequences from it which were, in the light of the then-dominant Newtonian physics, highly improbable (e.g., that light is deflected towards solid bodies—confirmed by Eddington's experiments in 1919), and which would, if they turned out to be false, falsify the whole theory. In contrast, nothing could, even in principle, falsify psychoanalytic theories. He thus came to the conclusion that psychoanalytic theories had more in common with primitive myths than with genuine science.

Question: Which two important psychologists did Popper view as advancing non-scientific theories?
Answer: Freud and Adler

Question: Whose recent breakthrough in physics did Popper view as paradigmatic science?
Answer: Einstein

Question: What quality of the theory of relativity did Popper believe made it proper science?
Answer: risky

Question: What did Popper think psychoanalytic theory shared more feature with than real science ?
Answer: primitive myths

Question: What could you not do to psychoanalytic theory that Popper believed crucial in genuine science?
Answer: falsify
Karl_Popper

Popper coined the term "critical rationalism" to describe his philosophy. Concerning the method of science, the term indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly against the latter, holding that scientific theories are abstract in nature, and can be tested only indirectly, by reference to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings.

Question: What term did Popper use for his philosophy?
Answer: critical rationalism

Question: Which account of scientific method did Popper's repudiate?
Answer: the classical observationalist-inductivist account

Question: What was Popper's position on classical empiricism?
Answer: rejection

Question: According to Popper, what is the only way one can test scientific theories because they are necessarily abstract?
Answer: indirectly
Karl_Popper

Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. To say that a given statement (e.g., the statement of a law of some scientific theory) -- [call it "T"] -- is "falsifiable" does not mean that "T" is false. Rather, it means that, if "T" is false, then (in principle), "T" could be shown to be false, by observation or by experiment. Popper's account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsifiability lies at the heart of his philosophy of science. It also inspired him to take falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation between what is, and is not, genuinely scientific: a theory should be considered scientific if, and only if, it is falsifiable. This led him to attack the claims of both psychoanalysis and contemporary Marxism to scientific status, on the basis that their theories are not falsifiable.

Question: Popper pointed out an important logical asymmetry between what two concepts?
Answer: verification and falsifiability

Question: What does Popper say demarcates scientific theory from non-science?
Answer: falsifiability

Question: What political theory did Popper say did not meet his falsifiability criterion?
Answer: Marxism

Question: What branch of psychology was Popper critical of for not producing falsifiable theory?
Answer: psychoanalysis
Karl_Popper

In All Life is Problem Solving, Popper sought to explain the apparent progress of scientific knowledge – that is, how it is that our understanding of the universe seems to improve over time. This problem arises from his position that the truth content of our theories, even the best of them, cannot be verified by scientific testing, but can only be falsified. Again, in this context the word "falsified" does not refer to something being "fake"; rather, that something can be (i.e., is capable of being) shown to be false by observation or experiment. Some things simply do not lend themselves to being shown to be false, and therefore, are not falsifiable. If so, then how is it that the growth of science appears to result in a growth in knowledge? In Popper's view, the advance of scientific knowledge is an evolutionary process characterised by his formula:

Question: Which of Popper's works addresses the improvement of scientific understanding of the world over time?
Answer: All Life is Problem Solving

Question: Popper described the growth of scientific understanding as what kind of process?
Answer: evolutionary

Question: What aspect of a scientific theory can never be fully verified, according to Popper?
Answer: truth content
Karl_Popper

In response to a given problem situation (), a number of competing conjectures, or tentative theories (), are systematically subjected to the most rigorous attempts at falsification possible. This process, error elimination (), performs a similar function for science that natural selection performs for biological evolution. Theories that better survive the process of refutation are not more true, but rather, more "fit"—in other words, more applicable to the problem situation at hand (). Consequently, just as a species' biological fitness does not ensure continued survival, neither does rigorous testing protect a scientific theory from refutation in the future. Yet, as it appears that the engine of biological evolution has, over many generations, produced adaptive traits equipped to deal with more and more complex problems of survival, likewise, the evolution of theories through the scientific method may, in Popper's view, reflect a certain type of progress: toward more and more interesting problems (). For Popper, it is in the interplay between the tentative theories (conjectures) and error elimination (refutation) that scientific knowledge advances toward greater and greater problems; in a process very much akin to the interplay between genetic variation and natural selection.

