All Life is Problem Solving (Paperback)

~ Karl Popper (Author) "The central idea I should like to present in this talk may be expressed in the following way..." (more)
Key Phrases: conjectural knowledge, possible falsification, causal closure, First World War, Otto Hahn, Soviet Union (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

As always, Popper's writing is extremely clear and fascinating.
–Stefano Gattei, Philosophy in Review

As always, Poppers writing is extremely clear and fascinating.
–Stefano Gattei, Philosophy in Review

Product Description

This collection illuminates Popper's process of working out key formulations in his theory of science, and indicates his view of the state of the world at the end of the Cold War and after the collapse of communism.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 190 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (February 28, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415249929
• ISBN-13: 978-0415249928
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #144,146 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Taste of Popper, February 18, 2003

By	Bradley A. Swope (State College, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is a collection of 15 lectures/speeches/interviews that Popper gave at various points throughout his career (earliest 1958, latest 1994). They are organized into two sections (1) those related to natural science and (2) those related to history and politics. The first section relates to theory of science and knowledge in an evolutionary context with the process of problem solving at the core. In the second section Popper addresses problem solving more generally ("all life is problem solving") and shares his thoughts on subjects such as war, peace, communism, and interpretation of history.

This book has the weaknesses and strengths that you would expect from a work not originally intended to be published in written form. The benefits are that the chapters are fairly brief and easy to read. Also, Popper's style is nearly anti-academic as he tries almost too hard to simplify the material in order to make it understandable to all. The primary drawbacks are that the book can't be well organized and there are significant repetition and overlap in ideas. Additionally, the book doesn't provide the level of detail that one normally expects in a book by a major thinker.

This is the first book of Popper's that I've read. I became interested in his work by being briefly introduced to some of his thinking from other authors. This book did not provide enough detail to satisfy my interest in Popper, but it served to confirm to me that he is a first rate thinker and that his other works should be near the top of my reading list. I especially enjoyed the surprise of reading Popper's thoughts on Saddam Hussein and the threat of nuclear weapons - highly relevant to our situation today (early 2003). There is no doubt where Popper would stand on the current debate about Iraq.

So this is a good book to get a taste of Popper or maybe for a quick review of some of his thinking if you are already familiar with him. However, this isn't the best book for studying Popper's ideas in detail.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fun read, but there are many better., March 19, 2003

By	Kevin Currie-Knight "Education Grad Student" (Newark, Delaware) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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I am a long-time Karl Popper fan. I've read all but, I believe, 4 books of his. To my knowledge, this is his shortest at 161 pages - all consisting of essays. This is also the book of his that is the least original. If you're a long-time fan, you've read these ideas before. If you are a newcomer, there are better books to start with.

For all that, the first essay, "The Logic and Evolution of Scientific Theory" is the best short summary of Popper's views on science that I've read. The second essay is also a good summary of Popper's theories of body/mind interactionism, an odd position for a modern theoriest to hold.

The second half, although quite unoriginal (I've started to realize that Popper's views on freedom, democracy, open society, etc. were better expressed by James Madison)is still quite interesting. Also, this book, I'm quite sure for the first time, gives us Popper's views towards international policy. 'Waging Wars for Peace', an excerpt from a radio interview, is pretty timely in 2003 and reminds us that there can be no thing as an absolute pacifist. Not destroying someone certain to kill only postpones. The title essay, at 6 pages, is another timely celebration of technology; timely because many on the right and left (for different reasons about different techonologies) are preaching against technologies while failing to see the many good sides.

All in all, a quick and fairly worthwhile read. The experienced reader of Popper, again, will find nothing new here. [...]

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and essential reading for all disciplines, October 14, 2009

By	B. Caithness (Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Perhaps a good place to start in this review of "All Life Is Problem Solving" is to focus on one essay, "Towards an evolutionary theory of knowledge" written in 1989. I believe this should be published as a tract and handed to every senior higher school student and certainly all tertiary entrants. Even if the recipient does not agree with some of the premises of the essay he or she should be able to mount an argument precipitated by its insights.This essay is thinking about thinking at its best.

