about the bucket and the searchlight…

today, I got knowledge from Jo. Joanne McMillan. about her, I guess you’ve known from my stories about “strawberry juice dari Jo…”. okay, that knowledge is about Karl Popper’s thought. actually it’s a simple thing, but it will be complicated if we don’t learn it seriously. why? because, actually it’s based from what we think and feel in our habit, but sometimes we didn’t realize it. the original title is Karl Popper “the bucket and the searchlight: two theories of knowledge”. maybe one of you’ve ever read, known or heard about Karl Popper. so if you’ve known, just share with us here…

Popper describes the common view of knowledge, which he calls the “bucket” view, and his new theory of knowledge, which he calls the “searchlight” view. according to the bucket theory, to have knowledge we must first have perceptions or experiences. In other words, we learn about the world through perception or experience. Knowledge is built from these perceptions or experiences. It is like water in a bucket. Each experience or perception is like a drop of water. The more drops of water we collect, the more water we have in the bucket. Or, the more perceptions and experiences we have, the more knowledge we have.

677036 Popper’s “searchlight” theory is different. According to his theory, we learn about the world through observation. Observation is different to perception because it is planned. We do not simply “see” the world; we “look” at it. Furthermore, to make observations we must first have expectations (or a hypothesis) about what we will perceive or experience. Our observations will either confirm or falsify our expectations..

This is like using a searchlight, or torch, in the dark. In the dark, we can use a torch to see the world around us. Light from the torch allows us to see. However, we cannot see everything. To see something we must point the torch towards it. So in Popper’s theory, our expectations are like the light from the torch because they allow us to “see” knowledge while the process of observation is like pointing the torch at something.

You could say that Popper’s searchlight theory is almost the inverse/opposite of the bucket theory. According to the bucket theory, experience comes first and this produces an idea about the world, or knowledge. According to the searchlight theory, first we have an idea about the world, and that idea allows us to obtain knowledge of the world through observation.

digest20001_p191 so, who is Karl Popper?

Karl Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. He was also a social and political philosopher of considerable stature, a self-professed ‘critical-rationalist’, a dedicated opponent of all forms of scepticism, conventionalism, and relativism in science and in human affairs generally, a committed advocate and staunch defender of the ‘Open Society’, and an implacable critic of totalitarianism in all of its forms. One of the many remarkable features of Popper’s thought is the scope of his intellectual influence.

In the modern technological and highly-specialised world scientists are rarely aware of the work of philosophers; it is virtually unprecedented to find them queuing up, as they have done in Popper’s case, to testify to the enormously practical beneficial impact which that philosophical work has had upon their own. But notwithstanding the fact that he wrote on even the most technical matters with consummate clarity, the scope of Popper’s work is such that it is commonplace by now to find that commentators tend to deal with the epistemological, scientific and social elements of his thought as if they were quite disparate and unconnected, and thus the fundamental unity of his philosophical vision and method has to a large degree been dissipated. Here we will try to trace the threads which interconnect the various elements of his philosophy, and which give it its fundamental unity.

okey, I can’t tell u more, I think you can search about Karl Popper from Prof. Google or other reference. thanks to read….

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