CONCEPT
Critical Rationalism
The philosophical attitude — more than a doctrine — that holds all beliefs tentatively, subjects them to the severest possible criticism, and treats the willingness to discover one has been wrong as the central intellectual virtue.
Critical rationalism is Popper's own name for his philosophical stance. It is not a system of doctrines but a disposition: the willingness to hold beliefs provisionally, to seek their refutation actively, to revise or abandon them when they fail, and to treat this process as the only reliable path to genuine knowledge. The disposition is not natural. It cuts against the grain of human cognition, which is biased toward confirmation and resistant to the discomfort of being wrong. Critical rationalism is therefore an achievement — cultivated through education, protected by institutions, and maintained through sustained practice. It is the epistemological attitude that sustains both genuine science and the open society. And it is the attitude most directly threatened by an environment in which confident answers are instantly available at no cost.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Popper distinguished critical rationalism from two adjacent positions. Against dogmatism, it insists that all beliefs remain open to