Question: What process in science is like the process of natural selection in nature?
Answer: error elimination

Question: What is a better description for theories that survive scientific scrutiny than "more true?"
Answer: more "fit"

Question: What is another term for the tentative theories enter the process of error elimination in science? 
Answer: conjectures

Question: Toward what does Popper believe scientific understandings progress?
Answer: more and more interesting problems
Karl_Popper

To Popper, who was an anti-justificationist, traditional philosophy is misled by the false principle of sufficient reason. He thinks that no assumption can ever be or needs ever to be justified, so a lack of justification is not a justification for doubt. Instead, theories should be tested and scrutinised. It is not the goal to bless theories with claims of certainty or justification, but to eliminate errors in them. He writes, "there are no such things as good positive reasons; nor do we need such things [...] But [philosophers] obviously cannot quite bring [themselves] to believe that this is my opinion, let alone that it is right" (The Philosophy of Karl Popper, p. 1043)

Question: According to Popper, what is not grounds for doubt?
Answer: lack of justification

Question: What principle of traditional philosophy did Popper take an anti-justificationist stance against?
Answer: principle of sufficient reason

Question: What does Popper believe is essential to do to theories instead of justification?
Answer: eliminate errors

Question: What don't we need to look for about theories in Popper's view?
Answer: good positive reasons
Karl_Popper

In The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, Popper developed a critique of historicism and a defence of the "Open Society". Popper considered historicism to be the theory that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to knowable general laws towards a determinate end. He argued that this view is the principal theoretical presupposition underpinning most forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. He argued that historicism is founded upon mistaken assumptions regarding the nature of scientific law and prediction. Since the growth of human knowledge is a causal factor in the evolution of human history, and since "no society can predict, scientifically, its own future states of knowledge", it follows, he argued, that there can be no predictive science of human history. For Popper, metaphysical and historical indeterminism go hand in hand.

Question: What is the term for the view that there are discoverable general laws constraining history's development?
Answer: historicism

Question: What political forms did Popper believe historicism supported?
Answer: authoritarianism and totalitarianism

Question: What unpredictable feature of the world did Popper say refuted historicism?
Answer: the growth of human knowledge

Question: Which of Popper's works criticized the idea that history has an inexorable developmental path?
Answer: The Poverty of Historicism
Karl_Popper

As early as 1934, Popper wrote of the search for truth as "one of the strongest motives for scientific discovery." Still, he describes in Objective Knowledge (1972) early concerns about the much-criticised notion of truth as correspondence. Then came the semantic theory of truth formulated by the logician Alfred Tarski and published in 1933. Popper writes of learning in 1935 of the consequences of Tarski's theory, to his intense joy. The theory met critical objections to truth as correspondence and thereby rehabilitated it. The theory also seemed, in Popper's eyes, to support metaphysical realism and the regulative idea of a search for truth.

Question: Whose theory of truth did Popper read with intense interest in 1935?
Answer: Alfred Tarski

Question: What theory of interest to Popper did Alfred Tarski publish in 1933?
Answer: semantic theory of truth

Question: Tarski's theory overcame certain objections to what conception of truth?
Answer: truth as correspondence

Question: What kind of realism did Popper believe Tarski's theory supported?
Answer: metaphysical
Karl_Popper

According to this theory, the conditions for the truth of a sentence as well as the sentences themselves are part of a metalanguage. So, for example, the sentence "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Although many philosophers have interpreted, and continue to interpret, Tarski's theory as a deflationary theory, Popper refers to it as a theory in which "is true" is replaced with "corresponds to the facts". He bases this interpretation on the fact that examples such as the one described above refer to two things: assertions and the facts to which they refer. He identifies Tarski's formulation of the truth conditions of sentences as the introduction of a "metalinguistic predicate" and distinguishes the following cases:

