Rw,
On a non-philosophical and academic level, Popper was always an outsider, a maverick and a reactionary in that he was constantly rebelling against what he regarded as mainstream, Marxist bias in academia (post-revolutionary Russia). Hence his rejection of the Vienna Circle (Wittgenstein, etc) but probably more accurately, they didn’t want him in. His reactionary side is apparent in The Open Society and Its Enemies (against Plato and Marx, for example)
I don’t think I read Logic of Scientific Discovery so I’m not familiar with the Postscript (was this an afterthought, revision or correction?) but I did read Conjectures and Refutations in the context of Philosophy of Science.
Re his use of swans, this originated with Hume in the 18th century in the context of the limitations of inductive logic but more importantly, an attempt by Hume to give intellectual legitimacy to the Church’s (Bishop Berkeley’s) opposition to Newton’s science, specifically that the earth is not the centre of the universe – contrary to the basic tenet of Christian belief. Like Hume, Popper was not concerned with the rationalism or justification of the physical sciences but with the foundations of belief in the social sciences (or theology); and for Popper, this centred on Marxism.
The irony is, Popper found widespread support in the 1960’s from the French left-wing, social science academics, especially sociologists.
For me, Taleb compounds ambiguity with half-baked theories derived from half-baked thinkers.
Thanks for the reference. I’ve only read Frege (impenetrable).
Grant.