Karl Popper (1902-1994) elegantly proposes that knowledge is linked to expectations and these expectations express theories of reality. Thus knowledge expresses models of reality. Reality in itself is unknowable.We as with all living things have propensities to guess reality based on largely unconscious hypotheses which both logically and psychologically tend to precede observation. Even a digital camera can only capture images of light spectra that it is programmed to capture; via it we deduce the world. Encounters with evidence are the bumps that allow continual reformulation of these models of reality. These statements do not imply that the universe separate from our perceptions is illusion. Indeed only fools or sophists would deny its existence, but what is the "real" world? What is the real you? What is the real anything - statistically analyzed, dissected, named, viewed under an electron microscope, blasted with x rays or gamma rays, painted by Monet? Open any dictionary on the word "knowledge", you will find all sorts of circularity and assumptions that knowledge is primarily empirically derived. Popper's association of knowledge with expectation, or guessing, is a breakthrough in clarity. Animals and plants carry what can be defined as unconscious guesses or theories, namely their genes and other molecular and physiological codes. Consciousness is secondary and fleeting. How much concentration does one apply to directing one's legs when one goes for a stroll?

Despite perceptual and cognitive limitations, living beings do seek truth and routinely test models against facts. Truth should correspond with facts, but the degree of certainty of facts varies. Popper's attitude to the demarcation of science from other intellectual endeavours is that scientific enquiry should have no expectation of discovering final truth but rather it is about asking things about the universe in such a way that any answer is capable of being modified (indeed capable of being falsified) if better evidence appears. Every answer is provisional. Scientism, which positively declares truths, is not science..."scientifically proven" is a nonsense phrase. Indeed, including and beyond science, all our knowledge is uncertain.

Still at least in our universe, the world is roughly spherical even though many of our forefathers assumed that it was flat. Evolution is similarly robust even if mechanisms and fine details have varying certainty. Thus some assumptions seem to be less wrong than others, i.e. have higher verisimilitude. The demarcation of science and non-science hinges on phrasing any claim in such a way that it can potentially be proven wrong, not turned into an accretion of supporting premises that is unbreakable simply because it is amorphous. On this point it does not matter by which method the claim is reached e.g. inspiration might occur in a reverie, but rather how the hypothesis is expressed when presented to an audience (On a side note, I think too much criticism of Popper has been a sidetracked discussion of history and method rather than the above stress on expression and revision). Creationism and intelligent design arguments tend to be accretions of self-supporting dogma rather than a critical and testable discourse.

However on a personal note I would suggest that a corollary of Popper's thought is not cynicism but openness to the unexpected. In narrow conceit, many so-called "skeptics" and other dogmatists overlook the corollary to the unknowable nature of reality namely that, precisely because we cannot prove otherwise, there is always room for the unexpected. Perhaps objective meaning can never be demonstrated in the deterministic (causal) world i.e. it is not found in Schopenhauer's "World as Representation" but rather in the unexpected, the magical, the coincidental, the "World as Will", Carl Jung's (1875-1961) synchronicity, knowledge felt. Yes humans seek passion and energy rather than meaning for its own sake (Joseph Campbell 1904-1987) although one must add that the search for meaning is an activity that we engage in passionately.

Excessive certainty is bred from protesting too loudly. The universe is mysterious, we do not need to invent mystery unless we want to couple spiritual sentiment to social power and we need not fear that honest engagement will destroy mystery. Even the prevailing metaphors in cosmology will have their used-by date. Rather than overly stress the demarcation of science from other forms of knowledge we ought to recognize that any statement of belief should be capable of being modified or indeed discarded if the facts contradict it. Finally, Karl Popper distinguished between tacit knowledge and objective knowledge. We know there is a physical world (World 1), we know there is a mental world (tacit, World 2), and we know there is a world of codes and descriptions and formulae (World 3). Even when individuals die, worlds 1 and 3 still exist.

Let us give Popper the last word: "I shall now try to give you a list of interesting conclusions that we can draw, and partly have drawn (although so far unconsciously) from our trivial proposition that animals can know something............"