Karl Popper

Quotes From

Knowledge never begins from nothing, but always from some background knowledge—knowledge which at the moment is taken for granted—together with some difficulties, some problems. These as a rule arise from the clash between, on the one side, expectations inherent in our background knowledge and, on the other side, some new findings, such as out observations or some hypotheses suggested by them.#Quoted in Ralph Rector, “The Economics of Rationality and the Rationality of Economics” (1990)

The aim-structure of animals or men is not ‘given’, but it develops with the help of some kind of feed-back mechanism out of earlier aims, and out of results which were or were not aimed at.#
The epistemology of induction breaks down even before having taken its first step. It cannot start from sense data or perceptions and build our theories upon them, since there are no such things as sense data or perceptions which are not built upon theories (or expectations, that is, the biological predecessors of linguistically formulated theories).#

Thoughts on the Paradox of Tolerance
This comic has been making the rounds on the internet, mostly by people justifying the legitimacy of punching Nazis. The response has been an interesting battle between the immune responses against Nazis and the immune response against attacks on free speech. There’s a slippery slope on both sides. But taking . . .
The Morality of Marginalism: Risk Aversion versus Aspirational Norms
It is a commonplace in New Institutional economics that norms matter for economic performance. There remains, however, no deep integration of norms into the rational choice framework beyond merely shunting them into the black box of “preferences”. This paper first establishes the importance for social cooperation of specific and directive . . .