Popper Had a Brand New Bag

¹ See Stove, D. C., ‘How Popper's Philosophy Began’, Philosophy 57, No. 221 (July 1982), 386.

² Op. cit. 381.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Popper, K. R., Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 36; quoted by Stove, ibid. Popper gave what is now Chapter I of Conjectures and Refutations as a lecture in 1953.

⁵ Stove, ibid.

⁶ Op. cit. 385.

⁷ Op. cit. 384.

⁸ Op. cit. 381.

⁹ The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1975) says that ‘irrefutable’ means ‘not to be refuted’ and that ‘equivocate’ means ‘use ambiguous words to conceal the truth’ or ‘prevaricate’. The suggestion that Popper takes ‘irrefutable’ to mean simply ‘consistent with every observation statement’ would be hard to sustain; cf. Popper, K. R., The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson,1968), sections 9, 20 and 21.

¹⁰ Conjectures and Refutations, 35.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Op. cit. 37.