Question: What term do philosophers give to the kind of theory Tarski proposed about truth?
Answer: deflationary

Question: With what does Popper say Tarski's theory replaces the predicate "is true?"
Answer: "corresponds to the facts"

Question: What concept did Tarski introduce to discuss the conditions for the truth of statements?
Answer: metalanguage

Question: What two things does Popper argue Tarski's theory involves in an evaluation of truth?
Answer: assertions and the facts to which they refer
Karl_Popper

Upon this basis, along with that of the logical content of assertions (where logical content is inversely proportional to probability), Popper went on to develop his important notion of verisimilitude or "truthlikeness". The intuitive idea behind verisimilitude is that the assertions or hypotheses of scientific theories can be objectively measured with respect to the amount of truth and falsity that they imply. And, in this way, one theory can be evaluated as more or less true than another on a quantitative basis which, Popper emphasises forcefully, has nothing to do with "subjective probabilities" or other merely "epistemic" considerations.

Question: What term does Popper use that roughly means verisimilitude?
Answer: truthlikeness

Question: Poppers notion of verisimilitude leaves no place for which kind of probabilities in the evaluation of scientific hypotheses?
Answer: subjective

Question: What class of considerations did Popper believe were not important in scientific measurement?
Answer: epistemic

Question: What is the logical content of hypotheses inversely proportional to in Popper's reasoning?
Answer: probability
Karl_Popper

Knowledge, for Popper, was objective, both in the sense that it is objectively true (or truthlike), and also in the sense that knowledge has an ontological status (i.e., knowledge as object) independent of the knowing subject (Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972). He proposed three worlds: World One, being the physical world, or physical states; World Two, being the world of mind, or mental states, ideas, and perceptions; and World Three, being the body of human knowledge expressed in its manifold forms, or the products of the second world made manifest in the materials of the first world (i.e., books, papers, paintings, symphonies, and all the products of the human mind). World Three, he argued, was the product of individual human beings in exactly the same sense that an animal path is the product of individual animals, and that, as such, has an existence and evolution independent of any individual knowing subjects. The influence of World Three, in his view, on the individual human mind (World Two) is at least as strong as the influence of World One. In other words, the knowledge held by a given individual mind owes at least as much to the total accumulated wealth of human knowledge, made manifest, as to the world of direct experience. As such, the growth of human knowledge could be said to be a function of the independent evolution of World Three. Many contemporary philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have not embraced Popper's Three World conjecture, due mostly, it seems, to its resemblance to mind-body dualism.

Question: What did Popper argue was objective and independent of its subject?
Answer: knowledge

Question: How many different worlds or realities did Popper differentiate in Objective Knowledge?
Answer: three

Question: What constituted World One in Popper's theory?
Answer: the physical world

Question: Who produced the contents of World Three?
Answer: individual human beings

Question: Which world's evolution corresponds to the growth of human knowledge?
Answer: World Three
Karl_Popper

Popper had his own sophisticated views on evolution that go much beyond what the frequently-quoted passages say. In effect, Popper agreed with some of the points of both creationists and naturalists, but also disagreed with both views on crucial aspects. Popper understood the universe as a creative entity that invents new things, including life, but without the necessity of something like a god, especially not one who is pulling strings from behind the curtain. He said that evolution must, as the creationists say, work in a goal-directed way but disagreed with their view that it must necessarily be the hand of god that imposes these goals onto the stage of life.

Question: Along with some creationists, Popper believed that evolution must have what quality to its progress?
Answer: goal-directed

Question: Popper disagreed with creationists that whose hand must be directing evolution?
Answer: god

Question: What kind of an entity did Popper believe the universe to be?
Answer: creative
Karl_Popper

Instead, he formulated the spearhead model of evolution, a version of genetic pluralism. According to this model, living organisms themselves have goals, and act according to these goals, each guided by a central control. In its most sophisticated form, this is the brain of humans, but controls also exist in much less sophisticated ways for species of lower complexity, such as the amoeba. This control organ plays a special role in evolution—it is the "spearhead of evolution". The goals bring the purpose into the world. Mutations in the genes that determine the structure of the control may then cause drastic changes in behaviour, preferences and goals, without having an impact on the organism's phenotype. Popper postulates that such purely behavioural changes are less likely to be lethal for the organism compared to drastic changes of the phenotype.

