Karl Popper Defends Rationalism in First Talk of William James Series

Great progress has been achieved in the field of ethics during the last fifty years, Karl R. Popper, professor of Logic and Scientific Method at the University of London, declared yesterday afternoon in the first of a series of ten William James Lectures. The talk, entitled: "Is Science Still Interesting," was an introductory analysis to Popper's theories of scientific method.

In a defense of rationalism, Popper refuted the attack that moral decadence stems from intellectualism by an affirmation that moral development has kept up with the intellectual advances of the world. Said Popper: "More men feel themselves responsible for men far away than they ever did before."

Popper defined science as "a friendly rivalry where each scientist tries to prove the other wrong . . . it consists in having ideas--queer, bold, inventive--rather than in careful observation."

The method set forth by Popper is essentially pragmatic. He advocated a humanistic outlook of science, a compromise between the axiomatic science of Descartes and the purely experimental science of Bacon. Axioms, he said, must be verified by experience.

"A good failure in science is always respectable," commented Popper. "The scientist who has taken the bold leap and has been proven wrong is no failure in the ordinary sense of the word."

Popper added that the Cartesian view, which conceives of success in science as contingent solely upon employing the correct method, is false, and that this attitude leads to what he considers an unhealthy organization of state scientific research.