Abstract

ARAUJO NETO, Gerson Albuquerque de  and  ARAUJO, Gustavo Bacelar Fontenele. Karl Popper and the question of the mind. Nat. hum. [online]. 2018, vol.20, n.1, pp.69-82. ISSN 1517-2430.

This essay aims to reflect on the philosopher Karl Popper's approach to the question of mind. Popper was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His work deals with various subjects ranging from science, logic, politics, metaphysics and the question of mind. In addition to severely criticizing and rejecting induction in science, Popper has an innovative demarcation criterion for classifying the science of non-science. This criterion of falsifiability came as a replacement for the verification criterion. This criterion argues that a scientific theory is always provisional and never definitive. A scientific theory is always a conjecture that can at any moment be refuted. Based on this criterion, Popper criticizes the epistemological status of Marxism and psychoanalysis. For him these two areas of knowledge do not pass in their criterion of falsifiability. Marxism because it had some propositions of its theory refuted and was not understood by its adherents like a refutation of Marxism. These, for Popper, were acting as dogmatic. Psychoanalysis, for Popper, put its propositions in such a way that it could not be refuted. For him there was a need for the theorists of psychoanalysis to reformulate its structure so that its propositions were open to refutation. For him Marxism ceased to be science, when it did not accept refutation and psychoanalysis, yet, it is not science until it presents its propositions, in such a way, that they can be refuted. Popper, too, works the question of mind when elaborating the theory of the three worlds. This work is expressed mainly in the book written in partnership with the winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, neurophysiologist John Eccles. This book is entitled The Self and its Brain. Popper still deals with the same subject in chapters of his other works and in other articles. This paper discusses the treatment of Karl Popper in relation to the question of the mind.

Keywords : Karl Popper; problem of the mind; psychoanalysis; epistemology.

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