Question: What is the name of Popper's model of evolution?
Answer: spearhead

Question: Popper's model of evolution is part of what family of models?
Answer: genetic pluralism

Question: What directs the actions of organisms in Popper's biological model?
Answer: goals

Question: Organisms' goals shift along with which notable genetic process?
Answer: Mutations
Karl_Popper

Popper contrasts his views with the notion of the "hopeful monster" that has large phenotype mutations and calls it the "hopeful behavioural monster". After behaviour has changed radically, small but quick changes of the phenotype follow to make the organism fitter to its changed goals. This way it looks as if the phenotype were changing guided by some invisible hand, while it is merely natural selection working in combination with the new behaviour. For example, according to this hypothesis, the eating habits of the giraffe must have changed before its elongated neck evolved. Popper contrasted this view as "evolution from within" or "active Darwinism" (the organism actively trying to discover new ways of life and being on a quest for conquering new ecological niches), with the naturalistic "evolution from without" (which has the picture of a hostile environment only trying to kill the mostly passive organism, or perhaps segregate some of its groups).

Question: Which view of evolution emphasizing large changes in organisms' phenotypes does Popper oppose to his own?
Answer: hopeful monster

Question: Which aspect of organisms changes most radically in the process of evolution Popper envisions?
Answer: behaviour

Question: How does Popper describe the "monsters" that evolve in his view of evolutionary processes?
Answer: hopeful behavioural monster

Question: What kind of Darwinism does Popper subscribe to in contrast to the naturalistic kind?
Answer: active
Karl_Popper

About the creation-evolution controversy, Popper wrote that he considered it "a somewhat sensational clash between a brilliant scientific hypothesis concerning the history of the various species of animals and plants on earth, and an older metaphysical theory which, incidentally, happened to be part of an established religious belief" with a footnote to the effect that "[he] agree[s] with Professor C.E. Raven when, in his Science, Religion, and the Future, 1943, he calls this conflict "a storm in a Victorian tea-cup"; though the force of this remark is perhaps a little impaired by the attention he pays to the vapours still emerging from the cup—to the Great Systems of Evolutionist Philosophy, produced by Bergson, Whitehead, Smuts, and others."

Question: Which professor cited by Popper described the creation-evolution debate as "a storm in a Victorian tea-cup?"
Answer: C.E. Raven

Question: What controversy involving science did Popper believe was sensationalized because of its connection with religion?
Answer: creation-evolution

Question: In which year did C.E. Raven publish the remarks on creation-evolution quoted by Popper?
Answer: 1943

Question: What term does Popper use when describing creationism as a type of theory?
Answer: metaphysical
Karl_Popper

In an interview that Popper gave in 1969 with the condition that it shall be kept secret until after his death, he summarised his position on God as follows: "I don't know whether God exists or not. ... Some forms of atheism are arrogant and ignorant and should be rejected, but agnosticism—to admit that we don't know and to search—is all right. ... When I look at what I call the gift of life, I feel a gratitude which is in tune with some religious ideas of God. However, the moment I even speak of it, I am embarrassed that I may do something wrong to God in talking about God." He objected to organised religion, saying "it tends to use the name of God in vain", noting the danger of fanaticism because of religious conflicts: "The whole thing goes back to myths which, though they may have a kernel of truth, are untrue. Why then should the Jewish myth be true and the Indian and Egyptian myths not be true?" In a letter unrelated to the interview, he stressed his tolerant attitude: "Although I am not for religion, I do think that we should show respect for anybody who believes honestly."

Question: In which year did Popper give a secret interview concerning his views about God?
Answer: 1969

Question: Which term for his religious outlook did Popper prefer?
Answer: agnosticism

Question: What did Popper believe were at the heart of religious disagreements, and should not be the cause of as much conflict as they are?
Answer: myths

Question: Although he opposed organized religion, what attitude did Popper think should be taken toward it:
Answer: tolerant